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The United States is a federal union of 50 states, with the District of Columbia as the seat of the national government. The Constitution outlines the structure of the national government and specifies its powers and activities. Other governmental activities are the responsibility of the individual states, which have their own constitutions and laws. Within each state are counties, townships, cities and villages, each of which has its own elective government.

American Civil War

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American Civil War
Clockwise from top: Battle of Gettysburg, Union and Confederate dead after the Battle of Antietam photographed by Mathew Brady, Battle of Hampton Roads between theUSS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, Richmond, the capital of the Confederate States of America, in ruins after the war,Battle of Franklin
Date April 12, 1861 – May 9, 1865 (by declaration)[1] (4 years, 3 weeks and 6 days) (last shot fired June 22, 1865) Location Southern United States, Northeastern United States, Western United States,Atlantic Ocean Result Union victory · Slavery abolished · Territorial integrity preserved · Lincoln assassinated five days after Lee's surrender · Dissolution of the Confederacy · Beginning of the Reconstruction Era
Belligerents
United States	Confederate States
Commanders and leaders
Abraham Lincoln† Edwin M. Stanton Ulysses S. Grant William T. Sherman David Farragut David D. Porter and others	Jefferson Davis Judah P. Benjamin Robert E. Lee Joseph E. Johnston Raphael Semmes Josiah Tattnall and others
Strength
2,100,000	1,064,000
Casualties and losses
110,000 Army killed in action/dead of wounds[2] 25,000 Army dead in Confederate prisons[2] 2,260 Navy/Marines killed[3] ~ 365,000 total dead[4] 275,200 wounded	75,000 killed in action/dead of wounds (incomplete data)[3] 26,000–31,000 Army dead in Union prisons[3] ~260,000 total dead 137,000+ wounded

The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil War as well as other sectional names, was fought from 1861 to 1865. Seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America, known as the "Confederacy" or the "South". They grew to include eleven states, and although they claimed thirteen states and additional western territories, the Confederacy was never recognized by a foreign country. The states that did not declare secession were known as the "Union" or the "North". The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories.^{[N 1]} After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead, and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves began.

In the 1860 presidential election, Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, opposed the expansion of slavery into US territories. Lincoln won, but before his inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to secede had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, a total of 48.8% for the six.^[5]Outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincoln's inaugural address declared his administration would not initiate civil war. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession. Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy. A peace conference failed to find a compromise, and both sides prepared for war. The Confederates assumed that Europeancountries were so dependent on "King Cotton" that they would intervene; none did and none recognized the new Confederate States of America.

Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, 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 states joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. Lincoln soon controlled the border states, after arresting state legislators and suspending habeas corpus,^[6] ignoring the ruling of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice that such suspension was unconstitutional, and established a naval blockade that crippled the southern economy. The Eastern Theater was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state) ended with Confederate retreat at theBattle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.^[7] To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy, then much of their western armies, and the Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lee's Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Lincoln issued theEmancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.^[8] Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. In the Western Theater, William T. Sherman drove east to capture Atlanta and marched to the sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure along the way. The Union marshaled the resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions, leading to the protracted Siege of Petersburg. The besieged Confederate army eventually abandoned Richmond, seeking to regroup at Appomattox Court House, though there they found themselves surrounded by union forces. This led to Lee's surrender to Grant on April 9, 1865. All Confederate generals surrendered by that summer.

The American 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, transportation and food supplies all foreshadowed World War I. It remains the deadliest war in American history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 750,000 soldiers and an undetermined number of civilian casualties.^{[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 perished.^[10] From 1861 to 1865 about 620,000 soldiers lost their lives.^[11]

Contents

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· 1 Causes of secession

o 1.1 Slavery

o 1.2 States' rights

o 1.3 Sectionalism

o 1.4 Territorial crisis

o 1.5 National elections

· 2 Secession and war begins

o 2.1 Resolves and developments

o 2.2 States align

o 2.3 Beginning the war

· 3 The War

o 3.1 Mobilization

o 3.2 Naval war

o 3.3 Eastern theater

o 3.4 Western theater

o 3.5 Trans-Mississippi

o 3.6 End of war

· 4 Diplomacy

· 5 Victory and aftermath

o 5.1 Results

o 5.2 Costs

o 5.3 Emancipation

o 5.4 Texas v. White

o 5.5 Reconstruction

· 6 Memory and historiography

o 6.1 Lost Cause

o 6.2 Beardian historiography

o 6.3 Civil War commemoration

· 7 See also

· 8 References

· 9 Further reading

· 10 External links

Causes of secession

Main articles: Origins of the American Civil War, Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War and History of the United States

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 offer a variety of reasons for the war.^[12] Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican 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. After Lincoln had won without carrying a single Southern state, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option, because they felt as if they were losing representation, which hampered their ability to promote pro-slavery acts and policies.^[13]

Slavery

Main article: Slavery in the United States

The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state-based property system protected by the Constitution.^[14] The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment — to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction.^[15] To slave holding interests in the South, this strategy was perceived as infringing upon their Constitutional rights.^[16] Slavery was being phased out of existence in the North and was fading in the border states and urban areas, but was expanding in highly profitable cotton districts of the south.

