Unit 6 · Civil War and Reconstruction

In 1846, the United States went to war with Mexico. Everyone expected the U.S. to win a large piece of land in the Southwest. That raised a hard question. Would the new land be open to slavery or closed to it? Each new state would send senators to Congress, so the answer could shift the balance of power between the North and the South.

A congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot had an idea. In 1846, he proposed a rule that slavery would be banned in any land taken from Mexico. This plan was called the Wilmot Proviso. A proviso is a condition added to a law. The House of Representatives, where the North had more members, passed it. The Senate, where North and South were evenly matched, voted it down.

The Wilmot Proviso never became law, but it split Congress by region instead of by party. Southerners said Congress had no right to keep slavery out of land that all Americans had fought for. Many Northerners did not want to compete with enslaved labor. In 1848, antislavery voters formed the Free-Soil Party. Its slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men.” It did not win the presidency, but it showed how strongly many Northerners felt.

In 1849, gold seekers rushed into California. Soon it had enough people to ask to become a state, and its people wanted it to be free. Southerners were alarmed. Adding California would give free states a majority in the Senate. Some Southern leaders began to talk about leaving the Union.

Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, now an old man, tried one more time to hold the nation together. After months of angry debate, Stephen Douglas of Illinois helped break Clay’s plan into separate bills and pushed them through Congress. Together, these laws are called the Compromise of 1850. A compromise is a deal where each side gives up something.

The North got California as a free state. The buying and selling of enslaved people was also banned in Washington, D.C., although slavery itself stayed legal there. The South got a much stronger law to capture people who escaped from slavery. In the territories of New Mexico and Utah, settlers would decide about slavery themselves. This idea was called popular sovereignty, which means “rule by the people.”

Many people cheered, believing the crisis was over. But neither side was truly happy. Many Northerners hated the new capture law. Many Southerners feared the North would keep growing stronger. The compromise bought time, but it did not answer the big question.

The Fugitive Slave Act was part of the Compromise of 1850. A fugitive is a person who runs away. The law said that people who escaped slavery had to be returned, even from free states. Anyone accused of being a runaway could not testify in court or ask for a jury trial. Citizens could be ordered to help catch them, and people who helped someone escape could be fined or jailed.

The law put free Black people in danger too. Slave catchers sometimes seized free people and claimed they had escaped. Thousands of Black Northerners fled to Canada, where the law could not reach them. In some Northern cities, crowds of Black and white abolitionists tried to rescue people who had been captured.

In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It told the story of enslaved families being torn apart. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold in its first year. For many Northern readers, the book made slavery feel real and personal for the first time. Many Southerners said the book was unfair and full of lies. The novel deepened the anger on both sides.

Stephen Douglas of Illinois wanted a railroad to cross the country, starting from Chicago. To build it, the huge land west of Iowa and Missouri needed to be organized into territories. But that land was north of the line set by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Under that deal, slavery was banned there.

Southern senators would not vote to organize the land unless slavery could go there too. So in 1854, Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. It said settlers in each one would decide about slavery by popular sovereignty. That meant the Missouri Compromise line no longer mattered. It was repealed, or canceled.

Douglas thought letting people vote was fair and would calm things down. Instead, many Northerners were furious. Land that had been promised to freedom for over 30 years could now be opened to slavery. Abraham Lincoln, who had stepped away from politics, said the act made him jump back in. Douglas later joked that he could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of his own burning likenesses, burned by angry crowds.

After 1854, both sides raced to fill Kansas with voters. Antislavery groups in the North helped families move there. Proslavery men from neighboring Missouri crossed the border on election day to vote illegally. They helped elect a proslavery government. Antislavery settlers refused to accept it and set up a government of their own. Now Kansas had two governments.

Soon the fighting turned deadly. In May 1856, a proslavery force attacked the antislavery town of Lawrence and burned buildings. A few days later, an abolitionist named John Brown and his followers killed five proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek. Raids and revenge attacks went back and forth. Newspapers called the territory “Bleeding Kansas.”

The violence even reached the U.S. Senate. In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a fierce speech against slavery in Kansas and insulted a senator from South Carolina. Two days later, Preston Brooks, a relative of that senator, beat Sumner with a cane at his desk until he fell unconscious. Sumner needed years to recover. Many Northerners were horrified. Many Southerners praised Brooks and sent him new canes. The two regions no longer saw events the same way.

Before 1854, the two big parties were the Democrats and the Whigs. Both had members in the North and the South, so both tried to avoid the slavery question. The Kansas-Nebraska Act broke the Whigs apart. Northern and Southern Whigs could no longer agree.

