* At the beginning of the 19th century, the general belief in the United States was that slavery would die out in America. Fifty years later, it was all too much alive, with tensions between the slaveholding South and the industrialized North growing towards an explosion.
In late 1859, an anti-slavery extremist John Brown performed a raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with the intent of starting a slave rebellion. The action was slapdash and a complete failure, its only real result being to set tensions between the North and the South to the breaking point. The breaking point finally came with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the American presidency in 1860. His very election began the rush towards secession, and from the outset of his presidency, Lincoln had a crisis on his hands.
The slide towards war proved irresistible; fighting finally broke out in the spring of 1861, when the new secessionist government of the break-away Southern states bombarded Fort Sumter, a Union outpost in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The first actions were disorganized to the point of haphazard, concluding in a major confrontation between Northern and Southern armies near Manassas in Virginia. The battle ended in Union defeat, though the Confederate victory was hardly decisive -- both sides beginning to realize that they faced hard war.
