American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Civil War began at 4:30 in the morning on the 12th of April 1861, when Confederate artillery fired the first of 4,000 shells at Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. By the time the last battle was fought and General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on the 9th of April 1865, an estimated 700,000 soldiers were dead. That toll made it the deadliest war in American history. Four million enslaved people were freed. A nation built on the promise of self-governance had come within a breath of tearing itself apart.

  How did the United States arrive at that moment? What drove eleven Southern states to leave the Union, seize federal property, and wage four years of ferocious combat against their own countrymen? And once the shooting stopped, what kind of country emerged from the wreckage? These are the questions the story of the Civil War forces us to answer.

• 2. Slavery and the Road to Secession

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  Mississippi's secession declaration left no ambiguity about what was at stake. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," it read, "the greatest material interest of the world." Historians in the 21st century overwhelmingly agree that slavery was the central cause of the conflict, at least from the Southern states' perspective.

  The political crisis had been building for decades. Congress had long admitted new states in pairs, one slave and one free, to preserve a rough balance of power in the Senate. But free states were outpacing slave states in population, eroding Southern influence in the House. The question of whether slavery would spread into the new Western territories became the era's defining political fault line.

  When Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed slavery's expansion, won the 1860 presidential election, seven Southern slave states responded within months by seceding from the United States. Their economies depended on cotton cultivated by enslaved labor, and Southern leaders feared Lincoln would set slavery on a course toward extinction. Lincoln was not even inaugurated until the 4th of March 1861, nearly four months after his election, and the South used that interval to prepare.

  The secession documents of at least four states, including South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas, provided detailed reasons for leaving, all centering on the movement to abolish slavery. The pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology would later deny this, but those original documents stand as direct evidence. A panel of historians stated in 2011 that, while slavery and its various discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war.

• 3. Fort Sumter and the War's First Months

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  Major Robert Anderson commanded the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, and on the 26th of December 1860, under cover of darkness, he moved his men from the poorly positioned Fort Moultrie to the sturdier island fortress. That move made Anderson a hero in the North almost overnight.

  For Lincoln, the fort presented a test of his presidency. His Secretary of State, William H. Seward, had been Lincoln's rival for the Republican nomination and considered himself the de facto head of government in the administration's early days. Seward pushed for withdrawing from the fort entirely. Lincoln overruled him and decided on April 6 to send a supply ship carrying food but no ammunition, informing South Carolina's governor of the plan. If the Confederacy fired on unarmed men delivering food, it would be the aggressor. A Confederate cabinet meeting on April 9 resulted in Jefferson Davis ordering General P. G. T. Beauregard to take the fort before the supplies arrived.

  When the fort fell the following day, a wave of patriotic feeling swept the North. On April 15, Lincoln called on the states to field 75,000 militiamen for 90 days; Northern states met those quotas quickly. On the 3rd of May 1861, Lincoln called for an additional 42,000 volunteers for three years. The response in the South was equally swift: Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina seceded and joined the Confederacy, and the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond to honor Virginia's entry into the war.

• 4. Industrial War and Naval Power

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  The Civil War unfolded during the early stages of the industrial revolution, and both sides reached for the era's new technologies. Railroads moved troops and supplies at speeds no previous war had seen. The electrical telegraph carried orders across hundreds of miles. Mass-produced weapons reached soldiers faster than in any earlier conflict. The war was among the first to deploy all of these tools at scale, and the technology and brutality it generated foreshadowed the world wars that would follow.

  At sea, the transformation was equally dramatic. The Union Navy stood at roughly small size in 1861 but had expanded by 1865 to 6,000 officers, 45,000 sailors, and 671 vessels totaling 510,396 tons. Its strategic weapon was the blockade, conceived by General Winfield Scott in his Anaconda Plan: strangle the South's trade until it could no longer sustain the war. Lincoln adopted the plan and announced the blockade in April 1861. By June, warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and nearly 300 ships were in service a year later.

  The naval revolution that defined the war arrived on the 8th and the 9th of March 1862, when the Confederate ironclad Virginia inflicted serious damage on the Union's wooden fleet in the Chesapeake Bay, then fought the first Union ironclad to a draw in the three-hour Battle of Hampton Roads. That single engagement proved ironclad warships were decisive, and the Union went on to build many copies of its Monitor-class vessel.

  To sustain the war despite the blockade, the Confederacy turned to small, fast, steam-driven blockade runners built by British investors, trading arms and supplies routed through Bermuda, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Financiers and companies including S. Isaac, Campbell and Company and the London Armoury Company became the Confederacy's main source of weapons. The blockade's true success was measured not by the runners who slipped through but by the thousands of merchant ships that never tried, as European insurers refused to cover voyages to Confederate ports. Britain ultimately paid the United States $15 million in 1871 for damages caused by vessels outfitted in British ports.

• 5. Turning Points East and West

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  The Eastern theater opened with Confederate victories. At the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, Confederate reinforcements arrived by railroad from the Shenandoah Valley and turned an initial Union advantage into a rout. A brigade of Virginians under Thomas J. Jackson held their ground so resolutely that day that Jackson earned the nickname "Stonewall."

