The American Civil War (1861-1865), which is also known by several other names, was a civil war between the United States of America (the "Union") and the Southern slave states of the newly formed Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis. The Union included all of the free states and the five slaveholding border states and was led by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery into territories owned by the United States, and their victory in the presidential election of 1860 resulted in seven Southern states declaring their secession from the Union even before Lincoln took office.James McPherson, Drawn With the Sword, from the article Who Freed the Slaves? The Union rejected secession, regarding it as rebellion.

Hostilities began on April 12 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a large volunteer army, then four more Southern states declared their secession. In the war's first year, the Union assumed control of the border states and established a naval blockade as both sides massed armies and resources. In 1862, battles such as Shiloh and Antietam caused massive casualties unprecedented in U.S. military history. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made ending slavery in the South a war goal, which complicated the Confederacy's manpower shortages.

In the East, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee won a series of victories over Union armies, but Lee's reverse at Gettysburg in early July, 1863 proved the turning point. The capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson by Ulysses S. Grant completed Union control of the Mississippi River. Grant fought bloody battles of attrition with Lee in 1864, forcing Lee to defend the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Union general William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and began his famous March to the Sea, devastating a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia. Confederate resistance collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

The war, the deadliest in American history, caused 620,000 soldier deathsAmerican Civil War, Encyclopædia Britannica and an undetermined number of civilian casualties, ended slavery in the United States, restored the Union by settling the issues of nullification and secession and strengthened the role of the Federal government. The social, political, economic and racial issues of the war continue to shape contemporary American thought.

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Abraham Lincoln (February 12 ,1809 -April 15 ,1865 ) was the sixteenth President of the United States , serving from March 4 ,1861 until his assassination . As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States ,[1] [2] Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his term, he helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War . He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.

Lincoln closely supervised the victorious war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including Ulysses S. Grant . Historians have concluded that he handled the factions of the Republican Party well, bringing leaders of each faction into his cabinet and forcing them to cooperate. Lincoln successfully defused a war scare with the United Kingdom in 1861. Under his leadership, the Union took control of the border slave states at the start of the war. Additionally, he managed his own reelection in the 1864 presidential election .

Opponents of the war (also known as " Copperheads ") criticized him for refusing to compromise on the slavery issue. Conversely, the Radical Republicans , an abolitionist faction of the Republican Party, criticized him for moving too slowly in abolishing slavery. Even with these road blocks, Lincoln successfully rallied public opinion through his rhetoric and speeches; his Gettysburg Address is but one example of this. At the close of the war, Lincoln held a moderate view of Reconstruction , seeking to speedily reunite the nation through a policy of generous reconciliation. His assassination in 1865 was the first presidential assassination in U.S. history and made him a martyr for the ideal of national unity.

Source: Wapedia

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Robert Edward Lee (January 19 ,1807 -October 12 ,1870 ) was a career United States Army officer , an engineer , and the most celebrated general of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War .

Lee was the son of Major General Henry Lee III "Light Horse Harry" (1756-1818), Governor of Virginia , and his second wife, Anne Hill Carter (1773-1829). He was a descendant of Sir Thomas More and of King Robert II of Scotland through the Earls of Crawford .[1] A top graduate of West Point , Lee distinguished himself as an exceptional soldier in the U.S. Army for 32 years, during which time he fought in the Mexican-American War .

In early 1861, Lee opposed the secession of his home state of Virginia , but rejected President Abraham Lincoln 's offer to give him command of Union forces. When Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Lee chose to follow his home state. Lee's role in the newly established Confederacy was to serve as a senior military adviser to President Jefferson Davis . Lee's first field command for the Confederate States came in June 1862 when he took command of the Confederate forces in the East (which Lee himself renamed the " Army of Northern Virginia ").

Lee's greatest victories were the Seven Days Battles , the Second Battle of Bull Run , the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville , but both of his campaigns to invade the North ended in failure. Barely escaping defeat at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, Lee was forced to return to the South. In early July 1863, Lee was decisively defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania . However, due to ineffectual pursuit by the commander of Union forces, Major General George Meade , Lee escaped again to Virginia.

In the spring of 1864, the new Union commander, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant , began a series of campaigns to wear down Lee's army. In the Overland Campaign of 1864 and the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-1865, Lee inflicted heavy casualties on Grant's larger army, but was unable to replace his own losses. In early April 1865, Lee's depleted forces were turned from their entrenchments near the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia , and he began a strategic retreat. Lee's subsequent surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9 ,1865 represented the loss of only one of the remaining Confederate field armies, but it was a psychological blow from which the South could not recover. By June 1865, all of the remaining Confederate armies had capitulated.

Lee's victories against superior forces won him enduring fame as a crafty and daring battlefield tactician, but some of his strategic decisions, such as invading the North in 1862 and 1863, have been criticized by many military historians.

In the final months of the Civil War, as manpower reserves drained away, Lee adopted a plan to arm willing slaves to fight on behalf of the Confederacy, but this came too late to change the outcome of the war. After Appomattox, Lee discouraged Southern dissenters from starting a guerrilla campaign to continue the war, and encouraged reconciliation between the North and South.

After the war, as a college president, Lee supported President Andrew Johnson 's program of Reconstruction and inter-sectional friendship, while opposing the Radical Republican proposals to give freed slaves the vote and take the vote away from ex-Confederates. He urged them to rethink their position between the North and South, and the reintegration of former Confederates into the nation's political life. Lee became the great Southern hero of the war, and his popularity grew in the North as well after his death in 1870. He remains an iconic figure of American military leadership.

Source: Wapedia