The American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, was between the American North and the South because of different economic issues. During the war, the North’s elites wanted economic expansion and changes in the South’s slavery and way of life. The Southern states saw in Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party enormous changes in their way of life and the use of free and slave labor.
The American Civil War began because of uncompromising differences between free and slave states regarding the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in areas that had not yet become states. The struggle between supporters and opponents of slavery, which dates back to the founding of the United States, had been tempered by a series of political compromises but the issue of extending slavery to western states reached a boiling point in the late 1850s. When Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president to win the election in 1860 by promising to continue slavery in the territories, the seven Deep South states split off to form the new Nation of the Confederate States of America.
The new Abraham Lincoln administration and most of the people of the North refused to recognize the legitimacy of the breakaway states. They feared that secession would discredit democracy and set a fatal precedent that would splinter the new nation of the Confederate States of America into several smaller, fractious countries. After four long years of bloody conflict, the United States was forced on April 9, 1865, to surrender to the Confederacy, but victory celebrations were marred by Lincoln’s assassination a few days later.
The Civil War began in the United States in 1861 after decades of simmering tensions between northern and southern states over slavery, state rights, and Western expansion. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 led to the secession of seven Southern states and the formation of the Confederate States of America, and four other states joined the Confederacy later. The war gave the country what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom but also cast a long shadow over the history of the South and its legacy shaped much of the later development of the country.
The secession of the southern states (in chronological order) of the eleven southern states in 1860-61 and the subsequent outbreak of armed hostilities was the culmination of decades of growing friction between the sections over slavery. The American Civil War (also known as the War of the States or Four Years War) (1861-65) was the war between the United States and the Confederate States of America for the secession of 11 southern states. The practice of slavery in the US was one of the central political issues of the nineteenth century, and decades of political turmoil over slavery led to war. On the eve of the war, in 1860, there were four million (3.2 million) Americans who were black slaves in the south of the United States.
With the defeat of the Southern Confederacy and the subsequent adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, the American Civil War (1861-1865) had long-term consequences, including the abolition of slavery in America and redefinition of the country as a single indivisible nation instead of a bound collection of independent states. It was a war in which there were many innovations such as America’s first income tax, the first battle on iron ships, the first full deployment of black soldiers and sailors in US services, the first use of Quinine for treating typhoid fever, and America’s first military design among many others. There have also been advances in medical treatment, military tactics, and pastoral care.
Lincoln seized the opportunity of the victory of the Union army at Antietam to issue the provisional proclamation of emancipation, which liberated enslaved people in rebellious states on January 1, 1863. The proclamation deprived the Confederation of most of its manpower and put an international public opinion on the side of the Union. Lincoln justified his decision as a war measure that did not go far enough to liberate all enslaved people outside the EU-loyal border states. By the end of the 1865 war, there had been approximately 186,000 black Civil War soldiers joining the Union Army, of whom 38,000 died.
The Declaration of Secession championed the rights of states to slave owners in the South and contained complaints about the rights of states in the North in the form of opposition to the Fleeing Slaves Act, claiming that the northern states had failed to fulfill their federal obligations under the Constitution. Southerners believed Abraham Lincoln was elected to restrict their right to slave ownership. Southern states believed that slavery had no constitutional right under the slave clause of the US Constitution.
The event that triggered the war occurred on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. President Lincoln announces in a public declaration that there is an uprising and calls on 75,000 militias to end it. The port of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, continues to fly the flag of the United States even as Confederate troops surround it.