  For nearly two years the Eastern theater remained inconclusive. General George B. McClellan launched a Peninsula campaign that reached the gates of Richmond in the spring of 1862 before Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston halted his advance at Seven Pines. Lee then took command and drove McClellan back in the Seven Days Battles. During the Maryland Campaign of September 1862, Lee led 45,000 troops across the Potomac River, only to meet McClellan at the Battle of Antietam on the 17th of September 1862, the bloodiest single day in the Civil War and in all of American military history. Lee's army retreated to Virginia; Lincoln used the Union's claim to victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as an executive order on the 1st of January 1863.

  The Battle of Chancellorsville in spring 1863 was Lee's most tactically brilliant performance, a risky decision to divide his army that left Union forces badly beaten. But the victory cost him Stonewall Jackson, shot in the arm and hand by friendly fire, his arm amputated, dying of pneumonia. Lee said: "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm."

  The war's turning point came in the first days of July 1863, when the three-day Battle of Gettysburg produced more than 50,000 Union and Confederate casualties. Meade's Army of the Potomac repelled Lee, who suffered 28,000 casualties against Meade's 23,000. Pickett's Charge on the 3rd of July, the final day of the battle, is considered the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

  In the West, the decisive moment came the same week. Ulysses S. Grant's long Vicksburg Campaign ended with the Confederate garrison's surrender in July 1863. The Mississippi River fell under Union control, splitting the Confederacy in two and producing the general Lincoln most needed.

• 6. Grant, Sherman, and the End of the War

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  In early 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac and placed General William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western forces. Both men understood the war's logic: only the complete destruction of Confederate armies and their economic base would end the fighting.

  Grant's Overland Campaign pressed Lee through a series of grinding battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, forcing the Confederates back repeatedly, before Grant turned south to begin the Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies fought trench warfare for over nine months.

  Sherman meanwhile drove from Chattanooga toward Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood. Atlanta fell on the 2nd of September 1864, an event that guaranteed Lincoln's reelection. Sherman then launched his March to the Sea, laying waste to about 20 percent of Georgia's farms and reaching Savannah in December 1864 before turning north through the Carolinas.

  To the north of Petersburg, General Philip Sheridan, after defeating Confederate General Jubal A. Early in a series of battles in September and October 1864, spent the following winter systematically destroying the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, cracked at the decisive Battle of Five Forks on the 1st of April 1865. The Union controlled the entire perimeter around Richmond and Petersburg. The Confederates abandoned their capital, and on the 9th of April 1865, at Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered to Grant. Lincoln lived to see that victory but was shot by an assassin on the 14th of April, dying the next day. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Confederacy dissolved, and the country turned toward the Reconstruction era, attempting to rebuild, reunify, and extend civil rights to four million people who had been freed.

• 7. Who Fought and Who Was Left Behind

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  European immigrants joined the Union Army in enormous numbers: 177,000 born in Germany, 144,000 in Ireland, and about 50,000 Canadians, roughly 2,500 of whom were Black. When the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in January 1863, formerly enslaved men were actively recruited to meet Union state quotas.

  Draft laws on both sides proved deeply unpopular. The Confederacy passed a conscription law in April 1862, covering men aged 18 to 35. The Union tightened its own draft law in March 1863, though men could escape service by providing a substitute or, until mid-1864, paying a commutation fee. About 120,000 Northern men evaded conscription, many by fleeing to Canada. The New York City draft riots of July 1863 drew in Irish immigrants who had been signed up as citizens without realizing that made them draft-eligible. At least 100,000 Southerners deserted during the war, roughly 10 percent of the total.

  Historian Elizabeth D. Leonard writes that between 500 and 1,000 women enlisted as soldiers on both sides, disguised as men. Women also served as spies, nurses, and hospital personnel aboard ships like the Union hospital ship Red Rover. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor, served in the Union Army treating the wounded. One soldier, Jennie Hodgers, fought for the Union under the name Albert D. J. Cashier and continued to live as a man after the war until she died in 1915 at the age of 71.

  As many as 100,000 men living inside Confederate-controlled territory served the Union Army or pro-Union guerrilla groups. The prisoner exchange system collapsed in 1863 when the Confederacy refused to exchange Black prisoners. After that breakdown, approximately 56,000 of the 409,000 prisoners of war died in captivity, accounting for 10 percent of the war's total fatalities.

• 8. Legacy and Unresolved Questions

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  The Civil War remains one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in American history. Historian John Keegan described it as "one of the most ferocious wars ever fought." The 237 named battles fought over four years, alongside countless smaller actions, were characterized by bitter intensity and casualty rates that stunned observers at the time.

  The war introduced industrial-scale warfare to the world. Railroads, telegraphs, ironclad warships, and mass-produced weapons became permanent features of modern conflict. European military observers initially dismissed Union and Confederate armies as amateurish, but Keegan concluded that each had outmatched the French, Prussian, and Russian armies and, without the Atlantic Ocean between them, could have threatened any of those powers with defeat.

  The pseudo-historical Lost Cause ideology, which denies slavery's central role in the secession and war, has persisted as a subject of cultural debate long after historians settled the question. The seceding states' own documents contradict it: South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas each cited the threat to slavery as their explicit reason for leaving the Union.

  The Reconstruction era that followed aimed to bring former Confederate states back into the United States and extend civil rights to freed people. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery. But the deeper question Lincoln had posed in his first inaugural address, whether a republic chosen by popular vote could survive an internal attempt to destroy it, would take generations to answer. The last Confederate general to surrender was Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Cherokee, who laid down arms after Lee's capitulation, closing a chapter that had drawn every corner of the continent into its devastation.