March | Historical Context

March Historical Context

The Civil War

The American Civil War lasted four years (1861–1865), the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history, which claimed 600,000 American lives, more than all wars fought between 1865 and 2007 added together. It broke out between northern states, the Union, and the southern states, the Confederacy, when the South seceded from the Union. The causes of the war were complex and involved political, economic, and social issues. The southern states had increasingly tried to separate themselves from the North since the Revolutionary War, a movement that escalated sharply after 1820 when the newly formed western territories began to deal with the question of slavery and faced being admitted to the Union as either slave or free states. The concern about keeping the number of states even on both sides was coupled with increasingly vocal objection by abolitionists in the North, which caused the South to be even more eager to have equal...
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