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Abraham Lincoln wins election, even though Lincoln was not on the ballot in the Southern States
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South Carolina became the first slave state in the south to secede from the United States.
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Representatives from the six seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a unified government, aka the Confederate States of America.
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Jefferson Davis was elected the Confederacy's first president.
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Part of his taking of the oath of office and was addressed to the people of the South.
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Confederate States Army, and the return gunfire and subsequent surrender by the United States Army, which started the War.
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Union and Confederate armies fought near Manassas Junction, Virginia, in the first major land battle of the American Civil War.
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First meeting in combat of ironclad warships, (the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia).
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Confederates launched a surprise attack on Union forces, while they were unable to hold their positions and were forced back, resulting in a Union victory.
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Naval action by Union forces seeking to capture the city. Permanent loss of New Orleans was considered one of the worst disasters suffered by the Confederacy.
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Confederate victory over the Union Army of Virginia. Over 20,000 men fell as casualties at this fight.
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First field army–level engagement in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War to take place on Union soil.
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A document stating that all slaves in the rebellious states "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free" even though it did not free a single slave, stirring the pot of the war even more.
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On July 1, 1863, the most famous battle of the Civil War began, and raged for three days. The Union forces repelled assault after assault until Lee recognized the futility of the campaign and ordered his defeated and crippled army back to Virginia.
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Final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign
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Violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the war.
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Infantry regiment that saw extensive service in the Union Army
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An attack by the Quantrill's Raiders, led by William Quantrill, on the Unionist town of Lawrence, Kansas.
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Speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of a soldiers' cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg.
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Hand-cranked Confederate submarine powered by H.L. Hunley torpedoed the mighty USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor it became the first combat submarine to sink an enemy warship.
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First battle of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's 1864 Virginia Overland Campaign against Gen. Robert E. Lee.
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Battle of the Atlanta Campaign with union forces commanded by William T. Sherman.
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Any hope for a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy vanished when Northern voters overwhelmingly endorse the leadership of President Lincoln.
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Sherman’s army had been sweeping from Atlanta across the state to the south and east towards Savannah. Along the way, Sherman destroyed farms and railroads, burned storehouses. Sherman intended to “make Georgia howl".
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Successful assault by the Union Army, Navy and Marine Corps against Fort Fisher near the end of the War.
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A speech delivered near the final days of the Civil War and only a month before he was assassinated.
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The Union Army captured and destroyed the Confederate arsenal, a building where weapons were made and stored, in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
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General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant.
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Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre.
