What was the American Civil War?
The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States, known as the Union or the North, and eleven Southern states that broke away to form the Confederate States of America. At its heart lay a single unresolved question the nation had carried since its founding: whether slavery would endure and expand, or end. When Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the spread of slavery, won the presidency in 1860, the Deep South chose to leave the Union rather than accept the result.
Seven states seceded before Lincoln even took office, and four more followed after the fighting began, joining together under a new government committed to preserving slavery. The North fought first to hold the country together, to prove that a democracy could not simply be dissolved by the losing side of an election. As the war ground on, its purpose deepened: with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the destruction of slavery became an explicit and irreversible aim.
It was a war of staggering scale. More than three million men took up arms. Rifled muskets and entrenchments made the battlefields deadlier than anything Americans had known, and disease killed twice as many soldiers as bullets did. Whole cities were besieged, railroads and farms were destroyed, and by the end nearly every family in the country, North and South, had felt its cost.
Why the Civil War was fought
The Civil War did not begin suddenly in 1861. It was the culmination of decades of deepening conflict over slavery, and above all over whether it would be allowed to spread into the new territories of the West. Each attempt at compromise, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, only postponed the reckoning.
North and South had grown into different worlds: an industrialising, free-labour North, and an agrarian South whose wealth was built on enslaved labour and the cotton it produced. As each new state threatened to tip the balance of power in Congress, violence erupted in “Bleeding Kansas.” The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 enraged the North, and John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry terrified the South.
When Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery’s expansion, won the presidency in 1860 without carrying a single Southern state, the Deep South concluded that its future in the Union was over. South Carolina seceded that December, and six more states followed before Lincoln was even inaugurated.
The course of the war, 1861-1865
Secession and the first shots
After Abraham Lincoln's election, eleven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. The war began when Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Both sides scrambled to raise armies, and the first great clash at Bull Run shattered any illusion that the war would be short.
The war turns bloody
Vast armies collided in the West at Shiloh and in the East on the Virginia Peninsula. On September 17, Antietam became the bloodiest single day in American history, more than 22,000 men killed or wounded. Its narrow Union outcome gave Lincoln the moment to announce that emancipation was coming.
The turning point
The Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day, remaking the purpose of the war. In July the tide turned for good: Lee's invasion of the North was broken at Gettysburg over three days, and the very next day Vicksburg surrendered, splitting the Confederacy and handing the Union the Mississippi.
Total war
Ulysses S. Grant took command of all Union armies and drove relentlessly at Lee through the Overland Campaign to the siege of Petersburg. In the West, William T. Sherman captured Atlanta and marched to the sea, breaking the South's will and capacity to keep fighting.
Surrender at Appomattox
Petersburg and Richmond fell in early April. On April 9, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, and the remaining Confederate armies laid down their arms over the following weeks. Days later Lincoln was assassinated. The Union was preserved and slavery abolished.
Emancipation and the home front
For its first eighteen months the North fought only to restore the Union. That changed with the Emancipation Proclamation, issued after the Battle of Antietam and taking effect on January 1, 1863. It declared the enslaved people of the rebelling states to be free, and turned the war into a struggle to end slavery itself.
It also opened the army to Black soldiers. By 1865 nearly 180,000 African Americans had served in the United States Colored Troops, about a tenth of the entire Union army, fighting with distinction at Fort Wagner, New Market Heights, and beyond.
Behind the lines the war remade both societies. Northern factories, railroads, and farms boomed under wartime demand; the blockaded South suffered shortages, inflation, and hunger. On both sides, women ran the farms and businesses and nursed the wounded while the men were away at the front.
What the war settled, and what it cost
The Union won, and in winning answered the two questions the war had been fought over. The nation would not be broken apart, and slavery in the United States was finished. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished it everywhere, freeing roughly four million people who had been held in bondage.
The cost was without parallel in American history. Somewhere between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers died, a toll that touched almost every community in the country. The difficult work of rebuilding the South and defining the freedom of the formerly enslaved became the era of Reconstruction that followed, and the meaning of the war has been argued over ever since.
