| The Civil War was a military conflict between the United States of America (the Union) and the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy) from 1861 to 1865.
The American Civil War is sometimes called the War Between the States. It began on April 12, 1861, when General P G T Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and it lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The war took more than 600,000 lives, destroyed property valued at $5 billion and opened wounds that have not yet completely healed more than 125 years later.
The chief and immediate cause of the war was slavery. The main debate between the North and the South on the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in the Western Territories recently acquired during the Mexican War (1846-1848). In 1860 the situation became explosive. The election of Abraham Lincoln as president was viewed by the South as a threat to slavery and ignited the war.
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