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Freeing the Slaves

Some abolitionists were not satisfi ed with merely smuggling
slaves to the North, insisting that an armed slave rebellion against
the slave owners was the only way to end slavery. In 1859, the
radical abolitionist John Brown led an attack on a US Army ar-
senal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, with the plan to obtain weapons
and arm slaves so they could rise up against their masters. The
raid failed. Brown and his men were captured and executed by
hanging on December 1, 1859.
Still, the incident helped stoke fear among southerners, who
were now convinced that the abolitionist movement in the North
aimed to use force to free the slaves. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln
was elected president. Lincoln believed slavery was morally wrong
and sympathized with the abolitionist movement. Many southern
whites believed he represented a danger to their way of life and
some southern states began to secede from, or drop out of, the
United States. On April 12, 1861—thirty-nine days after Lincoln
was inaugurated as president—the fi rst shots were fi red at Fort
Sumter in South Carolina between US forces and secessionist mi-
litias, touching off the Civil War. Eventually, thirteen states seceded
from the union. They were known as the Confederate States of
America, or simply the Confederacy.
The war continued for four years and produced a staggering
death toll: an estimated 360,000 Union soldiers lost their lives,
while 258,000 Confederate soldiers were killed before the South
fi nally surrendered. Given that the entire population of the country
at the time was about 31 million people, it means that about 2
percent of American citizens lost their lives in the war. Of course,
tens of thousands of other soldiers on both sides returned home
with devastating wounds such as the loss of arms and legs.
But the Union victory ensured the freedom of the slaves. In
1862, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
all American slaves—although his order was ignored in the South-
ern states. But following the war, in 1865, Congress adopted and
the state legislatures ratifi ed the Thirteenth Amendment to the

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