American Civil War and Emancipation (1861–1865)

CTL-E-5409 · Event · other · 1861–1865

VERIFIED evidence grade of this record

The American Civil War, fought from April 1861 to April 1865, was waged over slavery — and it became, in the fighting, the instrument of slavery's destruction. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared freedom for enslaved people in the rebellious states and opened the Union Army to Black enlistment; by the war's end some 180,000 Black men had served as Union soldiers, most of them formerly enslaved, and roughly 19,000 more in the Navy. Black troops fought in hundreds of engagements, from Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend to Fort Wagner and New Market Heights, and their service transformed the war's meaning: emancipation was no longer a policy granted but a freedom seized and defended in arms. The war closed with Confederate surrender in April 1865, and on December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. CTL records the war under the intake timeline's stop 'Civil War and Emancipation,' one record for the conflict and its central consequence together, as the paste framed them.

The record

• Also known as: Civil War and Emancipation, The Civil War

Notes

Statistics: War: April 1861 – April 1865. Emancipation Proclamation: January 1, 1863. Thirteenth Amendment ratified December 6, 1865. The intake paste's stop #7 (1861) is VERIFIED as an era label; the audit noted the Proclamation falls inside the stop's span. Adjacent gap flagged in the audit: Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) holds no CTL record as of this merge. · Curator's Judgment: DRAFT — for founder review: The graph had a hundred records downstream of this war and none for the war itself. This record states the load-bearing fact plainly: emancipation was enforced by Black arms. Any citation chain that starts later than 1861–65 starts in the middle of the story. · Photo slot: HELD — no rights-cleared image was verified for this record in the merge run's bounded Commons sweep (2026-10-15); slot stays HELD until a cleared image is obtained (commons upload, public-domain government portrait, or CTL original), per CTL-PHOTO-001.

Sources

• National Archives, 'The Emancipation Proclamation' and Civil War reference pages — supports: the January 1, 1863 Proclamation and Black enlistment under it (primary source)
• National Park Service, Civil War / African American Civil War Memorial references — supports: approximately 180,000 Black soldiers in the Union Army and 19,000 in the Navy
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'American Civil War' — supports: the war's dates (April 1861 – April 1865) and the Thirteenth Amendment's ratification on December 6, 1865

Record CTL-E-5409 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · evidence grade: VERIFIED · 3 sources (1 primary) · CTL research: BCI-001, RELP-001.
Directory: all entity records · the knowledge graph

Cite this record

Citation guidance for teachers, journalists, and funders: How to Cite Us.

From the Archive

The archive in pictures

The people, places, and institutions this work documents. Photographs from the CultureTechLens research record — rights-cleared, credited, and cited like everything else here.