The American Civil War and Emancipation

The American Civil War (1861-1865), fought between the Union and the Confederate states that seceded to preserve slavery, was the deadliest conflict in American history — killing an estimated 750,000 soldiers. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in Confederate states "forever free" and transforming the war from a fight to preserve the Union into a crusade against slavery. Nearly 180,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army, fighting for their own freedom. The war ended with Confederate surrender on April 9, 1865. The 13th Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States, freeing approximately four million people. But freedom was not equality: the brief promise of Reconstruction (1865-1877) gave way to Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, convict leasing, and a century of legalized segregation and racial terror that would not be fully challenged until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.