Why Did African Americans Win The Civil War

The American Civil War was a war fought over equality. The country was split into North and the South, the union and the confederates. The war was sparked by the election of the sixteenth president Abraham Lincoln in 1860. A month after Lincoln took office the Civil War would officially start. President Lincoln wanted to get slavery out of the states. Angry and unwilling to accept Lincoln’s proposal, seven southern confederate states withdrew from the rest of the country and made the Confederate States of America. With tensions rising and neither side willing to back down, a war broke out in the nation. This war was a brutal and bloody war, in some cases families would fight families over their disagreement in whether African Americans should

Many southerners were angry that the people who were previously their slaves would now be as equally free as them. One man by the name of John Wilkes Booth was extremely angry with the outcome of the war. On April 9, 1865 General Robert E. Lee would surrender his troops which would be a devastating blow to the confederate army. On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln would give a speech outside the White House about the country needed to reunify, Booth who was at the speech then said, “Now, by God I will put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make”. Just three days after while attending the play “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth proved he was not a liar by shooting Lincoln in the head at point blank range, which would kill the president. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was a demise to the progress that had been made with the civil war and equality because of the amount made prior to the assassination, the motives of those behind his assassination, and the events that would follow Lincoln’s

There were also anti-slavery movements starting in the North. In the South however, over a third of the Souths population were registered slaves. Slaves would often perform tasks that were extremely physical labor. Many were mistreated and lived in poor conditions. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, seven southern states would leave the United States because of Lincoln’s different view of slavery continuing into the new western civilizations. To prevent the country to split completely, Lincoln decided to fight the South. On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." This would actually not free any slaves until the southern states had been recaptured by the North, but as the southern states were captured the slaves in that state would become