Secession
Election, conventions, Sumter, and the creation of two war capitals.
The war's fuse was a decade of statute and violence: Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown, the 1860 split of the Democratic Party.
Calling it "the War Between the States" is itself a Lost Cause naming. This page uses the US legal name: a civil war against a rebellion.
Timeline
- Lincoln elected
A sectional president; secession conventions begin in December.
- Sumter
Confederate batteries open; Lincoln calls for volunteers; the upper South secedes.
- Antietam
Bloodiest single day; the preliminary emancipation proclamation follows.
- Emancipation Proclamation
Freedom as Union policy in rebel areas; USCT recruitment expands.
- Gettysburg and Vicksburg
Lee retreats from Pennsylvania; the Mississippi is taken on 4 July.
- Gettysburg Address
Lincoln's short speech reframes the war as a new birth of freedom.
- Grant vs Lee; Atlanta
Overland Campaign attrition; Sherman takes Atlanta in September -- a political gift to Lincoln's re-election.
- Appomattox
Lee surrenders to Grant; generous terms become part of the reunion myth and a real mercy.
- Lincoln shot
Booth's assassination at Ford's Theatre; Reconstruction loses its most flexible politician.
- Compromise of 1877
Federal troops leave the South; Reconstruction ends as a national project.
Eras
Improvised armies
Bull Run, the Peninsula, Shiloh, Antietam -- learning industrial war.
Emancipation year
Proclamation, USCT, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga.
Hard war
Grant, Sherman, Petersburg siege, Appomattox, assassination.
Reconstruction
Amendments, Freedmen's Bureau, terror, and the 1877 retreat.
Milestones
Emancipation as strategy
A moral and military decision that recast foreign and domestic politics.
Amendments 13-15
The legal second founding -- later gutted, later revived.
Industrial mobilisation
Rail, telegraph, and factories as Union weapons.
Appomattox ended field armies, not the political war over Black citizenship.
Recent death-toll revisions (toward ~750,000) should be stated as a range, not a new false precision.