The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil Wa

r as well as other sectional names, was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 to
determine the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy. Among t
he 34 states in January 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared
their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of Amer
ica. The Confederacy, often simply called the South, grew to include eleven stat
es, and although they claimed thirteen states and additional western territories
, the Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by a foreign country. The
states that remained loyal and did not declare secession were known as the Union
or the North. The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especia
lly the extension of slavery into the western territories.[N 1] After four years
of combat, which left over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead and dest
royed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed and slavery
was abolished. Then began the Reconstruction and the processes of restoring nati
onal unity and guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves.
In the 1860 presidential election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, opposed
the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories. The Republican Party, dominant i
n the North, secured a majority of the electoral votes, and Lincoln was elected
the first Republican president, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, se
ven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first s
ix to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total
of 48.8% for the six.[6] Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the i
ncoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's inaugural address d
eclared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave s
tates continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerou
s federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference
failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates a
ssumed that European countries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they woul
d intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sum
ter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina. Lincoln called for every
state to provide troops to retake the fort; consequently, four more slave state
s joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. The first bloodshed of
the Civil War occurred in Maryland during the Baltimore riot of 1861 on April 1
9. Lincoln soon controlled the border states, after arresting state legislators
and suspending habeas corpus,[7] ignoring the ruling of the Supreme Court's Chie
f Justice that such suspension was unconstitutional, and established a naval blo
ckade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern Theater was inconclusive i
n 1861 62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ende
d with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, dissuading British interve
ntion.[8] Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slaver
y a war goal.[9] To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate
river navy, then much of their western armies, and the 1863 Union siege of Vick
sburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E.
Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western suc
cesses led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the Wes
tern Theater, William T. Sherman drove east to capture Atlanta and marched to th
e sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. The Union marshaled
the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, leadin
g to the protracted Siege of Petersburg. The besieged Confederate army eventuall
y abandoned Richmond, seeking to regroup at Appomattox Court House, though there
they found themselves surrounded by union forces. This led to Lee's surrender t
o Grant on April 9, 1865. All Confederate generals surrendered by that summer. W
hile the military war had ended, and there was no insurgency, the political rein
tegration of the nation took another 12 years,
known as the Reconstruction Era. The domestic schism was largely healed when a
consensus was reached that Confederate nationalism and black slavery were both d
ead.

The AmeriThe causes of the Civil War were complex and have been controversial si
nce the war began. James C. Bradford wrote that the issue has been further compl
icated by historical revisionists, who have tried to offer a variety of reasons
for the war.[13] Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension
in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slave
ry, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candida
te, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. After Lincoln had won without carrying a sin
gle Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their onl
y option, because they thought that they were losing representation, which would
hamper their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.[14]
Root causes
Map of U.S. showing two kinds of Union states, two phases of secession and terri
tories.
Status of the states, 1861.
States that seceded before April 15, 1861
States that seceded after April 15, 1861
Union states that permitted slavery
Union states that banned slavery
Territories
Slavery. Contemporary actors, the Union and Confederate leadership and fighting
soldiers on both sides believed that slavery caused the Civil War. Union men mai
nly believed the war was to emancipate the slaves. Confederates fought to protec
t southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it.[15] From the anti-sla
very perspective, the issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery wa
s an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United S
tates. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment
to stop the expan
sion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction.[16] The slave-holding
interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their Constit
utional rights.[17] Southern whites believed that the emancipation of slaves wou
ld destroy the South's economy because of the alleged laziness of blacks under f
ree labor.[18]
Slavery was illegal in the North. It was fading in the border states and in Sout
hern cities, but was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the
South and Southwest. Subsequent writers on the American Civil War looked to seve
ral factors explaining the geographic divide, including sectionalism, protection
ism and state's rights.
Sectionalism. Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure,
customs and political values of the North and South.[19][20] It increased steadi
ly between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, in
dustrialized, urbanized and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concent
rated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence
farming for the poor whites. In the 1840s and 50s, the issue of accepting slaver
y (in the guise of rejecting slave-owning bishops and missionaries) split the na
tion's largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian
churches) into separate Northern and Southern denominations.[21]
Historians have debated whether economic differences between the industrial Nort
heast and the agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disag
ree with the economic determinism of historian Charles A. Beard in the 1920s and
emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary. Whil
e socially different, the sections economically benefited each other.[22][23]
New Orleans the largest cotton exporting port for New England and Great Britain
textile mills, shipping Mississippi River Valley goods from North, South and Bor
der states.

