The Civil War started on April 12, 1861. It was a military conflict between the United States of America, which was known as the union and the Confederate States of America know as the Confederacy. It began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The war took more than 600,000 lives, destroyed five billion dollars worth of property and brought freedom to 4 million black slaves.The main cause of the war was slavery. Southern states depended on slavery to support their agricultural economy. Only a small amount of Northerners were against slavery. However, they were opposed to its expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor. The main debate centered on whether slavery should be allowed in the Western territories, recently acquired during the Mexican War, which lasted from 1846-1848.The North and the South had developed into two very different regions by 1860. The North was firmly established as an industrial society. The South remained largely agricultural. At that time the federal government's main source of its profits was the tariff on imported goods. Southerners, who imported many manufactured goods, opposed tariffs, while the manufacturing economy of the North demanded high tariffs to protect its products from foreign competition. The expanding Northwest Territory was far from the markets its grain and cattle were used at. They built roads and canals for survival and supported demands for high tariffs. In addition, loyalty to one's state was often the priority over loyalty to one's country in the early days of the United States. Neither North or the South had any strong sense of the stability of the Union.In 1861, Seven southern states set up confederacy on February 8, with Jefferson Davis as president, they captured federal arsenals and forts. The...
