Sean Gehant
End of Slavery
U.S. History
Feb. 11th 2014
End of Slavery
This paper is about slavery and the reasons why the civil war ended it. After decades of the south’s extensions of slavery, our nation ran into a civil war. In 1861, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union. That was also when South Carolina troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston. Lincoln then asked for volunteers to build a union army. The same year, eleven southern states seceded from the union.
At the Battle of Bull Run, Americans realized the war would be a war of bloodshed. The confederacy had experienced generals, Lee and Jackson but lacked industrial resources and men to fight in the prolonged war. Lincoln had trouble finding generals with equal caliber, until he found Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. The union also had the sources and population to get through the war.
Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation, issued after the union’s victory at Antietam, freed all the slaves within the confederacy. It changed the goal of the war not to just preserve the union, but put an end to slavery.
Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg nearly collapsed the confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant’s siege of Vicksburg gave the Union control of the Mississippi. General Meade stopped the Union at the college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A crippled Lee lost 28,000 men and retreated to Virginia. Lincolns Gettysburg address, opening a national cemetery, redefined the struggle for war. Grant’s capture of Petersburg and Richmond, and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and his march to the sea ended any Confederate hopes for victory. Lee and his men withdrew to Appattomax County, where Lee surrendered to grant on April 9, 1865. The generous surrender did not pacify all Southerners, and on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln’s death shocked the North and South and thwarted plans for an orderly...