The Civil War

The Declaration had promised that all men are created equal. Yet by 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved, mostly in the South. For decades, North and South argued over whether slavery could spread into new western lands.

When Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery, was elected president in 1860, Southern states began to leave the Union. In April 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. So began the Civil War, the U.S. war between the North and the South^Q92. About 620,000 soldiers died, more than in any other American war. Of all the wars fought by the United States in the 1800s^Q91, the Civil War was by far the deadliest.

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation^Q95, which freed the slaves in the Confederate states still fighting the Union and turned the war into a fight for freedom. Abraham Lincoln is famous for many things^Q94, but above all because he freed the slaves.

The Union won in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment that December abolished slavery everywhere. The war that ended slavery^Q96 was the Civil War.

Lincoln did not live to see it. The Civil War had many important events^Q93, and one of the most tragic came at its very end. On April 14, 1865, five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford's Theatre in Washington. The news that Lincoln was assassinated stunned a grieving nation.