Protectionism. Historically, southern slave-holding states, because of their low

cost manual labor, had little perceived need for mechanization, and supported h
aving the right to sell cotton and purchase manufactured goods from any nation.
Northern states, which had heavily invested in their still-nascent manufacturing
, could not compete with the full-fledged industries of Europe in offering high
prices for cotton imported from the South and low prices for manufactured export
s in return. Thus, northern manufacturing interests supported tariffs and protec
tionism while southern planters demanded free trade.[24]
The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in t
he 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were
the lowest since 1816. The Whigs and Republicans complained because they favored
high tariffs to stimulate industrial growth, and Republicans called for an incr
ease in tariffs in the 1860 election. The increases were only enacted in 1861 af
ter Southerners resigned their seats in Congress.[25][26] The tariff issue was a
nd is sometimes cited long after the war by Lost Cause historians and neo-Confederat
e apologists. In 1860-61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head of
f secession raised the tariff issue.[27] Pamphelteers North and South rarely men
tioned the tariff,[28] and when some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury[2
9] and John Lothrop Motley,[30] they were generally writing for a foreign audien
ce.
States rights. The South argued that each state had the right to secede leave the
Union at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the st
ates. Northerners (including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed
to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual u
nion.[31] Historian James McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other n
on-slavery explanations:
While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Conf
ederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians
now subscribe to them. Of all these interpretations, the states'-rights argumen
t 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.[32]
Territorial crisis
Further information: Slave and free states
Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory
through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. At first, the states carved out of
these territories entering the union, slave states were balanced by new free sta
tes. It was over territories west of the Mississippi that the proslavery and ant
islavery forces collided.[33]
With the conquest of northern Mexico west to California in 1848, slaveholding in
terests looked forward to expanding these lands and perhaps Cuba and Central Ame
rica as well.[34][35] Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail
any further expansion of slave soil. The Compromise of 1850 over California bala
nced a free soil state with stronger fugitive slave laws for a political settlem
ent after four years of strife in the 1840s. But the states admitted following C
alifornia were all free soil: Minnesota (1858), Oregon (1859), Kansas (1861). In
the southern states the question of the territorial expansion of the slavery we
stward again became explosive.[36] Both the South and the North drew the same co
nclusion: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was t
he power to determine the future of slavery itself."[37][38]
Sen. Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854
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.[39] The first of these "conservative" theories, repre
sented by the Constitutional Union Party, argued that the Missouri Compromise ap
portionment of territory north for free soil and south for slavery should become
a Constitutional mandate. The Crittenden Compromise of 1860 was an expression o
f this view.[40] The second doctrine of Congressional preeminence, championed by
Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, insisted that the Constitution did no
t bind legislators to a policy of balance
that slavery could be excluded in a te
rritory as it was done in the Northwest Ordinance at the discretion of Congress,
[41] thus Congress could restrict human bondage, but never establish it. The Wil
mont Proviso announced this position in 1846.[45]
Senator Stephen A. Douglas proclaimed the doctrine of territorial or "popular" s
overeignty which declared that the settlers in a territory had the same rights a
s states in the Union to establish or disestablish slavery as a purely local mat
ter.[42] The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 legislated this doctrine.[43] In Kansas
Territory, years of pro and anti-slavery violence and political conflict erupte
d; the congressional House of Representatives voted to admit Kansas as a free st
ate in early 1860, but its admission in the Senate was delayed until January 186
1, after the 1860 elections when southern senators began to leave.[44]
The fourth theory was advocated by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis,[45] one
of state sovereignty ("states' rights"),[46] also known as the "Calhoun doctrine
",[47] named after the South Carolinian political theorist and statesman John C.
Calhoun.[48] Rejecting the arguments for federal authority or self-government,
state sovereignty would empower states to promote the expansion of slavery as pa
rt of the Federal Union under the US Constitution.[49] "States' rights" was an i
deology formulated and applied as a means of advancing slave state interests thr
ough federal authority.[50] As historian Thomas L. Krannawitter points out, the
"Southern demand for federal slave protection represented a demand for an unprec
edented expansion of federal power."[51][52] These four doctrines comprised the
major ideologies presented to the American public on the matters of slavery, the
territories and the US Constitution prior to the 1860 presidential election.[53
]
National elections
Beginning in the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the
people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an important exam
ple to the world of a national republic of political liberty and personal rights
. Previous regional independence movements such as the Greek revolt in the Ottom
an Empire, division and redivision in the Latin American political map, and the
British-French Crimean triumph leading to an interest in redrawing Europe along
cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time of upheaval and uncertain
ty about the basis of the nation-state. In the world of 19th century self-made A
mericans, growing in prosperity, population and expanding westward, "freedom" co
uld mean personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would ca
use failure first in their political institutions, then in their civil life togeth
er.
Nationalism and honor
Middle-aged man in a beard posed sitting in a suit, vest and bowtie.
Abraham Lincoln
16th U.S. President (1861 1865)
Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesme
n such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. While practically all Northerners s
upported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire Uni
ted States (called "unionists") and those loyal primarily to the southern region
and then the Confederacy.[54] C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group,