In 1854, people who opposed the spread of slavery formed a new party, the Republican Party. It pulled in former Whigs, Free-Soilers and some Northern Democrats. Most Republicans were not abolitionists. They did not promise to end slavery where it already existed. But they were determined to keep it out of the western territories.

The party grew amazingly fast. In 1856, its first candidate for president, the explorer John C. Frémont, won 11 states, all in the North. He lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but Republicans were now a major force. Abraham Lincoln joined them. Southerners watched with worry. The Republican Party was almost entirely Northern. If it ever won the presidency, the South would have a president it did not vote for.

Dred Scott was an enslaved man. His enslaver, an army doctor, took him to live for years in Illinois, a free state, and in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was banned. Later they returned to Missouri, a slave state. Scott, with the help of lawyers, sued for his freedom. He argued that living on free soil had made him free.

The case reached the Supreme Court. In March 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney announced the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The Court said Scott was still enslaved. It said Black Americans, free or enslaved, were not citizens and could not sue in federal court. It also said enslaved people were property, and the Constitution protected property. So Congress had no power to ban slavery in any territory.

The ruling was a shock. It meant the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along. It even seemed to make popular sovereignty meaningless. Many Southerners celebrated. Republicans and abolitionists were outraged, and the ruling made their party stronger. Dred Scott himself was freed a few months later when a new owner released him. He died the next year.

When Illinois Republicans chose Abraham Lincoln to run for the Senate in June 1858, he gave a famous speech in Springfield. He warned that the nation could not stay half slave and half free forever. Sooner or later it would become all one or all the other. Some friends thought the speech was too bold.

That summer and fall, Lincoln and Douglas held seven debates across Illinois. Douglas defended popular sovereignty. He accused Lincoln of wanting full equality between Black and white people, which most white voters then opposed. Lincoln said slavery was a moral wrong and must be kept from spreading. At the same time, like most white politicians of his day, he said he did not support full social and political equality.

At the debate in Freeport, Lincoln asked a tricky question. After Dred Scott, could the people of a territory still keep slavery out? Douglas said yes: if settlers refused to pass laws protecting slavery, it could not last there. This answer, called the Freeport Doctrine, helped him win in Illinois. But it angered Southern Democrats, who wanted full protection for slavery. In those days, state legislatures chose senators, and the Illinois legislature re-elected Douglas. Still, Lincoln had become known across the nation.

John Brown believed slavery was a terrible sin and that violence was justified to end it. In October 1859, he led about 20 men, both Black and white, in a raid on the U.S. weapons storehouse at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He hoped to seize guns and give them to enslaved people so they could rise up and free themselves.

The plan failed within about a day and a half. No large uprising began. Local militia surrounded Brown’s men. Then U.S. Marines, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee, stormed the building. Ten of Brown’s men were killed, including two of his sons. Brown was captured, tried for treason against Virginia, and hanged in December 1859.

Reactions split the nation. Most Northerners, including Lincoln, said the raid was wrong and illegal. But some abolitionists praised Brown as a hero who died for freedom, and church bells rang in some Northern towns on the day he was hanged. To many white Southerners, this praise was terrifying. They believed the North was encouraging violent revolts. Trust between the regions was almost gone.

By 1860, even the Democratic Party split in two. Northern Democrats chose Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats, angry about the Freeport Doctrine, chose John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who wanted slavery protected in all territories. A new party made up largely of former Whigs from the border states, the Constitutional Union Party, chose John Bell of Tennessee. It simply promised to keep the Union together.

The Republicans met in Chicago, in a large wooden hall called the Wigwam. They chose Abraham Lincoln. Their platform, a statement of the party’s goals, promised to keep slavery out of the territories. It did not promise to end slavery in the South.

On election day in November 1860, Lincoln won less than 40 percent of the popular vote. But he carried almost every free state, which gave him a clear majority in the Electoral College. In ten Southern states, his name was not even on the ballot. For the first time, a president had been elected without a single electoral vote from the South.

Many white Southerners believed Lincoln’s election meant slavery was doomed, even though he promised not to touch it in the states where it existed. They feared a Northern government would slowly squeeze slavery until it died. Leaders began to argue for secession, or formally leaving the Union.

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. By February 1861, six more states from the Deep South had followed: Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. In Montgomery, Alabama, they formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy. They chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president.

The seceding states wrote statements explaining why they left. They pointed again and again to slavery and to Northern opposition to it. Confederate leaders said states had the right to leave. Lincoln and most Northerners said the Union could not be broken. They argued that no state could simply walk away from a national government that all had agreed to.

In the months before Lincoln took office, leaders searched for one last compromise. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky suggested bringing back the old Missouri Compromise line and stretching it to the Pacific. Lincoln and most Republicans refused, because it would allow slavery to spread. The plan died.

