Civil War & Slavery (1861–1865)

The central tragedy of American history. The conflict between the industrialized North and the agrarian South — at its core a dispute over slavery — escalated into the Civil War after the election of Abraham Lincoln (1860). Eleven southern states seceded from the Union and founded the Confederacy (Confederate States of America) under President Jefferson Davis.

The Civil War (1861–1865) was the bloodiest conflict in US history — over 620,000 dead (more than in all other American wars combined). Battles like Gettysburg (July 1863, over 50,000 casualties in three days), Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history), and the Siege of Vicksburg shaped the memory.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — freeing all slaves in the rebellious states. After the North's victory, the constitutional amendments 13 (abolition of slavery), 14 (citizenship for all), and 15 (voting rights regardless of race) followed. Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, five days after the war ended, at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth.

The Reconstruction (1865–1877) brought temporary progress — black senators, schools, land ownership — before the Jim Crow laws from the 1880s cemented segregation in the South for nearly a century.