Civil War

Civil War. , Abraham Lincoln, who was inaugurated president in early 1861, inherited a divided country. There were many years of tension between the northern states that were industrial-based and the southern states that depended on slavery to harvest the cotton and other crops that the south's agricultural economy relied on. , On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the union. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia also seceded. Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the five other states to form the confederacy on February 4, 1861. Jefferson Davis was elected their first president. The Civil War began with a confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. , The failure of the confederacy to win recognition from foreign countries, and the effective blockade of their coasts by the federal navy, doomed the south to failure. When the war ended four years later, the human cost far exceeded what anyone had imagined at its start. The union endured and the United States emerged stronger from this conflict. The union lost 364,511 and the confederacy lost 163,280, for a total of 527,791 Americans who died in the conflict.