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American Civil War

Clockwise from top:

Battle of GettysburgUnion Captain John Tidball's artilleryConfederate prisonersironclad USS AtlantaRuins of Richmond, VirginiaBattle of Franklin

Date April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865[a][1][2]

(4 years, 1 month and 2 weeks)

Location

United States, Atlantic Ocean

Result

Union victory

Abolition of slavery in the United States

Beginning of the Reconstruction era

Passage of the Reconstruction Amendments

Territorial

changes Dissolution of the Confederate States of America

 

Belligerents

United States United States Confederate States

Commanders and leaders

United States Abraham Lincoln X

United States Ulysses S. Grant

and others... Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis Surrendered

Confederate States of America Robert E. Lee Surrendered

and others...

Strength

2,200,000[b]

698,000 (peak)[3][4] 750,000–1,000,000[b][5]

360,000 (peak)[3][6]

Casualties and losses

110,000+  †/ (DOW)

230,000+ accident/disease deaths[7][8]

25,000–30,000 died in Confederate prisons[3][7]

365,000+ total dead[9]

282,000+ wounded[8]

181,193 captured[3][better source needed][c]

Total: 828,000+ casualties

94,000+  †/ (DOW)[7]

26,000–31,000 died in Union prisons[8]

290,000+ total dead

137,000+ wounded

436,658 captured[3][better source needed][d]

Total: 864,000+ casualties

50,000 free civilians dead[10]

80,000+ slaves dead (disease)[11]

Total: 616,222[12]–1,000,000+ dead[13][14]

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Theaters of the American Civil War

Events leading to

the American Civil War

Economic

End of Atlantic slave trade

Panic of 1857

Political

Northwest Ordinance

Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions

Missouri Compromise

Nullification crisis

Gag rule

Tariff of 1828

End of slavery in British colonies

Texas Revolution

Texas annexation

Mexican–American War

Wilmot Proviso

Nashville Convention

Compromise of 1850

Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Kansas–Nebraska Act

Ostend Manifesto

Caning of Charles Sumner

Lincoln–Douglas debates

1860 presidential election

Crittenden Compromise

Secession of Southern states

Peace Conference of 1861

Corwin Amendment

Social

Nat Turner's slave rebellion

Martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy

Burning of Pennsylvania Hall

American Slavery As It Is

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Bleeding Kansas

The Impending Crisis of the South

Oberlin–Wellington Rescue

John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry

Judicial

Trial of Reuben Crandall

Commonwealth v. Aves

The Amistad affair

Prigg v. Pennsylvania

Recapture of Anthony Burns

Dred Scott v. Sandford

Virginia v. John Brown

Military

Star of the West

Battle of Fort Sumter

President Lincoln's 75,000 volunteers

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This article is part of a series on the

History of the

United States

Timeline and periods

Topics

By group

See also

flag United States portal

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The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union[e] ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.

Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the western territories. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in February 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy asserted control over about a third of the U.S. population in eleven of the 34 U.S. states that then existed. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.

During 1861–1862 in the war's Western Theater, the Union made significant permanent gains—though in the war's Eastern Theater the conflict was inconclusive. The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which declared all slaves in states in rebellion to be free, applying to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. To the west, the Union destroyed the Confederacy's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his March to the Sea. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war.

A wave of Confederate surrenders followed. On April 14, just five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. On May 26, the last military department of the Confederacy, the Department of the Trans-Mississippi, effectively surrendered, but the conclusion of the American Civil War lacks a clear end date, and Appomattox is often symbolically referred to. Small confederate ground forces continued surrendering past the May 26 surrender date until June 23. By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its railroads. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves.

The Civil War is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in U.S. history. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The American Civil War was among the first wars to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were all widely used during the war. In total, the war left between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American history.[f] The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming World Wars.

Causes of secession

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War and Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War

Map of U.S. showing two kinds of Union states, two phases of secession and territories

Status of the states, 1861

   Slave states that seceded before April 15, 1861

   Slave states that seceded after April 15, 1861

   Border Southern states that permitted slavery but did not secede (both KY and MO had dual competing Confederate and Unionist governments)

   Union states that banned slavery

   Territories

The reasons for the Southern states' decisions to secede have been historically controversial, but most scholars today identify preserving slavery as the central reason, in large part because the seceding states' secession documents say that it was. Although some historical revisionists have offered additional reasons for the war,[15] slavery was the central source of escalating political tensions in the 1850s.[16] The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery to the territories, which, after they were admitted as free states, would give the free states greater representation in Congress and the Electoral College. Many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won, many Southern leaders felt that disunion was their only option, fearing that the loss of representation would hamper their ability to enact pro-slavery laws and policies.[17][18] In his second inaugural address, Lincoln said that:

slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.[19]

Slavery

Main article: Slavery in the United States

Disagreements among states about the future of slavery were the main cause of disunion and the war that followed.[20][21] Slavery had been controversial during the framing of the Constitution, which, because of compromises, ended up with proslavery and antislavery features.[22] The issue of slavery had confounded the nation since its inception and increasingly separated the United States into a slaveholding South and a free North. The issue was exacerbated by the rapid territorial expansion of the country, which repeatedly brought to the fore the question of whether new territory should be slaveholding or free. The issue had dominated politics for decades leading up to the war. Key attempts to resolve the matter included the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, but these only postponed the showdown over slavery that would lead to the Civil War.[23]

The motivations of the average person were not necessarily those of their faction;[24][25] some Northern soldiers were indifferent on the subject of slavery, but a general pattern can be established.[26] As the war dragged on, more and more Unionists came to support the abolition of slavery, whether on moral grounds or as a means to cripple the Confederacy.[27] Confederate soldiers fought the war primarily to protect a Southern society of which slavery was an integral part.[28][29] Opponents of slavery considered slavery an anachronistic evil incompatible with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to stop the expansion of slavery and thereby put it on a path to ultimate extinction.[30] The slaveholding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their constitutional rights.[31] Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy, because of the large amount of capital invested in slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population.[32] In particular, many Southerners feared a repeat of the 1804 Haiti massacre (referred to at the time as "the horrors of Santo Domingo"),[33][34] in which former slaves systematically murdered most of what was left of the country's white population—including men, women, children, and even many sympathetic to abolition—after the successful slave revolt in Haiti. Historian Thomas Fleming points to the historical phrase "a disease in the public mind" used by critics of this idea and proposes it contributed to the segregation in the Jim Crow era following emancipation.[35] These fears were exacerbated by the 1859 attempt of John Brown to instigate an armed slave rebellion in the South.[36]

Abolitionists

Main article: Abolitionism in the United States

Uncle Tom's Cabin, authored by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852, helped enlighten the public to slavery's evil and contributed to increased American opposition to it. According to legend, when Lincoln was introduced to her at the White House, his first words were, "So this is the little lady who started this Great War."[37]

The abolitionists—those advocating the end of slavery—were active in the decades leading up to the Civil War. They traced their philosophical roots back to Puritans, who believed that slavery was morally wrong. One of the early Puritan writings on this subject was The Selling of Joseph, by Samuel Sewall in 1700. In it, Sewall condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted many of the era's typical justifications for slavery.[38][39]

The American Revolution and the cause of liberty added tremendous impetus to the abolitionist cause. Even in Southern states, laws were changed to limit slavery and facilitate manumission. The amount of indentured servitude dropped dramatically throughout the country. An Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves sailed through Congress with little opposition. President Thomas Jefferson supported it, and it went into effect on January 1, 1808, which was the first day that the Constitution (Article I, section 9, clause 1) permitted Congress to prohibit the importation of slaves. Benjamin Franklin and James Madison each helped found manumission societies. Influenced by the Revolution, many slave owners freed their slaves, but some, such as George Washington, did so only in their wills. The number of free black people as a proportion of the black population in the upper South increased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790 and 1810 as a result of these actions.[40][41][42][43][44][45]

The establishment of the Northwest Territory as "free soil"—no slavery—by Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam (who both came from Puritan New England) would also prove crucial. This territory (which became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota) doubled the size of the United States.[46][47][39]

Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was a leading abolitionist

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, repeatedly used the Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousand times. Parker, in urging New England congressmen to support the abolition of slavery, wrote, "The son of the Puritan ... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth and Right."[48][49] Literature served as a means to spread the message to common folks. Key works included Twelve Years a Slave, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slavery as It Is, and the most important: Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-selling book of the 19th century aside from the Bible.[50][51][52]

A more unusual abolitionist than those named above was Hinton Rowan Helper, whose 1857 book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, "[e]ven more perhaps than Uncle Tom's Cabin ... fed the fires of sectional controversy leading up to the Civil War."[53] A Southerner and a virulent racist, Helper was nevertheless an abolitionist because he believed, and showed with statistics, that slavery "impeded the progress and prosperity of the South, ... dwindled our commerce, and other similar pursuits, into the most contemptible insignificance; sunk a large majority of our people in galling poverty and ignorance, ... [and] entailed upon us a humiliating dependence on the Free States...."[54]

By 1840 more than 15,000 people were members of abolitionist societies in the United States. Abolitionism in the United States became a popular expression of moralism, and led directly to the Civil War. In churches, conventions and newspapers, reformers promoted an absolute and immediate rejection of slavery.[55][56] Support for abolition among the religious was not universal though. As the war approached, even the main denominations split along political lines, forming rival Southern and Northern churches. For example, in 1845 the Baptists split into the Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists over the issue of slavery.[57][58]

Abolitionist sentiment was not strictly religious or moral in origin. The Whig Party became increasingly opposed to slavery because it saw it as inherently against the ideals of capitalism and the free market. Whig leader William H. Seward (who would serve as Lincoln's secretary of state) proclaimed that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and free labor, and that slavery had left the South backward and undeveloped.[59] As the Whig party dissolved in the 1850s, the mantle of abolition fell to its newly formed successor, the Republican Party.[60]

Territorial crisis

Further information: Slave states and free states

Manifest destiny heightened the conflict over slavery. Each new territory acquired had to face the thorny question of whether to allow or disallow the "peculiar institution".[61] Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the new states carved out of these territories entering the union were apportioned equally between slave and free states. Pro- and anti-slavery forces collided over the territories west of the Mississippi River.[62]

The Mexican–American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the war.[63] As the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo finalized the conquest of northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to expanding into these lands and perhaps Cuba and Central America as well.[64][65] Prophetically, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Mexico will poison us", referring to the ensuing divisions around whether the newly conquered lands would end up slave or free.[66] Northern free-soil interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave territory. The Compromise of 1850 over California balanced a free-soil state with a stronger federal fugitive slave law for a political settlement after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states admitted following California were all free: Minnesota (1858), Oregon (1859), and Kansas (1861). In the Southern states, the question of the territorial expansion of slavery westward again became explosive.[67] Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."[68][69] Soon after the Utah Territory legalized slavery in 1852, the Utah War of 1857 saw Mormon settlers in the Utah territory fighting the US government.[70][71]

Man standing

Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, author of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854

Man sitting

Sen. John J. Crittenden, of the 1860 Crittenden Compromise

By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and they all claimed they were sanctioned by the Constitution, implicitly or explicitly.[72] The first of these theories, represented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise apportionment of territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become a constitutional mandate. The failed Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression of this view.[73]

The second doctrine of congressional preeminence was championed by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. It insisted that the Constitution did not bind legislators to a policy of balance—that slavery could be excluded in a territory, as it was in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, at the discretion of Congress.[74] Thus Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The ill-fated Wilmot Proviso announced this position in 1846.[75] The Proviso was a pivotal moment in national politics, as it was the first time slavery had become a major congressional issue based on sectionalism, instead of party lines. Its support by Northern Democrats and Whigs, and opposition by Southerners, was a dark omen of coming divisions.[76]

Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the third doctrine: territorial or "popular" sovereignty, which asserted that the settlers in a territory had the same rights as states in the Union to allow or disallow slavery as a purely local matter.[77] The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine.[78] In the Kansas Territory, political conflict spawned "Bleeding Kansas", a five-year paramilitary conflict between pro- and anti-slavery supporters. The U.S. House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free state in early 1860, but its admission did not pass the Senate until January 1861, after the departure of Southern senators.[79]

The fourth doctrine was advocated by Mississippi Senator (and soon to be Confederate President) Jefferson Davis.[80] It was one of state sovereignty ("states' rights"),[81] also known as the "Calhoun doctrine",[82] named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C. Calhoun.[83] Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government, state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as part of the federal union under the U.S. Constitution.[84] These four doctrines comprised the dominant ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the territories, and the U.S. Constitution before the 1860 presidential election.[85]

States' rights

A long-running dispute over the origin of the Civil War is to what extent states' rights triggered the conflict. The consensus among historians is that the Civil War was not fought about states' rights.[86][87][88][89] But the issue is frequently referenced in popular accounts of the war and has much traction among Southerners. Southerners advocating secession argued that just as each state had decided to join the Union, a state had the right to secede—leave the Union—at any time. Northerners (including pro-slavery President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers, who said they were setting up a perpetual union.[90]

Historian James McPherson points out that even if Confederates genuinely fought over states' rights, it boiled down to states' right to slavery.[89] McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other non-slavery explanations:

While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights argument is perhaps the weakest. It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle.[89]

States' rights was an ideology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests through federal authority.[91] As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the "Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprecedented expansion of Federal power."[92][93] Before the Civil War, the Southern states supported the use of federal powers to enforce and extend slavery, as with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.[94][95] The faction that pushed for secession often infringed on states' rights. Because of the overrepresentation of pro-slavery factions in the federal government, many Northerners, even non-abolitionists, feared the Slave Power conspiracy.[94][95] Some Northern states resisted the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Historian Eric Foner states that the act "could hardly have been designed to arouse greater opposition in the North. It overrode numerous state and local laws and legal procedures and 'commanded' individual citizens to assist, when called upon, in capturing runaways." He continues, "It certainly did not reveal, on the part of slaveholders, sensitivity to states' rights."[87] According to historian Paul Finkelman, "the southern states mostly complained that the northern states were asserting their states' rights and that the national government was not powerful enough to counter these northern claims."[88] The Confederate Constitution also "federally" required slavery to be legal in all Confederate states and claimed territories.[86][96]

Sectionalism

Sectionalism resulted from the different economies, social structure, customs, and political values of the North and South.[97][98] Regional tensions came to a head during the War of 1812, resulting in the Hartford Convention, which manifested Northern dissatisfaction with a foreign trade embargo that affected the industrial North disproportionately, the Three-Fifths Compromise, dilution of Northern power by new states, and a succession of Southern presidents. Sectionalism increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized, and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence agriculture for poor whites. In the 1840s and 1850s, the issue of accepting slavery (in the guise of rejecting slave-owning bishops and missionaries) split the nation's largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches) into separate Northern and Southern denominations.[99]

Historians have debated whether economic differences between the mainly industrial North and the mainly agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s, and emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary. While socially different, the sections economically benefited each other.[100][101]

Protectionism

Owners of slaves preferred low-cost manual labor with no mechanization. Northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protectionism while Southern planters demanded free trade.[102] The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816. The Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress.[103][104] The tariff issue was a Northern grievance. However, neo-Confederate writers have claimed it as a Southern grievance. In 1860–61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue.[105] Pamphleteers from the North and the South rarely mentioned the tariff.[106]

Nationalism and honor

Marais des Cygnes massacre of anti-slavery Kansans, May 19, 1858

Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entirety of the United States (called "Southern Unionists") and those loyal primarily to the Southern region and then the Confederacy.[107]

Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin and abolitionist John Brown's attempt to incite a slave rebellion in 1859.[108][109]

While the South moved towards a Southern nationalism, leaders in the North were also becoming more nationally minded, and they rejected any notion of splitting the Union. The Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it.[110] The South ignored the warnings; Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would fight to hold the Union together.[111]

Lincoln's election

Main article: 1860 United States presidential election

Portrait of the middle-aged Abraham Lincoln the year of 1860 by Mathew Brady

Mathew Brady's Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, 1860

The election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for secession.[112] Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction.[113] However, Lincoln would not be inaugurated until five months after the election, which gave the South time to secede and prepare for war in the winter and spring of 1861.[114]

According to Lincoln, the American people had shown that they had been successful in establishing and administering a republic, but a third challenge faced the nation: maintaining a republic based on the people's vote, in the face of an attempt to destroy it.[115]

Outbreak of the war

Secession crisis

The election of Lincoln provoked the legislature of South Carolina to call a state convention to consider secession. Before the war, South Carolina did more than any other Southern state to advance the notion that a state had the right to nullify federal laws, and even to secede from the United States. The convention unanimously voted to secede on December 20, 1860, and adopted a secession declaration. It argued for states' rights for slave owners in the South, but contained a complaint about states' rights in the North in the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their federal obligations under the Constitution. The "cotton states" of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit, seceding in January and February 1861.[116]

Newspaper in extra large text, noting "Union is Dissolved"

The first published imprint of secession, a broadside issued by the Charleston Mercury, December 20, 1860

Among the ordinances of secession passed by the individual states, those of three—Texas, Alabama, and Virginia—specifically mentioned the plight of the "slaveholding states" at the hands of Northern abolitionists. The rest make no mention of the slavery issue and are often brief announcements of the dissolution of ties by the legislatures.[117] However, at least four states—South Carolina,[118] Mississippi,[119] Georgia,[120] and Texas[121]—also passed lengthy and detailed explanations of their reasons for secession, all of which laid the blame squarely on the movement to abolish slavery and that movement's influence over the politics of the Northern states. The Southern states believed slaveholding was a constitutional right because of the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution. These states agreed to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America, on February 4, 1861.[122] They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries with little resistance from outgoing President James Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4, 1861. Buchanan said that the Dred Scott decision was proof that the South had no reason for secession, and that the Union "was intended to be perpetual", but that "The power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union" was not among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress".[123] One-quarter of the U.S. Army—the entire garrison in Texas—was surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.[124]

As Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House, Republicans were able to pass projects that had been blocked by Southern senators before the war. These included the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morrill Act), a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad (the Pacific Railroad Acts),[125] the National Bank Act, the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862, and the ending of slavery in the District of Columbia. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax to help finance the war.[126]

In December 1860, the Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Missouri Compromise line by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to the north of the line while guaranteeing it to the south. The adoption of this compromise likely would have prevented the secession of the Southern states, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it.[127] Lincoln stated that any compromise that would extend slavery would in time bring down the Union.[128] A pre-war February Peace Conference of 1861 met in Washington, proposing a solution similar to that of the Crittenden compromise; it was rejected by Congress. The Republicans proposed an alternative compromise to not interfere with slavery where it existed but the South regarded it as insufficient. Nonetheless, the remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy following a two-to-one no-vote in Virginia's First Secessionist Convention on April 4, 1861.[129]

Middle-aged man in a goatee posed standing in a suit, vest and bowtie

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America (1861–1865)

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void".[130] He had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property,[130] including forts, arsenals, mints, and customhouses that had been seized by the Southern states.[131] The government would make no move to recover post offices, and if resisted, mail delivery would end at state lines. Where popular conditions did not allow peaceful enforcement of federal law, U.S. marshals and judges would be withdrawn. No mention was made of bullion lost from U.S. mints in Louisiana, Georgia, and North Carolina. He stated that it would be U.S. policy to only collect import duties at its ports; there could be no serious injury to the South to justify the armed revolution during his administration. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union, famously calling on "the mystic chords of memory" binding the two regions.[130]

The Davis government of the new Confederacy sent three delegates to Washington to negotiate a peace treaty with the United States of America. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents because he claimed the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government.[132] Lincoln instead attempted to negotiate directly with the governors of individual seceded states, whose administrations he continued to recognize.[citation needed]

Complicating Lincoln's attempts to defuse the crisis were the actions of the new Secretary of State, William Seward. Seward had been Lincoln's main rival for the Republican presidential nomination. Shocked and embittered by this defeat, Seward agreed to support Lincoln's candidacy only after he was guaranteed the executive office that was considered at that time to be the most powerful and important after the presidency itself. Even in the early stages of Lincoln's presidency Seward still held little regard for the new chief executive due to his perceived inexperience, and therefore Seward viewed himself as the de facto head of government or "prime minister" behind the throne of Lincoln. In this role, Seward attempted to engage in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.[132] However, President Lincoln was determined to hold all remaining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy: Fort Monroe in Virginia, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson and Fort Taylor in Florida, and Fort Sumter in South Carolina.[133][citation needed]

Battle of Fort Sumter

Main article: Battle of Fort Sumter

See also: President Lincoln's 75,000 volunteers

Artwork Despite him stone fort at center surrounded by water. The fort is on fire and shells explode in the air above it.

The Battle of Fort Sumter, as depicted by Currier and Ives

The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces opened fire on the Union-held Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter is located in the middle of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.[134] Its status had been contentious for months. Outgoing President Buchanan had dithered in reinforcing the Union garrison in the harbor, which was under command of Major Robert Anderson. Anderson took matters into his own hands and on December 26, 1860, under the cover of darkness, sailed the garrison from the poorly placed Fort Moultrie to the stalwart island Fort Sumter.[135] Anderson's actions catapulted him to hero status in the North. An attempt to resupply the fort on January 9, 1861, failed and nearly started the war then and there. But an informal truce held.[136] On March 5, the newly sworn in Lincoln was informed that the Fort was running low on supplies.[137]

Fort Sumter proved to be one of the main challenges of the new Lincoln administration.[137] Back-channel dealing by Secretary of State Seward with the Confederates undermined Lincoln's decision-making; Seward wanted to pull out of the fort.[138] But a firm hand by Lincoln tamed Seward, and Seward became one of Lincoln's staunchest allies. Lincoln ultimately decided that holding the fort, which would require reinforcing it, was the only workable option. Thus, on April 6, Lincoln informed the Governor of South Carolina that a ship with food but no ammunition would attempt to supply the Fort. Historian McPherson describes this win-win approach as "the first sign of the mastery that would mark Lincoln's presidency"; the Union would win if it could resupply and hold onto the Fort, and the South would be the aggressor if it opened fire on an unarmed ship supplying starving men.[139] An April 9 Confederate cabinet meeting resulted in President Davis's ordering General P. G. T. Beauregard to take the Fort before supplies could reach it.[140]

At 4:30 am on April 12, Confederate forces fired the first of 4,000 shells at the Fort; it fell the next day. The loss of Fort Sumter lit a patriotic fire under the North.[141] On April 15, Lincoln called on the states to field 75,000 volunteer troops for 90 days; impassioned Union states met the quotas quickly.[142] On May 3, 1861, Lincoln called for an additional 42,000 volunteers for a period of three years.[143][144] Shortly after this, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded and joined the Confederacy. To reward Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.[145]

Attitude of the border states

Main article: Border states (American Civil War)

US Secession map. The Union vs. the Confederacy.

   Union states

   Union territories not permitting slavery

   Border Union states, permitting slavery

(One of these states, West Virginia was created in 1863)

   Confederate states

   Union territories that permitted slavery (claimed by Confederacy) at the start of the war, but where slavery was outlawed by the U.S. in 1862

Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky were slave states whose people had divided loyalties to Northern and Southern businesses and family members. Some men enlisted in the Union Army and others in the Confederate Army.[146] West Virginia separated from Virginia and was admitted to the Union on June 20, 1863.[147]

Maryland's territory surrounded the United States' capital of Washington, D.C., and could cut it off from the North.[148] It had numerous anti-Lincoln officials who tolerated anti-army rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges, both aimed at hindering the passage of troops to the South. Maryland's legislature voted overwhelmingly (53–13) to stay in the Union, but also rejected hostilities with its southern neighbors, voting to close Maryland's rail lines to prevent them from being used for war.[149] Lincoln responded by establishing martial law and unilaterally suspending habeas corpus in Maryland, along with sending in militia units from the North.[150] Lincoln rapidly took control of Maryland and the District of Columbia by seizing many prominent figures, including arresting 1/3 of the members of the Maryland General Assembly on the day it reconvened.[149][151] All were held without trial, with Lincoln ignoring a ruling on June 1, 1861, by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, not speaking for the Court,[152] that only Congress (and not the president) could suspend habeas corpus (Ex parte Merryman). Federal troops imprisoned a prominent Baltimore newspaper editor, Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, after he criticized Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring Taney's ruling.[153]

In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain within the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state militia, it was attacked by federal forces under General Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State Guard to the southwestern corner of the state (see also: Missouri secession). In the resulting vacuum, the convention on secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri.[154]

Kentucky did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. When Confederate forces entered the state in September 1861, neutrality ended and the state reaffirmed its Union status while maintaining slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces in 1861, Confederate sympathizers organized a secession convention, formed the shadow Confederate Government of Kentucky, inaugurated a governor, and gained recognition from the Confederacy. Its jurisdiction extended only as far as Confederate battle lines in the Commonwealth, and it went into exile after October 1862.[155]

After Virginia's secession, a Unionist government in Wheeling asked 48 counties to vote on an ordinance to create a new state on October 24, 1861. A voter turnout of 34 percent approved the statehood bill (96 percent approving).[156] Twenty-four secessionist counties were included in the new state,[157] and the ensuing guerrilla war engaged about 40,000 federal troops for much of the war.[158][159] Congress admitted West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. West Virginia provided about 20,000–22,000 soldiers to both the Confederacy and the Union.[160]

A Unionist secession attempt occurred in East Tennessee, but was suppressed by the Confederacy, which arrested over 3,000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union. They were held without trial.[161]

War

See also: List of American Civil War battles and Military leadership in the American Civil War

The Civil War was a contest marked by the ferocity and frequency of battle. Over four years, 237 named battles were fought, as were many more minor actions and skirmishes, which were often characterized by their bitter intensity and high casualties. In his book The American Civil War, British historian John Keegan writes that "The American Civil War was to prove one of the most ferocious wars ever fought". In many cases, without geographic objectives, the only target for each side was the enemy's soldier.[162]

Mobilization

See also: Economic history of the United States Civil War

As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in Montgomery, the entire U.S. army numbered 16,000. However, Northern governors had begun to mobilize their militias.[163] The Confederate Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by governors as early as February. By May, Jefferson Davis was pushing for 100,000 soldiers for one year or the duration, and that was answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.[164][165][166]

U.S. minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams proved particularly adept and convinced Britain not to openly challenge the Union blockade. The Confederacy purchased several warships from commercial shipbuilders in Britain (CSS Alabama, CSS Shenandoah, CSS Tennessee, CSS Tallahassee, CSS Florida, and some others). The most famous, the CSS Alabama, did considerable damage and led to serious postwar disputes. However, public opinion against slavery in Britain created a political liability for British politicians, where the anti-slavery movement was powerful.[210]

A December 1861 cartoon in Punch magazine in London ridicules American aggressiveness in the Trent Affair. John Bull, at right, warns Uncle Sam, "You do what's right, my son, or I'll blow you out of the water."

War loomed in late 1861 between the U.S. and Britain over the Trent affair, which began when U.S. Navy personnel boarded the British ship Trent and seized two Confederate diplomats. However, London and Washington were able to smooth over the problem after Lincoln released the two men.[211] Prince Albert had left his deathbed to issue diplomatic instructions to Lord Lyons during the Trent affair. His request was honored, and, as a result, the British response to the United States was toned down and helped avert the British becoming involved in the war.[212] In 1862, the British government considered mediating between the Union and Confederacy, though even such an offer would have risked war with the United States. British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston reportedly read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times when deciding on what his decision would be.[211]

The Union victory in the Battle of Antietam caused the British to delay this decision. The Emancipation Proclamation over time would reinforce the political liability of supporting the Confederacy. Realizing that Washington could not intervene in Mexico as long as the Confederacy controlled Texas, France invaded Mexico in 1861. Washington repeatedly protested France's violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Despite sympathy for the Confederacy, France's seizure of Mexico ultimately deterred it from war with the Union. Confederate offers late in the war to end slavery in return for diplomatic recognition were not seriously considered by London or Paris. After 1863, the Polish revolt against Russia further distracted the European powers and ensured that they would remain neutral.[213]

Russia supported the Union, largely because it believed that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to its geopolitical rival, the United Kingdom. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, respectively.[214]

Eastern theater

Further information: Eastern Theater of the American Civil War

Map of the United States with counties colored

County map of Civil War battles by theater and year

The Eastern theater refers to the military operations east of the Appalachian Mountains, including the states of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and the coastal fortifications and seaports of North Carolina.[citation needed]

Background

Army of the Potomac

Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26, 1861 (he was briefly general-in-chief of all the Union armies but was subsequently relieved of that post in favor of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862. The 1862 Union strategy called for simultaneous advances along four axes:[215]

McClellan would lead the main thrust in Virginia towards Richmond.

Ohio forces would advance through Kentucky into Tennessee.

The Missouri Department would drive south along the Mississippi River.

The westernmost attack would originate from Kansas.

Army of Northern Virginia

Old man with gray beard and military uniform

Robert E. Lee

The primary Confederate force in the Eastern theater was the Army of Northern Virginia. The Army originated as the (Confederate) Army of the Potomac, which was organized on June 20, 1861, from all operational forces in Northern Virginia. On July 20 and 21, the Army of the Shenandoah and forces from the District of Harpers Ferry were added. Units from the Army of the Northwest were merged into the Army of the Potomac between March 14 and May 17, 1862. The Army of the Potomac was renamed Army of Northern Virginia on March 14. The Army of the Peninsula was merged into it on April 12, 1862.

When Virginia declared its secession in April 1861, Robert E. Lee chose to follow his home state, despite his desire for the country to remain intact and an offer of a senior Union command.

Lee's biographer, Douglas S. Freeman, asserts that the army received its final name from Lee when he issued orders assuming command on June 1, 1862.[216] However, Freeman does admit that Lee corresponded with Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston, his predecessor in army command, before that date and referred to Johnston's command as the Army of Northern Virginia. Part of the confusion results from the fact that Johnston commanded the Department of Northern Virginia (as of October 22, 1861) and the name Army of Northern Virginia can be seen as an informal consequence of its parent department's name. Jefferson Davis and Johnston did not adopt the name, but it is clear that the organization of units as of March 14 was the same organization that Lee received on June 1, and thus it is generally referred to today as the Army of Northern Virginia, even if that is correct only in retrospect.

On July 4 at Harper's Ferry, Colonel Thomas J. Jackson assigned Jeb Stuart to command all the cavalry companies of the Army of the Shenandoah. He eventually commanded the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry.

Battles

Middle aged man with large beard in military uniform

"Stonewall" Jackson obtained his nickname at the Battle of Bull Run.

Man with mustache and military uniform, striking a Napoleon pose

George B. McClellan, a Union Army general and, later, governor of New Jersey

In one of the first highly visible battles, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces led by Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard near Washington was repulsed at the First Battle of Bull Run (also known as First Manassas).

The Union had the upper hand at first, nearly pushing confederate forces holding a defensive position into a rout, but Confederate reinforcements under Joseph E. Johnston arrived from the Shenandoah Valley by railroad, and the course of the battle quickly changed. A brigade of Virginians under the relatively unknown brigadier general from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, stood its ground, which resulted in Jackson receiving his famous nickname, "Stonewall".

Upon the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations, McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the peninsula between the York River and James River, southeast of Richmond. McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign.[217][218][219]

Also in the spring of 1862, in the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson led his Valley Campaign. Employing audacity and rapid, unpredictable movements on interior lines, Jackson's 17,000 troops marched 646 miles (1,040 km) in 48 days and won several minor battles as they successfully engaged three Union armies (52,000 men), including those of Nathaniel P. Banks and John C. Fremont, preventing them from reinforcing the Union offensive against Richmond. The swiftness of Jackson's men earned them the nickname of "foot cavalry".

Johnston halted McClellan's advance at the Battle of Seven Pines, but he was wounded in the battle, and Robert E. Lee assumed his position of command. General Lee and top subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson defeated McClellan in the Seven Days Battles and forced his retreat.[220]

The Northern Virginia Campaign, which included the Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory for the South.[221] McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders to send reinforcements to John Pope's Union Army of Virginia, which made it easier for Lee's Confederates to defeat twice the number of combined enemy troops.[citation needed]

Painting of battlefield scene

The Battle of Antietam, the Civil War's deadliest one-day fight

Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North with the Maryland Campaign. General Lee led 45,000 troops of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored Pope's troops to McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in United States military history.[220][222] Lee's army, checked at last, returned to Virginia before McClellan could destroy it. Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.[223]

When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside was soon defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg[224] on December 13, 1862, when more than 12,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against Marye's Heights.[225] After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker.[226]

Trench with abandoned rifles and dead men

Confederate dead overrun at Marye's Heights, reoccupied next day May 4, 1863

Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering the Confederates by more than two to one, his Chancellorsville Campaign proved ineffective, and he was humiliated in the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863.[227] Chancellorsville is known as Lee's "perfect battle" because his risky decision to divide his army in the presence of a much larger enemy force resulted in a significant Confederate victory. Gen. Stonewall Jackson was shot in the left arm and right hand by accidental friendly fire during the battle. The arm was amputated, but he died shortly thereafter of pneumonia.[228] Lee famously said: "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm."[229]

The fiercest fighting of the battle—and the second bloodiest day of the Civil War—occurred on May 3 as Lee launched multiple attacks against the Union position at Chancellorsville. That same day, John Sedgwick advanced across the Rappahannock River, defeated the small Confederate force at Marye's Heights in the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, and then moved to the west. The Confederates fought a successful delaying action at the Battle of Salem Church.[230]

Cavalry charges on a battlefield

Pickett's Charge

Gen. Hooker was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 to 3, 1863).[231] This was the bloodiest battle of the war and has been called the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3 is often considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy because it signaled the collapse of serious Confederate threats of victory. Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).[232]

Western theater

Further information: Western Theater of the American Civil War

The Western theater refers to military operations between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, as well as parts of Louisiana.[233]

Background

Army of the Tennessee and Army of the Cumberland

Ulysses S. Grant

The primary Union forces in the Western theater were the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Cumberland, named for the two rivers, the Tennessee River and Cumberland River. After Meade's inconclusive fall campaign, Lincoln turned to the Western Theater for new leadership. At the same time, the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg surrendered, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River, permanently isolating the western Confederacy, and producing the new leader Lincoln needed, Ulysses S. Grant.[234][citation needed]

Army of Tennessee

The primary Confederate force in the Western theater was the Army of Tennessee. The army was formed on November 20, 1862, when General Braxton Bragg renamed the former Army of Mississippi. While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern Theater, they were defeated many times in the West.[233]

Battles

The Union's key strategist and tactician in the West was Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Forts Henry (February 6, 1862) and Donelson (February 11 to 16, 1862), earning him the nickname of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant, by which the Union seized control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.[235] Nathan Bedford Forrest rallied nearly 4,000 Confederate troops and led them to escape across the Cumberland. Nashville and central Tennessee thus fell to the Union, leading to attrition of local food supplies and livestock and a breakdown in social organization.[citation needed]

Leonidas Polk's invasion of Columbus ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned it against the Confederacy. Grant used river transport and Andrew Foote's gunboats of the Western Flotilla to threaten the Confederacy's "Gibraltar of the West" at Columbus, Kentucky. Although rebuffed at Belmont, Grant cut off Columbus. The Confederates, lacking their gunboats, were forced to retreat and the Union took control of western Kentucky and opened Tennessee in March 1862.[236]

Albert Sidney Johnston died at Shiloh.