Lincoln became president on March 4, 1861. In his first inaugural address, the speech a president gives when taking office, he said he would not attack slavery in the states. But he also said secession was illegal and he would protect federal property. He begged Southerners to remember their shared history.

Fort Sumter, a U.S. fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, was running out of food. Lincoln told South Carolina he would send supplies, but not weapons or new troops. Confederate leaders decided not to wait. On April 12, 1861, their cannons opened fire. After about a day and a half of shelling, Major Robert Anderson surrendered. No one was killed in the battle itself.

Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. Four more states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, refused to fight against other Southern states and joined the Confederacy. Now 11 states had left. The Civil War had begun.

When war came, four slave states did not secede: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. They were called the border states because they sat along the line between North and South. Each had enslaved people, but each also had strong ties to the North through trade and family.

Lincoln knew these states were vital. Maryland surrounded Washington, D.C., on three sides. If it joined the Confederacy, the capital would be trapped. Kentucky and Missouri controlled parts of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. So Lincoln moved carefully. In Maryland, he sent troops and had some people who supported secession arrested and held without trial. He also avoided attacking slavery early in the war, so the border states would not be pushed away.

Loyalties were split inside families and states. In Kentucky and Missouri, men joined both armies, and neighbors sometimes fought neighbors. In western Virginia, many people opposed secession. They broke away from Virginia and joined the Union as a new state, West Virginia, in 1863.

On paper, the North looked much stronger. It had far more people, so it could raise bigger armies. It had most of the nation’s factories, which could make guns, shoes, uniforms and railroad cars. It had more miles of railroad track and a navy. It also had a working national government and banks to pay for the war.

The South had strengths too. Many of the country’s best military officers came from the South. Southern soldiers were fighting on their own land, to defend their homes, and they knew the ground well. Most important, the South did not have to conquer the North. It only had to hold on until Northerners grew tired of the war and let it go.

Southern leaders also hoped cotton would bring help. British and French mills depended on Southern cotton. Confederates believed these countries would support them to keep the cotton coming. This idea was called “King Cotton.” It did not work as planned. Britain had stored extra cotton and found other sources, and it never officially recognized the Confederacy.

Abraham Lincoln had little military experience, but he learned fast and never lost sight of saving the Union. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was a West Point graduate and a former U.S. secretary of war. He was hardworking but often clashed with his generals.

Robert E. Lee was one of the finest officers in the U.S. Army. He was offered a top command in the Union army. But when Virginia seceded, he resigned and fought for his home state. He became the South’s most famous general. On the Union side, a quiet former officer from Galena, Illinois, named Ulysses S. Grant would slowly rise to the top.

The Union’s oldest general, Winfield Scott, created a plan to win. First, the navy would blockade Southern ports, meaning ships would block them so the South could not sell cotton or buy supplies. Second, Union forces would take control of the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy in two. Newspapers called it the Anaconda Plan, after a snake that squeezes its prey. Many Northerners laughed at it and cried “On to Richmond!” instead, hoping to capture the Confederate capital fast.

In July 1861, about 35,000 Union soldiers marched out of Washington toward Richmond. Most had trained for only a few weeks. Some members of Congress and other curious people rode out in carriages to watch, expecting an easy win. On July 21, the armies met near a creek called Bull Run, close to the town of Manassas, Virginia.

At first the Union troops pushed forward. Then Confederate reinforcements, or extra troops, arrived by railroad. A brigade under General Thomas Jackson stood firm on a hill. He earned the nickname “Stonewall” Jackson. The Confederates charged, and the tired Union soldiers began to fall back. The retreat turned into a panic as soldiers and spectators crowded the roads back to Washington.

The Confederates won, but they were too disorganized to chase the Union army. The battle shocked the North. Lincoln signed up hundreds of thousands more soldiers for longer terms. He put General George McClellan in charge of training a large new army. Both sides now understood that the war would not be over in a few months.

The Union navy began blockading Southern ports in 1861. The Confederacy had few ships, so it looked for a new weapon. It raised a sunken Union ship, the Merrimack, and covered it with iron plates. It renamed the ship the Virginia. Wooden ships could not hurt an iron-covered ship, called an ironclad.

On March 8, 1862, the Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads, a harbor in Virginia, and destroyed two wooden Union warships. Cannonballs bounced off its sides. The Union was alarmed. But it had built its own ironclad, the Monitor. It was low and flat, with a turning gun tower on top. People said it looked like a cheese box on a raft.

The next day, March 9, the two ironclads fought for hours. Neither could sink the other. The battle was a draw. But it showed that wooden warships were now out of date. Navies around the world began building iron ships. The Union blockade continued, slowly cutting off the South’s trade.

