The American Civil War (18611865), often referred to as The Civil War in the United States, was a civil

war fought over the secessionof the Confederate States. In response to the election of Abraham
Lincoln as President, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and
formed the Confederate States of America ("the Confederacy"); the other 25 states supported the
federal government ("the Union"). After four years of warfare, mostly within the Southern states, the
Confederacy surrendered and slavery was outlawed everywhere in the nation. Issues that led to war
were partially resolved in the Reconstruction Era that followed, though others remained unresolved.
In the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, had campaigned
against expanding slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. The Republicans strongly
advocated nationalism, and in their 1860 platform they denounced threats of disunion as avowals of
treason. After a Republican victory, but before the new administration took office on March 4, 1861,
seven cotton states declared their secession and joined to form the Confederate States of America. Both
the outgoing administration of PresidentJames Buchanan and the incoming administration rejected the
legality of secession, considering it rebellion. The other eight slave states rejected calls for secession at
this point. No country in the world recognized the Confederacy.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort
Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a volunteer army from each state to
recapture federal property, which led to declarations of secession by four more slave states. Both sides
raised armies as the Union seized control of the border states early in the war and established a naval
blockade. Land warfare in the East was inconclusive in 186162, as the Confederacy beat back Union
efforts to capture its capital,Richmond, Virginia, notably during the Peninsular Campaign. In September
1862, the Confederate campaign in Maryland ended in defeat at the Battle of Antietam, which
dissuaded the British from intervening.
[2]
Days after that battle, Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.
[3]

In 1863, Confederate general Robert E. Lee's northward advance ended in defeat at the Battle of
Gettysburg. To the west, the Union gained control of the Mississippi River after the Battle of
Shiloh and Siege of Vicksburg, splitting the Confederacy in two and destroying much of their western
army. Due to his western successes, Ulysses S. Grant was given command of the eastern army in 1864,
and organized the armies of William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan and others to attack the
Confederacy from all directions, increasing the North's advantage in manpower. Grant restructured the
union army, and put other generals in command of divisions of the army that were to support his push
into Virginia. He fought several battles of attrition against Lee through the Overland Campaign to seize
Richmond, though in the face of fierce resistance he altered his plans and led the Siege of
Petersburg which nearly finished off the rest of Lee's army. Meanwhile, Sherman
captured Atlanta and marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. When
the Confederate attempt to defend Petersburg failed, the Confederate army retreated but was pursued
and defeated, which resulted in Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
The American Civil War was one of the earliest true industrial wars. Railroads, the telegraph,
steamships, and mass-produced weapons were employed extensively. The practices of total war,
developed by Sherman in Georgia, and of trench warfare around Petersburg foreshadowed World War I
in Europe. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated
750,000 soldiers
[4]
and an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Historian John
Huddleston estimates the death toll at ten percent of all Northern males 2045 years old, and 30
percent of all Southern white males aged 1840.
[5]
Victory for the North meant the end of the
Confederacy and of slavery in the United States, and strengthened the role of the federal government.
The social, political, economic and racial issues of the war decisively shaped the reconstruction era that
lasted to 1877.

Causes of secession
The causes of the Civil War were complex, and have been controversial since the war began. The issue
has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who have tried to improve the image of
the South by lessening the role of slavery.[6] Slavery was the central source of escalating political
tension in the 1850s. TheRepublican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many
Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election.
Following Lincoln's victory, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option.
While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to preserve 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.[7] Abraham Lincoln consistently
made preserving the Union the central goal of the war, though he increasingly saw slavery as a crucial
issue and made ending it an additional goal.[8] Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation angered both Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized most
Republicans.[9] 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 crushed at the 1863 elections in
Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.[10]

