American Civil War
The American Civil War killed some 750,000 people in four years, more than every other American war combined. Its cause was slavery, and the sequence by which that became a war is a sequence of failed compromises: the Missouri line of 1820, the settlement of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska in 1854 which reopened everything, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which held that Congress could not exclude slavery from any territory at all. Lincoln was elected in November 1860 on a platform of no expansion and no interference where it existed, with no southern electoral votes, and seven states seceded before he took office. The declarations of secession say what they were about; the Confederate vice-president's cornerstone speech says it more plainly still. The war began at Fort Sumter in April 1861 and was expected to be short. The North had four times the free population, ten times the industry, and the navy; the South had better generals in the east for two years, interior lines and the advantage of only needing not to lose. Antietam in September 1862 let Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the war's object and made European recognition impossible. Gettysburg and Vicksburg came in the same week of July 1863. Grant then applied the arithmetic without stopping, and Sherman took the war to the civilian economy. Lee surrendered in April 1865, and Lincoln was shot five days later. The peace was harder than the war. Reconstruction put federal troops in the south, wrote three amendments into the constitution and elected Black legislators, and was abandoned in 1877 in exchange for a disputed presidency; the system of segregation and disenfranchisement that replaced it lasted until the 1960s.
- Year: 1861 CE
- Category: Military
