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President Abraham Lincoln is elected
On Tuesday, November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President of the United States, with Hannibal Hamlin of Maine his Vice-President. Lincoln and Hamlin received 1,866,452 popular votes and 180 electoral votes in 17 of the 33 states. -
South Carolina secedes from the Union
On this day, a secession convention meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, unanimously adopted an ordinance dissolving the connection between South Carolina and the United States of America. -
Firing on Fort Sumter (battle)
Fort Sumter 5. On April 12, 1861, General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command of the Confederate forces around Charleston Harbor, opened fire on the Union garrison holding Fort Sumter. At 2:30pm on April 13 Major Robert Anderson, garrison commander, surrendered the fort and was evacuated the next day. -
North Carolina secedes from Union
On May 20, 1861, the state of North Carolina made the most calamitous decision in its history. Following the states of the Deep South, the Tar Heel state seceded from the Union and joined the war for Southern independence. -
President Jefferson Davis is elected
On November 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected president, not of the United States of America but of the Confederate States of America. He ran unopposed and was elected to serve for a six-year term. -
The Battle of Shiloh
On the morning of April 6, 1862, 40,000 Confederate soldiers under the command of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston poured out of the nearby woods and struck a line of Union soldiers occupying ground near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. -
The Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." -
The Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to July 3, 1863, is considered the most important engagement of the American Civil War. After a great victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee marched his Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in late June 1863. -
The Battle of Mananas
On September 19-20, 1863, Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee defeated a Union force commanded by General William Rosecrans in the Battle of Chickamauga, during the American Civil War. -
The Battle of the Crater
After weeks of preparation, on July 30 the Federals exploded a mine in Burnside's IX Corps sector beneath Pegram's Salient, blowing a gap in the Confederate defenses of Petersburg. -
Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia
The Battle of Appomattox Court House, fought on the morning of April 9, 1865, was the final engagement of Confederate States Army General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia before it surrendered to the Union Army under Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and one of the last battles of the American Civil War. -
Jefferson Davis moves the Confederate Capitol to Greensboro
Founded in 1819, on the high bluffs above the Alabama River and 330 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, Montgomery, Alabama quickly became the heart of the state's plantation economy. -
Joseph E. Johnston surrenders at Bennett Place, North Carolina
In April 1865, two battle-weary adversaries, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston and Union General William T. Sherman, met under a flag of truce to discuss a peaceful solution to the tragic Civil War.
