Sand Creek on 29 November 1864 was the most controversial event in the history of the Indian Wars. Chivington attacked Black Kettle's peaceful village flying a US flag under Army protection. An estimated 150-200 people were killed, including many women and children; bodies were mutilated. The Army initially celebrated it as a victory; a joint congressional investigation condemned it as a massacre of people under government protection. Sand Creek ignited the Cheyenne-Sioux retaliatory raids of 1865, accelerated war across the entire Central and Northern Plains, and became the defining symbol of US Army atrocities against Native Americans.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
150-200 Cheyenne and Arapaho killed (2/3 women and children); 9 US soldiers killed (mostly by friendly fire)
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