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The Civil War was the worst war in American history. The Confederacy seceded from the United States in order to preserve slavery, leading to 4 years of modern warfare the likes we have never seen. In the process the US defined what freedom meant as a nation.

All US history lectures in chronological order:    • US history lectures  
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See pinned comment and its replies for notes, responses, and errata
assigned readings for this week
Battle Hymn of the Republic (1862):    • The Battle Hymn of the Republic  
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863): https://bit.ly/2WzLPpY
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865): https://bit.ly/2TbBJJM
William Henry Singleton, “Recollection of My Slavery Days,” Documenting the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1922): https://bit.ly/2LxWxqF

Bibliography
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988). https://amzn.to/2PP9Xzh

Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (New York: Scribner, 2020). https://amzn.to/3cGCc3j

Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, New Ed. (1991; New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 1993). https://amzn.to/39mL6wb

Wars Within a War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War, eds. Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009). https://amzn.to/2UO7biu

A great set of primary sources on the entire conflict: The War of the Rebellion: A compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 129 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1882). https://www.loc.gov/item/03003452/
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Wiki: The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 9, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union (states that remained loyal to the federal union,[e] or "the North") and the Confederacy (states that voted to secede, or "the South").[f] The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery into territories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican–American War.[14] On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, four million of the 32 million Americans (~13%) were enslaved black people, almost all in the South.[15]

The practice of slavery in the United States was one of the key political issues of the 19th century. Decades of political unrest over slavery led up to the Civil War. Disunion came after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidential election on an anti-slavery expansion platform. An initial seven southern slave states declared their secession from the country to form the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized federal forts within territory they claimed. The last-minute Crittenden Compromise tried to avert conflict but failed; both sides prepared for war. Fighting broke out in April 1861 when the Confederate army began the Battle of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, just over a month after the first inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. The Confederacy grew to control at least a majority of territory in eleven states (out of the 34 U.S. states in February 1861), and asserted claims to two more. Both sides raised large volunteer and conscription armies. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.
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