The Civil War is one of the central events in America's collective memory. There are innumerable statues, commemorations, books and archival collections. The memory includes the home front, military affairs, the treatment of soldiers, both living and dead, in the war's aftermath, depictions of the war in literature and art, evaluations of heroes and villains, and considerations of the moral and political lessons of the war. The last theme includes moral evaluations of racism and slavery, heroism in combat and behind the lines, and the issues of democracy and minority rights, as well as the notion of an "Empire of Liberty" influencing the world. Memory of the war in the white South crystallized in the myth of the "Lost Cause", which shaped regional identity and race relations for generations.

2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. Many in the American South attempted to incorporate both black history and white perspectives. A Harris Poll given in March 2011 suggested that Americans were still uniquely divided over the results and appropriate memorials to acknowledge the occasion. While traditionally American films of the Civil War feature "brother versus brother" themes film treatments of the war are evolving to include African American characters. Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama NAACP, said celebrating the Civil War is like celebrating the "Holocaust". In reference to slavery, Simelton said that black "rights were taken away" and that blacks "were treated as less than human beings." National Park historian Bob Sutton said that slavery was the "principal cause" of the war. Sutton also claimed that the issue of state rights was incorporated by the Confederacy as a justification for the war in order to get recognition from Britain. Sutton went on to mention that during the 100th anniversary of the Civil War white southerners focused on the genius of southern generals, rather than slavery. In Virginia during the fall of 2010, a conference took place that addressed the slavery issue. During November 2010, black Civil War reenactors from around the country participated in a parade at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

So what if the Confederacy had won the Civil War? What would be the outcome of the United States? As depicted in the movie C.S.A: The Confederate States of America, a mockumentary,  the South tries to induce the North to accept the institution of slavery. John Ambrose Fauntroy I introduces a tax that is alleviated by the purchase of slaves, and the works of Samuel A. Cartwright dominate Confederate American medical science. By the start of the 20th century, the CSA becomes the Western hemisphere's superpower — conquering and occupying all of the continental US, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America, with a blend of segregation and apartheid. Only the Russian colony of Alaska and Canada are not CSA "client states", with Canada becoming home to refugee abolitionists and escaped black slaves. The Confederates construct a wall along the border between the two countries called the "Cotton Curtain" (referencing the Iron Curtain). Hatred of "Red Canada" dates to the late 19th century, when Frederick Douglass convinces the Canadian Parliament not to repatriate escaped slaves. Canada becomes the popular culture capital of the world with the contributions of African Americans and other exiles (Elvis Presley, after being jailed for a time, flees there), whereas the CSA never evolves beyond heavy-handed government propaganda.

The CSA is hit by the 1929 Economic Crash and extricates itself by reviving the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. New African slaves are provided by collaborationist African leaders who enslave on behalf of the CSA members of tribes which they consider "inferior".

During World War II, the CSA is friendly with Nazi Germany, but disagrees with Adolf Hitler's Final Solution — the CSA preferring to exploit non-white races instead of exterminating them. The CSA agrees to remain neutral in any German war. However, the CSA becomes hostile with Japan, seeing its expansionism as a threat to the entire Pacific Region. Confederate leaders assume that the CSA will easily win the war, judging the Japanese as small and weak in physical stature, as well as being non-white. On December 7, 1941 (the date of the actual attack on Pearl Harbor), the CSA strikes two Japanese naval bases and bombs the city of Kyoto as the opening blow in a war against the "Yellow Peril". During the war, the CS military suffers massive losses, and tried to solve its manpower shortages by recruiting a black regiment by promising slaves their freedom if they would fight (which is later revealed to be a lie). This regiment receives the most dangerous missions and suffers high casualties, but earns the respect of white officers. The war is won using the atomic bomb. However, the European war still ends in German defeat, albeit with many more Soviet casualties. After the war, the Summit Nations impose trade sanctions and embargoes on the CSA, forcing the nation into isolation. South Africa becomes the only country maintaining diplomatic relations with the CSA.

During the 1950s, a series of abolitionist attacks cause some Confederate Americans to question the need for slavery. In 1960, when only 29 percent of voters approve of slavery, Roman Catholic Republican John F. Kennedy is elected CSA president over Democrat Richard Nixon. However, foreign policy such as the Newfoundland Missile Crisis distracts him, and he is unable to implement his domestic agenda before being assassinated. The Vietnam War is briefly mentioned as an "expansionist campaign" of the CSA. Slaves rebel throughout the country, including the Watts Riots. Democratic Senator John Ambrose Fauntroy V presents programs returning America to its former Southern Protestant Biblical values — tolerance of adultery and of husbands beating their wives, and intolerance of homosexuals. By the early 1990s, the Confederacy has largely put away such self-doubt.