At the Battle of Shiloh, in Shiloh, Tennessee in April 1862, the Confederates made a surprise attack that pushed Union forces against the river as night fell. Overnight, the Navy landed additional reinforcements, and Grant counter-attacked. Grant and the Union won a decisive victory—the first battle with the high casualty rates that would repeat over and over.[237] The Confederates lost Albert Sidney Johnston, considered their finest general before the emergence of Lee.[238]

One of the early Union objectives in the war was the capture of the Mississippi River, to cut the Confederacy in half. The Mississippi River was opened to Union traffic to the southern border of Tennessee with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee.[239]

In April 1862, the Union Navy captured New Orleans.[239] "The key to the river was New Orleans, the South's largest port [and] greatest industrial center."[240] U.S. Naval forces under Farragut ran past Confederate defenses south of New Orleans. Confederate forces abandoned the city, giving the Union a critical anchor in the deep South.[241] which allowed Union forces to begin moving up the Mississippi. Memphis fell to Union forces on June 6, 1862, and became a key base for further advances south along the Mississippi River. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, prevented Union control of the entire river.[242]

By 1863, the Union controlled large portions of the Western Theater, especially areas surrounding the Mississippi River.

Bragg's second invasion of Kentucky in the Confederate Heartland Offensive included initial successes such as Kirby Smith's triumph at the Battle of Richmond and the capture of the Kentucky capital of Frankfort on September 3, 1862.[243] However, the campaign ended with a meaningless victory over Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of Perryville. Bragg was forced to end his attempt at invading Kentucky and retreat due to lack of logistical support and lack of infantry recruits for the Confederacy in that state.[244]

Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River in Tennessee, the culmination of the Stones River Campaign.[245]

Naval forces assisted Grant in the long, complex Vicksburg Campaign that resulted in the Confederates surrendering at the Battle of Vicksburg in July 1863, which cemented Union control of the Mississippi River and is considered one of the turning points of the war.[246]

The Battle of Chickamauga, the highest two-day losses

The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga. After Rosecrans' successful Tullahoma Campaign, Bragg, reinforced by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's corps (from Lee's army in the east), defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic defensive stand of Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas.[citation needed]

Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged in the Chattanooga Campaign. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg at the Third Battle of Chattanooga,[247] eventually causing Longstreet to abandon his Knoxville Campaign and driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.[248]

Trans-Mississippi theater

Further information: Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War

Background

The Trans-Mississippi theater refers to military operations west of the Mississippi River, encompassing most of Missouri, Arkansas, most of Louisiana, and Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The Trans-Mississippi District was formed by the Confederate Army to better coordinate Ben McCulloch's command of troops in Arkansas and Louisiana, Sterling Price's Missouri State Guard, as well as the portion of Earl Van Dorn's command that included the Indian Territory and excluded the Army of the West. The Union's command was the Trans-Mississippi Division, or the Military Division of West Mississippi.[249]

Battles

Nathaniel Lyon secured St. Louis docks and arsenal, led Union forces to expel Missouri Confederate forces and government.[250]

The first battle of the Trans-Mississippi theater was the Battle of Wilson's Creek (August 1861). The Confederates were driven from Missouri early in the war as a result of the Battle of Pea Ridge.[251]

Extensive guerrilla warfare characterized the trans-Mississippi region, as the Confederacy lacked the troops and the logistics to support regular armies that could challenge Union control.[252] Roving Confederate bands such as Quantrill's Raiders terrorized the countryside, striking both military installations and civilian settlements.[253] The "Sons of Liberty" and "Order of the American Knights" attacked pro-Union people, elected officeholders, and unarmed uniformed soldiers. These partisans could not be entirely driven out of the state of Missouri until an entire regular Union infantry division was engaged. By 1864, these violent activities harmed the nationwide anti-war movement organizing against the re-election of Lincoln. Missouri not only stayed in the Union but Lincoln took 70 percent of the vote for re-election.[254]

Numerous small-scale military actions south and west of Missouri sought to control Indian Territory and New Mexico Territory for the Union. The Battle of Glorieta Pass was the decisive battle of the New Mexico Campaign. The Union repulsed Confederate incursions into New Mexico in 1862, and the exiled Arizona government withdrew into Texas. In the Indian Territory, civil war broke out within tribes. About 12,000 Indian warriors fought for the Confederacy and smaller numbers for the Union.[255] The most prominent Cherokee was Brigadier General Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender.[256]

After the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, General Kirby Smith in Texas was informed by Jefferson Davis that he could expect no further help from east of the Mississippi River. Although he lacked resources to beat Union armies, he built up a formidable arsenal at Tyler, along with his own Kirby Smithdom economy, a virtual "independent fiefdom" in Texas, including railroad construction and international smuggling. The Union, in turn, did not directly engage him.[257] Its 1864 Red River Campaign to take Shreveport, Louisiana, was a failure and Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war.[258]

Lower Seaboard theater

Further information: Lower Seaboard Theater of the American Civil War

Background

The Lower Seaboard theater refers to military and naval operations that occurred near the coastal areas of the Southeast (Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) as well as the southern part of the Mississippi River (Port Hudson and south). Union Naval activities were dictated by the Anaconda Plan.[259]

Battles

One of the earliest battles of the war was fought at Port Royal Sound (November 1861), south of Charleston. Much of the war along the South Carolina coast concentrated on capturing Charleston. In attempting to capture Charleston, the Union military tried two approaches: by land over James or Morris Islands or through the harbor. However, the Confederates were able to drive back each Union attack. One of the most famous of the land attacks was the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, in which the 54th Massachusetts Infantry took part. The Union suffered a serious defeat in this battle, losing 1,515 soldiers while the Confederates lost only 174.[260] However, the 54th was hailed for its valor in that battle, which encouraged the general acceptance of the recruitment of African American soldiers into the Union Army, which reinforced the Union's numerical advantage.

Fort Pulaski on the Georgia coast was an early target for the Union navy. Following the capture of Port Royal, an expedition was organized with engineer troops under the command of Captain Quincy A. Gillmore, forcing a Confederate surrender. The Union army occupied the fort for the rest of the war after repairing it.[261]

New Orleans captured

In April 1862, a Union naval task force commanded by Commander David D. Porter attacked Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which guarded the river approach to New Orleans from the south. While part of the fleet bombarded the forts, other vessels forced a break in the obstructions in the river and enabled the rest of the fleet to steam upriver to the city. A Union army force commanded by Major General Benjamin Butler landed near the forts and forced their surrender. Butler's controversial command of New Orleans earned him the nickname "Beast".[262]

The following year, the Union Army of the Gulf commanded by Major General Nathaniel P. Banks laid siege to Port Hudson for nearly eight weeks, the longest siege in US military history. The Confederates attempted to defend with the Bayou Teche Campaign but surrendered after Vicksburg. These two surrenders gave the Union control over the entire Mississippi.[263]

Several small skirmishes were fought in Florida, but no major battles. The biggest was the Battle of Olustee in early 1864.[citation needed]

Pacific Coast theater

Further information: Pacific Coast Theater of the American Civil War

The Pacific Coast theater refers to military operations on the Pacific Ocean and in the states and Territories west of the Continental Divide.[264]

Conquest of Virginia

William Tecumseh Sherman

At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would end the war.[265] This was total war not in killing civilians but rather in taking provisions and forage and destroying homes, farms, and railroads, that Grant said "would otherwise have gone to the support of secession and rebellion. This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end."[266] Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire Confederacy from multiple directions. Generals George Meade and Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond, General Franz Sigel (and later Philip Sheridan) were to attack the Shenandoah Valley, General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march to the sea (the Atlantic Ocean), Generals George Crook and William W. Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia, and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile, Alabama.[267]

Grant's Overland Campaign

These dead soldiers—from Ewell's May 1864 attack at Spotsylvania—delayed Grant's advance on Richmond in the Overland Campaign.

Grant's army set out on the Overland Campaign intending to draw Lee into a defense of Richmond, where they would attempt to pin down and destroy the Confederate army. The Union army first attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles, notably at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. These battles resulted in heavy losses on both sides and forced Lee's Confederates to fall back repeatedly.[268] At the Battle of Yellow Tavern, the Confederates lost Jeb Stuart.[269]

An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Each battle resulted in setbacks for the Union that mirrored those they had suffered under prior generals, though, unlike those prior generals, Grant chose to fight on rather than retreat. Grant was tenacious and kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. While Lee was preparing for an attack on Richmond, Grant unexpectedly turned south to cross the James River and began the protracted Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.[270]

Sheridan's Valley Campaign

Philip Sheridan

Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan was initially repelled at the Battle of New Market by former U.S. vice president and Confederate Gen. John C. Breckinridge. The Battle of New Market was the Confederacy's last major victory of the war and included a charge by teenage VMI cadets. After redoubling his efforts, Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley, a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.[271]

Sherman's March to the Sea

Painting of four men conferring in a ship's cabin, entitled "The Peacemakers".

The Peacemakers by George Peter Alexander Healy portrays Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter discussing plans for the last weeks of the Civil War aboard the steamer River Queen in March 1865. (Clickable image—use cursor to identify.)

Meanwhile, Sherman maneuvered from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta on September 2, 1864, guaranteed the reelection of Lincoln as president.[272] Hood left the Atlanta area to swing around and menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin–Nashville Campaign. Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.[273]

Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched, with no destination set, laying waste to about 20 percent of the farms in Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah, Georgia, in December 1864. Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the march. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south, increasing the pressure on Lee's army.[274]

The Waterloo of the Confederacy

Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. One last Confederate attempt to break the Union hold on Petersburg failed at the decisive Battle of Five Forks (sometimes called "the Waterloo of the Confederacy") on April 1. This meant that the Union now controlled the entire perimeter surrounding Richmond-Petersburg, completely cutting it off from the Confederacy. Realizing that the capital was now lost, Lee's army and the Confederate government were forced to evacuate. The Confederate capital fell on April 2–3, to the Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west after a defeat at Sayler's Creek on April 6.[275]

End of the war

Main article: Conclusion of the American Civil War

This New York Times front page celebrated Lee's surrender, headlining how Grant let Confederate officers retain their sidearms and "paroled" the Confederate officers and men.[276]

News of Lee's April 9 surrender reached this southern newspaper (Savannah, Georgia) on April 15—after the April 14 shooting of President Lincoln.[277] The article quotes Grant's terms of surrender.[277]

Initially, Lee did not intend to surrender but planned to regroup at Appomattox Station, where supplies were to be waiting and then continue the war. Grant chased Lee and got in front of him so that when Lee's army reached the village of Appomattox Court House, they were surrounded. After an initial battle, Lee decided that the fight was now hopeless, and surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at "Wilmer McLean's farmhouse, located less than 100 yards west of the county courthouse",[278] now known as the McLean House.[279] In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of peacefully restoring Confederate states to the Union, Lee was permitted to keep his sword and his horse, Traveller. His men were paroled, and a chain of Confederate surrenders began.[280]

On April 14, 1865, President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Lincoln died early the next morning. Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, was unharmed, because his would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve, so Johnson was immediately sworn in as president. Meanwhile, Confederate forces across the South surrendered as news of Lee's surrender reached them.[281] On April 26, 1865, the same day Sergeant Boston Corbett killed Booth at a tobacco barn, General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered nearly 90,000 troops of the Army of Tennessee to Major General William Tecumseh Sherman at Bennett Place near present-day Durham, North Carolina. It proved to be the largest surrender of Confederate forces. On May 4, all remaining Confederate forces in Alabama, Louisiana east of the Mississippi River, and Mississippi under Lieutenant General Richard Taylor surrendered.[282]

The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was captured at Irwinville, Georgia on May 10, 1865.[283]

On May 13, 1865, the last land battle of the war was fought at the Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas.[284][285][286]

On May 26, 1865, Confederate Lt. Gen. Simon B. Buckner, acting for General Edmund Kirby Smith, signed a military convention surrendering the Confederate trans-Mississippi Department forces.[287][288] This date is often cited by contemporaries and historians as the end date of the American Civil War.[1][2] On June 2, 1865, with most of his troops having already gone home, technically deserted, a reluctant Kirby Smith had little choice but to sign the official surrender document.[289][290] On June 23, 1865, Cherokee leader and Confederate Brig. Gen. Stand Watie became the last Confederate general to surrender his forces.[291][292]

On June 19, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced General Order No. 3, bringing the Emancipation Proclamation into effect in Texas and freeing the last slaves of the Confederacy.[293] The anniversary of this date is now celebrated as Juneteenth.[294]

The naval portion of the war ended more slowly. It had begun on April 11, 1865, two days after Lee's surrender, when President Lincoln proclaimed that foreign nations had no further "claim or pretense" to deny equality of maritime rights and hospitalities to U.S. warships and, in effect, that rights extended to Confederate ships to use neutral ports as safe havens from U.S. warships should end.[295][296] Having no response to Lincoln's proclamation, President Andrew Johnson issued a similar proclamation dated May 10, 1865, more directly stating the premise that the war was almost at an end ("armed resistance...may be regarded as virtually at an end") and that insurgent cruisers still at sea and prepared to attack U.S. ships should not have rights to do so through use of safe foreign ports or waters and warned nations which continued to do so that their government vessels would be denied access to U.S. ports. He also "enjoined" U.S. officers to arrest the cruisers and their crews so "that they may be prevented from committing further depredations on commerce and that the persons on board of them may no longer enjoy impunity for their crimes".[297] Britain finally responded on June 6, 1865, by transmitting a June 2, 1865 letter from Foreign Secretary John Russell, 1st Earl Russell to the Lords of the Admiralty withdrawing rights to Confederate warships to enter British ports and waters but with exceptions for a limited time to allow a captain to enter a port to "divest his vessel of her warlike character" and for U.S. ships to be detained in British ports or waters to allow Confederate cruisers twenty-four hours to leave first.[298] U.S. Secretary of State William Seward welcomed the withdrawal of concessions to the Confederates but objected to the exceptions.[299] Finally, on October 18, 1865, Russell advised the Admiralty that the time specified in his June 2, 1865 message had elapsed and "all measures of a restrictive nature on vessels of war of the United States in British ports, harbors, and waters, are now to be considered as at an end".[300] Nonetheless, the final Confederate surrender was in Liverpool, England where James Iredell Waddell, the captain of the CSS Shenandoah, surrendered the cruiser to British authorities on November 6, 1865.[301]

Legally, the war did not end until August 20, 1866, when President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that declared "that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America".[302][303][304]

Union victory and aftermath

Explaining the Union victory

A map of the U.S. South showing shrinking territory under rebel control

Map of Confederate territory losses year by year

The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. The North and West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political power of the slaveowners and rich Southerners ended. Historians are less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially regarding the second-class citizenship of the freedmen and their poverty.[305]

Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the war. Most scholars, including James M. McPherson, argue that Confederate victory was at least possible.[306] McPherson argues that the North's advantage in population and resources made Northern victory likely but not guaranteed. He also argues that if the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, it would have more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union.[307]

Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory to win but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies to win.[307] Lincoln was not a military dictator and could continue to fight the war only as long as the American public supported a continuation of the war. The Confederacy sought to win independence by outlasting Lincoln; however, after Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864, all hope for a political victory for the South ended. At that point, Lincoln had secured the support of the Republicans, War Democrats, the border states, emancipated slaves, and the neutrality of Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also defeated the Copperheads, who had wanted a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America.[308]

Comparison of Union and Confederacy, 1860–1864[309]

Year Union Confederacy

Population 1860 22,100,000 (71%) 9,100,000 (29%)

1864 28,800,000 (90%)[g] 3,000,000 (10%)[310]

Free 1860 21,700,000 (98%) 5,600,000 (62%)

Slave 1860 490,000 (2%) 3,550,000 (38%)

1864 negligible 1,900,000[h]

Soldiers 1860–64 2,100,000 (67%) 1,064,000 (33%)

Railroad miles 1860 21,800 (71%) 8,800 (29%)

1864 29,100 (98%)[311] negligible

Manufactures 1860 90% 10%

1864 98% 2%

Arms production 1860 97% 3%

1864 98% 2%

Cotton bales 1860 negligible 4,500,000

1864 300,000 negligible

Exports 1860 30% 70%

1864 98% 2%

Some scholars argue that the Union held an insurmountable long-term advantage over the Confederacy in industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, only delayed defeat.[312][313] Civil War historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly:

I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back .... If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War.[314]

A minority view among historians is that the Confederacy lost because, as E. Merton Coulter put it, "people did not will hard enough and long enough to win."[315][316] However, most historians reject the argument.[317] McPherson, after reading thousands of letters written by Confederate soldiers, found strong patriotism that continued to the end; they truly believed they were fighting for freedom and liberty. Even as the Confederacy was visibly collapsing in 1864–65, he says most Confederate soldiers were fighting hard.[318] Historian Gary Gallagher cites General Sherman, who in early 1864 commented, "The devils seem to have a determination that cannot but be admired." Despite their loss of slaves and wealth, with starvation looming, Sherman continued, "yet I see no sign of let-up—some few deserters—plenty tired of war, but the masses determined to fight it out."[319]

Also important were Lincoln's eloquence in rationalizing the national purpose and his skill in keeping the border states committed to the Union cause. The Emancipation Proclamation was an effective use of the President's war powers.[320] The Confederate government failed in its attempt to get Europe involved in the war militarily, particularly Great Britain and France. Southern leaders needed to get European powers to help break up the blockade the Union had created around the Southern ports and cities. Lincoln's naval blockade was 95% effective at stopping trade goods; as a result, imports and exports to the South declined significantly. The abundance of European cotton and Britain's hostility to the institution of slavery, along with Lincoln's Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico naval blockades, severely decreased any chance that either Britain or France would enter the war.[321]

Historian Don Doyle has argued that the Union victory had a major impact on the course of world history.[322] The Union victory energized popular democratic forces. A Confederate victory, on the other hand, would have meant a new birth of slavery, not freedom. Historian Fergus Bordewich, following Doyle, argues that:

The North's victory decisively proved the durability of democratic government. Confederate independence, on the other hand, would have established an American model for reactionary politics and race-based repression that would likely have cast an international shadow into the twentieth century and perhaps beyond."[323]

Scholars have debated what the effects of the war were on political and economic power in the South.[324] The prevailing view is that the southern planter elite retained its powerful position in the South.[324] However, a 2017 study challenges this, noting that while some Southern elites retained their economic status, the turmoil of the 1860s created greater opportunities for economic mobility in the South than in the North.[324]

Casualties

One in thirteen veterans were amputees.

