( also the American Civil War BrE ))
a civil war fought between the northern and southern states of America from 1861–65. In the 19th century, an increasing number of people mostly from the industrial northern states, called abolitionists , wanted to make slavery illegal, but the more agricultural southern states wanted the right for each state to decide whether to keep slavery or not. Southern states also wanted individual states to have more power than the US federal government and many became secessionists , believing that southern states should secede from the Union (= become independent from the US). In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became President and although he was against slavery, he said that he would not end it. The southern states did not believe this and eleven states left the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, often called the Confederacy , with Jefferson Davis as its President and its capital in Richmond , Virginia. On 12 April 1861 the Confederate Army attacked Fort Sumter , which was in the Confederate state of South Carolina but still occupied by the Union Army and the Civil War began. Over the next four years, the Union army tried to take control of the South. After the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln made the famous Gettysburg Address about democracy. The same year he issued the Emancipation Proclamation which made slavery illegal, but only in the Confederacy. Slaves played an important part in the war, giving information to Union soldiers and also serving in the Union army. In the South especially, people suffered greatly during the war and had little to eat. On 9 April 1865, when the South could fight no more, General Robert E Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. After the war, many Southerners still had very bad feelings towards the North and did not want to end slavery. On 14 April 1865, an actor who supported the South, John Wilkes Booth , shot and killed President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Many southern cities had been destroyed during the war and the economy ruined, and there followed a long, difficult period of Reconstruction . Compare English Civil War .