timescale.info
Sign inSign up

The U.S. Civil War, 1861–1865

The American Civil War with its causes and aftermath: the forty years of compromises and crises over slavery, secession and the founding of the Confederacy, the war in the East, the West and at sea, emancipation and the Black soldiers who fought for it, the surrenders that followed Appomattox, and Reconstruction to 1877. **How to read it.** Chapter headings mark the eras and the war’s years. Campaigns, sieges, commands, presidencies and the war itself are durations; everything else is a moment, tagged by thread (slavery, politics, east, west, navy, black soldiers, command, surrender, reconstruction). Related moments are linked: a cause and what it led to. **Slavery** was the central cause of the war, as the seceding states’ own declarations say and as historians agree. **The cost:** about 620,000 soldiers dead by the traditional count, about 750,000 by J. David Hacker’s 2011 census-based estimate; both are estimates. **Dates.** Local days, shown at a fixed UTC−5 (standard time zones came only in 1883). Where a date is approximate, its dating note says so. A sample timeline built from the cited sources (Wikipedia, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the Avalon Project and Hacker’s article); not a definitive history.

121 moments · 1820-01-01T00:00:00-05:00 CE – 1877-04-24T00:00:00-05:00 CE · by @athan · @athan

Moments

  1. Roots of the war, 1820–1860
  2. Missouri Compromise
  3. The Liberator
  4. Nat Turner's rebellion
  5. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  6. Harriet Tubman escapes
  7. Fugitive Slave Act
  8. Uncle Tom's Cabin
  9. Kansas–Nebraska Act
  10. Sack of Lawrence
  11. Sumner caned in the Senate
  12. Pottawatomie massacre
  13. Dred Scott v. Sandford
  14. John Brown hanged
  15. Election and secession
  16. Lincoln elected president
  17. Crittenden Compromise proposed
  18. South Carolina secedes
  19. South Carolina's Declaration of Causes
  20. Mississippi secedes
  21. Florida secedes
  22. Alabama secedes
  23. Georgia secedes
  24. Louisiana secedes
  25. Kansas admitted as a free state
  26. Texas secedes
  27. The Confederate States formed
  28. Corwin Amendment passes Congress
  29. Confederate Constitution
  30. Cornerstone Speech
  31. 1861: The war begins
  32. Fort Sumter
  33. Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers
  34. Virginia secedes
  35. The Anaconda Plan
  36. Arkansas secedes
  37. North Carolina secedes
  38. "Contraband of war"
  39. Tennessee secedes
  40. First Bull Run
  41. First Confiscation Act
  42. 1862: From Donelson to Antietam
  43. Fort Henry
  44. Fort Donelson: "unconditional surrender"
  45. Monitor and Virginia
  46. Slavery abolished in Washington, D.C.
  47. Farragut takes New Orleans
  48. Robert Smalls takes the Planter
  49. Second Confiscation Act and Militia Act
  50. Emancipation read to the cabinet