Soldiers came from every walk of life: farmers, clerks, factory workers and immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Many were young. Some boys lied about their age to join, and drummer boys could be as young as 12 or even younger. Most had never been far from home.

Camp life followed a routine. A bugle woke the men at dawn. They practiced marching and loading their guns, which was called drill. They cooked, cleaned, stood guard and wrote letters. Food was plain: salted meat, beans, coffee and hardtack, a hard cracker that could break a tooth. Confederate soldiers often had even less, as supplies ran short.

Soldiers filled free time with card games, music, baseball and reading. But long weeks of boredom could end suddenly in battle. In a few hours, a regiment of about 1,000 men might lose half its members killed or wounded. Many soldiers wrote that nothing had prepared them for what they saw.

Many Civil War soldiers carried a rifled musket. The inside of its barrel had spiral grooves that made the bullet spin. A spinning bullet flew much straighter and farther than a ball from an older gun. The most common bullet was a soft lead one called the Minié ball. But many generals still ordered soldiers to charge in lines across open fields, as in older wars. Against rifles, these charges were deadly.

Doctors did their best with little knowledge. No one yet understood that germs cause infection. Surgeons often worked with dirty tools and unwashed hands. When a bullet shattered an arm or leg bone, the surgeon often had to amputate, or cut it off, to save the soldier’s life.

The biggest killer was disease. Crowded camps, dirty water and poor food spread illnesses like dysentery, typhoid and measles. Many farm boys had never been around so many people and had no protection against these diseases. About two of every three soldiers who died in the war died of disease, not wounds.

At the start of the war, most army nurses were men, and many officers did not want women near the battlefield. Women proved them wrong. Dorothea Dix, a reformer famous for improving care for people with mental illness, was put in charge of Union army nurses. Thousands of women, Black and white, served as nurses in the North and the South.

Clara Barton, a government clerk from Massachusetts, collected supplies and brought them right to the battlefields. Soldiers called her the “Angel of the Battlefield.” After the war, she founded the American Red Cross. Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a widow from Galesburg, Illinois, worked in army hospitals with Grant’s and Sherman’s armies. The soldiers called her “Mother” Bickerdyke.

Other women raised money, sewed uniforms and packed food for the troops through groups like the U.S. Sanitary Commission. At home, with men gone, women ran farms, shops and plantations. A few hundred women disguised themselves as men and joined the armies. One of them, an Irish immigrant who called himself Albert Cashier, served for three years with the 95th Illinois Infantry.

In the West, rivers were highways. In February 1862, Grant moved his troops, with help from gunboats, against two Confederate forts in Tennessee. Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson guarded the Cumberland River. Both fell. When the Confederate commander at Fort Donelson asked for terms, Grant demanded unconditional surrender. Northern newspapers joked that his initials, U.S., stood for “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

In April 1862, Confederate forces surprised Grant’s army near a church called Shiloh in southern Tennessee. The two-day battle was brutal. About 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing, more than in all of America’s earlier wars combined. The Union held on and won, but the huge losses shocked the country. People realized how terrible the war would be.

That same month, a Union fleet under David Farragut sailed past Confederate forts and captured New Orleans, the South’s largest city and busiest port. Now the Union controlled both the top and the bottom of the Mississippi River. Part of the Anaconda Plan was coming true.

General George McClellan built the Union’s eastern army into a well-trained force. The soldiers loved him. But he was very cautious. He often believed the enemy had far more troops than it really did. Lincoln grew frustrated as months passed without a big attack.

In the spring of 1862, McClellan finally moved. He shipped his army to the peninsula, a strip of land, between two rivers southeast of Richmond. This was called the Peninsula Campaign. His army crept close to the Confederate capital. Then Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate army. In late June, in a series of battles called the Seven Days, Lee attacked again and again and drove McClellan back.

In August 1862, Lee beat another Union army at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Confederate spirits soared. Lee decided to invade the North. He hoped a victory on Northern soil would discourage Northerners and win support from Britain or France.

In September 1862, Lee’s army crossed into Maryland. By luck, Union soldiers found a copy of Lee’s battle orders wrapped around some cigars in an abandoned camp. McClellan now knew Lee’s army was divided. But he moved slowly again, and Lee had time to pull his army together near Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek.

On September 17, 1862, the armies clashed from dawn until dark. About 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing. It is still the bloodiest single day in American history. Neither side won clearly, but Lee retreated back to Virginia. McClellan did not chase him, and Lincoln soon removed him from command.