- soldiers killed, North and South
- 620,000+
- people freed from slavery
- 4 million
- Amendment abolished slavery, 1865
- 13th
- of war, 1861 to 1865
- 4 years
Reconstruction and the war’s legacy
The war ended with the Union preserved and slavery abolished, but at a staggering cost, and with vast stretches of the South in ruins. Days after Lee’s surrender, on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, robbing the nation of its leader at the very moment of peace.
The work of rebuilding, and of defining the freedom of four million formerly enslaved people, became the era of Reconstruction. Its promise was fiercely contested and, by 1877, largely abandoned, opening the way to decades of segregation. The war settled that the nation was one and indivisible and that slavery was finished; the meaning of the freedom it won would be fought over for another century.
Abolished slavery throughout the United States.
Guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law to all born in the country.
Protected the right to vote regardless of race, colour, or previous enslavement.
Civil War battles by state
The war was fought across the whole country, but not evenly. Virginia, the Confederate capital’s home and the front line of the Eastern Theater, saw 1,359 documented engagements; Tennessee, the great battleground of the West, saw 1,014. Every state below opens to its full engagement map, its leading battles, and the regiments it sent to war.
The map shades every state by how much fighting it saw. Hover for the count, click a state to open its full engagement map, its leading battles, and the regiments it raised.
The theaters of the war
The fighting fell into four broad theaters. Each opens to its campaigns, the principal battles within them, the commanders on both sides, and a map of every recorded engagement.
1861-1865 · 316,953 casualties
1861-1865 · 291,216 casualties
1861-1865 · 39,895 casualties
1861-1865 · 23,410 casualties
- Burnside's North Carolina Expedition · 5 battles · 1862
- Peninsula Campaign · 16 battles · 1862
- Jackson's Valley Campaign · 7 battles · 1862
- Northern Virginia Campaign · 6 battles · 1862
- Maryland Campaign · 4 battles · 1862
- Gettysburg Campaign · 10 battles · 1863
- Bristoe Campaign · 5 battles · 1863
- Grant's Overland Campaign · 11 battles · 1864
- Bermuda Hundred Campaign · 5 battles · 1864
- Richmond-Petersburg Campaign · 19 battles · 1864-1865
- Sheridan's Valley Campaign · 8 battles · 1864
- Appomattox Campaign · 14 battles · 1865
- Federal Penetration up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers · 4 battles · 1862
- Confederate Heartland Offensive · 5 battles · 1862
- Middle Tennessee Operations · 5 battles · 1863
- Grant's Operations Against Vicksburg · 11 battles · 1863
- Chickamauga Campaign · 3 battles · 1863
- Longstreet's Knoxville Campaign · 3 battles · 1863
- Atlanta Campaign · 16 battles · 1864
- Franklin-Nashville Campaign · 8 battles · 1864
- Savannah Campaign · 5 battles · 1864
- Carolinas Campaign · 5 battles · 1865
- Mobile Campaign · 2 battles · 1865
- Operations to Control Missouri · 8 battles · 1861
- Sibley's New Mexico Campaign · 2 battles · 1862
- Operations North of Boston Mountains · 6 battles · 1862
- Red River Campaign · 7 battles · 1864
- Camden Expedition · 5 battles · 1864
- Price's Missouri Expedition · 11 battles · 1864
The battles that decided the war
Each with a full account, the forces engaged, and the human cost drawn from the record.
Seen through the camera
The Civil War was the first war photographed at scale. Aubrey indexes 13,655 images from the Library of Congress collection.
The whole war, catalogued and connected
For more than 160 years the record of the Civil War has sat in fragments, battle reports in one archive, regimental rolls in another, over six million service records on microfilm, tens of thousands of photographs in library vaults. Aubrey has drawn them together into a single, cross-referenced collection.
Follow one soldier to the regiment he served in, that regiment to the battles it fought, and each battle to the ground it stood on and the photographs that survive of it. It is the connective tissue that turns scattered facts into a history you can actually follow, and it is free to explore.
Explore the collection
Every documented engagement fought on each state's soil, with the regiments it raised.
Union, Confederate, and USCT regiments, with muster dates and key engagements.
Portraits, battlefield scenes, and documentary images from the Brady-Handy archive.
An index of individual service records: name, regiment, rank, side, and state.
Frequently asked
What a full report reveals, anywhere in the United States
Pick any location and Aubrey pulls together 18 strands of its history, each drawn from the record:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.