American Civil War: A Visual History

The American Civil War was fought from April 1861 to April 1865 between the United States (the Union) and eleven southern states that seceded to form the Confederate States of America. The cause was slavery: the South's determination to protect and expand it, and the election of Abraham Lincoln on a platform of stopping its spread. Roughly 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died, more than in all other American wars combined until Vietnam. The Union's victory preserved the country, freed four million enslaved people through the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, and shifted power decisively to the federal government.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is American Civil War. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Estimated soldier deaths

Traditional figures (Union about 360,000, Confederate about 258,000). A 2011 census-based study suggests the true total may be around 750,000. Disease killed about two men for every one killed in battle.

Timeline of the American Civil War

1. 1860
   Lincoln electedNovember; South Carolina secedes in December.
2. 1861
   Fort Sumter12 April; the war begins. First Bull Run in July.
3. 1862
   Shiloh, AntietamEmancipation Proclamation announced in September.
4. 1863
   Gettysburg and VicksburgThe Confederacy's high water mark and its splitting.
5. 1864
   Grant versus Lee; Atlanta fallsSherman's March to the Sea; Lincoln re-elected.
6. 1865
   AppomattoxLee surrenders 9 April; Lincoln assassinated 14 April.
7. Dec 1865
   Thirteenth AmendmentSlavery abolished throughout the United States.

Secession and Fort Sumter

Decades of compromise over whether new territories would permit slavery broke down in the 1850s: the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry polarised the country. When Abraham Lincoln, a Republican opposed to slavery's expansion, was elected in November 1860 without a single southern electoral vote, South Carolina seceded within six weeks and six more states followed by February 1861.

The Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour on 12 April 1861. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and four more states including Virginia seceded. Both sides expected a short war. The first big battle at Bull Run in July 1861, a Union rout, showed otherwise.

1862-1863: the war becomes a revolution

In the East, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia beat a succession of Union commanders. In the West, Ulysses S. Grant took Forts Henry and Donelson and won at Shiloh, and the Union navy captured New Orleans. Lee's first invasion of the North was stopped at Antietam in September 1862, and Lincoln used the victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebel territory from 1 January 1863 and turning the war into a war against slavery.

July 1863 was the turning point. Lee's second invasion was defeated at Gettysburg (1-3 July) in the war's largest battle, and Grant took Vicksburg on 4 July, splitting the Confederacy along the Mississippi. Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers eventually served in the Union army and navy.

Grant, Sherman and total war

Lincoln made Grant general in chief in March 1864. Grant attacked Lee relentlessly through the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, accepting terrible losses to pin him down at Petersburg. William T. Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864, saving Lincoln's re-election, then marched to the sea and through the Carolinas, destroying railways, crops and the South's will to fight.

The Confederacy, blockaded by the Union navy and short of everything, was starving. Its bid for British and French recognition failed, partly because emancipation made a war for slavery impossible for European governments to support.

Appomattox and after

Petersburg and Richmond fell on 2-3 April 1865, and Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April on generous terms. Five days later John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. The remaining Confederate armies gave up over the following weeks; the last, in Texas, in June.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in December 1865, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth granted citizenship and the vote to Black men. Reconstruction attempted to rebuild the South on that basis, but its abandonment in 1877 opened the door to segregation and disenfranchisement that lasted into the 1960s. The war remains the deadliest in American history and the central event of the nation's story.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• United States (1776 to present)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Spanish Empire (1492 to 1976)
• Danish colonial empire (1536 to 1953)
• Dutch Empire (1602 to 1975)
• First Mexican Empire (1821 to 1823)

Wars of the same era and region

• American Revolution (1775 to 1783)
• Mexican War of Independence (1810 to 1821)
• Paraguayan War (War of the Triple Alliance) (1864 to 1870)
• Wars of German Unification (1864 to 1871)
• Crimean War (1853 to 1856)
• Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1920)

10 surprising things about the American Civil War

1. Disease killed roughly twice as many soldiers as combat; dysentery, typhoid and pneumonia were the real enemies.
2. The bloodiest single day in American history was not D-Day or 9/11 but Antietam, 17 September 1862.
3. The war's first battle, Bull Run, was watched by picnicking Washington society, who fled with the army.
4. The Confederacy's constitution explicitly protected slavery, and its Vice President Alexander Stephens said slavery was the 'cornerstone' of the new nation.
5. Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born in Kentucky, less than 100 miles and eight months apart.
6. Wilmer McLean's farm was the site of the First Battle of Bull Run; he moved to get away from the war, and Lee surrendered in his new parlour at Appomattox.
7. The Union used observation balloons, ironclad warships, railways and the telegraph on an unprecedented scale; it was arguably the first modern war.
8. Around 20 percent of soldiers were foreign born, including whole regiments of German and Irish immigrants.
9. The last Confederate general to surrender was a Cherokee, Stand Watie, in June 1865.
10. The last verified Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson of the Union army, died in 1956; the last widow receiving a Civil War pension died in 2020.

Sources

• American Civil War Encyclopaedia Britannica
• American Civil War Wikipedia
• Civil War Facts American Battlefield Trust
• The Civil War US National Park Service
• James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) Oxford University Press
• J. David Hacker, A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead (2011) Civil War History

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