The documentarians ask Senator (and presidential candidate) Fauntroy V to arrange an interview with some slaves, but it becomes clear that the slaves have been coached. However, they are clandestinely passed a note instructing them to meet a black man named Big Sam (earlier identified as the fugitive leader of a radical splinter group of the "National Association for the Advancement of Chattel People"). Big Sam, in turn, leads them to Horace, a lifelong slave of Fauntroy's, who alleges Fauntroy V is part black, sharing a common slave ancestor. The racial accusations cost Fauntroy V the presidential election; a month later, the senator commits suicide on December 12, 2002. Narration then states DNA tests were negative.

The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering contention today. There is much less dispute about the results. Confederate nationalism died. American nationalism triumphed. The North and West grew rich while the once-rich South became poor for a century. The national political power of the slaveowners and rich southerners ended. Historians are less sure about the results of the postwar Reconstruction, especially regarding the second class citizenship of the Freedmen and their poverty. The Freedmen did indeed get their freedom, their citizenship, and control of their lives, their families and their churches. 


Historians have debated whether the Confederacy could have won the war. Most scholars, such as James McPherson, argue that Confederate victory was at least possible. McPherson argues that the North's advantage in population and resources made Northern victory likely but not guaranteed. He also argues that if the Confederacy had fought using unconventional tactics, they would have more easily been able to hold out long enough to exhaust the Union.

The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and 50,000 civilians. Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20% higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000. The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American deaths in other U.S. wars combined.

One reason for the high number of battle deaths during the war was the use of Napoleonic tactics, such as charging. With the advent of more accurate rifled barrels, Minié balls and (near the end of the war for the Union army) repeating firearms such as the Spencer Repeating Rifle and the Henry Repeating Rifle, soldiers were mowed down when standing in lines in the open. This led to the adoption of trench warfare, a style of fighting that defined the better part of World War I.

The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered, further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery. During the Civil War, sentiment concerning slaves, enslavement and emancipation in the United States was divided. In 1861, Lincoln worried that premature attempts at emancipation would mean the loss of the border states, and that "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."  Copperheads and some War Democrats opposed emancipation, although the latter eventually accepted it as part of total war needed to save the Union.

Reconstruction began during the war, with the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 and continued to 1877. It comprised multiple complex methods to resolve the war, the most important of which were the three "Reconstruction Amendments" to the Constitution which remain in effect to the present time: the 13th (1865), the 14th (1868) and the 15th (1870). From the Union perspective, the goals of Reconstruction were to guarantee the Union victory on the battlefield by reuniting the Union; to guarantee a "republican form of government for the ex-Confederate states; and to permanently end slavery—and prevent semi-slavery status.

President Johnson took a lenient approach and saw the achievement of the main war goals as realized in 1865, when each ex-rebel state repudiated secession and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Radical Republicans demanded strong proof that Confederate nationalism was dead and the slaves were truly free. They came to the fore after the 1866 elections and undid much of Johnson's work. They used the Army to dissolve Southern state governments and hold new elections with Freedmen voting. The result was a Republican coalition that took power in ten states for varying lengths of time, staying in power with the help of U.S. Army units and black voters. Grant was elected president in 1868 and continued the Radical policies. Meanwhile the Freedman's Bureau, started by Lincoln in 1865 to help the freed slaves, played a major role in helping the blacks and arranging work for them. In opposition paramilitary groups such as the first Ku Klux Klan used violence to thwart these efforts.

As the first seven states began organizing a Confederacy in Montgomery, the entire US army numbered 16,000, however Northern governors had begun to mobilize their militias. The Confederate Congress authorized the new nation up to 100,000 troops sent by governors as early as February in the opinion of historian E. Merton Coulter. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln called out 75,000 three-month volunteers, by May Jefferson Davis was pushing for 100,000 men under arms for one year or the duration, and that was answered in kind by the U.S. Congress.

The small U.S. Navy of 1861 was rapidly enlarged to 6,000 officers and 45,000 men in 1865, with 671 vessels, having a tonnage of 510,396. Its mission was to blockade Confederate ports, take control of the river system, defend against Confederate raiders on the high seas, and be ready for a possible war with the British Royal Navy. Meanwhile, the main riverine war was fought in the West, where a series of major rivers gave access to the Confederate heartland, if the U.S. Navy could take control. In the East, the Navy supplied and moved army forces about, and occasionally shelled Confederate installations.

By early 1861, General Winfield Scott had devised the Anaconda Plan to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. Scott argued that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy. Lincoln adopted parts of the plan, but he overruled Scott's caution about 90-day volunteers. Public opinion however demanded an immediate attack by the army to capture Richmond.

In April 1861, Lincoln announced the Union blockade of all Southern ports; commercial ships could not get insurance and regular traffic ended. The South blundered in embargoing cotton exports in 1861 before the blockade was effective; by the time they realized the mistake it was too late. "King Cotton" was dead, as the South could export less than 10% of its cotton. The blockade shut down the ten Confederate seaports with railheads that moved almost all the cotton, especially New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. By June 1861, warships were stationed off the principal Southern ports, and a year later nearly 300 ships were in service.