A month later, photographs from the battlefield went on display at Mathew Brady’s gallery in New York City. Brady’s team took thousands of war photographs. For the first time, people far from the fighting saw pictures of dead soldiers lying where they fell. Crowds came to look in silence. Antietam also gave Lincoln the Union victory he had been waiting for. Five days after the battle, he made an announcement that would change the war.

When the war began, Lincoln said its goal was to save the Union. But enslaved people did not wait for permission. Thousands escaped to Union army camps. In 1861, a Union general in Virginia refused to send three escaped men back. He called them “contraband of war,” meaning enemy property that could be taken. Soon people who escaped to Union lines were called contrabands.

Congress acted too. In 1862, it ended slavery in Washington, D.C., and banned it in the western territories. It also passed laws allowing the army to free enslaved people who escaped from Confederate owners. Abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass urged Lincoln to go further and free all enslaved people.

Lincoln thought carefully about the war. Enslaved people grew the South’s food and dug its forts, so slavery helped the Confederacy fight. Freeing them would weaken the South. By the summer of 1862, Lincoln had written a plan to free enslaved people in the Confederate states. His advisers told him to wait for a Union victory, so it would not look like a desperate move.

Five days after the Battle of Antietam, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln announced that on January 1, 1863, all enslaved people in areas still rebelling against the United States would be free. On New Year’s Day 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A proclamation is an official public announcement.

The proclamation had limits. It did not free enslaved people in the loyal border states or in Southern areas already under Union control. In the Confederacy, Lincoln had no power to enforce it until Union armies arrived. So on the first day, it freed few people directly.

Still, it changed everything. Now every Union army that marched south became an army of freedom. The proclamation also allowed Black men to join the Union army and navy. And it made it much harder for Britain and France, which had ended slavery, to support the Confederacy. Black communities in the North held watch-night services on New Year’s Eve, waiting and praying for the news.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, Black men enlisted in large numbers. Some were free Northerners. Many had just escaped slavery. They served in units called the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the war, about 180,000 Black soldiers had served in the Union army, about one in ten Union soldiers. Thousands more served in the navy.

They faced unfair treatment. They served under white officers. At first they were paid less than white soldiers. Many protested, and in 1864 Congress voted for equal pay. They also faced greater danger if captured. Confederate leaders threatened to enslave or execute captured Black soldiers, and some were killed after surrendering.

Black soldiers fought in many battles and won respect for their courage. Harriet Tubman, who had led people out of slavery before the war, served as a scout and spy. In 1863, she helped guide a Union raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed more than 700 enslaved people. For Black Americans, fighting for the Union was also a claim to full citizenship.

As the war dragged on, fewer men volunteered. In 1862, the Confederacy passed the first draft in American history. A draft is a law that requires people to serve in the military. Men who enslaved 20 or more people could stay home to manage their plantations. Poorer Southerners complained that it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

In 1863, the Union passed its own draft. A drafted man could avoid service by hiring a substitute to go in his place or by paying the government $300, close to a year’s pay for many workers. Only the well-off could afford that.

In July 1863, anger exploded in New York City. Many poor workers, including Irish immigrants, did not want to fight a war that they feared would bring freed people north to compete for jobs. For four days, rioters attacked draft offices and wealthy homes. They also attacked Black New Yorkers, killing some, and burned an orphanage for Black children, though the children escaped. More than 100 people died before soldiers ended the riot.

Wars cost huge amounts of money. The Union government found new ways to pay. In 1861, Congress passed the first federal income tax, a tax on the money people earn. The government also sold war bonds. A bond is a loan to the government that is paid back later with interest. Millions of ordinary Northerners bought them.

The Union also printed paper money that was not backed by gold or silver. Because the bills were printed with green ink, people called them greenbacks. Prices rose, but the Northern economy stayed strong. Its factories and farms were busy making supplies for the army.

The Confederacy had a much harder time. The blockade cut off much of its trade. It printed huge amounts of paper money. Prices shot up, a problem called inflation. By the end of the war, Confederate money was almost worthless. Food ran short. In 1863, hungry women in Richmond marched through the streets and broke into stores to take bread.

Early in the war, the two sides often exchanged prisoners. A captured soldier might be traded for an enemy soldier and sent home. But in 1863, exchanges mostly stopped. One major reason was that the Confederacy refused to treat captured Black soldiers the same as white soldiers. The Union would not agree to trades that left Black soldiers behind.

Prison camps filled up fast. The worst was Camp Sumter, known as Andersonville, in Georgia. It was an open field with a wall of logs around it. Prisoners had little shelter, food or clean water. About 45,000 Union soldiers were held there, and about 13,000 of them died. After the war, its commander was tried and executed for war crimes.

Northern camps were deadly too. At Elmira in New York and Camp Douglas in Chicago, thousands of Confederate prisoners died from disease, cold and poor food. On both sides, more than 50,000 prisoners of war died.

