The 1861-65 US war over union and slavery that killed more Americans than any other US war and remade the Constitution.
Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.
The American Civil War began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, after eleven slaveholding states seceded following Abraham Lincoln's election. The Confederate States claimed independence; the United States fought to preserve the Union. Slavery was the structural cause; union and emancipation became the war's joint political end-state after 1863.
About 620,000-850,000 people died, scholarly range -- more US dead than in the two world wars combined for American forces. Industrial railroads, rifled muskets, and a Union naval blockade made it a modern war on a continental map. Gettysburg (1-3 July 1863) and Vicksburg (4 July 1863) were the twin hinges; Appomattox (9 April 1865) ended the main Confederate army.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments recast the Constitution. Reconstruction (1865-77) was a second political war that white supremacist "Redemption" later rolled back. English-speaking memory outside the US treats this as the great American epic; inside the US it remains a live argument about flags, statues and school books.
Deep introduction
The Civil War was a political war about a slaveholding republic that became, through arms and amendments, a different constitution -- then a contested memory.
Lincoln's 1860 election, without southern electoral votes, triggered secession conventions. The Confederate constitution explicitly protected slavery. Sumter forced the upper South to choose; Virginia's departure put the war's capital pair -- Washington and Richmond -- a hundred miles apart.
Border states (Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri) were a campaign of politics as much as of armies.
Lincoln's early aim was union. The 1 January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, tied to the Antietam moment, made freedom a Union war aim for Confederate-held territory and opened large-scale Black enlistment in USCT regiments.
Britain and France stayed out; the cotton famine did not buy Confederate recognition once emancipation recast the war's meaning abroad.
In the east, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia won famous battles and lost the war. In the west, Grant and the rivers -- Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg -- cut the Confederacy. Sherman's 1864 Atlanta campaign and March to the Sea were political warfare against a slaveholding society's capacity.
The Union blockade and the new naval ironclads (Monitor and Virginia, 1862) were a technology sideshow with a strategic effect: the South could not export its way to victory.
Lincoln was murdered on 14 April 1865. Andrew Johnson and then Radical Republicans fought over the terms of southern readmission. The Ku Klux Klan and "Redeemer" governments used terror to restore white rule after federal troops left in 1877.
The war's legal victory (amendments) and its social defeat (Jim Crow) are both part of the same file.
1861-1865: secession, emancipation, Gettysburg, Appomattox and Reconstruction.
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02Union and Confederate armies, USCT and the blockade -- historical structures.
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03Eastern and western theatres as historical sequence.
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04About 620,000-850,000 dead, scholarly range -- the deadliest US war.
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05Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Douglass, Sherman, Tubman.
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06Amendments, Jim Crow, Lost Cause memory and statue politics.
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07Battlefield parks, film, Juneteenth and school fights.
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