US Civil War Ends
The American Civil War ended in 1865 when the Confederate armies surrendered one after another, bringing down the secessionist government that had tried to form a separate slaveholding nation. The war killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers, the deadliest conflict in American history, and its outcome preserved the Union and set the country on the path to ending slavery. Its unresolved questions about citizenship and equality shaped American politics for generations.
The war began in 1861 after Abraham Lincoln's election led eleven Southern states to secede, chiefly over the future of slavery and its expansion into western territories. Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, and the conflict soon grew into a massive struggle. The Union had a larger population, more industry, and a stronger railroad network, while the Confederacy relied on defensive warfare and the hope of foreign recognition, which never came. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued in January 1863, declared enslaved people in Confederate-held areas free and allowed Black men to enlist in the Union army. About 180,000 served in it.
By 1864 the Union's advantages were telling. Ulysses S. Grant pressed Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia through a grinding campaign, while William T. Sherman captured Atlanta and then marched across Georgia, destroying infrastructure and undermining Confederate morale. Lincoln won re-election that November. Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell in early April 1865, and Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9. Other Confederate forces followed over the next weeks and months, with the last significant surrenders coming in late spring. Historians often treat Appomattox as the symbolic end, though the formal conclusion was staggered.
Just days after Appomattox, on April 14, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, and he died the next morning. His death left Andrew Johnson to manage the reunification of the country. Meanwhile, Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865, and it was ratified in December, abolishing slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime.
The period that followed, known as Reconstruction, attempted to rebuild the South and define the status of nearly four million freed people. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments extended citizenship, equal protection, and voting rights to Black men, and for a time Black Southerners held public office in significant numbers. Yet resistance, including violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and waning Northern commitment led to Reconstruction's end in 1877. The legacy of the war, including the long struggle over civil rights, remains central to how Americans understand their history.