Beginning in 1861, the American Civil War was one of the most brutal, bloody, and God-forsaken periods in American history. We suffered a lot in the South during the 1960s, but the Civil War was much worse. It is difficult to comprehend why the South "liked Dixie" and desired to establish a new nation within the United States below the Mason-Dixon Line. As if it were "fun" in some way, people in the South even staged "recreations" of the Civil War in which actors pretended to "die" in the major battles of the war, which historians have referred to as a conflict in which "brother killed brother." researching civil war ancestors

Regardless, the northern United States (the Union, or the North) and the southern slave states of the temporary Confederate States of America (the Confederacy, or the South), led by their elected president Jefferson Davis, fought in the Civil War. The North was known as the Union, and the South was the Confederacy. The Union was led by President Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, which was the original version of the Democratic Party and included all Free States as well as the five Border States that had slaves.

Before Lincoln took office, seven southern states declared secession from the Union following Lincoln's victory in the 1860 presidential election, and Republicans at the time were opposed to the expansion of slavery into USA-owned overseas territories. Secession was categorically rejected by the Union as an internal "rebellion."

On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a Union military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, kicking off the war. President Lincoln before long shaped up an enormous worker multitude of northerners, yet four additional southern states then, at that point, proclaimed their severance. The Union established a naval blockade and took control of the Border States within the first year of the war, but both sides amassed enormous armies and resources. The war casualties on American soil at Shiloh and Antietam in 1862 were unlike anything else in history.

This bloody war, dubbed "the battle between brother and brother in the land of liberty," resulted in the deaths of approximately 620,000 Americans. Many of the men who took part in the battle were members of the same family. The war ruined the white South's finances and left untold numbers of civilians dead. It did a lot of damage with newer weapons technology, leaving massive farm fields littered with bodies.

This war stood out forever as the most horrendously terrible one America at any point battled, which is presumably a significant justification for why the South actually recalls that it. White northerners are well aware of their "attitude adjustment" issues following their defeat, which included rumors of the South "rising again" and possibly even seceding from the Union. Since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, most of this later "ranting" has stopped.

However, during the Civil War, the white North offered blacks opportunities if they fought for them, while the South used black soldiers to force their own slaves into battle. However, this is where the Emancipation Proclamation came into play, and the fact that its "war goal" was to end slavery in the South made it famous. This likely contributed to the Union's eventual victory and made the Confederacy's labor shortages significantly more difficult. However, the entire nation, particularly the South, was horribly devastated and torn apart, necessitating reparations for a considerable amount of time, leading the South to fantasize about white vengeance.