From Fort Sumter to Appomattox
1The Civil War began in April 1861, when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Four more slave states then joined the Confederacy, making eleven in all. Four slave states, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, stayed in the Union and were called the border states. At first President Abraham Lincoln said the North was fighting to save the Union, and many Northern soldiers agreed. But thousands of enslaved people escaped to Union army camps, and their actions pushed the question of slavery into the war.
2The war went badly for the Union in the East at first. By the summer of 1862, a large Union attack aimed at the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, had failed. In July 1862 Lincoln read his cabinet a draft of a proclamation freeing enslaved people in the states in rebellion. Secretary of State William Seward advised him to wait for a Union victory. Lincoln put the draft away.
3On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate armies fought at Antietam Creek in Maryland, the bloodiest single day of the war. General Robert E. Lee's army retreated to Virginia. Five days later Lincoln announced that on January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in areas still in rebellion would be "thenceforward, and forever free."
4The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. It did not apply to the border states or to parts of the South already under Union control. It could be carried out only where Union armies reached. Still, it made ending slavery a Union war aim. Britain, which had ended slavery in its empire years earlier, became less willing to help the Confederacy. The proclamation also allowed Black men to join the Union army and navy, and by the end of the war about 180,000 Black soldiers had served in the army.
5In July 1863 came two more turning points. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Union forces stopped Lee's invasion of the North after three days of fighting, July 1–3. On July 4 the Confederate city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River. That November, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address described the war as a test of whether a nation "conceived in Liberty" could survive. After nearly two more years of fighting, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.