Civil War & Reconstruction
The Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877): secession, emancipation, Union victory, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the collapse of Radical Reconstruction.
From Sectional Crisis to Secession
The Civil War was the violent resolution of a constitutional and moral dispute over slavery's expansion. The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) — which held that Black Americans were not citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories — radicalized Northern opinion and shattered the Second Party System. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 on a free-soil platform, elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860 without carrying a single Southern state.
South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, followed by six Gulf states; they formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861 under Jefferson Davis. The war began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Charleston harbor, on April 12, 1861. Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers pushed four Upper South states, including Virginia, into secession.
The War and Emancipation
The Union's grand strategy followed the Anaconda Plan: blockade Southern ports, seize the Mississippi, and strangle the Confederacy's capacity to wage war. The war's character changed in 1862-63. The Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862) — the bloodiest single day in American history — gave Lincoln the strategic footing to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863. It freed enslaved people in rebelling states and authorized Black enlistment; roughly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the United States Colored Troops.
The twin Union victories of July 1863 — Gettysburg (July 1-3) and the fall of Vicksburg (July 4) — marked the strategic turning point, splitting the Confederacy and ending Lee's offensive capacity. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) recast the war as a struggle to vindicate a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people.' General Ulysses S. Grant's elevation to overall command in 1864 and Sherman's March to the Sea (late 1864) applied total war. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, days into the peace.
The Thirteenth Amendment
The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure of contested permanence. Constitutional abolition came with the Thirteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified December 6, 1865, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments and the foundation on which the postwar constitutional order would be built — and contested — for the next twelve years.