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