In May 1863, Lee won a great victory at Chancellorsville in Virginia, though he lost Stonewall Jackson, who was shot by mistake by his own men. Confident, Lee invaded the North again, this time into Pennsylvania. On July 1, 1863, his army ran into Union troops near the small town of Gettysburg. The Union army, now led by General George Meade, took strong positions on hills and ridges south of town.

For three days, the armies fought. On July 2, Confederates attacked both ends of the Union line. At a hill called Little Round Top, soldiers from Maine held on against repeated attacks. On July 3, Lee made a bold choice. He sent about 12,500 men charging across an open field at the center of the Union line. This attack is called Pickett’s Charge. Union cannons and rifles cut down the attackers, and the charge failed.

On July 4, Lee’s beaten army began to retreat to Virginia in the rain. Gettysburg was the largest battle of the war. About 51,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured or missing. Lee would never again invade the North.

Thousands of soldiers died at Gettysburg. Many were buried quickly where they fell. The state of Pennsylvania and others worked to create a national cemetery there. On November 19, 1863, a crowd gathered to dedicate it, or officially set it aside, as a place of honor.

The main speaker, Edward Everett, was a famous speaker. He talked for about two hours. Then Lincoln rose and spoke for only about two minutes. His speech had fewer than 300 words. Some listeners were surprised it was over so soon.

In those few words, Lincoln gave the war a larger meaning. He reminded listeners that the nation was founded on the idea that all people are created equal. He said the living must finish the work the soldiers died for. The nation, he said, would have “a new birth of freedom.” Today the Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, sat on high bluffs above a bend in the Mississippi River. Its cannons could fire on any Union boat passing below. It was the last big Confederate stronghold on the river. Lincoln called it the key to winning the war.

Grant tried for months to capture it. Finally, in the spring of 1863, he marched his army down the west side of the river, crossed below the city, and won a series of battles inland. Then he surrounded Vicksburg. In a siege, an army surrounds a place and cuts off its supplies until it gives up.

For about six weeks, Union cannons shelled the city. Residents dug caves into the hillsides to stay safe. Food ran so low that people ate mules and rats. On July 4, 1863, one day after Pickett’s Charge failed at Gettysburg, Vicksburg surrendered. Days later, the last Confederate fort on the river fell. Now the Union controlled the whole Mississippi, and the Confederacy was cut in two.

In March 1864, Lincoln put Grant in charge of all Union armies. Grant had a simple plan: attack the Confederacy everywhere at once and never let up. In Virginia, he fought Lee in a series of bloody battles, including the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. Losses were huge, but Grant kept moving south. By June, he had Lee’s army trapped in a long siege at Petersburg, near Richmond.

Meanwhile, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Tennessee into Georgia. In September 1864, he captured Atlanta, a key railroad center. Then he led about 60,000 soldiers on a march to the sea, reaching Savannah in December. His troops tore up railroads, burned buildings and took or destroyed crops and livestock across a wide path.

This approach is called total war. It means attacking not only enemy armies but also the resources that keep them fighting. Sherman wanted Southerners to feel the war’s cost so they would give up. Thousands of enslaved people left the plantations and followed his army toward freedom.

In 1864, the nation held a presidential election in the middle of a civil war. Many people thought Lincoln would lose. The war was long and costly. The Democrats chose George McClellan, the general Lincoln had removed. But Sherman’s capture of Atlanta gave Northerners hope. Lincoln won easily, with strong support from soldiers.

In early April 1865, Lee’s army finally had to leave Petersburg, and Richmond fell to Union troops. Lee tried to escape west, but Grant’s army blocked the way. On April 9, 1865, the two generals met in a farmhouse in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Grant’s terms were generous. Lee’s soldiers could go home. They could keep their horses and mules for spring planting. Grant sent food to the hungry Confederate troops. When Union soldiers began to fire cannons to celebrate, Grant ordered them to stop. Other Confederate armies surrendered in the weeks that followed, and the war came to an end.

On April 14, 1865, just five days after Lee’s surrender, Lincoln went to see a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. John Wilkes Booth, an actor who supported the Confederacy, shot him. Lincoln died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. A funeral train carried Lincoln’s body on a long journey home to Springfield, Illinois, where he was buried.

Lincoln had pushed for a lasting way to end slavery everywhere, since the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure. Congress passed the 13th Amendment in January 1865. Illinois was the first state to ratify, or approve, it. It became part of the Constitution in December 1865 and ended slavery throughout the United States. In Texas, many enslaved people did not learn they were free until Union troops arrived on June 19, 1865, a day now celebrated as Juneteenth.