Southern fears of modernization
According to the historian James M. McPherson, exceptionalism applied not to the South but to the
North after the North phased out slavery and launched an industrial revolution that led to urbanization,
which in turn led to increased education, which in its own turn gave ever-increasing strength to various
reform movements but especially abolitionism.[citation needed] The fact that seven immigrants out of
eight settled in the North (and the fact that most immigrants viewed slavery with disfavor),
compounded by the fact that twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa,
contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior. The Charleston Mercury read that on
the issue of slavery the North and South "are not only two Peoples, but they are rival, hostile
Peoples."[35] As De Bow's Review said, "We are resisting revolution.... We are not engaged in a Quixotic
fight for the rights of man.... We are conservative."[35]

Southern fears of modernity
Allan Nevins argued that the Civil War was an "irrepressible" conflict, adopting a phrase first used by
U.S. Senator and Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State William H. Seward. Nevins synthesized
contending accounts emphasizing moral, cultural, social, ideological, political, and economic issues. In
doing so, he brought the historical discussion back to an emphasis on social and cultural factors. Nevins
pointed out that the North and the South were rapidly becoming two different peoples, a point made
also by historian Avery Craven. At the root of these cultural differences was the problem of slavery, but
fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the regions were diverging in other ways as well.
More specifically, the North was rapidly modernizing in a manner threatening to the South. Historian
McPherson explains:[35]
When secessionists protested in 1861 that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values,
they were correct. They fought to preserve their constitutional liberties against the perceived Northern
threat to overthrow them. The South's concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a
century; the North's had.... The ascension to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of
competitive, egalitarian free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the Northern majority had
turned irrevocably towards this frightening, revolutionary future.
Harry L. Watson has synthesized research on antebellum southern social, economic, and political
history. Self-sufficient yeomen, in Watson's view, "collaborated in their own transformation" by allowing
promoters of a market economy to gain political influence. Resultant "doubts and frustrations" provided
fertile soil for the argument that southern rights and liberties were menaced by Black
Republicanism.[36]
J. Mills Thornton III, explained the viewpoint of the average white Alabamian. Thornton contends that
Alabama was engulfed in a severe crisis long before 1860. Deeply held principles of freedom, equality,
and autonomy, as expressed in republican values appeared threatened, especially during the 1850s, by
the relentless expansion of market relations and commercial agriculture. Alabamians were thus, he
judged, prepared to believe the worst once Lincoln was elected.[37]

Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The events which led to the origins of the American Civil War and to the Civil War itself may be
considered in two periods, the long term build up over many decades and the five-month build up to
war in the period immediately after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President (in November 1860)
and the fall of Fort Sumter (in April 1861). Over many years from almost the beginning of the colonial
period in Virginia, events, occurrences, actions and statements by politicians and others in the United
States brought about issues, differences, tensions and divisions between the leaders and people of
the slave states of the Southern United States and the leaders and people of the free states of the
Northern United States (including Western states). The big underlying issue from which other issues
developed was whether slavery should be retained and even expanded to other areas or whether it
should be contained and eventually abolished. Over many decades, these issues and divisions became
increasingly irreconcilable and contentious. Events in the 1850s culminated with the election of the anti-
slavery, but not yet abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. This provoked the
first round of State secessions as leaders of the Deep South States were unwilling to trust Lincoln not to
move against slavery. This timeline briefly describes and links to narrative articles and references about
many of the events and issues which historians recognize as causes of the Civil War. The series of events
for the period from Lincoln's election on November 6, 1860 through the fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln's
call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion on the next day, April 15, 1861, led to the breaking point
and civil war. The timeline shows many key events and statements in this crucial period immediately
before hostilities began. The entries that finish this timeline include a few more events in the following
months in 1861 that relate to the secession of four additional states and further initial actions and
occurrences as both groups of states prepared for war. Four additional states, the Upper South States of
(Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas) completed the formation of the Confederate States
of America during this period. Their addition to the Confederacy insured a war would be prolonged and
bloody because they contributed many men and resources to the Confederacy. Initially, only the seven
Deep South States, with economies based on cotton (then in heavy European demand with rising prices)
of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas seceded. President
Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion pushed the four other Upper South States also to
secede.
Robert Francis Engs described the issues which caused the Civil War in Slavery during the Civil
War in The Confederacy edited by Richard N. Current at page 983:
Although slavery was at the heart of the sectional impasse between the North and South in 1860, it was
not the singular cause of the Civil War. Rather, it was the multitude of differences arising from the
slavery issue that impelled the Southern States to secede....The new republic claimed its justification to
be the protection of state rights. In truth, close reading of the states' secession proclamations and of the
new Confederate Constitution reveal that it was primarily one state right that impelled their separation:
the right to preserve African American slavery within their borders....Thus, the North went to war to
preserve the Union, and the white South went to war for independence so that it might protect slavery.
Historian, James M. McPherson, similarly stated on the first page of his 1982 one-volume history of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction:
The social and political strains produced by rapid growth provoked repeated crises that threatened to
destroy the republic. From the beginning, these strains were associated mainly with slavery. The
geographical division of the country into free and slave states ensured that the crises would take the
form of sectional conflict. Each section evolved institutions and values based on its labor system. These
values in turn generated ideologies that justified each section's institutions and condemned those of the
other.
McPherson notes at page 2 that "as early as 1787, conflict over slavery at the constitutional convention
almost broke up the Union before it was fairly launched." He further stated at page 51 of Ordeal by
Fire that:
Slavery was the main issue in national politics from 1844 to the outbreak of the Civil War. And many
times before 1844 this vexed question burst through the crust of other issues to set section against
section, as in the Missouri debates of 18191820. Even the nullification crisis of 1832, ostensibly over
the tariff, had slavery as its underlying cause. The South Carolina nullifiers feared that the centralization
of government power, as manifested by the tariff, might eventually threaten slavery itself. Nullification
was the most extreme assertion of states' rights a constitutional theory whose fundamental purpose
was to protect slavery against potential federal interference.
At first, all the American colonies allowed slavery but over the period from 1777 to 1804, Northern
states abolished it or provided for its gradual abolition within their borders. Thereafter, the Northern
and Southern states gradually grew apart over slavery and a number of issues related directly or
indirectly to slavery, as the historians who have studied and written about the war in depth have
pointed out. Other issues that developed in association with the complex issue concerning the
institution and retention of slavery in the United States included competing understandings between
the Northern and Southern sections of the country relating to federalism and the powers of the federal
and state governments, differences in party politics, preference or opposition to national expansion and
to where it would or could occur, differing theories of economics and labor, preferences for and against
tariffs and federally-financed internal improvements, industrialization versus agrarianism, sectionalism,
and differences in social structures and general values.
The leaders and citizens of the various sections developed increasingly strident and irreconcilable
positions about the existence and expansion of slavery and other issues during the 1850s. The slave
states began to believe they were losing ground in these arguments and that the institution of slavery
was increasingly threatened. The leaders of the Deep South States in particular reacted to the election
of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States on November 6, 1860 on a platform that called for
the end of the expansion of slavery with professed fears that the Northern States and their leaders
would soon try to abolish slavery altogether. No longer able, or perhaps no longer willing, to
compromise or attempt to compromise on the issues which divided the sections of the country, the
seven Deep South States gave up on the political process and seceded from the Union of the United
States even before the inauguration of Lincoln as President. The onset of the Civil War in April 1861
occurred with only these seven Deep South States having passed ordinances of secession and joined the
Confederacy. Soon after Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion on April 15, 1861, the four
Upper South States joined the Confederacy. Some people from the Upper South states in particular
adhered to the Union but significant minorities in the border slave states of Kentucky, Maryland and
Missouri, which remained in the Union, also supported the Southern cause.[1]
This timeline is a chronological list of events, statements, writings and influences that historians such as
James McPherson, David J. Eicher, Harry Hansen, John Bowman, E. B. Long, Margaret Wagner and
others have cited and associated with the issues of slavery and other issues that led to the build up to
and outbreak of the American Civil War.[2][3]