American Civil War

The American Civil War, widely known in the United States as simply the Civil

War , was fought from 1861 to 1865. Seven Southern slave states individually declared
their secession (kivonulas) from the United States and formed the Confederate States of
America, known as the "Confederacy" or the "South". They grew to include eleven states,
and although they claimed thirteen states and additional western territories, the Confederacy
was never recognized by a foreign country. The states that did not declare secession were
known as the "Union" or the "North".

During the Civil War, women took on new roles, including running farms and
plantations and spying; some disguised themselves as men and fought in battle. - See more at:
http://www.historynet.com/civil-war#sthash.MZr62Xc9.dpuf

Causes
A common assumption to explain the cause of the American Civil War was that the North
was no longer willing to tolerate slavery as being part of the fabric of US society and that the
political power brokers (ugynok) in Washington were planning to abolish slavery throughout
the Union. Therefore for many people slavery is the key issue to explain the causes of the
American Civil War. However, it is not as simple as this and slavery, while a major issue,
was not the only issue that pushed American into the ‘Great American Tragedy’. ByApril
1861, slavery had become entwined (korulfon)with state rights, the power of the federal
government over the states, the South’s ‘way of life’ etc. – all of which made a major
contribution to the causes of the American Civil War.

The Northern and Southern sections of the United States developed along different lines. The
South remained a predominantly agrarian economy while the North became more and more
industrialized. Different social cultures and political beliefs developed. All of this led to
disagreements on issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements as well as states
rights versus federal rights.

Development

The burning issue (kerdes, vitapont) that led to the disruption of the union, however, was the
debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a
war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union,
and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states
under its own constitution.

The agrarian South utilized slaves to tend (gondoz) its large plantations and perform other
duties. Slaves could be rented or traded or sold to pay debts. Ownership of more than a
handful of slaves bestowed respect and contributed to social position.

The states of the North, meanwhile, one by one had gradually abolished slavery. A steady
flow of immigrants, especially from Ireland and Germany during the potato famine of the
1840s and 1850s, insured the North a ready pool of laborers, many of whom could be hired at
low wages, diminishing the need to cling to the institution of slavery. 

When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform
pledging (fogadva) to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South
seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America.

The Confederate States of America is formed with Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate
and former U.S. Army officer, as president.

The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize
the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would eventually fragment the no-longer
United States into several small, countries.

The event that triggered (kivalt) war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12,
1861. Claiming this United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened
fire on the federal garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln
called out the militia to suppress(lenyom) this "insurrection."(felkeles) Four more slave states
seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly a million armed men
confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri. Several
battles had already taken place.

By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore the Union had given way to a
new strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery and to
give the restored Union a "new birth of freedom.

By the spring of 1865 all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union
cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10,
1865, resistance collapsed and the war ended. 

Consequences

Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the
institution of slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. But these achievements
came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other
wars in which this country has fought combined. The American Civil War was the largest and
most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in
1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914

It destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was
abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and
guaranteeing civil rights to the freed slaves began.