A WAR FAR FROM CIVIL

On 12th April 1861, the four-year-long American Civil War began.

The gruesome war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which resulted in a huge toll of 620,000 to 10 lakh lives, ended on 26th May 1865. Many more were injured. The Civil War was indisputably the deadliest among all the American wars, but it resulted in a great thing that is the abolition of slavery from the United States.

During the Civil War, the US was referred to as the Union. Informally it was called the North too. The eleven southern slave states of the US seceded from the US to form the Confederate States of America. They were also collectively called Confederacy or the South.

The 11 southern states which seceded from the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

Fight for Slavery

The root cause of the secession was the decades of controversy and the resulting acrimony over slavery. The main dispute which lead to the war was whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which many believed would lead to slavery's eventual extinction from the US.

The election of Abraham Lincoln, who strongly opposed slavery, as the President of the United States in 1860, gave further momentum to this long brewing friction. The Republican Party, which Lincoln represented, also had a clear anti-slavery stance.