The cost of the war was enormous. Roughly 620,000 soldiers died, and some historians now believe the true number was closer to 750,000. Much of the South lay in ruins. But the Union was saved, and about four million people were free. The nation now faced a new question: what would freedom really mean?

Reconstruction is the name for the period after the Civil War when the nation worked to rebuild the South and bring the Confederate states back into the Union. It lasted from 1865 to 1877. The big questions were hard. How should the South be treated? And what rights would four million freed people have?

During the war, Lincoln offered a mild plan. When ten percent of a state’s voters swore loyalty to the Union and accepted the end of slavery, the state could form a new government. Some Republicans in Congress thought this was far too easy on the South. Lincoln was killed before the question was settled.

Andrew Johnson, the new president, was a Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had stayed loyal to the Union. He required Southern states to accept the 13th Amendment, but he pardoned many former Confederate leaders. A pardon is an official act of forgiveness for a crime. He did nothing to give Black Southerners a voice. By late 1865, Southern voters had elected many former Confederate leaders to Congress, including the Confederacy’s own vice president. Congress refused to seat them.

In 1865 and 1866, the new Southern state governments passed laws called Black Codes. These laws applied only to Black people. They allowed freedpeople to marry, own some property and go to court in certain cases. But their main purpose was to control Black workers and keep them on plantations.

Under many Black Codes, Black people had to sign yearly work contracts. If they quit, they could be arrested. A Black person without a job could be charged with vagrancy, meaning having no home or work, and then fined. If they could not pay, they could be hired out to work for whoever paid the fine. Some codes banned Black people from owning guns or from renting land in towns.

Many Northerners were outraged. It looked as if the South was rebuilding slavery under a new name. Unfair laws were not only a Southern problem, though. Illinois had its own Black Laws that limited the rights of Black residents. In 1865, after years of campaigning by Black leaders such as Chicago businessman John Jones, Illinois repealed them.

A group in Congress called the Radical Republicans wanted real change in the South. Leaders like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts wanted to protect freed people and give Black men the right to vote. After the Black Codes, many more moderate Republicans joined them.

In 1866, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It said everyone born in the United States, except some Native Americans, was a citizen with equal rights under the law. Johnson vetoed it, meaning he rejected it. But two-thirds of both houses of Congress voted to override the veto, so it became law anyway. Congress also renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau over Johnson’s veto.

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts. They divided ten Southern states into five military districts, each run by a Union general with troops. To rejoin the Union, a state had to write a new constitution that let Black men vote and approve the 14th Amendment. For the first time, hundreds of thousands of Black men registered to vote.

Johnson and Congress fought constantly. To limit Johnson’s power, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. It said the president could not fire certain officials without the Senate’s approval. In February 1868, Johnson fired his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who supported Congress’s plans.

The House of Representatives then voted to impeach Johnson. To impeach means to formally charge a government official with serious wrongdoing. Johnson became the first president ever impeached. Next, the Senate held a trial. Removing a president requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

In May 1868, the Senate voted 35 to 19 to remove Johnson. That was one vote short of two-thirds. Some Republican senators voted to keep him. They believed Johnson had not committed a true crime and that removing a president over a political fight would weaken the presidency. Johnson finished his term, but he had little power left. In 1868, voters elected Ulysses S. Grant president.

Republicans worried that a future Congress or court might undo the Civil Rights Act of 1866. So they wrote its main ideas into the Constitution itself. The 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified in 1868.

The amendment says that all people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. To be naturalized means to become a citizen after moving from another country. This overturned the Dred Scott decision, which had said Black Americans could not be citizens. The amendment also says no state may take away a person’s life, liberty or property without due process, meaning fair legal steps. And no state may deny any person equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment is one of the most important parts of the Constitution. For many years, courts did not enforce it strongly. But in the 1900s, it became a powerful tool. People used it to fight segregation and to protect the rights of women, immigrants, people with disabilities and many others.

The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. It said the right to vote could not be denied because of race, color or having once been enslaved. It protected voting for Black men across the nation, North and South. Women’s rights leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were bitterly disappointed that it did not include women, and the women’s movement split over it.

Black men voted in huge numbers and helped elect new state governments. These governments, made up of Black and white Republicans, built the South’s first public school systems open to all children. They also rebuilt roads and railroads and made taxes fairer in some states.

Well over a thousand Black men held public office during Reconstruction, from sheriffs to state lawmakers. In 1870, Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American in the U.S. Senate. Blanche K. Bruce, also from Mississippi, was the first to serve a full Senate term. Robert Smalls, who had escaped slavery by steering a Confederate ship past the guns of Charleston harbor, was elected to Congress from South Carolina.

