America.doc - The American Civil War was a civil war in the...

The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between
the Union and the Confederacy, the latter formed by states that had seceded. The
central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to
expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented
from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of
ultimate extinction.
Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory
in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's
expansion into the western territories. An initial seven southern slave states
responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in February
1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal
assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the
Confederacy asserted control over about a third of the U.S. population in eleven of
the 34 U.S. states that then existed. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the
South, ensued.
During 1861–1862 in the war's Western Theater, the Union made significant permanent
gains—though in the war's Eastern Theater the conflict was inconclusive. The
abolition of slavery became a war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in states in rebellion to be
free, applying to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the
country. Former slaves who escaped from plantations or were liberated by the Union
Army were recruited into the United States Colored Troops regiments of the Union
Army. To the west, the Union destroyed the Confederate's river navy by the summer
of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful
1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi
River. In 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the
Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command
of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of
Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the
Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union
General William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his march to the sea. The last
significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the
Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April
9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House,
setting in motion the end of the war.
A wave of Confederate surrenders followed. On April 14, just five days after Lee's
surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. As a practical matter, the war ended with the
May 26 surrender of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi but the conclusion of
the American Civil War lacks a clear and precise historical end date. Confederate
ground forces continued surrendering past the May 26 surrender date until June 23.