A great slave society ... had grown up and miraculously flourished in the heart
of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its
bourgeois origins and elaborated and painfully rationalized its institutional, l
egal, metaphysical, and religious defenses ... When the crisis came it chose to
fight. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins
.[55]
Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity
of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)[56] and the actions of abolitionist John Brown in tr
ying to incite a slave rebellion in 1859.[57]
While the South moved toward a Southern nationalism, leaders in the North were a
lso becoming more nationally minded, and rejected any notion of splitting the Un
ion. The Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that Republicans
regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it: "We denounce those threa
ts of disunion ... as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as
an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indigna
nt people sternly to rebuke and forever silence."[58] The South ignored the warn
ings: Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would fight to hold the
Union together.[59]
Lincoln's election
Main article: United States presidential election, 1860
The election of Lincoln in November 1860 was the final trigger for secession.[60
] Efforts at compromise, including the "Corwin Amendment" and the "Crittenden Co
mpromise", failed. Southern leaders feared that Lincoln would stop the expansion
of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. The slave states, which ha
d already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were now facing a f
uture as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College against an inc
reasingly powerful North. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven slave
states had declared their secession and joined to form the Confederacy.
Outbreak of the war
Secession crisis
The first published imprint of secession
The election of Lincoln caused the legislature of South Carolina to call a state
convention to consider secession. Prior to the war, South Carolina did more tha
n any other Southern state to advance the notion that a state had the right to n
ullify federal laws and, even, secede from the United States. The convention sum
moned unanimously voted to secede on December 20, 1860 and adopted the "Declarat
ion of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Caro
lina from the Federal Union". It argued for states' rights for slave owners in t
he South, but contained a complaint about states' rights in the North in the for
m of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were no
t fulfilling their federal obligations under the Constitution. The "cotton state
s" of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit
, seceding in January and February 1861.
Among the ordinances of secession passed by the individual states, those of thre
e Texas, Alabama, and Virginia
specifically mentioned the plight of the 'slaveho
lding states' at the hands of northern abolitionists. The rest make no mention o
f the slavery issue, and are often brief announcements of the dissolution of tie
s by the legislatures.[61] However, at least four states
South Carolina,[62] Mis
sissippi,[63] Georgia,[64] and Texas[65] also passed lengthy and detailed explan
ations of their causes for secession, all of which laid the blame squarely on th
e movement to abolish slavery and that movement's influence over the politics of
the northern states. The southern states believed slaveholding was a constituti
onal 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.[66] They took control of federal forts and other p
roperties 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 th
e Union "... was intended to be perpetual," but that, "The power by force of arm
s to compel a State to remain in the Union," was not among the "... enumerated p
owers granted to Congress."[67] One quarter of the U.S. Army
the entire garrison
in Texas
was surrendered in February 1861 to state forces by its commanding gen
eral, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.
As Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House, Republicans wer
e able to pass bills for projects that had been blocked by Southern Senators bef
ore the war, including the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morill Act),
a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad (the Pacific Railway Acts),[68] th
e National Banking Act and the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal
Tender Act of 1862. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax to help f
inance the war.
In December 1860 the Crittenden Compromise was proposed to re-establish the Miss
ouri Compromise line by constitutionally banning slavery in territories to the n
orth of the line while guaranteeing it to the south. The adoption of this compro
mise likely would have prevented the secession of every southern state apart fro
m South Carolina, but Lincoln and the Republicans rejected it.[69] It was then p
roposed to hold a national referendum on the compromise. The Republicans again r
ejected the idea, although a majority of both Northerners and Southerners would
have voted in favor of it.[70] A pre-war February Peace Conference of 1861 met i
n 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 ins
ufficient. 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.[71]
Middle-aged man in a goatee posed standing in a suit, vest and bowtie
Jefferson Davis, President of Confederacy (1861 1865)
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural ad
dress, 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".[72] He had no intent to invade Southern
states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but said that he wou
ld use force to maintain possession of Federal property. The government would ma
ke 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 Fede
ral law, U.S. Marshals and Judges would be withdrawn. No mention was made of bul
lion lost from U.S. mints in Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina. In Lincoln's
inaugural address, he stated that it would be U.S. policy to only collect impor
t duties at its ports; there could be no serious injury to the South to justify
armed revolution during his administration. His speech closed with a plea for re
storation of the bonds of union, famously calling on "the mystic chords of memor
y" binding the two regions.[73]
The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal prop
erties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected an
y negotiations with Confederate agents because he claimed the Confederacy was no
t a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamoun
t to recognition of it as a sovereign government.[74] Secretary of State William
Seward who at that time saw himself as the real governor or "prime minister" be
hind the throne of the inexperienced Lincoln, engaged in unauthorized and indire
ct negotiations that failed.[74] President Lincoln was determined to hold all re

maining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy, Fort Monroe in Virginia, in Flo

rida, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson, and Fort Taylor, and in the cockpit of seces
sion, Charleston, South Carolina's Fort Sumter.
Battle of Fort Sumter
Main article: Battle of Fort Sumter
Crowd surrounding an equestrian statue toped by a huge U.S. flag.
Mass meeting April 20, 1861 to support the Government at Washington's equestrian
statue in Union Square NYC
Ft. Sumter was located in the middle of the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina
, where thecan Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads
, the telegraph, steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively
. The mobilization of civilian factories, mines, shipyards, banks, transportatio
n and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World Wa
r I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths o
f an estimated 750,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualtie
s.[N 2] One estimate of the death toll is that ten percent of all Northern males
20 45 years old, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18 40 died.[11] Fr
om 1861 to 1865 about 620,000