Four years that freed four million and remade the Union
The American Civil War, fought from April 1861 to May 1865, set the Union against a Confederacy of slave states that seceded after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election. Historians now overwhelmingly agree slavery lay at its heart, and the Union victory freed four million enslaved African Americans.
The deciding quarrel of the 1850s was whether slavery would spread into western territories bound for statehood. Congress had long admitted states in slave-and-free pairs to balance the Senate, but free states were outgrowing slave states in voters. When Lincoln, who opposed slavery’s expansion, won in 1860, South Carolina voted unanimously to secede on 20 December, and six more cotton states of the Deep South followed. Lincoln rejected the Crittenden Compromise, which would have allowed slavery south of the old Missouri line. Several secession declarations blamed the abolitionist movement directly, and the pseudo-historical Lost Cause claim that slavery was not the main cause is contradicted by those very documents.
Fighting began on 12 April 1861, when Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and four more states then left the Union. Slaves made up 47 percent of the Confederacy’s population but far less in the upper South, and western Virginia, with little slavery, broke away to become West Virginia in 1863. With Southern members gone, Congress passed a Homestead Act, land-grant colleges, a transcontinental railroad and the first income tax.
In 1861–1862 the Union made lasting gains in the west, destroying the Confederate river navy and seizing New Orleans, while the east stayed deadlocked. On 1 January 1863 Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in rebel states, covering more than 3.5 million of the country’s 4 million enslaved people, and the siege of Vicksburg that year split the Confederacy. A tightening naval blockade and attacks from every side brought the fall of Atlanta to William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 and his March to the Sea to Savannah.
After a ten-month siege of Petersburg, the Confederates abandoned Richmond, and Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, and Reconstruction began amid a ruined Southern infrastructure.
Source: American Civil War
