Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this 'insurrection.' Four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy.

Claiming this United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened fire on the federal garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914. But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives-nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined. Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the institution of slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world. While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. Saved Land Browse Interactive Map View active campaigns.Help Tell African American Stories of Valor.Save 150 Endangered Acres at Gaines’ Mill and Cold Harbor.Help Enrich Battle Understanding Through Archaeology.Virtual Tours View All See Antietam now!.National Teacher Institute July 21 - 24, 2022 Learn More.

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