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Ft. Sumter
The day after his inauguration, the new president received an urgent dispatch from the fort’s commander,The Confederacy was demanding that he surrender or face an attack, and his supplies of food and ammunition would last six weeks at the most. -
Secession of Virginia
When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for three months, the response was over-whelming. In Iowa, 20 times the state’s quota rushed to enlist.Virginia, unwilling to fight against other Southern states, seceded—a terrible loss to the Union. Virginia was the most heavily populated state in the South and the most industrialized -
Battle at Bull Run
An army of 30,000 inexperienced Union soldiers on its way toward the Confederate capital at Richmond, only 100 miles from
Washington, D.C., came upon an equally inexperienced
Confederate army encamped near the little creek of Bull Run, just 25 miles from the Union capital. -
Battle at Shiloh
One month after the victories at Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, in late March of 1862, Grant gathered his troops near
a small Tennessee church named Shiloh, which was close to the
Mississippi border. 6 thousands of yelling Confederate
soldiers surprised the Union forces. Many Union troops were shot
while making coffee; -
Battle at Richmond
McClellan transported
the Army of the Potomac slowly toward the Confederate
capital. On the way he encountered a Confederate army
commanded by General Joseph E. Johnston. After a series of
battles, Johnston was wounded, and command of the army
passed to Robert E. Lee. -
Battle at Antietam
Now Lee moved against the enemy’s capital. On August 29 and 30,
his troops won a resounding victory at the Second Battle of Bull Run. A few days
later, they crossed the Potomac into the Union state of Maryland. A resident of one Potomac River town described the starving Confederate troops. -
Emancipation Proclamation
As the South struggled in vain to gain foreign recognition, abolitionist feeling grew in the North. Some Northerners believed that just winning the war would not be enough if the issue of slavery
was not permanently settled. -
Battle at Gettysburg
The most decisive battle of the war was fought near Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania. The town was an unlikely spot for a bloody battle—and indeed, no one planned to fight there. On July 2, almost 90,000 Yankees and 75,000 Confederates stood ready to fight for Gettysburg. The yelling Rebels overran Union troops who had mistakenly left their positions on Little Round Top, -
Gettysburg Address
ceremony was held to dedicate a cemetery in Gettysburg. The
first speaker was Edward Everett, a noted orator, who gave a flowery two-hour oration. Then Abraham Lincoln spoke for a little more than two minutes. According to the historian Garry Wills, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “remade America.” -
Surrender at Appomattox:
it was clear that the end of the Confederacy was near. Grant and Sheridan were approaching Richmond from the west, while Sherman was approaching from the south. On April 2—in response to news that Lee and his troops had been overcome by Grant’s forces at Peters burg—President Davis and his government abandoned their capital, setting it afire to keep the Northerners from taking it. Despite the fire-fighting efforts of Union troops, flames destroyed some 900 buildings and damaged hundreds more -
ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN
five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Lincoln and his wife went to Ford’s Theater in Washington to see a British comedy, Our American Cousin. During the play’s third act, a man silently opened the unguarded doors to the pres-
identical box. He crept up behind Lincoln, raised a pistol, and fired, hitting the president in the back of the head.
The assassin, John Wilkes Booth—a 26-year-old actor
and Southern sympathizer