Remains of both sides were reinterred.

Andersonville National Cemetery, Georgia

The war resulted in at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50,000 civilians.[10] Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000.[325][13] A novel way of calculating casualties by looking at the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm through analysis of census data found that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000 people, but most likely 761,000 people, died in the war.[326] As historian McPherson notes, the war's "cost in American lives was as great as in all of the nation's other wars combined through Vietnam."[327]

Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South.[328][329] About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps during the War.[330] An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs in the war.[331]

Of the 359,528 Union Army dead, amounting to 15 percent of the over two million who served:[7]

110,070 were killed in action (67,000) or died of wounds (43,000).

199,790 died of disease (75 percent was due to the war, the remainder would have occurred in civilian life anyway)

24,866 died in Confederate prison camps

9,058 were killed by accidents or drowning

15,741 other/unknown deaths

In addition, there were 4,523 deaths in the Navy (2,112 in battle) and 460 in the Marines (148 in battle).[8]

After the Emancipation Proclamation authorized freed slaves to "be received into the armed service of the United States", former slaves who escaped from plantations or were liberated by the Union Army were recruited into the United States Colored Troops regiments of the Union Army, as were black men who had not been slaves. The U.S. Colored Troops made up 10 percent of the Union death toll—15 percent of Union deaths from disease and less than 3 percent of those killed in battle.[7] Losses among African Americans were high. In the last year and a half and from all reported casualties, approximately 20 percent of all African Americans enrolled in the military died during the Civil War. Notably, their mortality rate was significantly higher than that of white soldiers. While 15.2% of United States Volunteers and just 8.6% of white Regular Army troops died, 20.5% of United States Colored Troops died.[332]: 16 

The United States National Park Service uses the following figures in its official tally of war losses:[3]

Union: 853,838

110,100 killed in action

224,580 disease deaths

275,154 wounded in action

211,411 captured (including 30,192 who died as POWs)

Confederate: 914,660

94,000 killed in action

164,000 disease deaths

194,026 wounded in action

462,634 captured (including 31,000 who died as POWs)

Burying Union dead on the Antietam battlefield, 1862

While the figures of 360,000 army deaths for the Union and 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete. In addition to many Confederate records being missing, partly as a result of Confederate widows not reporting deaths due to being ineligible for benefits, both armies only counted troops who died during their service and not the tens of thousands who died of wounds or diseases after being discharged. This often happened only a few days or weeks later. Francis Amasa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 census, used census and surgeon general data to estimate a minimum of 500,000 Union military deaths and 350,000 Confederate military deaths, for a total death toll of 850,000 soldiers. While Walker's estimates were originally dismissed because of the 1870 census's undercounting, it was later found that the census was only off by 6.5% and that the data Walker used would be roughly accurate.[13]

Analyzing the number of dead by using census data to calculate the deviation of the death rate of men of fighting age from the norm suggests that at least 627,000 and at most 888,000, but most likely 761,000 soldiers, died in the war.[326] This would break down to approximately 350,000 Confederate and 411,000 Union military deaths, going by the proportion of Union to Confederate battle losses.[citation needed]

Deaths among former slaves has proven much harder to estimate, due to the lack of reliable census data at the time, though they were known to be considerable, as former slaves were set free or escaped in massive numbers in an area where the Union army did not have sufficient shelter, doctors, or food for them. University of Connecticut Professor Jim Downs states that tens to hundreds of thousands of slaves died during the war from disease, starvation, or exposure and that if these deaths are counted in the war's total, the death toll would exceed 1 million.[333]

Losses were far higher than during the recent defeat of Mexico, which saw roughly thirteen thousand American deaths, including fewer than two thousand killed in battle, between 1846 and 1848. One reason for the high number of battle deaths during the war was the continued use of tactics similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the century, such as charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled barrels, Minié balls, and (near the end of the war for the Union army) repeating firearms such as the Spencer Repeating Rifle and the Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare, a style of fighting that defined much of World War I.[334]

Emancipation

Abolition of slavery in the various states of the United States over time:

  Abolition of slavery during or shortly after the American Revolution

  The Northwest Ordinance, 1787

  Gradual emancipation in New York (starting 1799, completed 1827) and New Jersey (starting 1804, completed by Thirteenth Amendment, 1865)

  The Missouri Compromise, 1821

  Effective abolition of slavery by Mexican or joint US/British authority

  Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1861

  Abolition of slavery by Congressional action, 1862

  Emancipation Proclamation as originally issued, January 1, 1863

  Subsequent operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863

  Abolition of slavery by state action during the Civil War

  Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864

  Operation of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865

  Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution, December 18, 1865

  Territory incorporated into the US after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment

Abolishing slavery was not a Union war goal from the outset, but it quickly became one.[21] Lincoln's initial claims were that preserving the Union was the central goal of the war.[335] In contrast, the South saw itself as fighting to preserve slavery.[21] While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting for slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file in Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.[336] However, as the war dragged on, and it became clear that slavery was central to the conflict, and that emancipation was (to quote from the Emancipation Proclamation) "a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing [the] rebellion," Lincoln and his cabinet made ending slavery a war goal, culminating in the Emancipation Proclamation.[21][337] Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation angered both Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized most Republicans.[337] By warning that free blacks would flood the North, Democrats made gains in the 1862 elections, but they did not gain control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the Northern state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.[338]

Emancipation Proclamation

Main article: Emancipation Proclamation

Slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended in each area when Union armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The last Confederate slaves were freed on June 19, 1865, celebrated as the modern holiday of Juneteenth. Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.[339][340] The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery.[i]

During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and emancipation in the United States was divided. Lincoln's fears of making slavery a war issue were based on a harsh reality: abolition did not enjoy wide support in the west, the territories, and the border states.[342][343] In 1861, Lincoln worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."[343] Copperheads and some War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually accepted it as part of the total war needed to save the Union.[344]

At first, Lincoln reversed attempts at emancipation by Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Generals John C. Frémont (in Missouri) and David Hunter (in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida) to keep the loyalty of the border states and the War Democrats. Lincoln warned the border states that a more radical type of emancipation would happen if his plan of gradual compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization was rejected.[345] But compensated emancipation occurred only in the District of Columbia, where Congress had the power to enact it. When Lincoln told his cabinet about his proposed emancipation proclamation, which would apply to the states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, Seward advised Lincoln to wait for a Union military victory before issuing it, as to do otherwise would seem like "our last shriek on the retreat".[346] Walter Stahr, however, writes, "There are contemporary sources, however, that suggest others were involved in the decision to delay", and Stahr quotes them.[347]

Lincoln laid the groundwork for public support in an open letter published in response to Horace Greeley's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions".[348][349][350] He also laid the groundwork at a meeting at the White House with five African American representatives on August 14, 1862. Arranging for a reporter to be present, he urged his visitors to agree to the voluntary colonization of black people, apparently to make his forthcoming preliminary Emancipation Proclamation more palatable to racist white people.[351] A Union victory in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, provided Lincoln with an opportunity to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the subsequent War Governors' Conference added support for the proclamation.[352]

Contrabands—fugitive slaves—cooks, laundresses, laborers, teamsters, railroad repair crews—fled to the Union Army, but were not officially freed until 1863 by the Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1863, the Union army accepted Freedmen. Seen here are Black and White teen-aged soldiers.

Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. It stated that the slaves in all states in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be free. He issued his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, keeping his promise. In his letter to Albert G. Hodges, Lincoln explained his belief that "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong .... And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling .... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."[353][j]

Lincoln's moderate approach succeeded in inducing the border states to remain in the Union and War Democrats to support the Union. The border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware) and Union-controlled regions around New Orleans, Norfolk, and elsewhere, were not covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. Nor was Tennessee, which had come under Union control.[355] Missouri and Maryland abolished slavery on their own; Kentucky and Delaware did not.[356] Still, the proclamation did not enjoy universal support. It caused much unrest in what were then considered western states, where racist sentiments led to a great fear of abolition. There was some concern that the proclamation would lead to the secession of western states, and its issuance prompted the stationing of Union troops in Illinois in case of rebellion.[357]

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was based on the President's war powers, it applied only in territory held by Confederates at the time it was issued. However, the Proclamation became a symbol of the Union's growing commitment to add emancipation to the Union's definition of liberty.[358] The Emancipation Proclamation greatly reduced the Confederacy's hope of being recognized or otherwise aided by Britain or France.[359] By late 1864, Lincoln was playing a leading role in getting the House of Representatives to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which mandated the ending of chattel slavery.[360]

Reconstruction

Main article: Reconstruction era

Through the supervision of the Freedmen's Bureau, Northern teachers traveled into the South to provide education and training for the newly freed population.

Oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and, among other promises, to "abide by and faithfully support all acts of Congress passed during the … rebellion having reference to slaves … ", signed by former Confederate officer Samuel M. Kennard on June 27, 1865[361]

The war had utterly devastated the South and posed serious questions of how the South would be re-integrated to the Union. The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South. All accumulated investment in Confederate bonds was forfeited; most banks and railroads were bankrupt. The income per person in the South dropped to less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted until well into the 20th century. Southern influence in the federal government, previously considerable, was greatly diminished until the latter half of the 20th century.[362] Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, and it continued until 1877.[363] It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the outstanding issues of the war's aftermath, the most important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to the Constitution: the 13th outlawing slavery (1865), the 14th guaranteeing citizenship to slaves (1868), and the 15th ensuring voting rights to slaves (1870). From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to consolidate the Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union, to guarantee a "republican form of government" for the ex-Confederate states, and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.[364]

President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865 when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and that the slaves were truly free. They overrode Johnson's vetoes of civil rights legislation, and the House impeached him, although the Senate did not convict him. In 1868 and 1872, the Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency. In 1872, the "Liberal Republicans" argued that the war goals had been achieved and that Reconstruction should end. They chose Horace Greeley to head a presidential ticket in 1872 but were decisively defeated. In 1874, Democrats, primarily Southern, took control of Congress and opposed further reconstruction. The Compromise of 1877 closed with a national consensus, except perhaps on the part of former slaves, that the Civil War had finally ended.[365] With the withdrawal of federal troops, however, whites retook control of every Southern legislature, and the Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement and legal segregation was ushered in.[366]

The Civil War would have a huge impact on American politics in the years to come. Many veterans on both sides were subsequently elected to political office, including five U.S. Presidents: General Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.[367]

Memory and historiography

Monument to the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veteran organization

Cherokee Confederates reunion in New Orleans, 1903

The Civil War is one of the central events in American collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books, and archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war.[368] The last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism in combat and heroism behind the lines, and issues of democracy and minority rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire of Liberty" influencing the world.[369]

Professional historians have paid much more attention to the causes of the war than to the war itself. Military history has largely developed outside academia, leading to a proliferation of studies by non-scholars who nevertheless are familiar with the primary sources and pay close attention to battles and campaigns and who write for the general public. Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote are among the best known.[370][371] Practically every major figure in the war, both North and South, has had a serious biographical study.[372]

Even the name used for the conflict has been controversial, with many names for the American Civil War. During and immediately after the war, Northern historians often used a term like "War of the Rebellion". Writers in rebel states often referred to the "War for Southern Independence". More recently, some Southerners have described it as the "War of Northern Aggression".[373]

Lost Cause

Main article: Lost Cause of the Confederacy

The memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause": that the Confederate cause was just and heroic. The myth shaped regional identity and race relations for generations.[374] Alan T. Nolan notes that the Lost Cause was expressly a rationalization, a cover-up to vindicate the name and fame of those in rebellion. Some claims revolve around the insignificance of slavery as a cause of the war; some appeals highlight cultural differences between North and South; the military conflict by Confederate actors is idealized; in any case, secession was said to be lawful.[375] Nolan argues that the adoption of the Lost Cause perspective facilitated the reunification of the North and the South while excusing the "virulent racism" of the 19th century, sacrificing black American progress to white man's reunification. He also deems the Lost Cause "a caricature of the truth. This caricature wholly misrepresents and distorts the facts of the matter" in every instance.[376] The Lost Cause myth was formalized by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, whose The Rise of American Civilization (1927) spawned "Beardian historiography". The Beards downplayed slavery, abolitionism, and issues of morality. Though this interpretation was abandoned by the Beards in the 1940s, and by historians generally by the 1950s, Beardian themes still echo among Lost Cause writers.[377][378][additional citation(s) needed]

Battlefield preservation

Beginning in 1961 the U.S. Post Office released commemorative stamps for five famous battles, each issued on the 100th anniversary of the respective battle.

Main article: American Civil War battlefield preservation

The first efforts at Civil War battlefield preservation and memorialization came during the war itself with the establishment of National Cemeteries at Gettysburg, Mill Springs and Chattanooga. Soldiers began erecting markers on battlefields beginning with the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but the oldest surviving monument is the Hazen Brigade Monument near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, built in the summer of 1863 by soldiers in Union Col. William B. Hazen's brigade to mark the spot where they buried their dead following the Battle of Stones River.[379] In the 1890s, the United States government established five Civil War battlefield parks under the jurisdiction of the War Department, beginning with the creation of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in Tennessee and the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland in 1890. The Shiloh National Military Park was established in 1894, followed by the Gettysburg National Military Park in 1895 and Vicksburg National Military Park in 1899. In 1933, these five parks and other national monuments were transferred to the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.[380] Chief among modern efforts to preserve Civil War sites has been the American Battlefield Trust, with more than 130 battlefields in 24 states.[381][382] The five major Civil War battlefield parks operated by the National Park Service (Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga/Chattanooga and Vicksburg) had a combined 3.1 million visitors in 2018, down 70% from 10.2 million in 1970.[383]

Civil War commemoration

Further information: Commemoration of the American Civil War and Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps

Top: Grand Army of the Republic (Union)

Bottom: United Confederate Veterans

The American Civil War has been commemorated in many capacities, ranging from the reenactment of battles to statues and memorial halls erected, to films being produced, to stamps and coins with Civil War themes being issued, all of which helped to shape public memory. These commemorations occurred in greater numbers on the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the war.[384] Hollywood's take on the war has been especially influential in shaping public memory, as in such film classics as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Lincoln (2012). Ken Burns's PBS television series The Civil War (1990) is especially well-remembered, though criticized for its historical inaccuracy.[385][386]

Technological significance

Numerous technological innovations during the Civil War had a great impact on 19th-century science. The Civil War was one of the earliest examples of an "industrial war", in which technological might is used to achieve military supremacy in a war.[387] New inventions, such as the train and telegraph, delivered soldiers, supplies and messages at a time when horses were considered to be the fastest way to travel.[388][389] It was also in this war that aerial warfare, in the form of reconnaissance balloons, was first used.[390] It saw the first action involving steam-powered ironclad warships in naval warfare history.[391] Repeating firearms such as the Henry rifle, Spencer rifle, Colt revolving rifle, Triplett & Scott carbine and others, first appeared during the Civil War; they were a revolutionary invention that would soon replace muzzle-loading and single-shot firearms in warfare. The war also saw the first appearances of rapid-firing weapons and machine guns such as the Agar gun and the Gatling gun.[392]

In works of culture and art

The Civil War is one of the most studied events in American history, and the collection of cultural works around it is enormous.[393] This section gives an abbreviated overview of the most notable works.

