<Ul> <Li> Union blockade </Li> <Li> Eastern </Li> <Li> Western </Li> <Li> Lower Seaboard </Li> <Li> Trans - Mississippi </Li> <Li> Pacific Coast </Li> </Ul> <Li> Trans - Mississippi </Li> <P> The American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865 . The result of a long - standing controversy over slavery, war broke out in April 1861, when Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, shortly after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated . The nationalists of the Union proclaimed loyalty to the U.S. Constitution . They faced secessionists of the Confederate States of America, who advocated for states' rights to perpetual slavery and its expansion in the Americas . </P> <P> Among the 34 U.S. states in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America . The Confederacy grew to include eleven states; it claimed two more border states (Kentucky and Missouri), the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the Union's western territories of Arizona and New Mexico, which was organized and incorporated into the Confederacy as Confederate Arizona . The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government, nor was it recognized by any foreign country (although Britain and France granted it belligerent status). The states that remained loyal, including the border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North . </P>

When did the first battle of the civil war take place