American Civil War

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a separatist conflict between the United States Federal government (the "Union") and eleven Southern slave states that declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America, led by President Jefferson Davis. The Union, led by President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, opposed the expansion of slavery and rejected any right of secession. Fighting commenced on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a Federal military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

During the first year, the Union asserted control of the border states and established a naval blockade as both sides raised large armies. In 1862 large, bloody battles began, causing massive casualties as a result of new weapons and old battlefield tactics. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made the freeing of the slaves a war goal, despite opposition from northern Copperheads who tolerated secession and slavery. Emancipation ensured that Britain and France would not intervene to help the Confederacy. In addition, the goal also allowed the Union to recruit African-Americans for reinforcements, a resource that the Confederacy did not dare exploit until it was too late. War Democrats reluctantly accepted emancipation as part of total war needed to save the Union. In the East, Robert E. Lee rolled up a series of Confederate victories over the Army of the Potomac, but his best general, Thomas &quot;Stonewall&quot; Jackson, was killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. Lee's invasion of the North was repulsed at the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania in July 1863; he barely managed to escape back to Virginia. In the West, the Union Navy captured the port of New Orleans in 1862, and Ulysses S. Grant seized control of the Mississippi River by capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi in July 1863, thus splitting the Confederacy.

By 1864, long-term Union advantages in geography, manpower, industry, finance, political organization and transportation were overwhelming the Confederacy. Grant fought a number of bloody battles with Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864. Lee won most of the battles in a tactical sense but on the whole lost strategically, as he could not replace his casualties and was forced to retreat into trenches around his capital, Richmond, Virginia. Meanwhile, William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia. Sherman's March to the Sea destroyed a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia. In 1865, the Confederacy collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House; all slaves in the Confederacy were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves outside Confederate control were freed by state action or by the Thirteenth Amendment.

The full restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as Reconstruction. The war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including approximately 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease. The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering controversy even today. The main results of the war were the restoration and strengthening of the Union, and the end of slavery in the United States.

Note: The above description pertains to the American Civil War as it unfolded in OTL, as well as all timelines with a POD after 1865.

American Civil War in Crosstime Traffic
Crosstime Traffic was aware of several alternates in which the Confederate States had won the American Civil War.

American Civil War in Days of Infamy
Even 77 years after its end, the American Civil War was still a sore topic in the US, especially in the south who referred to it as "The War Between the States", or “The War of Damnyankee Aggression”. Although many southerners preferred not to talk about the war, they still liked to remember the fight they put up. USMC Sergeant Les Dillon observed this when he met Captain Braxton Bradford.

American Civil War in "Lee at the Alamo"
The American Civil War began in February 1861 when United States Army Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee defended the Union garrison at the Alamo from Texas Militia and Confederate forces under the command of Benjamin McCulloch. The Second Battle of the Alamo ended in defeat for the Union, but made a hero out of Lee. The Colonel had been unsure which side he would support in the coming war, but these events convinced him to stay with the Union, on certain conditions. President Lincoln, whose term had begun while the Alamo siege continued, agreed to the hero's conditions, and transferred Lee to the western theater to fight against Confederates again.

Literary comment
As the story ends in April 1861, the full course of this timeline's Civil War is never told.

American Civil War in "Must and Shall"
The Great Rebellion ended in defeat for the Confederacy. The United States, led by President Hannibal Hamlin since the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln in an attack on Washington, imposed retribution on the South, so harsh that the region remained in a perpetually restive area even into the 1940s. In effect, though destroyed as an actual political entity, the Confederate States continued to claim the allegiance of Southerners, and the war failed in its main aim: to make the United States a single nation again.

American Civil War in Southern Victory
See War of Secession

American Civil War in The Guns of the South
See Second American Revolution

American Civil War in "The Last Reunion"
American Civil War veterans from the vanquished South began periodic reunions in the early Twentieth Century. One veteran, John Houston Thorpe, died at a reunion in 1932. His ghost joined those of the men who died in battle during the Civil War, re-enacting various battles in a far more congenial manner.