Literature

"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865) by Walt Whitman, famous eulogies to Lincoln

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) poetry by Herman Melville

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) by Jefferson Davis

The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885) by Mark Twain

Texar's Revenge, or, North Against South (1887) by Jules Verne

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) by Ambrose Bierce

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane

Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell

North and South (1982) by John Jakes

The March: A Novel (2005) by E. L. Doctorow, fictionalized account of Sherman's March to the Sea

Film

The Birth of a Nation (1915, US)

The General (1926, US)

Operator 13 (1934, US)

Gone with the Wind (1939, US)

The Red Badge of Courage (1951, US)

The Horse Soldiers (1959, US)

Shenandoah (1965, US)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Italy-Spain-FRG)

The Beguiled (1971, US)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, US)

Glory (1989, US)

The Civil War (1990, US)

Gettysburg (1993, US)

The Last Outlaw (1993, US)

Cold Mountain (2003, US)

Gods and Generals (2003, US)

North and South (miniseries)

Lincoln (2012, US)

Free State of Jones (2016, US)

Music

See also: Music of the American Civil War

"Dixie"

"Battle Cry of Freedom"

"Battle Hymn of the Republic"

"The Bonnie Blue Flag"

"John Brown's Body"

"When Johnny Comes Marching Home"

"Marching Through Georgia"

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

Video games

North & South (1989, FR)

Sid Meier's Gettysburg! (1997, US)

Sid Meier's Antietam! (1999, US)

American Conqest: Divided Nation (2006, US)

Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War (2006, US)

The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided (2006, US)

Ageod's American Civil War (2007, US/FR)

History Civil War: Secret Missions (2008, US)

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009, US)

Darkest of Days (2009, US)

Victoria II: A House Divided (2011, US)

Ageod's American Civil War II (2013, US/FR)

Ultimate General: Gettysburg (2014, UKR)

Ultimate General: Civil War (2016, UKR)

War of Rights (2018, US)

See also

General reference

American Civil War Corps Badges

List of American Civil War battles

List of costliest American Civil War land battles

List of weapons in the American Civil War

Union

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

Uniform of the Union Army

Confederacy

Central Confederacy

Uniforms of the Confederate States Armed Forces

Ethnic articles

African Americans in the American Civil War

German Americans in the American Civil War

Irish Americans in the American Civil War

Italian Americans in the American Civil War

Native Americans in the American Civil War

Topical articles

Commemoration of the American Civil War

Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps

Dorothea Dix

Education of freed people during the Civil War

History of espionage § American Civil War 1861–1865

Spies in the American Civil War

Gender issues in the American Civil War

Infantry in the American Civil War

List of ships captured in the 19th century#American Civil War

Slavery during the American Civil War

National articles

Canada in the American Civil War

Foreign enlistment in the American Civil War

Prussia in the American Civil War

United Kingdom in the American Civil War

State articles

Category:American Civil War by state

Memorials

List of Confederate monuments and memorials

List of memorials and monuments at Arlington National Cemetery

List of memorials to Jefferson Davis

List of memorials to Robert E. Lee

List of memorials to Stonewall Jackson

List of monuments erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy

List of monuments of the Gettysburg Battlefield

List of Union Civil War monuments and memorials

Memorials to Abraham Lincoln

Removal of Confederate monuments and memorials

Other modern civil wars in the world

Main article: List of civil wars

Boxer Rebellion

Chinese Civil War

Finnish Civil War

Mexican Revolution

Russian Civil War

Spanish Civil War

Taiping Rebellion

References

Notes

 See also Conclusion of the American Civil War and American Civil War#End of the war

 Total number that served

 211,411 Union soldiers were captured, and 30,218 died in prison. The ones who died have been excluded to prevent double-counting of casualties.

 462,634 Confederate soldiers were captured and 25,976 died in prison. The ones who died have been excluded to prevent double-counting of casualties.

 The Union was the U.S. government and included the states that remained loyal to it, both the non-slave states and the border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) where slavery was legal. Nevertheless, Missouri and Kentucky were given full state delegations in the Confederate Congress for the duration of the war.

 Assuming Union and Confederate casualties are counted together—more Americans were killed in World War II than in either the Union or Confederate Armies if their casualty totals are counted separately.

 "Union population 1864" aggregates 1860 population, average annual immigration 1855–1864, and population governed formerly by CSA per Kenneth Martis source. Contrabands and after the Emancipation Proclamation freedmen, migrating into Union control on the coasts and to the advancing armies, and natural increase are excluded.

 "Slave 1864, CSA" aggregates 1860 slave census of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Texas. It omits losses from contraband and after the Emancipation Proclamation, freedmen migrating to the Union controlled coastal ports and those joining advancing Union armies, especially in the Mississippi Valley.

 In spite of the South's shortage of soldiers, most Southern leaders—until 1865—opposed enlisting slaves. They used them as laborers to support the war effort. As Howell Cobb said, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Confederate generals Patrick Cleburne and Robert E. Lee argued in favor of arming blacks late in the war, and Jefferson Davis was eventually persuaded to support plans for arming slaves to avoid military defeat. The Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox before this plan could be implemented.[341]

 In late March 1864 Lincoln met with Governor Bramlette, Archibald Dixon, and Albert G. Hodges, to discuss recruitment of African American soldiers in the state of Kentucky. In a letter dated April 4, 1864, Lincoln summarized his stance on slavery, at Hodges' request.[354]

Citations

 Blair, William A. (2015). "Finding the Ending of America's Civil War". The American Historical Review. Oxford University Press. 120 (5): 1753–1766. doi:10.1093/ahr/120.5.1753. JSTOR 43697075. Retrieved July 29, 2022. Pennsylvania State University Professor William A. Blair wrote at pages 313–14: "the sheer weight of scholarship has leaned toward portraying the surrenders of the Confederate armies as the end of the war."; The New York Times: "End of the Rebellion; The Last Rebel Army Disbands. Kirby Smith Surrenders the Land and Naval Forces Under His Command. The Flag Disappears from the Continent. The Era of Peace Begins. Military Prisoners During the War to be Discharged. Deserters to be Released from Confinement. [Official.] From Secretary Stanton to Gen. Dix". The New York Times. United States Department of War. May 29, 1865. Retrieved July 29, 2022.; United States Civil War Centennial Commission Robertson, James I. Jr. (1963). The Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Civil War Centennial Commission. OCLC 299955768. At p. 31, Professor James I. Robertson Jr. of Virginia Tech University and Executive Director of the U. S. Civil War Centennial Commission wrote, "Lee's surrender left Johnston with no place to go. On April 26, near Durham, N. C., the Army of Tennessee laid down its arms before Sherman's forces. With the surrender of isolated forces in the Trans-Mississippi West on May 4, 11, and 26, the most costly war in American history came to an end."

 Among the many other contemporary sources and later historians citing May 26, 1865, the date that the surrender of the last significant Confederate force in the trans-Mississippi department was agreed upon, or citing simply the surrender of the Confederate armies, as the end date for the American Civil War hostilities are George Templeton Strong, who was a prominent New York lawyer; a founder, treasurer, and member of the Executive Committee of United States Sanitary Commission throughout the war; and a diarist. A diary excerpt is published in Gienapp, William E., ed. The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Documentary Collection. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001, pp. 313–314 ISBN 978-0-393-97555-0. A footnote in Gienapp shows the excerpt was taken from an edited version of the diaries by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2 (New York: The McMillan Company), pp. 600–601, which differs from the volume and page numbers of the original diaries; the actual diary is shown at https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A55249 Archived November 16, 2022, at the Wayback Machine, the page in Strong's original handwriting is shown at that web page, it is Volume 4, pp. 124–125: diary entries for May 23 (continued)-June 7, 1865 of the original diaries; Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States, 1860–'65. Volume II. Hartford: O. D. Case & Company, 1866. OCLC 936872302. p. 757: "Though the war on land ceased, and the flag utterly disappeared from this continent with the collapse and dispersion of Kirby Smith's command...."; John William Draper, History of the American Civil War. [1] Volume 3. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870. OCLC 830251756. Retrievfootnoed July 28, 2022. p. 618: "On the 26th of the same month General Kirby Smith surrendered his entire command west of the Mississippi to General Canby. With this, all military opposition to the government ended."; Jefferson Davis. The Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government. Volume II. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881. OCLC 1249017603. p. 630: “With General E. K. Smith's surrender the flag no longer floated on the land; p. 663: “When the Confederate soldiers laid down their arms and went home, all hostilities against the power of the Government of the United States ceased.”; Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. Volume 2. [2] New York: Charles L. Webster & Company, 1886. OCLC 255136538. p. 522: "General E. Kirby Smith surrendered the trans-Mississippi department on the 26th of May, leaving no other Confederate army at liberty to continue the war."; Frederick H. Dyer A compendium of the War of the Rebellion. [3] Des Moines, IA: Dyer Publishing Co., 1908. OCLC 8697590. Full entry on last Table of Contents page (unnumbered on download): "Alphabetical Index of Campaigns, Battles, Engagements, Actions, Combats, Sieges, Skirmishes, Reconnaissances, Scouts and Other Military Events Connected with the "War of the Rebellion" During the Period of Actual Hostilities, From April 12, 1861, to May 26, 1865"; Nathaniel W. Stephenson, The Day of the Confederacy, A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 in The Chronicles Of America Series. [4] New Haven: Yale University Press; Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.; London: Oxford University Press, 1919. p. 202: "The surrender of the forces of the Trans-Mississippi on May 26, 1865, brought the war to a definite conclusion."; Bruce Catton. The Centennial History of the Civil War. Vol. 3, Never Call Retreat. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965. p. 445. "and on May 26 he [E. Kirby Smith] surrendered and the war was over"; and Gary W. Gallagher, Stephen D. Engle, Robert K. Krick & Joseph T. Glatthaar, foreword by James M. McPherson. The American Civil War: This Mighty Scourge of War. New York: Osprey Publishing, Ltd., 2003 ISBN 978-1-84176-736-9. p. 308: "By 26 May, General Edward Kirby Smith had surrendered the Rebel forces in the trans-Mississippi west. The war was over."

 "Facts". National Park Service.

 "Size of the Union Army in the American Civil War" Archived April 16, 2017, at the Wayback Machine: Of which 131,000 were in the Navy and Marines, 140,000 were garrison troops and home defense militia, and 427,000 were in the field army.

 Long 1971, p. 705.

 "The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies; Series 4 – Volume 2" Archived July 25, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, United States War Dept., 1900.

 Fox, William F. Regimental losses in the American Civil War Archived May 25, 2017, at the Wayback Machine (1889).

 "DCAS Reports – Principal Wars, 1775–1991". dcas.dmdc.osd.mil.

 Chambers & Anderson 1999, p. 849.

 Nofi, Al (June 13, 2001). "Statistics on the War's Costs". Louisiana State University. Archived from the original on July 11, 2007. Retrieved October 14, 2007.

 James Downs, "Colorblindness in the demographic death toll of the Civil War" Archived January 19, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Oxford University Press blog, April 13, 2012. "The rough 19th century estimate was that 60,000 former slaves died from the epidemic, but doctors treating black patients often claimed that they were unable to keep accurate records due to demands on their time and the lack of manpower and resources. The surviving records only include the number of black patients whom doctors encountered; tens of thousands of other slaves had no contact with army doctors, leaving no records of their deaths." 60,000 documented plus 'tens of thousands' undocumented gives a minimum of 80,000 slave deaths.

 Toward a Social History of the American Civil War Exploratory Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 4.

 Hacker, J. David (September 20, 2011). "Recounting the Dead". The New York Times. Associated Press. Archived from the original on September 25, 2011. Retrieved September 22, 2011.

 James Downs, "Colorblindness in the demographic death toll of the Civil War" Archived January 19, 2018, at the Wayback Machine. Oxford University Press blog, April 13, 2012. "An 2 April 2012 New York Times article, 'New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll', reports that a new study ratchets up the death toll from an estimated 650,000 to a staggering 850,000 people. As horrific as this new number is, it fails to reflect the mortality of former slaves during the war. If former slaves were included in this figure, the Civil War death toll would likely be over a million casualties ...".

 James C. Bradford, A Companion to American Military History (2010), vol. 1, p. 101.

 "[I]n 1854, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act ... overturned the policy of containment [of slavery] and effectively unlocked the gates of the Western territories (including both the old Louisiana Purchase lands and the Mexican Cession) to the legal expansion of slavery...."Guelzo, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (2009), p. 80.

 Freehling, William W. (2008). The Road to Disunion: Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. Oxford University Press. pp. 9–24. ISBN 978-0-19-983991-9. Martis, Kenneth C. (1989). Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress: 1789–1988. Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. pp. 111–115. ISBN 978-0-02-920170-1. and Foner, Eric (1980). Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford University Press. pp. 18–20, 21–24. ISBN 978-0-19-972708-7.

 Coates, Ta-Nehisi (June 22, 2015). "What This Cruel War Was Over". The Atlantic. Retrieved December 21, 2016.

 White, Ronald C. Jr. (2006). Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. Simon and Schuster. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-7432-9962-6.

 Gallagher, Gary (February 21, 2011). Remembering the Civil War (Speech). Sesquicentennial of the Start of the Civil War. Miller Center of Public Affairs UV: C-Span. Retrieved August 29, 2017. Issues related to the institution of slavery precipitated secession.... It was not states' rights, it was not the tariff. It was not unhappiness with manners and customs that led to secession and eventually to war. It was a cluster of issues profoundly dividing the nation along a fault line delineated by the institution of slavery.

 McPherson 1988, pp. vii–viii.

 Dougherty, Keith L.; Heckelman, Jac C. (2008). "Voting on slavery at the Constitutional Convention". Public Choice. 136 (3–4): 293. doi:10.1007/s11127-008-9297-7. S2CID 14103553.

 McPherson 1988, pp. 7–8.

 McPherson, James M. (1994). What They Fought For 1861–1865. Louisiana State University Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-8071-1904-4.

 McPherson, James M. (1997). For Cause and Comrades. Oxford University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-19-509023-9.

 Gallagher, Gary (February 21, 2011). Remembering the Civil War (Speech). Sesquicentennial of the Start of the Civil War. Miller Center of Public Affairs UV: C-Span. Retrieved August 29, 2017. The loyal citizenry initially gave very little thought to emancipation in their quest to save the union.... Most loyal citizens, though profoundly prejudice[d] by 21st century standards[,] embraced emancipation as a tool to punish slaveholders, weaken the Confederacy, and protect the Union from future internal strife. A minority of the white populous invoked moral grounds to attack slavery, though their arguments carried far less weight than those presenting emancipation as a military measure necessary to defeat the rebels and restore the Union.

 "Union Soldiers Condemn Slavery". SHEC: Resources for Teachers. The City University of New York Graduate Center. Retrieved February 2, 2023.

 Eskridge, Larry (January 29, 2011). "After 150 years, we still ask: Why 'this cruel war'?". Canton Daily Ledger. Canton, Illinois. Archived from the original on February 1, 2011. Retrieved January 29, 2011.

 Kuriwaki, Shiro; Huff, Connor; Hall, Andrew B. (2019). "Wealth, Slaveownership, and Fighting for the Confederacy: An Empirical Study of the American Civil War". American Political Science Review. 113 (3): 658–673. doi:10.1017/S0003055419000170. ISSN 0003-0554.

 Weeks 2013, p. 240.

 Olsen 2002, p. 237.

 Chadwick, French Ensor (1906). Causes of the civil war, 1859–1861. p. 8 – via Internet Archive.

 Julius, Kevin C (2004). The Abolitionist Decade, 1829–1838: A Year-by-Year History of Early Events in the Antislavery Movement. McFarland & Company.

 Marcotte, Frank B. (2004). Six Days in April: Lincoln and the Union in Peril. Algora Publishing. p. 171.

 Fleming, Thomas (2014). A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. Hachette Books. ISBN 978-0-306-82295-7.

 McPherson 1988, p. 210.

 , "Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Little Lady Who Started the Civil War Archived October 10, 2020, at the Wayback Machine". New England Historical Society. Retrieved October 6, 2020.

 Sewall, Samuel. The Selling of Joseph, pp. 1–3, Bartholomew Green & John Allen, Boston, Massachusetts, 1700.

 McCullough, David. John Adams, pp. 132–133, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001. ISBN 0-684-81363-7.

 Ketcham, Ralph, James Madison: A Biography, pp. 625–626, American Political Biography Press, Newtown, Connecticut, 1971. ISBN 0-945707-33-9.

 "Benjamin Franklin Petitions Congress". National Archives and Records Administration. August 15, 2016.

 Franklin, Benjamin (February 3, 1790). "Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery". Archived from the original on May 21, 2006. Retrieved May 21, 2006.

 John Paul Kaminski (1995). A Necessary Evil?: Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-945612-33-9.

 Painter, Nell Irvin (2007). Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present. p. 72.

 Wilson, Black Codes (1965), p. 15. "By 1775, inspired by those 'self-evident' truths which were to be expressed by the Declaration of Independence, a considerable number of colonists felt that the time had come to end slavery and give the free Negroes some fruits of liberty. This sentiment, added to economic considerations, led to the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery in six northern states, while there was a swelling flood of private manumissions in the South. Little actual gain was made by the free Negro even in this period, and by the turn of the century, the downward trend had begun again. Thereafter the only important change in that trend before the Civil War was that after 1831 the decline in the status of the free Negro became more precipitate."

 Hubbard, Robert Ernest. General Rufus Putnam: George Washington's Chief Military Engineer and the "Father of Ohio", pp. 1–4, 105–106, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4766-7862-7.

 McCullough, David. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, pp. 4, 9, 11, 13, 29–30, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2019. ISBN 978-1-5011-6868-0.

 Gradert, Kenyon. Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination, pp. 1–3, 14–5, 24, 29–30, University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2020. ISBN 978-0-226-69402-3.

 Commager, Henry Steele. Theodore Parker, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1936, pp. 206–210.

