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The American Civil War

Men and women and kids working as slaves in Alabama (1861)

In the 1850's, white people in the southern part of the United States were getting more and more angry with rich people who lived in the North. One reason was that these northern rich people were getting richer from new factories they were building, and the southern rich people were not. Poor people were coming from all over Europe to work in the northern factories, but they didn't come to the South, so in the South rich land-owners still forced African-American people to work as slaves in their big cotton and tobacco fields.

People in the North wanted to make the southern land-owners free these people, because they thought slavery was unfair. The African-Americans thought that sounded good. But the Southern land-owners were afraid that ending slavery would just make the South even poorer, and the North would still be rich. That seemed unfair to them. Poor white people in the South also didn't like the idea that Northerners would tell them what to do.

Abraham Lincoln

In 1860, the men who could vote elected Abraham Lincoln to be president (but no women, or people who had recently arrived in the United States, or enslaved African-Americans were allowed to vote). Lincoln was a northerner, and he saw things in a Northern way. This made the southern people so angry and afraid that they decided to split off from the United States and form their own country, which they called the Confederacy.
The states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee were in the Confederacy, and parts of Missouri and Kentucky. Mostly these were the states where it was legal to own slaves, but there were four states where slavery was legal that decided not to join the Confederacy.The white men of the Confederacy elected their own president, Jefferson Davis .

The war started in 1861. The Confederate army was greatly outnumbered, and the United States also had more guns and more ammunition for their guns. The only hope of the Confederates was to get help from England or France, the way they had in the American Revolutionary War a hundred years earlier. But this time both England and France said no. They would not help any country where it was legal to hold people as slaves. England did send some guns and ammunition to the South, but no soldiers.

A Civil War hospital

But the Confederates and the United States fought a lot of battles anyway. Hundreds of thousands of men died in these battles, without anything being solved. Many other men lost their legs or their arms or their eyes. This was mainly because men had invented new kinds of guns which were more powerful and more accurate than earlier guns. Using these new guns, it was a lot easier to kill somebody. But generals kept on fighting battles in the old way, with a bunch of men marching along in a long line. The two lines would just shoot at each other until most of them were dead.

In the end, the Confederacy ran out of both men and guns. Robert E Lee surrendered to the United States general, Ulysses S Grant, in April, 1865. So the southern states became part of the United States again.

Slavery effectively ended in the U.S. in the spring of 1865 when the Confederate armies surrendered. All slaves in the Confederacy were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which stipulated that slaves in Confederate-held areas were free. Slaves in the border states and Union-controlled parts of the South were freed by state action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.

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The American Civil War