The American Civil War

The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States and eleven Southern states that had seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, to protect slavery and its spread into the West. It was the deadliest war in American history: Britannica's estimate is that between 752,000 and 851,000 soldiers died, about two in every hundred Americans alive in 1860. The Union won, the Confederacy was destroyed, and slavery, which held nearly four million people in 1860, was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on 31 January 1865 and ratified on 6 December.

The quarrel over slavery in the new western territories had been patched by compromises for forty years. When Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican Party wanted to stop slavery's expansion, was elected president in November 1860, seven states of the Deep South seceded and formed the Confederacy. On 12 April 1861 Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in the harbour of Charleston; when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, four more states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, joined them.

In the East, Confederate armies under Robert E. Lee won battle after battle against Union generals who would not fight hard, while in the West Ulysses S. Grant took the forts and rivers of Tennessee. Lee's invasion of Maryland was stopped at Antietam on 17 September 1862, the bloodiest single day in American history, and Lincoln used the moment to proclaim the slaves of the rebel states free from 1 January 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation turned the war into a war against slavery and opened the army to Black men; almost 200,000 served. In July 1863 Lee was beaten at Gettysburg and Vicksburg fell to Grant, giving the Union the Mississippi. In 1864 Grant, now in command of all the Union armies, ground Lee down in Virginia while William T. Sherman took Atlanta and marched through Georgia to the sea, destroying what the South needed to fight.

Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell on 3 April 1865, and on 9 April Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. Five days later Lincoln was shot in a Washington theatre; he died the next morning. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the last large Confederate army to Sherman on 26 April, and the final surrender came at Galveston, Texas, on 2 June. The Union had won with more men, more factories and railways, a navy that blockaded the South, firm political leadership and, from 1863, the freed slaves themselves.

In the years of Reconstruction that followed, the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 made the freed people citizens with equal protection of the laws and the Fifteenth of 1870 gave Black men the vote; but after 1877 the South imposed segregation and stripped Black citizens of those rights for nearly a century, until the civil rights movement. It was the first war to be photographed: the pictures of the dead at Antietam and Gettysburg by Mathew Brady's photographers brought the battlefield home to the North. Americans still argue over how to remember it, as a war for union and freedom or, in the South's Lost Cause legend, as a noble defeat.