 Anderson, Mic. "8 Influential Abolitionist Texts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved January 7, 2021.

 McPherson 1988, p. 38.

 "The Sentimental Novel: The Example of Harriet Beecher Stowe" by Gail K. Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 221. Book preview Archived November 16, 2022, at the Wayback Machine.

 Fredrickson, George M., ed., The Impending Crisis of the South, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968. The quotation is from Frederickson's "Introduction", p. ix.

 The Impending Crisis of the South, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 25.

 Shapiro, William E. (1993). The Young People's Encyclopedia of the United States. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press. ISBN 1-56294-514-9. OCLC 30932823.

 Robins, R.G. (2004). A.J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-988317-2.

 McPherson 1988, p. 40.

 "Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary" (PDF). Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. December 2018. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022. Retrieved July 29, 2019.

ugust 23, 1862. Holzer, Harold, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 401.

 Abraham Lincoln (August 24, 1862). "A LETTER FROM PRESIDENT LINCOLN.; Reply to Horace Greeley. Slavery and the Union The Restoration of the Union the Paramount Object". The New York Times. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Wikidata Q116965145.

 White, Jonathan W., A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, ch. 3.

 Pulling, Sr. Anne Frances, Altoona: Images of America, Arcadia Publishing, 2001, 10.

 Lincoln's Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864.

 "Lincoln Lore – Albert G. Hodges". apps.legislature.ky.gov. Retrieved January 20, 2022.

 "Andrew Johnson and Emancipation in Tennessee – Andrew Johnson National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)". www.nps.gov.

 Harper, Douglas (2003). "Slavery in Delaware". Archived from the original on October 16, 2007. Retrieved October 16, 2007.

 Donald 1995, pp. 417–419.

 McPherson, James, "A War that Never Goes Away", American Heritage, Vol. 41, no. 2 (Mar 1990). Archived February 18, 2022, at the Wayback Machine

 Asante & Mazama 2004, p. 82.

 Holzer & Gabbard 2007, pp. 172–74.

 "Copy of original document, via Ancestry.com". Ancestry.com.

 The Economist, "The Civil War: Finally Passing Archived April 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine", April 2, 2011, pp. 23–25.

 Hans L. Trefousse, Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction (Greenwood, 1991) covers all the main events and leaders.

 Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction (1990) is a brief survey.

 C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (2nd ed. 1991).

 Williams, Susan Millar; Hoffius, Stephen G. (2011). Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3715-9. JSTOR j.ctt46nc9q – via JSTOR.

 "Presidents Who Were Civil War Veterans". Essential Civil War Curriculum.

 Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher, eds. (2009), Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press).

 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001).

 Woodworth 1996, p. 208.

 Cushman, Stephen (2014). Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War. UNC Press Books. pp. 5–6. ISBN 978-1-4696-1878-4.

 Charles F. Ritter and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., Leaders of the American Civil War: A Biographical and Historiographical Dictionary (1998). Provides short biographies and historiographical summaries.

 Oscar Handlin; Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.; Samuel Eliot Morison; Frederick Merk; Arthur M. Schlesinger; Paul Herman Buck (1954), Harvard Guide to American History, Belknap Press, pp. 385–98, Wikidata Q118746838

 Gaines M. Foster (1988), Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913.

 Nolan, Alan T., in Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (2000), pp. 14–19.

 Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause, pp. 28–29.

 Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927), 2:54.

 Richard Hofstadter (2012) [1968]. Progressive Historians. Knopf Doubleday. p. 304. ISBN 978-0-307-80960-5.

 [7] Archived November 18, 2018, at the Wayback Machine Murfreesboro Post, April 27, 2007, "Hazen's Monument a rare, historic treasure." Accessed May 30, 2018.

 Timothy B. Smith, "The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation" (2008; The University of Tennessee Press).

 Bob Zeller, "Fighting the Second Civil War: A History of Battlefield Preservation and the Emergence of the Civil War Trust," (2017: Knox Press)

 [8] Archived August 12, 2019, at the Wayback Machine American Battlefield Trust "Saved Land" page. Accessed May 30, 2018.

 Cameron McWhirter, "Civil War Battlefields Lose Ground as Tourist Draws" The Wall Street Journal May 25, 2019 Archived October 10, 2019, at the Wayback Machine

 Gary Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Univ of North Carolina Press, 2008).

 "Debate over Ken Burns Civil War doc continues over decades | The Spokesman-Review". spokesman.com. Retrieved May 4, 2020.

 Merritt, Keri Leigh. "Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved May 4, 2020.

 Bailey, Thomas and David Kennedy: The American Pageant, p. 434. 1987

 Dome, Steam (1974). "A Civil War Iron Clad Car". Railroad History. The Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. 130 (Spring 1974): 51–53.

 William Rattle Plum, The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States, ed. Christopher H. Sterling(New York: Arno Press, 1974) vol. 1:63.

 Buckley, John (2006). Air Power in the Age of Total War. Routledge. pp. 6, 24. ISBN 978-1-135-36275-1.

 Sondhaus, Naval Warfare 1815–1914 p. 77.

 Keegan, John (2009). The American Civil War. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-307-27314-7.

 Hutchison, Coleman (2015). A History of American Civil War Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-316-43241-9.

Bibliography

Main article: Bibliography of the American Civil War

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (1972). A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01762-5.

Anderson, Bern (1989). By Sea and By River: The naval history of the Civil War. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80367-3.[permanent dead link]

Asante, Molefi Kete; Mazama, Ama (2004). Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-0-7619-2762-4.

Beringer, Richard E., Archer Jones, and Herman Hattaway (1986). Why the South Lost the Civil War, influential analysis of factors; an abridged version is The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion (1988)

Bestor, Arthur (1964). "The American Civil War as a Constitutional Crisis". American Historical Review. 69 (2): 327–52. doi:10.2307/1844986. JSTOR 1844986.

Canney, Donald L. (1998). Lincoln's Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861–65. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-519-4.

Chambers, John W.; Anderson, Fred (1999). The Oxford Companion to American Military History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-507198-6.

Dinçaslan, M. Bahadırhan (2022). Amerikan İç Savaşı El Kitabı (US Civil War Handbook). Ankara, Turkey: Altınordu Yayınları Press. ISBN 978-6-257-61066-7.

Donald, David Herbert (1995). Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-80846-8.

Dunkerly, Robert M. (2015). To the Bitter End: Appomattox, Bennett Place and the Surrenders of the Confederacy. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie. ISBN 978-1-61121-252-5.

Foner, Eric (1981). Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502926-0. Retrieved April 20, 2012.

Foner, Eric (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-34066-2.

Foote, Shelby (1974). The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-74623-4.

Frank, Joseph Allan; Reaves, George A. (2003). Seeing the Elephant: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07126-3.

Fuller, Howard J. (2008). Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-59114-297-3.

Gallagher, Gary W. (1999). The Confederate War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-16056-9.

Gallagher, Gary W. (2011). The Union War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06608-3.

Gara, Larry (1964). "The Fugitive Slave Law: A Double Paradox," in Unger, Irwin, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (originally published in Civil War History, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 1964, pp. 229–40).

Hacker, J. David (December 2011). "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead". Civil War History. 57 (4): 307–48. doi:10.1353/cwh.2011.0061. PMID 22512048. S2CID 30195230.

Heidler, David S.; Heidler, Jeanne T.; Coles, David J. (2002). Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-57607-382-7.

Herring, George C. (2011). From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-976553-9.[permanent dead link]

Hofstadter, Richard (1938). "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War". American Historical Review. 44 (1): 50–55. doi:10.2307/1840850. JSTOR 1840850.

Holzer, Harold; Gabbard, Sara Vaughn, eds. (2007). Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2764-5.

Hunt, Jeffrey Wm (2015). The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch. Austinisbn=978-0-292-73461-6: University of Texas Press.

Johannsen, Robert W. (1973). Stephen A. Douglas. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-501620-8.

Johnson, Timothy D. (1998). Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-0914-7.

Jones, Howard (2002). Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913. Wilmington, Delaware: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-8420-2916-2.

Jones, Terry L. (2011). Historical Dictionary of the Civil War. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-7953-9.

Keegan, John (2009). The American Civil War: A Military History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8.

Krannawitter, Thomas L. (2008). Vindicating Lincoln: defending the politics of our greatest president. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7425-5972-1.

Long, E.B. (1971). The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. OCLC 68283123.

McPherson, James M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503863-7.

McPherson, James M. (1997). For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974105-2.

McPherson, James M. (2007). This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539242-5.

Mendelsohn, Adam (2012). "Samuel and Saul Isaac: International Jewish Arms Dealers, Blockade Runners, and Civil War Profiteers" (PDF). Journal of the Southern Jewish Historical Society. Southern Jewish Historical Society. 15: 41–79. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 9, 2022.

Murray, Williamson; Bernstein, Alvin; Knox, MacGregor (1996). The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War. Cabmbridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56627-8.

Neely, Mark E. (1993). Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. ISBN 978-0-87462-325-3.

Neff, Stephen C. (2010). Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-1-61121-252-5.

Nelson, James L. (2005). Reign of Iron: The Story of the First Battling Ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimack. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-052404-3.

Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union, an 8-volume set (1947–1971). the most detailed political, economic and military narrative; by Pulitzer Prize-winner

1. Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 online; 2. A House Dividing, 1852–1857; 3. Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859; 4. Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861; vols 5–8 have the series title War for the Union; 5. The Improvised War, 1861–1862; 6. online; War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863; 7. The Organized War, 1863–1864; 8. The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865

Olsen, Christopher J. (2002). Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516097-0.

Potter, David M. (1962b). "The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa". American Historical Review. 67 (4): 924–50. doi:10.2307/1845246. JSTOR 1845246.

Potter, David M.; Fehrenbacher, Don E. (1976). The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-013403-7.

Richter, William L. (2009). The A to Z of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-6336-1.

Russell, Robert R. (1966). "Constitutional Doctrines with Regard to Slavery in Territories". Journal of Southern History. 32 (4): 466–86. doi:10.2307/2204926. JSTOR 2204926.

Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. A Companion to the U.S. Civil War 2 vol. (April 2014) Wiley-Blackwell, New York ISBN 978-1-444-35131-6. 1232 pp; 64 Topical chapters by scholars and experts; emphasis on historiography.

Stampp, Kenneth M. (1990). America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-503902-3.

Stern, Phillip Van Doren (1962). The Confederate Navy. Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Symonds, Craig L.; Clipson, William J. (2001). The Naval Institute Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-984-0.

Thornton, Mark; Ekelund, Robert Burton (2004). Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Rowman & Littlefield.

Tucker, Spencer C.; Pierpaoli, Paul G.; White, William E. (2010). The Civil War Naval Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-59884-338-5.

Varon, Elizabeth R. (2008). Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-3232-5.

Vinovskis, Maris (1990). Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-39559-5.

Ward, Geoffrey R. (1990). The Civil War: An Illustrated History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-56285-8.

Weeks, William E. (2013). The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-00590-7.

Weigley, Frank Russell (2004). A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–1865. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-33738-2.

Welles, Gideon (1865). Secretary of the Navy's Report. Vol. 37–38. American Seamen's Friend Society.

Winters, John D. (1963). The Civil War in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-0834-5.

Wise, Stephen R. (1991). Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8724-97993.  Borrow book at: archive.org

Woodworth, Steven E. (1996). The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Wesport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-29019-0.

Further reading

Further information: Bibliography of the American Civil War and Bibliography of American Civil War naval history

Catton, Bruce (1960). The Civil War. New York: American Heritage Distributed by Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-8281-0305-3.

Davis, William C. (1983). Stand in the Day of Battle: The Imperiled Union: 1861–1865. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-14895-5.

Davis, William C. (2003). Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-7432-3499-3.

Donald, David; Baker, Jean H.; Holt, Michael F. (2001). The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-97427-0.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. (1981). Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-502883-6.

Fellman, Michael; Gordon, Lesley J.; Sunderland, Daniel E. (2007). This Terrible War: The Civil War and its Aftermath (2nd ed.). New York: Pearson. ISBN 978-0-321-38960-2.

Green, Fletcher M. (2008). Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776–1860: A Study in the Evolution of Democracy. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-58477-928-5.

Guelzo, Allen C. (2009). Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-536780-5.

Guelzo, Allen C. (2012). Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-984328-2.

Holt, Michael F. (2005). The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-8090-4439-9.

Huddleston, John (2002). Killing Ground: The Civil War and the Changing American Landscape. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-6773-6.

Jones, Howard (1999). Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-2582-4.

Lipset, Seymour Martin (1960). Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

McPherson, James M. (1992). Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-045842-0.

Murray, Robert Bruce (2003). Legal Cases of the Civil War. Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-0-8117-0059-7.

Perman, Michael; Taylor, Amy M. (2010). Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays (3rd ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0-618-87520-7.

Potter, David M. (1962a) [1942]. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rhodes, John Ford (1917). History of the Civil War, 1861–1865. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Schott, Thomas E. (1996). Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2106-1.

External links

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West Point Atlas of Civil War Battles

Civil War photos at the National Archives

View images from the Civil War Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress

American Battlefield Trust – A non-profit land preservation and educational organization with two divisions, the Civil War Trust and the Revolutionary War Trust, dedicated to preserving America's battlefields through land acquisitions.

Civil War Era Digital Collection at Gettysburg College – This collection contains digital images of political cartoons, personal papers, pamphlets, maps, paintings and photographs from the Civil War Era held in Special Collections at Gettysburg College.

Civil War 150 Archived October 27, 2019, at the Wayback Machine – Washington Post interactive website on the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War.

Civil War in the American South Archived March 13, 2021, at the Wayback Machine – An Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) portal with links to almost 9,000 digitized Civil War-era items – books, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, maps, personal papers, and manuscripts – held at ASERL member libraries

The Civil War – site with 7,000 pages, including the complete run of Harper's Weekly newspapers from the Civil War

The short film A House Divided (1960) is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive.

"American Civil World" maps at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection, Cornell University Library

Civil War Manuscripts at Shapell Manuscript Foundation

Statements of each state as to why they were seceding, battlefields.org

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The 1619 Project examines the legacy of slavery in America. Read all the stories.

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Artwork by Deb Bishop

our hundred years after enslaved fricans were first brought to irginia, most mericans still don’t know the full story of slavery.

Curated by Mary Elliott

All text by Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes

Aug. 19, 2019

Sometime in 1619, a Portuguese slave ship, the São João Bautista, traveled across the Atlantic Ocean with a hull filled with human cargo: captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa. The men, women and children, most likely from the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, endured the horrific journey, bound for a life of enslavement in Mexico. Almost half the captives had died by the time the ship was seized by two English pirate ships; the remaining Africans were taken to Point Comfort, a port near Jamestown, the capital of the English colony of Virginia, which the Virginia Company of London had established 12 years earlier. The colonist John Rolfe wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, of the Virginia Company, that in August 1619, a “Dutch man of war” arrived in the colony and “brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes, which the governor and cape merchant bought for victuals.” The Africans were most likely put to work in the tobacco fields that had recently been established in the area.

[Read our essay on why American schools can’t teach slavery right.]

Forced labor was not uncommon — Africans and Europeans had been trading goods and people across the Mediterranean for centuries — but enslavement had not been based on race. The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began as early as the 15th century, introduced a system of slavery that was commercialized, racialized and inherited. Enslaved people were seen not as people at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though people of African descent — free and enslaved — were present in North America as early as the 1500s, the sale of the “20 and odd” African people set the course for what would become slavery in the United States.

The broadside pictured above advertised a slave auction at the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans on March 25, 1858. Eighteen people were for sale, including a family of six whose youngest child was 1. The artifact is part of the collection of The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its curator of American Slavery, Mary Elliott, cowrote the history of slavery below — told primarily through objects in the museum's collection.

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lavery, ower and the uman ost

1455 - 1775

In the 15th century, the Roman Catholic Church divided the world in half, granting Portugal a monopoly on trade in West Africa and Spain the right to colonize the New World in its quest for land and gold. Pope Nicholas V buoyed Portuguese efforts and issued the Romanus Pontifex of 1455, which affirmed Portugal’s exclusive rights to territories it claimed along the West African coast and the trade from those areas. It granted the right to invade, plunder and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Queen Isabella invested in Christopher Columbus’s exploration to increase her wealth and ultimately rejected the enslavement of Native Americans, claiming that they were Spanish subjects. Spain established an asiento, or contract, that authorized the direct shipment of captive Africans for trade as human commodities in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Eventually other European nation-states — the Netherlands, France, Denmark and England — seeking similar economic and geopolitical power joined in the trade, exchanging goods and people with leaders along the West African coast, who ran self-sustaining societies known for their mineral-rich land and wealth in gold and other trade goods. They competed to secure the asiento and colonize the New World. With these efforts, a new form of slavery came into being. It was endorsed by the European nation-states and based on race, and it resulted in the largest forced migration in the world: Some 12.5 million men, women and children of African descent were forced into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The sale of their bodies and the product of their labor brought the Atlantic world into being, including colonial North America. In the colonies, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statute, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of slavery and ensure power.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Queen Njinga

Hand-colored lithograph by Achille Devéria, 1830s.

In 1624, after her brother’s death, Ana Njinga gained control of the kingdom of Ndongo, in present-day Angola. At the time, the Portuguese were trying to colonize Ndongo and nearby territory in part to acquire more people for its slave trade, and after two years as ruler, Njinga was forced to flee in the face of Portuguese attack. Eventually, however, she conquered a nearby kingdom called Matamba. Njinga continued to fight fiercely against Portuguese forces in the region for many years, and she later provided shelter for runaway slaves. By the time of Njinga’s death in 1663, she had made peace with Portugal, and Matamba traded with it on equal economic footing. In 2002, a statue of Njinga was unveiled in Luanda, the capital of Angola, where she is held up as an emblem of resistance and courage.

