Civil War, American

Civil War, American (April 1861– April 1865) costing more than 600,000 American lives, the Civil War consolidated the Revolutionary War of 1776 by ensuring that the United States would remain a single republic rather than a collection of potentially independent states. The Civil War brought enormous changes to the United States, most notably in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and gave citizenship to African Americans. The war also made use of several military innovations. Longer-range and more destructive ammunition, primarily the minié rifle bullet, made casualty rates much higher than in previous wars. The Civil War also was the first to make use of the draft and ironclad warships, and extensive use of rail transport and military telegraph lines, and it was first to be widely documented by photographers. Prompted by sectional disputes between slaveholding southern states and northern states, the Civil War began following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose party was committed to free labor ideology. Rather than accepting Lincoln's leadership, seven southern states, led by South Carolina and comprising Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas elected to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America (CSA) in February 1861. The Confederacy elected Mexican War (1846–48) hero and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis as their president, and began organizing an independent government modeled on the U.S. Constitution, with caveats guaranteeing slavery. On April 12, the Confederacy began fighting to assert its independence when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Soon after, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia joined the Confederacy.

Union commander Gen. Winfield Scott's strategic response was to blockade and encircle the Confederacy in a strategy dubbed the Anaconda Plan. Nevertheless, the first two years of fighting favored Confederate armies. Despite the superiority in men and supplies held by the Union's Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee won or dramatically stopped U.S. armies in a series of battles fought in northern Virginia and Maryland. Notable among these were the 1861 First Battle of Bull Run, in which southern armies won the war's first major contest; a series of dramatic raids conducted in the Shenandoah Valley by troops under Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson; the Seven Days' Battle (1862), in which Lee, at high cost, drove Union general George B. McClellan back from the Confederate capital at Richmond; the 1862 Second Battle of Bull Run, in which Lee virtually crushed Union armies fighting under John Pope; Antietam, that same year, where McClellan failed to capitalize on a costly victory that stopped Lee's advance into the heart of Maryland; and Fredericksburg (also 1862), which witnessed well-defended Confederates cutting down 13,000 Union troops with only 5,000 losses of their own.

While Lee stymied Union armies in the East, federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant chipped away at the South's western defenses. In February 1862 Grant launched joint army-navy attacks that took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Kentucky and Tennessee, piercing the center of the Confederacy's western defenses. As Union armies began moving into the Confederacy from the West, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston counterattacked near Shiloh (1862) on the Tennessee River. Grant's unprepared troops suffered heavy casualties, but managed to repel the attack. The Union then began a long push into the South. The year 1863 proved crucial in many ways. After Antietam, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation stating that the federal government considered all slaves still in Confederate territory to be free, which went into effect on January 1, 1863. The proclamation had two important consequences. For many in the North it transformed the war into a crusade against slavery. It also dissuaded Britain from officially recognizing and aiding the Confederacy. That year, the United States accepted African American enlistments to the army for the first time since 1820. By war's end, over 179,000 African-American men served in the U.S. armed forces. the year 1863 also witnessed two of the most crucial Confederate military defeats. Lee attempted to bring the Union to negotiate a peace by making an offensive strike. Federal armies under Gen. George G. Meade stopped that advance in the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July—the war's largest and most consequential battle. In the west, on July 4, Grant took the city of Vicksburg, the Confederacy's last major stronghold on the Mississippi. In 1864, Lincoln promoted Grant to general-in-chief. As Grant pushed against Lee's armies toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, Gen. William T. Sherman assailed Atlanta and then conducted his infamous March to the Sea (1864–65). Aiming to undercut the Confederacy's ability to sustain warfare in terms of both material and morale, Sherman's forces cut a sixty-mile wide trail through Georgia from Atlanta to the Atlantic, earning him the longstanding enmity of many southerners, despite his own personal regard for the region and its people. These two offensives combined with a concerted Union press to shatter the Confederacy. The war effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, Virginia. In something of an anticlimax, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston handed over the last Confederate army to Sherman near Durham, North Carolina, on April 26. The Reconstruction that followed in its wake was fraught, a situation only made worse by Abraham Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865.