Aim higher, reach further.

How America's Civil War Changed the World

Imagine how the last 150 years would have been different had the North not freed the slaves and saved the Union.

On April 12, 1861, a shell fired from a rebel battery on Johnson's Island in Charleston harbor burst over Fort Sumter, touching off the Civil War. Answering the South Carolina secession convention's call to join it in "a great Slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses," 11 slave-holding states soon withdrew from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. Armies fought over now-famous battlefields from Bull Run to Petersburg in a seesaw contest that would ultimately claim 620,000 American lives before coming to an end at Appomattox,...

Popular on WSJ