Erica Deeman for The New York Times. Objects from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ballast block on loan from Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Means of Control

Right: An iron ballast block used to counterbalance the weight of enslaved persons aboard the São José Paquete Africa slave ship, which left Mozambique in 1794 and sank near what is now Cape Town, South Africa. Left: A child’s iron shackles, before 1860.

“The iron entered into our souls,” lamented a formerly enslaved man named Caesar, as he remembered the shackles he had to wear during his forced passage from his home in Africa to the New World. Used as restraints around the arms and legs, the coarse metal cut into captive Africans’ skin for the many months they spent at sea. Children made up about 26 percent of the captives. Because governments determined by the ton how many people could be fitted onto a slave ship, enslavers considered children especially advantageous: They could fill the boat’s small spaces, allowing more human capital in the cargo hold. Africans were crammed into ships with no knowledge of where they were going or if they would be released. This forced migration is known as the Middle Passage. As Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved author, remembered, “I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.” Overheating, thirst, starvation and violence were common aboard slave ships, and roughly 15 percent of each ship’s enslaved population died before they ever reached land. Suicide attempts were so common that many captains placed netting around their ships to prevent loss of human cargo and therefore profit; working-class white crew members, too, committed suicide or ran away at port to escape the brutality. Enslaved people did not meekly accept their fate. Approximately one out of 10 slave ships experienced resistance, ranging from individual defiance (like refusing to eat or jumping overboard) to full-blown mutiny.

Saint Louis Art Museum

Cultivating Wealth and Power

“Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam,” painted by John Greenwood, circa 1752-58.

The slave trade provided political power, social standing and wealth for the church, European nation-states, New World colonies and individuals. This portrait by John Greenwood connects slavery and privilege through the image of a group of Rhode Island sea captains and merchants drinking at a tavern in the Dutch colony of Surinam, a hub of trade. These men made money by trading the commodities produced by slavery globally — among the North American colonies, the Caribbean and South America — allowing them to secure political positions and determine the fate of the nation. The men depicted here include the future governors Nicholas Cooke and Joseph Wanton; Esek Hopkins, a future commander in chief of the Continental Navy; and Stephen Hopkins, who would eventually become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

ll children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.’

— Virginia law enacted in 1662

Race Encoded Into Law

The use of enslaved laborers was affirmed — and its continual growth was promoted — through the creation of a Virginia law in 1662 that decreed that the status of the child followed the status of the mother, which meant that enslaved women gave birth to generations of children of African descent who were now seen as commodities. This natural increase allowed the colonies — and then the United States — to become a slave nation. The law also secured wealth for European colonists and generations of their descendants, even as free black people could be legally prohibited from bequeathing their wealth to their children. At the same time, racial and class hierarchies were being coded into law: In the 1640s, John Punch, a black servant, escaped bondage with two white indentured servants. Once caught, his companions received additional years of servitude, while Punch was determined enslaved for life. In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, in which free and enslaved black people aligned themselves with poor white people and yeoman white farmers against the government, more stringent laws were enacted that defined status based on race and class. Black people in America were being enslaved for life, while the protections of whiteness were formalized.

Erica Deeman for The New York Times. Object from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

A Deadly Commodity

Sugar cane cutter, metal and wood, 19th century.

Before cotton dominated American agriculture, sugar drove the slave trade throughout the Caribbean and Spanish Americas. Sugar cane was a brutal crop that required constant work six days a week, and it maimed, burned and killed those involved in its cultivation. The life span of an enslaved person on a sugar plantation could be as little as seven years. Unfazed, plantation owners worked their enslaved laborers to death and prepared for this high “turnover” by ensuring that new enslaved people arrived on a regular basis to replace the dying. The British poet William Cowper captured this ethos when he wrote, “I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?” The sweetening of coffee and tea took precedence over human life and set the tone for slavery in the Americas.

Continual Resistance

Enslaved Africans had known freedom before they arrived in America, and they fought to regain it from the moment they were taken from their homes, rebelling on plantation sites and in urban centers. In September 1739, a group of enslaved Africans in the South Carolina colony, led by an enslaved man called Jemmy, gathered outside Charleston, where they killed two storekeepers and seized weapons and ammunition. “Calling out Liberty,” according to Gen. James Oglethorpe, the rebels “marched on with Colours displayed, and two Drums beating” along the Stono River, entreating other members of the enslaved community to join them. Their goal was Spanish Florida, where they were promised freedom if they fought as the first line of defense against British attack. This effort, called the Stono Rebellion, was the largest slave uprising in the mainland British colonies. Between 60 and 100 black people participated in the rebellion; about 40 black people and 20 white people were killed, and other freedom fighters were captured and questioned. White lawmakers in South Carolina, afraid of additional rebellions, put a 10-year moratorium on the importation of enslaved Africans and passed the Negro Act of 1740, which criminalized assembly, education and moving abroad among the enslaved. The Stono Rebellion was only one of many rebellions that occurred over the 246 years of slavery in the United States.

Erica Deeman for The New York Times. Object from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Memory and Place-Making

Low Country basket, 19th century.

Enslaved black people came from regions and ethnic groups throughout Africa. Though they came empty-handed, they carried with them memories of loved ones and communities, moral values, intellectual insight, artistic talents and cultural practices, religious beliefs and skills. In their new environment, they relied on these memories to create new practices infused with old ones. In the Low Country region of the Carolinas and Georgia, planters specifically requested skilled enslaved people from a region stretching from Senegal to Liberia, who were familiar with the conditions ideal for growing rice. Charleston quickly became the busiest port for people shipped from West Africa. The coiled or woven baskets used to separate rice grains from husks during harvest were a form of artistry and technology brought from Africa to the colonies. Although the baskets were utilitarian, they also served as a source of artistic pride and a way to stay connected to the culture and memory of the homeland.

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he imits of reedom

1776 - 1808

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So begins the Declaration of Independence, the document that eventually led to the creation of the United States. But the words point to the paradox the nation was built on: Even as the colonists fought for freedom from the British, they maintained slavery and avoided the issue in the Constitution. Enslaved people, however, seized any opportunity to secure their freedom. Some fought for it through military service in the Revolutionary War, whether serving for the British or the patriots. Others benefited from gradual emancipation enacted in states like Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. In New York, for example, children born after July 4, 1799, were legally free when they turned 25, if they were women, or 28, if they were men — the law was meant to compensate slaveholders by keeping people enslaved during some of their most productive years.

[How was slavery taught in your school? We want to hear your story.]

Yet the demand for a growing enslaved population to cultivate cotton in the Deep South was unyielding. In 1808, Congress implemented the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which terminated the country’s legal involvement in the international slave trade but put new emphasis on the domestic slave trade, which relied on buying and selling enslaved black people already in the country, often separating them from their loved ones. (In addition, the international trade continued illegally.) The ensuing forced migration of over a million African-Americans to the South guaranteed political power to the slaveholding class: The Three-Fifths Clause that the planter elite had secured in the Constitution held that three-fifths of the enslaved population was counted in determining a state’s population and thus its congressional representation. The economic and political power grab reinforced the brutal system of slavery.

Illustration by Jamaal Barber

A Powerful Letter

Benjamin Banneker and Thomas Jefferson.

After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson and other politicians — both slaveholding and not — wrote the documents that defined the new nation. In the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned King George III of Britain for engaging in the slave trade and ignoring pleas to end it, and for calling upon the enslaved to rise up and fight on behalf of the British against the colonists. This language was excised from the final document, however, and all references to slavery were removed, in stunning contrast to the document’s opening statement on the equality of men. Jefferson was a lifelong enslaver. He inherited enslaved black people; he fathered enslaved black children; and he relied on enslaved black people for his livelihood and comfort. He openly speculated that black people were inferior to white people and continually advocated for their removal from the country. In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black mathematician, scientist, astronomer and surveyor, argued against this mind-set when he wrote to Jefferson, then secretary of state, urging him to correct his “narrow prejudices” and to “eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us.” Banneker also condemned Jefferson’s slaveholding in his letter and included a manuscript of his almanac, which would be printed the following year. Jefferson was unconvinced of the intelligence of African-Americans, and in his swift reply only noted that he welcomed “such proofs as you exhibit” of black people with “talents equal to those of the other colors of men.”

From the Massachusetts Historical Society

She Sued for Her Freedom

A miniature portrait of Mum Bett by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick, 1811.

In the wake of the Revolutionary War, African-Americans took their cause to statehouses and courthouses, where they vigorously fought for their freedom and the abolition of slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, better known as Mum Bett, an enslaved woman in Massachusetts whose husband died fighting during the Revolutionary War, was one such visionary. The new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 stated that “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.” Arguing that slavery violated this sentiment, Bett sued for her freedom and won. After the ruling, Bett changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman to signify her new status. Her precedent-setting case helped to effectively bring an end to slavery in Massachusetts.

‘f one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and had been told must die at the end of that minute, would have taken it.’

— Mum Bett

From the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture

God Wouldn’t Want Segregated Sanctuaries

1916 poster for the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia, with its founder, Richard Allen, at center.

Black people, both free and enslaved, relied on their faith to hold onto their humanity under the most inhumane circumstances. In 1787, the Rev. Richard Allen and other black congregants walked out of services at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest its segregated congregations. Allen, an abolitionist who was born enslaved, had moved to Philadelphia after purchasing his freedom. There he joined St. George’s, where he initially preached to integrated congregations. It quickly became clear that integration went only so far: He was directed to preach a separate service designated for black parishioners. Dismayed that black people were still treated as inferiors in what was meant to be a holy space, Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal denomination and started the Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church. For communities of free people of color, churches like Allen’s were places not only of sanctuary but also of education, organizing and civic engagement, providing resources to navigate a racist society in a slave nation. Allen and his successors connected the community, pursued social justice and helped guide black congregants as they transitioned to freedom. The African Methodist Episcopal Church grew rapidly; today at least 7,000 A.M.E. congregations exist around the world, including Allen’s original church.

From the Library of Congress

The Destructive Impact of the Cotton Gin

Wood-engraving illustration of a cotton gin, Harper’s Weekly, 1859.

The national dialogue surrounding slavery and freedom continued as the demand for enslaved laborers increased. In 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made it possible to clean cotton faster and get products to the market more quickly. Cotton was king, as the saying went, and the country became a global economic force. But the land for cultivating it was eventually exhausted, and the nation would have to expand to keep up with consumer demand. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon Bonaparte, the Louisiana Purchase: In exchange for $15 million, the United States gained almost 830,000 square miles of land, doubling the size of the country and expanding America’s empire of slavery and cotton. Soon after this deal, the United States abolished the international slave trade, creating a labor shortage. Under these circumstances, the domestic slave trade increased as an estimated one million enslaved people were sent to the Deep South to work in cotton, sugar and rice fields.

Describing the Depravity of Slavery

“Benevolent men have voluntarily stepped forward to obviate the consequences of this injustice and barbarity,” proclaimed the Rev. Peter Williams Jr. in a historic speech about the end of the nation’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “They have striven assiduously to restore our natural rights; to guaranty them from fresh innovations; to furnish us with necessary information; and to stop the source from whence our evils have flowed.” A free black man who founded St. Philip’s African Church in Manhattan, Williams spoke in front of a white and black audience on Jan. 1, 1808 — the day the United States ban on the international slave trade went into effect. The law, of course, did not end slavery, and it was often violated. Williams forced the audience to confront slavery’s ugliness as he continued, “Its baneful footsteps are marked with blood; its infectious breath spreads war and desolation; and its train is composed of the complicated miseries of cruel and unceasing bondage.” His oration further defined a black view of freedom that had been building since the foundation of the country, as when the formerly enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley noted in 1774,“for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

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lave ation ights for reedom

1809 - 1865

As demand for cotton grew and the nation expanded, slavery became more systemic, codified and regulated — as did the lives of all enslaved people. The sale of enslaved people and the products of their labor secured the nation’s position as a global economic and political powerhouse, but they faced increasingly inhumane conditions. They were hired out to increase their worth, sold to pay off debts and bequeathed to the next generation. Slavery affected everyone, from textile workers, bankers and ship builders in the North; to the elite planter class, working-class slave catchers and slave dealers in the South; to the yeoman farmers and poor white people who could not compete against free labor. Additionally, in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson implemented his plan for Indian removal, ripping another group of people from their ancestral lands in the name of wealth. As slavery spread across the country, opposition — both moral and economic — gained momentum. Interracial abolition efforts grew in force as enslaved people, free black people and some white citizens fought for the end of slavery and a more inclusive definition of freedom. The nation was in transition, and it came to a head after Abraham Lincoln was elected president; a month later, in December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, citing “an increasing hostility on the part of the nonslaveholding states to the institution of slavery” as a cause. Five years later, the Civil War had ended, and 246 years after the “20 and odd Negroes” were sold in Virginia, the 13th Amendment ensured that the country would never again be defined as a slave nation.

Erica Deeman for The New York Times. Object from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

A Woman Bequeathed

Daguerreotype of Rhoda Phillips, circa 1850.

Rhoda Phillips’s name was officially written down for the first time in 1832, in the record of her sale. She was purchased when she was around 1 year old, along with her mother, Milley, and her sister Martha, for $550. The enslaver Thomas Gleaves eventually acquired Rhoda. He bequeathed her to his family in his will, where she is listed as valued at $200. She remained enslaved by them until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Afterward, Rhoda is believed to have married a man and had eight children with him. When she died, the Gleaves family ran an obituary in The Nashville Banner that showed the family still could not see the inhumanity of slavery. “Aunt Rhody,” the obituary said, “was raised by Mr. Gleaves and has lived with the family all her life. She was one of the old-time darkies that are responsible for the making of so many of their young masters.” In this daguerreotype of Rhoda, she is about 19, and in contrast to the practice at the time, Rhoda appears alone in the frame. Typically, enslaved people were shown holding white children or in the background of a family photo, the emphasis placed on their servitude. Rhoda’s story highlights one of the perversities of slavery: To the Gleaves, Rhoda was a family member even as they owned her.

By Black People, for Black People

On March 16, 1827, the same year that slavery was abolished in New York, Peter Williams Jr. co-founded Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African-Americans. A weekly New York paper, it was edited by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, who wrote in their first editorial, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations.” Russwurm and Cornish wanted the paper to strengthen relations among newly freed black people living in the North and counter racist and hostile representations of African-Americans in other papers. At its peak, the paper circulated in 11 states and internationally. Although it folded in 1829, Freedom’s Journal served as inspiration for other black newspapers, and by the start of the Civil War, there were at least two dozen black-owned papers in the country. The renowned abolitionist and scholar Frederick Douglass used his newspapers to call for and to secure social justice.

Generations of Enslavement

On March 7, 1854, Sally and her three daughters, Sylvia, Charlotte and Elizabeth, were sold for $1,200. Sally was able to remain with her children, at least for a short time, but most enslaved women had to endure their children being forcibly taken from them. Their ability to bear children — their “increase” — was one of the reasons they were so highly valued. Laws throughout the country ensured that a child born to an enslaved woman was also the property of the enslaver to do with as he saw fit, whether to make the child work or to sell the child for profit. Many enslaved women were also regularly raped, and there were no laws to protect them; white men could do what they wanted without reproach, including selling the offspring — their offspring — that resulted from these assaults. Many white women also served as enslavers; there was no alliance of sisterhood among slave mistresses and the black mothers and daughters they claimed as property.

‘rethren, arise, arise! trike for your lives and liberties. ow is the day and the hour. ... et your motto be resistance!’

—Henry Highland Garnet, 1843

Liberation Theology

In 1831, Nat Turner, along with about 70 enslaved and free black people, led a revolt in Southampton County, Va., that shook the nation. Turner, a preacher who had frequent, powerful visions, planned his uprising for months, putting it into effect following a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. He and his recruits freed enslaved people and killed white men, women and children, sparing only a number of poor white people. They killed nearly 60 people over two days, before being overtaken by the state militia. Turner went into hiding, but he was found and hanged a few months later. It was one of the deadliest revolts during slavery, a powerful act of resistance that left enslavers scared — both for their lives and for the loss of their “property.” The Virginia resident Eleanor Weaver reflected on the events, stating in a letter to family members: “We hope our government will take some steps to put down Negro preaching. It is those large assemblies of Negroes causes the mischief.” More stringent laws went into effect that controlled the lives of black people, free or enslaved, limiting their ability to read, write or move about.

The Slave Patrols

In 1846, Col. Henry W. Adams, of the 168th Regiment, Virginia Militia, started a slave patrol in Pittsylvania County, Va., that would “visit all Negro quarters and other places suspected of entertaining unlawful assemblies of slaves ... as aforesaid, unlawfully assembled, orany others strolling from one plantation to another, without a pass from his or her master or mistress or overseer, and take them before the next justice of the peace, who if he shall see cause, is hereby required to order every such slave ... aforesaid to receive any number of lashes, not exceeding 20 on his or her back.” Slave patrols throughout the nation were created by white people who were fearful of rebellion and were seeking to protect their human property. While overseers were employed on plantation sites as a means of control, slave patrols — which patrolled plantations, streets, woods and public areas — were thought to serve the larger community. While slave patrols tried to enforce laws that limited the movement of the enslaved community, black people still found ways around them.

