American Civil War (1861-1865)

It was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election
of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 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.
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 President James 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.
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. 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. Lincoln's decision to issue the
Emancipation Proclamation angered both Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and
War Democrats, but energized most Republicans. 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.
Slavery for the Confederacy's 3.5 million blacks effectively ended when Union
armies arrived; they were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.
Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory
occupied
prior
to
the
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ncipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 18, 1865) by
the Thirteenth Amendment. The full restoration of the Union was the work of a
highly contentious postwar era known as Reconstruction.