Slavery had torn countless families apart through sales. After the war, freedpeople searched for husbands, wives, children and parents. They walked hundreds of miles, asked travelers and placed ads in newspapers. Some found loved ones after many years. Many never did. Couples who had not been allowed to marry legally under slavery now held weddings.

Black churches became the heart of many communities. Freedpeople left white-controlled churches and founded their own, especially Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches. Churches were places of worship, but also schools, meeting halls and centers of political organizing.

Education was a top goal. Freedpeople, the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern church groups started thousands of schools. Colleges were founded to train Black teachers, ministers and other leaders. They include Fisk University (1866), Howard University (1867) and Hampton Institute (1868). Today these schools are known as historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.

In March 1865, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was the first large federal agency to help people in need. It gave out food and medicine, helped freedpeople find work and write fair contracts, set up courts to settle disputes, and helped start schools.

Most freedpeople wanted land of their own. Land meant independence, so no one could order them around. In January 1865, General Sherman set aside land along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for freed families, in plots of up to 40 acres. Thousands of families began farming there. The phrase “forty acres and a mule” came to stand for the hope of owning land.

But later in 1865, President Johnson ordered most of this land returned to its former owners, who had been pardoned. Army officers told freed families to sign work contracts with the landowners or leave. Congress did not pass a plan to give land to freed people. Without land or money, most freedpeople had to work on land owned by others.

After the war, landowners had land but little money to pay workers. Freedpeople could work but had no land. A system called sharecropping grew out of this. A landowner let a family farm a piece of land and gave them seed, tools and a cabin. In return, the family gave the landowner a share of the crop, often half.

At first, sharecropping seemed better than working in gangs as under slavery. Families could work together and decide their own daily schedule. But the system had serious problems. Sharecroppers usually had to buy food and supplies on credit from a local store, often owned by the landowner. Credit means buying now and paying later, usually with extra charges.

At harvest time, the sharecropper’s share often was not enough to pay what they owed. They ended the year in debt and had to stay and farm again to pay it off. Many sharecroppers, Black and white, were trapped year after year. Some farmers were tenant farmers instead, who paid rent to use land. They had a bit more freedom, but many also struggled with debt.

Many white Southerners refused to accept Black citizens voting and holding office. Around 1866, former Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee, started the Ku Klux Klan. Klan members wore disguises and rode at night. They threatened, beat and killed Black Southerners and their white Republican allies. They burned schools and churches. Their goal was to frighten Black people away from voting and to bring back white control.

Congress fought back. In 1870 and 1871, it passed the Enforcement Acts, which made it a federal crime to use force to stop people from voting. President Grant sent troops to parts of South Carolina, and hundreds of Klan members were arrested. The first Klan was mostly broken up by the early 1870s.

But violence did not end. Other armed groups kept attacking Black voters. Northern voters grew tired of Reconstruction. An economic depression, the Panic of 1873, turned their attention to jobs and money. Scandals in Grant’s government hurt the Republicans. Supreme Court rulings also weakened federal protection of Black rights. One by one, white Democrats regained control of Southern state governments.

The presidential election of 1876 was one of the closest in American history. The Democrat, Samuel Tilden of New York, won more popular votes. But the electoral votes of three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, plus one vote from Oregon, were disputed. Each side claimed it had won them. Whoever got those votes would win.

Congress created a special commission of 15 members to decide. It voted along party lines and gave all the disputed votes to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes won by a single electoral vote, 185 to 184. Democrats were furious.

To settle the crisis, leaders reached an informal deal known as the Compromise of 1877. Democrats accepted Hayes as president. In return, Hayes removed the federal troops that still protected the Republican governments in South Carolina and Louisiana. Without them, those governments fell. Reconstruction was over. Black Southerners were left largely on their own to defend their rights.

After 1877, white Democrats who called themselves Redeemers ran Southern state governments. Over the next decades, they passed laws to keep Black citizens from voting. Poll taxes charged a fee to vote. Literacy tests required voters to read and explain difficult passages, and white officials judged them unfairly. Many poor white men lost their vote too.

Southern states also passed laws that segregated, or separated, Black and white people in schools, railroad cars, parks and many other places. These were called Jim Crow laws. The name came from an insulting character in stage shows. Facilities for Black people were almost always worse. These laws would last until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Meanwhile, some Southern leaders called for a “New South.” Henry Grady, a newspaper editor in Atlanta, urged the South to build factories and railroads instead of relying only on cotton. Textile mills, steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama, and tobacco factories grew. But most Southerners, Black and white, stayed poor farmers. The promises of Reconstruction were left unfinished, but the 14th and 15th Amendments remained in the Constitution, waiting to be used.