Growing National Tension

In 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, which required that all citizens aid in the capturing of fugitive enslaved black people. Lack of compliance was considered breaking the law. The previous act, from 1793, enabled enslavers to pursue runaway enslaved persons, but it was difficult to enforce. The 1850 act — which created a legal obligation for Americans, regardless of their moral views on slavery, to support and enforce the institution — divided the nation and undergirded the path to the Civil War. Black people could not testify on their own behalf, so if a white person incorrectly challenged the status of a free black person, the person was unable to act in his or her own defense and could be enslaved. In 1857, Dred Scott, who was enslaved, went to court to claim his freedom after his enslaver transported him into a free state and territory. The Supreme Court determined his fate when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney stated that no black person, free or enslaved, could petition the court because they were not “citizens within the meaning of the Constitution.” By statute and interpretation of the law, black people in America were dehumanized and commodifiedin order to maintain the economic and political power supported by slavery.

Erica Deeman for The New York Times. Object from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Enlisting in a Moral Fight

Carte de visite silver gelatin portrait of Sgt. Jacob Johns.

It is unclear whether Jacob Johns was enslaved, recently freed or a free man when he enlisted in the Union Army as a sergeant in the 19th United States Colored Troops Infantry, Company B. His unit fought in 11 battles, and 293 of its men were killed or died of disease, including Johns. When the war began in 1861, enslaved African-Americans seized their opportunity for freedom by crossing the Union Army lines in droves. The Confederate states tried to reclaim their human “property” but were denied by the Union, which cleverly declared the formerly enslaved community as contraband of war — captured enemy property. President Abraham Lincoln initially would not let black men join the military, anxious about how the public would receive integrated efforts. But as casualties increased and manpower thinned, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act in 1862, allowing Lincoln to “employ as many persons of African descent” as he needed, and thousands enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Jacobs was one of nearly 180,000 black soldiers who served in the U.S.C.T. during the Civil War, a group that made up nearly one-tenth of all soldiers, fighting for the cause of freedom.

From the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History and Culture

Always on Your Person

Joseph Trammell’s freedom papers, 1852.

A free black man living in Loudoun County, Va., Joseph Trammell created this small metal tin to protect his certificate of freedom — proof that he was not enslaved. During slavery, freedom was tenuous for free black people: It could be challenged at any moment by any white person, and without proof of their status they could be placed into the slave trade. Trammell, under Virginia law, had to register his freedom every few years with the county court. But even for free black people, laws were still in place that limited their liberty — in many areas in the North and the South, they could not own firearms, testify in court or read and write — and in the free state of Ohio, at least two race riots occurred before 1865.

One Family’s Ledger

Slaveholding families kept meticulous records of their business transactions: buying, selling and trading people. A record of the Rouzee family’s taxable property includes five horses, 497 acres of land and 28 enslaved people. Records show the family enterprise including the purchase and sale of African-Americans, investment in provisions to maintain the enslaved community and efforts to capture an enslaved man who ran toward freedom. From one century to the next, the family profited from enslaved people, their wealth passing from generation to generation. As enslaved families were torn apart, white people — from the elite planter class to individuals invested in one enslaved person — were building capital, a legacy that continues today.

‘ shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city waited and watched at a public meeting, with 3,000 others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. or shall ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the mancipation roclamation.’

— Frederick Douglass

From the Smithsonian's Museum of African American History and Culture

Freedom Begins

The Emancipation Proclamation in pamphlet form, published by John Murray Forbes, 1862.

On Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating that if the Confederacy did not end its rebellion by Jan. 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in the states that had seceded would be free. The Confederacy did not comply, and the proclamation went into effect. But the Emancipation Proclamation freed only those enslaved in the rebelling states, approximately 3.5 million people. It did not apply to half a million enslaved people in slaveholding states that weren’t part of the Confederacy — Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware and what would become West Virginia — or to those people in parts of the Confederacy that were already under Northern control. They remained enslaved until Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. The freedom promised by the proclamation — and the official legal end of slavery — did not occur until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on Dec. 6, 1865. Only then was the tyranny of slavery truly over. Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation was deeply meaningful to the community of formerly enslaved African-Americans and their allies. Annual emancipation celebrations were established, including Juneteenth; across the country, African-American gathering spots were named Emancipation Park; and the words of the proclamation were read aloud as a reminder that African-Americans, enslaved and free, collectively fought for freedom for all and changed an entire nation.

‘he story of the frican-merican is not only the quintessential merican story but it’s really the story that continues to shape who we are today.’

— Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Mary Elliott is curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she co-curated the ‘‘Slavery and Freedom’’ exhibition. Jazmine Hughes is a writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Read more: 1619 and American History | The 1619 Project Book

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United States profile - Timeline

Published

20 January 2021

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A chronology of key events:

1565 - First permanent European settlement in North America - St Augustine, present-day Florida - founded by the Spanish. North America is already inhabited by several distinct groups of people, who go into decline following the arrival of settlers.

1607 - Jamestown, Virginia, founded by English settlers, who begin growing tobacco.

1620 - Plymouth Colony, near Cape Cod, is founded by the Pilgrim Fathers, whose example is followed by other English Puritans in New England.

17th-18th centuries - Hundreds of thousands of Africans brought over and sold into slavery to work on cotton and tobacco plantations.

1763 - Britain gains control of territory up to the Mississippi river following victory over France in Seven Years' War.

War of Independence

1774 - Colonists form First Continental Congress as Britain closes down Boston harbour and deploys troops in Massachusetts.

1775 - American Revolution: George Washington leads Continental Army to fight against British rule.

1776 4 July - Declaration of Independence endorsed by Congress; colonies declare independence.

1781 - Rebel states form loose confederation after defeating the British at the Battle of Yorktown.

United States profile

1783 - Britain accepts loss of colonies by virtue of Treaty of Paris.

1787 - Founding Fathers draw up new constitution for United States of America. Constitution comes into effect in 1788.

1789 - George Washington elected first president of USA.

1791 - Bill of Rights guarantees individual freedom.

1803 - France sells Louisiana territories to USA.

1808 - Atlantic slave trade abolished.

1812-15 - War of 1812 between the US and Britain, partly over the effects of British restrictions on US trade during the Napoleonic Wars.

19th century - Residual resistance by indigenous people crushed as immigration from Europe assumes mass proportions, with settlers moving westwards and claiming "manifest destiny" to control North America; number of states in the union rises from 17 to 45.

1846-48 - US acquires vast tracts of Mexican territory in wake of Mexican War including California and New Mexico.

Civil War

1854 - Opponents of slavery, or abolitionists, set up Republican Party.

1860 - Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln elected president.

1860-61 - Eleven pro-slavery southern states secede from Union and form Confederate States of America, triggering civil war with abolitionist northern states.

1863 - Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in Confederate states to be free.

1865 - Confederates defeated; slavery abolished under Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln is assassinated.

1898 - US gains Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba following the Spanish-American war. US annexes Hawaii.

World War I and the Great Depression

1917-18 - US intervenes in World War I, but rejects membership of League of Nations in its aftermath.

1920 - Women given the right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment.

1920 - Sale and manufacture of alcoholic liquor outlawed. The Prohibition era sees a mushrooming of illegal drinking joints, home-produced alcohol and gangsterism.

Huge crowds watch the Wall Street Stock Exchange in October 1929

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

The Wall Street crash of 1929 sparked the Great Depression

1924 - Congress gives indigenous people right to citizenship.

1929-33 - More than 13 million people are unemployed after the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 triggers the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover rejects direct federal relief.

1933 - President Franklin D Roosevelt launches "New Deal" recovery programme which includes major public works. Sale of alcohol resumes.

World War II and the Cold War

1941 - Japanese warplanes attack US fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, leading to US joining World War II against the Axis powers.

1945 - US drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders.

1947 - US enunciates policy of aid for nations it deems threatened by communism in what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Cold War with Soviet Union begins.

1948 - America's programme to revive ailing post-war European economies - the Marshall Plan - comes into force. Some $13bn is disbursed over four years and the plan is regarded as a success.

1950-54 - Senator Joseph McCarthy carries out a crusade against alleged communists in government and public life; the campaign and its methods become known as McCarthyism. In 1954 McCarthy is formally censured by the Senate.

1950-53 - US forces play leading role against North Korean and Chinese troops in Korean War.

Desegregation and the Vietnam war

1954 - Racial segregation in schools becomes unconstitutional; start of campaign of civil disobedience to secure civil rights for Americans of African descent.

1960 - Democratic Party candidate John F Kennedy elected president, narrowly defeating his rival Richard Nixon.

1961 - Bay of Pigs invasion: an unsuccessful attempt to invade Cuba by Cuban exiles, organised and financed by Washington.

1962 - US compels Soviet Union to withdraw nuclear weapons from Cuba in what has become known as the Cuban missile crisis.

1963 - President John F Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon Johnson becomes president.

1964 - US steps up its military intervention in Vietnam. Civil Rights Act signed into law; it aims to halt discrimination on grounds of race, colour, religion, nationality.

1968 - Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King assassinated.

1969 - Republican Party candidate Richard Nixon elected president amid growing public opposition to Vietnam war. US military presence in Vietnam exceeds 500,000 personnel.

US astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the Moon.

1972 - Nixon re-elected and makes historic visit to China that leads to recognition of the communist government .

1973 - Vietnam ceasefire agreement signed. The campaign had claimed some 58,000 American lives.

1974 - President Nixon resigns in the Watergate scandal over a 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters.

1976 - Democratic Party candidate Jimmy Carter elected president.

1979 - US embassy in Tehran, Iran, seized by radical students. The 444-day hostage crisis - including a failed rescue attempt in 1980 - impacts on President Carter's popularity and dominates the 1980 presidential election campaign.

Global assertiveness

1980 November - Republican Party's Ronald Reagan elected president, and goes on to adopt a tough anti-communist policy abroad and tax-cutting policies at home.

1986 January - Space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take off from Cape Canaveral. All seven crew members are killed. Manned space flights are suspended until September 1988.

1986 - US warplanes bomb Libyan cities. "Irangate" scandal uncovered, revealing that proceeds from secret US arms sales to Iran were used illegally to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

1988 - Reagan's vice-president, George Bush, elected president.

1989 - US troops invade Panama, oust its government and arrest its leader, one-time Central Intelligence Agency informant General Manuel Noriega, on drug-trafficking charges.

1991 - US forces play dominant role in war against Iraq, which was triggered by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and ended with the expulsion of Iraqi troops from that country.

The Clinton years

1992 - Democratic Party candidate Bill Clinton elected president.

1992 - Congress passes North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, intended to create free-trade bloc among US, Canada and Mexico.

1995 - Oklahoma bomb by far-right activists kills more than 160 people in worst ever incident of its kind in US.

1998 - Scandal over Clinton's sexual impropriety with White House worker Monica Lewinsky dominates domestic political agenda, and leads to impeachment proceedings in Congress.

1999 March-June - US plays leading role in Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia in response to Serb violence against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo.

Smoke pours from the World Trade Center after it was hit by two hijacked passenger planes on 11 September 11.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

The 9/11 twin attacks in New York shattered Americans' sense of invulnerability

2000 November - Republican Party's George W Bush wins presidency.

11 September attacks

2001 11 September - Co-ordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda terror group prompts the US to embark on a ''war on terror'' that includes invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

2001 October - US leads massive campaign of air strikes against Afghanistan and helps opposition forces defeat the Taliban regime.

2002 November - President Bush signs into law a bill creating a Department of Homeland Security, the biggest reorganisation of federal government in more than 50 years.

2003 February - Space shuttle Columbia's 28th mission ends in tragedy when the craft breaks-up while re-entering the atmosphere. The seven astronauts on board are killed.

Iraq war

2003 March - Missile attacks on Baghdad mark the start of a US-led campaign to topple the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. US forces advance into central Baghdad in early April.

2004 May - Furore over pictures showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in US custody.

2005 August - Hundreds of people are killed when Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm to hit the US in decades, sweeps through gulf coast states. Much of the city of New Orleans is submerged by flood waters.

2006 March - Congress renews the USA Patriot Act, a centrepiece of the government's fight against terrorism, after months of debate about its impact on civil liberties. The government agrees to some curbs on information gathering.

US President George Bush addresses the nation on Iraq beneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on 30 April 2003

IMAGE SOURCE,AFP

Image caption,

Bush years: Wave of support after 9/11 yielded to derision at home and abroad

2007 January - President Bush announces a new Iraq strategy; thousands more US troops will be dispatched to shore up security in Baghdad.

2008 September - Turmoil in the US and international financial markets as major Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers collapses and other big US financial players face growing troubles as a result of the "credit crunch".

Obama elected

2008 November - Democratic Senator Barack Obama becomes the first black president of the United States.

2009 January - First "Tea Party" rally held in protest at Obama administration's plans to bail out banks and introduce healthcare reform. The populist and libertarian movement acts as focus for conservative opposition to the president's reform plans.

2010 March - Democrats in Congress succeed in passing a bill on health care reform, despite strong Republican opposition.

US and Russia announce agreement on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The pact was to be signed on 8 April.

President Obama unveils a new defence policy significantly curtailing the circumstances in which the US would use nuclear weapons.

2011 May - US forces kill Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in an operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

2011 July - The final Space Shuttle mission is completed with the landing of Atlantis on 21 July, bringing about the end of the 30-year programme.

2012 September - The US ambassador in Libya is killed when armed men storm the consulate in Benghazi.

2013 April - Twin bomb blasts targeting the Boston marathon kill three people and injure more than 170. Soviet-born Islamic extremist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is charged after a manhunt in which his elder brother and suspected co-conspirator Tamerlan is killed.

2013 May - Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden flees to Russia via Hong Kong after revealing leaking information on extensive internet and telephone surveillance by US intelligence.

Riot police on 18 August 2014 face off with protesters angered by the killing of a black teenager by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

The Ferguson unrest of 2014 again brought interlinked issues of race and law enforcement to the fore

2014 August-November - The shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman sparks a weeks of riots the Missouri town of Ferguson. In November, a grand jury's decision not to charge the officer with murder sets off new unrest.

Republican resurgence

2014 November - Republicans win a Senate majority in mid-term elections, gaining control of both houses of Congress and further reducing President Obama's room for manoeuvre.

2014 December - US and Cuba begin steps to normalise diplomatic relations after more than 50 years of stand-off.

2015 March - President Obama announces that 10,000 US troops will remain in Afghanistan as advisors and trainers until 2016.

2015 June - US accuses Chinese hackers of massive breach of personal data of nearly four million government workers. China denies any role.

White supremacist shoots dead nine African-American worshippers in a church in Charleston, prompting nationwide revulsion and demands for end to public display of Confederate Civil-War-era symbols.

2015 December - FBI say Muslim couple who shot dead 14 people and wounded 21 others at office party in San Bernadino, California, were Islamist extremists who had prepared the attack, the worst on US soil since September 2001, in advance.

Trump elected president

2016 November - Republican candidate Donald Trump wins presidential election, defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in one of the biggest political upsets in US history. He is inaugurated in January.

2017 January - President Trump signs executive orders restricting visas for people seeking to enter the US from certain Muslim-majority countries, and barring funding for cities that shelter illegal immigrants. Both policies are blocked by the courts.

President Donald Trump at his inauguration, January 2017

IMAGE SOURCE,MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Donald Trump won a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election

2017 May - President Trump sacks FBI Director James Comey, prompting a public row about whether the White House was trying to derail an inquiry into alleged collusion between Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and the Trump campaign.

2017 August - A woman is run over and killed by a suspected far-right sympathiser amid protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Trump is widely criticised for blaming both sides for violence, rather than the neo-Nazis and White supremacists.

2017 December - US recognises Jerusalem as capital of Israel and announces plans to move embassy there, prompting anger in Arab countries. In March 2019 the US recognises Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

North Korea diplomacy

2018 April - China imposes 25% tariffs on a range of US goods in response to similar US measures.

2018 June - After months of hostile rhetoric, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meet in Singapore and agree to continue dialogue aimed at reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

2018 October - The US, Canada and Mexico reach a new trade deal to replace the current North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

The US announces plans to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which restricts US and Russian short- and medium-range nuclear missiles, accusing Moscow of having violated its terms.

Road to impeachment

2018 November - Opposition Democrats take control of House of Representatives in mid-term elections, making it harder for President Trump's Republicans to pass legislation.

2019 February - US and North Korea talks in Vietnam break down over pace of nuclear disarmament.

2019 March - Mueller Report finds no evidence of collusion between Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and the Trump campaign.

2019 October - US withdraws troops from northern Syria, which prompts Turkey to occupy Kurdish-run parts of the north in an attempt to create a buffer zone.

2019 December - President Trump is impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. His trial is set to begin in the Senate the following month.

2020 January - US drone strike kills leading Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad Airport, promoting Iranian threats of retaliation.

2020 March - National emergency declared over the Covid-19 pandemic.

2020 May - Nationwide protests break out following the killing of African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

2020 November - Democrat former Vice-President Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump in the presidential election.

2021 January - Joe Biden inaugurated president amid unprecedented security, a week after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington DC.

• Condition: In Excellent Condition
• Options: Commemorative
• Year of Issue: 2023
• Currency: Commorative
• Fineness: 0.5
• Features: Commemorative
• Material: Metal
• Country/Region of Manufacture: United Kingdom
• Variety: Bill of Rights, Gettysburg, Grant
• Country of Origin: United States
• Colour: Gold

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