MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 3 · 1865
ON THIS DAY · 3 APRIL 1865
Richmond
May 1861 — The Confederacy moves its capital here: industry, prestige, and a fatal geography — two capitals a hundred miles apart fix four years of slaughter between them. It burns and falls on 3 April 1865; Lincoln walks its streets the next day.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration lie four months in which the Union dissolves while a lame-duck government watches. South Carolina goes first (20 December, by 169 votes to 0), and its declaration is refreshingly free of later euphemism: it lists the free states’ “increasing hostility… to the institution of slavery,” their refusal to return fugitives, their toleration of abolition societies. Six states follow by February; delegates at Montgomery write a constitution that forbids their own congress ever to impair slavery. The last grand compromise — Crittenden’s constitutional amendments to protect slavery forever below a line — fails because Lincoln will not concede the one point his election settled: no expansion.
From Chapter 2 — Secession Winter of The American Civil War, 1861–1865 (APR 1861).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — A four-month vacuum of power. The Constitution then left presidents-elect waiting until March. Buchanan held that secession was illegal but that coercion was also illegal — a…
- The turn — Fort Sumter, 12–14 April 1861. The bombardment killed no one in combat and changed everything: it turned a constitutional dispute into a rebellion under fire, brought four more…
- What it changed — The upper South flips — and doubles the war. Virginia brings the Tredegar Iron Works (the South’s only great foundry), Robert E. Lee, and a border on Washington itself. The capital moves to…
Then ask the room: Lincoln could have evacuated Sumter and bought time — many advisers urged exactly that. Was provoking the crisis a mistake? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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