The American Civil War — the deadliest war in American history, with about 750,000 military deaths — ran from?
South Carolina seceded in December 1860 — eight more states followed by spring 1861 — but the war's first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour on 12 April 1861. Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865. Smaller Confederate forces continued to surrender through May and June 1865; the last (the *Shenandoah*, in Liverpool, Britain) surrendered in November 1865, but the substantive war was over by mid-1865. President Lincoln was assassinated on 14 April 1865 — five days after Appomattox.
Read the full facts →The American Civil War was the armed conflict between the United States federal government and the eleven slave-holding southern states that formed the Confederate States of America between 1861 and 1865. The deadliest war in American history, it ended the institution of chattel slavery in the United States and produced the constitutional reorganization of the federal-state relationship that has defined the modern American political order.
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