 Civil War were complex, and have been controversial since the war began. The issue has been further complicated by historical revisionists, who have tried to improve the image of the South by lessening the role of slavery Slavery was the central source of escalating political tension in the 1850s. The Republican Party was determined to prevent any spread of slavery, and many Southern leaders had threatened secession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the 1860 election. Following Lincoln's victory, many Southern whites felt that disunion had become their only option.

While not all Southerners saw themselves as fighting to preserve slavery, most of the officers and over a third of the rank and file in Lee's army had close family ties to slavery. To Northerners, in contrast, the motivation was primarily to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery. Abraham Lincoln consistently made preserving the Union the central goal of the war, though he increasingly saw slavery as a crucial issue and made ending it an additional goal. Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation angered both Peace Democrats ("Copperheads") and War Democrats, but energized most Republicans. By warning that free blacks would flood the North, Democrats made gains in the1862 elections, but they did not gain control of Congress. The Republicans' counterargument that slavery was the mainstay of the enemy steadily gained support, with the Democrats losing decisively in the 1863 elections in the northern state of Ohio when they tried to resurrect anti-black sentiment.

The slavery issue was primarily about whether the system of slavery was an anachronistic evil that was incompatible with Republicanism in the United States, or a state system protected by the Constitution. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was to stop the expansion and thus put slavery on a path to gradual extinction. To the white South, this strategy trampled their Constitutional rights. Slavery was gradually phased out of existence in the North and was fading in the border states and urban areas, but expanded in highly profitable cotton states of the Deep South.

A New Orleans woman and the child she held in slavery, 1850
Man whipped; the guilty overseer was fired.

Despite compromises in 1820 and 1850, the slavery issues exploded in the 1850s. Causes include controversy over admitting Missouri as a slave state in 1820, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the status of slavery in western territories won as a result of the Mexican–American War and the resulting Compromise of 1850. Irreconcilable disagreements over slavery ended the Whig and Know Nothing parties, and split the Democratic Party between North and South, while the new Republican Partyangered slavery interests by demanding an end to its expansion. Most observers believed that without expansion slavery would eventually die out; Lincoln argued this in 1845 and1858. Following the U.S. victory over Mexico, Northerners attempted to exclude slavery from conquered territories in the Wilmot Proviso; it never passed. Northern (and British) readers recoiled in anger at the horrors of slavery as described in the novel and play Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Sectionalism refers to the different economies, social structure, customs and political values of the North and South. It increased steadily between 1800 and 1860 as the North, which phased slavery out of existence, industrialized, urbanized and built prosperous farms, while the deep South concentrated on plantation agriculture based on slave labor, together with subsistence farming for the poor whites. The South expanded into rich new lands in the Southwest (from Alabama to Texas).

However, slavery declined in the border states and could barely survive in cities and industrial areas (it was fading out in cities such as Baltimore, Louisville, and St. Louis), so a South based on slavery was rural and non-industrial. On the other hand, as the demand for cotton grew, the price of slaves soared. Historians have debated whether economic differences between the industrial Northeast and the agricultural South helped cause the war. Most historians now disagree with the economic determinism of historian Charles Beard in the 1920s and emphasize that Northern and Southern economies were largely complementary

Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest. Of the states carved out of these territories by 1845, all had entered the union as slave states: Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and Texas, as well as the southern portions of Alabama and Mississippi. And with the conquest of northern Mexico, including California, in 1848, slaveholding interests looked forward to the institution flourishing in these lands as well. Southerners also anticipated garnering slaves and slave states in Cuba and Central America. Northern free soil interests vigorously sought to curtail any further expansion of slave soil. It was these territorial disputes that the proslavery and antislavery forces collided over. The existence of slavery in the southern states was far less politically polarizing than the explosive question of the territorial expansion of the institution westward. Moreover, Americans were informed by two well-established readings of the Constitution regarding human bondage: first, that the slave states had complete autonomy over the institution within their boundaries, and second, that the domestic slave trade – trade among the states – was immune to federal interference. The only feasible strategy available to attack slavery was to restrict its expansion into the new territories. Slave holding interests fully grasped the danger that this strategy posed to them. Both the South and the North drew the same conclusion: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself."

Beginning in the American Revolution and accelerating after the War of 1812, the people of the United States grew in their sense of country as an important example to the world of a national republic of political liberty and personal rights. Previous regional independence movements such as the Greek revolt in the Ottoman Empire, division and redivision in the Latin American political map, and the British-French Crimean triumph leading to an interest in redrawing Europe along cultural differences, all conspired to make for a time of upheaval and uncertainty about the basis of the nation-state. In the world of 19th century self-made Americans, growing in prosperity, population and expanding westward, "freedom" could mean personal liberty or property rights. The unresolved difference would cause failure—first in their political institutions, then in their civil life together.

The American Civil War, also known as the War between the States or simply the Civil War (see naming), was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States (the "Union" or the "North") and several Southern slave states that declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South"). The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories. Foreign powers did not intervene. After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficultReconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.