The Civil war that shattered the United States was an event without precedent in our nation’s history. It was a conflict that grew out of longstanding tensions and disagreements about economic policies and practices, cultural values, and the extent to which the Federal government should intervene in the lives of people in individual states.
For 80 years, Americans debated the issues that led to war. The question of slavery was central. As time went on, it became more difficult for politicians to contain the dispute through compromise. When, in 1860, the Republican Party chose an explicitly antislavery candidate for president, seven Southern states carried out their threat to secede and organized as the Confederate States of America.
On April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, a Confederate force seized the Federal garrison, forcing it to lower the American flag in surrender. That act triggered a public declaration of an insurrection and prompted President Abraham Lincoln to call for 75,000 militia to suppress it. Four more slave states would follow suit and join the Confederacy, setting in motion a massive war of destruction with far-reaching consequences.
By 1862 the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore the Union had given way to the more ambitious strategy of “total war” to destroy the old South and its basic institution of slavery, with a promise of a new birth of freedom for all Americans. To achieve this goal, a series of gigantic battles was fought-at Shiloh in Tennessee, Second Manassas and Fredericksburg in Virginia, Wilson’s Creek and Gettysburg in Missouri, and the successful Union siege of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River.
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