Chapter 21

Both sides sought foreign support in the war's early months. In late 1861, the Trent Affair nearly dragged Britain into the conflict when a U.S. Navy captain removed two Confederate envoys from a British mail steamer. London demanded their release and prepared for war; Lincoln, unwilling to fight two enemies at once, wisely released the envoys and defused the crisis.

Despite southern hopes of British and French recognition, no European power ever formally recognized the Confederacy, and Union diplomacy — aided by the Emancipation Proclamation's moral clarity — kept Europe on the sidelines.

In September 1862, Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland, hoping a victory on northern soil would win European recognition and northern war-weariness. Union forces intercepted Lee's battle plans and met his army at Antietam Creek, resulting in the bloodiest single day in American history — over 22,000 combined casualties — and a tactical draw that nonetheless forced Lee to retreat.

The narrow Union strategic success gave President Lincoln the political opening he needed. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in Confederate-held territory free. It did not free enslaved people in the loyal border states, but it transformed the war's purpose — from merely preserving the Union to also ending slavery — and opened the Union army's ranks to Black soldiers, nearly 200,000 of whom would ultimately serve.

Emboldened by victories in Virginia, Lee launched a second invasion of the North in the summer of 1863. Union and Confederate forces collided at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the war's largest and bloodiest battle. On the third day, Lee ordered a massive frontal assault — Pickett's Charge — against the center of the Union line, which was decisively repulsed with catastrophic Confederate losses.

Lee retreated back to Virginia and never again invaded northern territory. Gettysburg is widely regarded as the war's turning point, ending any realistic Confederate hope of winning the war through a decisive battlefield victory in the North.

On the very same week as Gettysburg, General Ulysses S. Grant completed a grinding siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. Its surrender on July 4, 1863, gave the Union total control of the river, splitting the Confederacy and cutting Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana off from the rest of the South.

The twin victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg marked the definitive turning point of the war, though nearly two more years of brutal fighting remained.

In November 1863, Lincoln delivered a brief address at the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg. In just a few hundred words, the Gettysburg Address redefined the meaning of the war — casting it not merely as a struggle to preserve the Union, but as a test of whether a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could endure, promising a "new birth of freedom."

In 1864, Lincoln made Ulysses S. Grant commanding general of all Union armies. Grant adopted a strategy of relentless, coordinated pressure on multiple fronts, accepting heavy casualties in a war of attrition that the more populous North could better sustain than the South.

General William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta and then led his army on the destructive March to the Sea through Georgia, waging a form of total war that targeted railroads, factories, and farms to cripple the Confederacy's ability and will to keep fighting. Sherman's success — especially the fall of Atlanta — helped secure Lincoln's reelection in November 1864 over Democratic challenger George McClellan, ensuring the war would be fought to its conclusion.

With his armies exhausted and surrounded, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, on generous terms that allowed his soldiers to return home. Other Confederate forces surrendered in the following weeks, effectively ending the Civil War.

Just five days later, on April 14, 1865, actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington; Lincoln died the next morning. Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president, inheriting the immense task of reunifying the nation.

That December, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, formally and permanently abolishing slavery throughout the United States — completing, in law, what the Emancipation Proclamation had begun in war, but leaving the far harder work of Reconstruction still to come.