Slavers' War

Slavers' War (also known as the First American Civil War) was a military conflict fought on the territory of the Old United States between the Union and the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. The war was a result of the long controversy on the issue of slavery by Southern planters. The war broke out in April 1861 when secessionist forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina shortly after Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as the President of the United States and ended when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Appomattox Court House, followed by Andrew Johnson's 9 May Proclamation.

The Slavers' War became one of the central historical events in the American collective memory. In the South, the perception of the war was affected by the myth of the Lost Cause, which glorified the Confederate cause as a just and heroic one and portrayed the North as aggressors who attempted to suppress the Southern way of life and "states' rights", all while downplaying the significance of slavery as the ultimate reason for the war. After the Red May Revolution, the Lost Cause historiography quickly became marginalized in the scholar circles and faded away from the public perception.