Info Brief: The Civil War and Emancipation

Following President Lincoln’s election, eleven states seceded from the Union and formed their own confederacy. Attempts to avoid armed conflict failed, and a bloody war had begun. At first, many Northerners believed that they were fighting to preserve the Union, while white Southerners believed that a break from the Union was justified to maintain slavery and protect sectional interests.

Radical voices in the North called for more aggressive action against slavery. President Lincoln and most (but not all) of his Republican colleagues began the war with a cautious approach—fearful of losing the support of the border states and still hoping to bring the war to a swift end. However, events on the ground—and the actions of African Americans themselves—would shape the nature (and meaning) of the war.

From the beginning of the war, African Americans began fleeing Southern plantations and entering Union lines. Furthermore, Radical voices in the North—both within Congress and within the abolitionist community—called for bolder action by President Lincoln and Congress. As the war dragged on, President Lincoln and Congress—pushed by African American refugees, abolitionists, and radical voices in Congress—would begin to move more decisively against slavery. Over time, the Union remained the war’s main aim, but the war increasingly became one of liberation.

As the war progressed, President Lincoln explicitly recast the war’s meaning as a battle to end slavery, not just preserve the Union and prevent slavery’s expansion. Of course, the most famous example is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was a massive push for emancipation—unthinkable before the Civil War.

Over time, thousands of African Americans signed up for the Union Army—with hundreds of thousands of African Americans fighting the Confederacy—and laying claim to the promise of equal citizenship. And African Americans in Convention—before, during, and after the Civil War—demanded their rights, petitioning Congress for equal rights, key liberties (like free speech, religious liberty, and the right to keep and bear arms), and for the right to vote.

Of course, following a bloody Civil War, the Union prevailed—but lost President Lincoln to an assassination. The debate quickly turned to the question of what comes next—Reconstruction.

Below, explore the timeline of key moments and actions in the Civil War and the fight for emancipation.

November 1860: President Lincoln is reelected.

December 1860: South Carolina votes unanimously to secede from the Union in December 1860 and is quickly joined by six other Southern states.

April 12-14, 1861: Confederate forces attack Fort Sumter, a federal military base in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. This is the first major military engagement of the Civil War, and Union forces quickly surrender.

Early 1861: General-in-Chief Winfield Scott coins the Union grand strategy for the war. Known as the “Anaconda Plan,” Scott envisions surrounding the Confederacy by forcefully closing all Southern ports and splitting the South in two by sending military forces to take control of the Mississippi.

April 19, 1861: President Lincoln declares a blockade of Southern ports.

April-May, 1861: Lincoln calls 75,000 state militiamen into national service, and four more states join the Confederacy. The war begins.

July 21, 1861: The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas, marks the first major battle of the war. The Confederate forces easily defeat the Union army, forcing a retreat.

April 6-7, 1862: Union forces win a surprising victory in the Western Theater of the war. General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army prevents Confederate forces from eliminating Grant’s army before it can resupply and continue dividing the South and progressing down the Mississippi River—but Grant’s forces suffer heavy casualties, and Grant is heavily criticized.

May 1862: The national government abolishes slavery in Washington, D.C.

September 17, 1862: In the bloodiest single day of the war, Union forces secure one of their only major victories of the year at Antietam, Maryland.

January 1, 1863: President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation: “[A]ll persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Black men begin to serve in the Union army, and Southern enslaved people begin to flee to Union lines in even larger numbers, where they are considered “takings” from the enemy as contraband of war. The Proclamation does not end slavery in the border states.

July 1-3, 1863: In their attempted invasion of the North, General Robert E. Lee’s forces clash with the Union army at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Both sides experience high casualties in the bloodiest battle of the War, and Lee remains on the defensive for the remainder of the conflict. This is a major turning point in the Eastern Theater.

July 4, 1863: Confederates in Vicksburg, Mississippi, finally surrender to General Grant after two months of siege. This ends Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, and is a major turning point in the Western Theater, as it solidifies the division between the western and eastern halves of the Confederacy. Lincoln had previously called Vicksburg “the key to the war.”

September 2, 1864: General William T. Sherman captures Atlanta. Sherman’s victory boosts Northern morale, solidifies Lincoln’s re-election, and all but ensures the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

December 21, 1864: General Sherman captures the port city of Savannah, Georgia, presenting it as a Christmas present to President Lincoln and ending his “March to the Sea.”

April 9, 1865: General Lee’s forces are surrounded by General Grant’s army, and Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

April 14-15, 1865: President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated at Ford’s Theatre by Confederate sympathizer and actor John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln dies the following day, and Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes President.