Emancipation Proclamation

The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by eleven Southern slave states that had declared their secession from... the United States. Secessionists argued that the United States Constitution was a compact among states, an agreement which each state could abandon without consultation. The U.S. government rejected secession as illegal. Following a Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, a federal fort in the Confederate state of South Carolina, the U.S. used military action to defeat the Confederacy. No foreign nation officially recognized the Confederate States of America as an independent country, but several did grant belligerent status. The Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories formed a "permanent federal government" in Montgomery, Alabama. In response to a call by Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other lost federal properties in the South, four additional slave-holding states declared their secession and joined the Confederacy.
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The American Civil War , also referred to as the War Between the States or simply the Civil War, was a civil war fought in the United States of... America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25 states supported the federal government . After four years of warfare, mostly within the Southern states, the Confederacy surrendered and slavery was outlawed everywhere in the nation. Issues that led to war were partially resolved in the Reconstruction Era that followed, though others remained unresolved. In the presidential election of 1860, the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, had campaigned against expanding slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. The Republicans strongly advocated nationalism, and in their 1860 platform they denounced threats of disunion as avowals of treason.
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