An 1863 photo ofGordon, distributed in the North during the war.^[17]

Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave state in 1820, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the status of slavery in western territories won as a result of the Mexican–American War and the resulting Compromise of 1850.^[18] Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude slavery from conquered territories in the Wilmot Proviso; although it passed the House, it failed in the Senate. Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors of slavery as described in the novel and play Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.^[19][20] Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery ended the Whig and Know Nothing political parties, and later split the Democratic Party between North and South, while the new Republican Party angered slavery interests by demanding an end to its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and 1858.^[21][22]

Meanwhile, the South of the 1850s saw an increasing number of slaves leave the border states through sale, manumission and escape. During this same period, slave-holding border states had more free African-Americans and European immigrants than the lower South, which increased Southern fears that slavery was threatened with rapid extinction in this area.^[23] With tobacco and cotton wearing out the soil, the South believed it needed to expand slavery.^[24] Some advocates for the Southern states argued in favor of reopening the international slave trade to populate territory that was to be newly opened to slavery.^[25] Southern demands for a slave code to ensure slavery in the territories repeatedly split the Democratic Party between North and South by widening margins.^{[26][N 3]}

To settle the dispute over slavery expansion, Abolitionists and proslavery elements sent their partisans into Kansas, both using ballots and bullets. In the 1850s, a miniature civil war in Bleeding Kansas led pro-South Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan to attempt a forced admission of Kansas as a slave state through vote fraud.^[31] The 1857 Congressional rejection of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution was the first multi-party solid-North vote, and that solid vote was anti-slavery to support the democratic majority voting in the Kansas Territory.^[32] Violence on behalf of Southern honor reached the floor of the Senate in 1856 when a Southern Congressman, Preston Brooks, physically assaulted Republican Senator Charles Sumner when he ridiculed prominent slaveholders as pimps for slavery.^[33]

The earlier political party structure failed to make accommodation among sectional differences. Disagreements over slavery caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse. In 1860, the last national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines. Anti-slavery Northerners mobilized in 1860 behind moderate Abraham Lincoln because he was most likely to carry the doubtful western states. In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ended the Congressional compromise for Popular Sovereignty in Kansas. According to the court, slavery in the territories was a property right of any settler, regardless of the majority there. Chief Justice Taney's decision said that slaves were "... so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". The decision overturned the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery in territory north of the 36°30' parallel.^[34]

Members of slave-owning planter aristocracydominated society and politics in the South.

Republicans denounced the Dred Scott decision and promised to overturn it; Abraham Lincoln warned that the next Dred Scott decision could threaten the Northern states with slavery. The Republican party platform called slavery "a national evil", and Lincoln believed it would die a natural death if it were contained.^[35] The Democrat Stephen A. Douglas developed the Freeport Doctrine to appeal to North and South. Douglas argued, Congress could not decide either for or against slavery before a territory was settled. Nonetheless, the anti-slavery majority in Kansas could stop slavery with its own local laws if their police laws did not protect slavery introduction.^[36] Most 1850 political battles followed the arguments of Lincoln and Douglas, focusing on the issue of slavery expansion in the territories.^[21]

But political debate was cut short throughout the South with Northern abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry Armoryin an attempt to incite slave insurrections. The Southern political defense of slavery transformed into widespread expansion of local militias for armed defense of their "peculiar" domestic institution.^[37] Lincoln's assessment of the political issue for the 1860 elections was that, "This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."^{[N 4]} The Republicans gained majorities in both House and Senate for the first time since the 1856 elections, they were to be seated in numbers that Lincoln might use to govern, a national parliamentary majority even before pro-slavery House and Senate seats were vacated.^[40] Meanwhile, Southern Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in the Cornerstone Speech, declared the new confederate "Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution."^[41] The Republican administration enacted the Confiscation Acts that set conditions for emancipation of slaves prior to the official proclamation of emancipation.^[42] Likewise, Lincoln had previously condemned slavery and called for its "extinction."^[43]

Considering the relative weight given to causes of the Civil War by contemporary actors, historians such as Chandra Manning argue that both Union and Confederate fighting soldiers believed that slavery caused the Civil War. Union men mainly believed the war was to emancipate the slaves. Confederates fought to protect southern society, and slavery as an integral part of it.^[44] Addressing the causes, Eric Foner would relate a historical context with multidimensional political, social and economic variables. The several causes united in the moment by a consolidating nationalism. A social movement that was individualist, egalitarian and perfectionist grew to a political democratic majority attacking slavery, and slavery's defense in the Southern pre-industrial traditional society brought the two sides to war.^[45]

States' rights

Main article: States' rights

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

Everyone agreed that states had certain rights—but did those rights carry over when a citizen left that state? The Southern position was that citizens of every state had the right to take their property anywhere in the U.S. and not have it taken away—specifically they could bring their slaves anywhere and they would remain slaves. Northerners rejected this "right" because it would violate the right of a free state to outlaw slavery within its borders. Republicans committed to ending the expansion of slavery were among those opposed to any such right to bring slaves and slavery into the free states and territories. The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 bolstered the Southern case within territories, and angered the North.^[46]

Secondly, 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 states. Northerners (including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a "perpetual union".^[46] Historian James McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other non-slavery explanations:

Sectionalism