American Civil War (12 avr. 1861 – 9 avr. 1865)

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By the time December rolled around, nearly a million armed Americans confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri (about 1930 km). The real fighting began in 1862. Huge battles such as Shiloh in Tennessee, Fredericksburg in Virginia, Gaines’ Mill, Second Manassas and Antietam in Maryland preceded even bigger campaigns and battles in the following years to come. By 1864, the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore Unity had dissolved into a new strategy of ‘total war’ to destroy the Old South and its slave trade and to give the new Union a ‘new birth of freedom’, as put by President Lincoln in his address at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery to the soldiers killed there. From 1862 to 1865 Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fended off attacks and invasions by the Union Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by a series of completely ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia to become general chief of all the Union armies in 1864. Grant was the general who finally brought Lee to bay at Appomattox in 1865. Meanwhile, the Union army won a series of battles over Confederate armies commanded by useless or hopelessly unlucky Confederate generals.

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