Short answer

  • The war began on April 12, 1861, with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, after seven Southern states had seceded over the winter of 1860 to 1861.
  • The famous end date is April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House.
  • Larger Confederate forces surrendered later: Joseph E. Johnston on April 26, 1865 (the end date Encyclopaedia Britannica uses), and the last general in the field, the Cherokee brigadier Stand Watie, on June 23, 1865.
  • The legal end came on August 20, 1866, when President Andrew Johnson proclaimed that peace existed "in and throughout the whole of the United States of America."
  • There was never a peace treaty, because the United States never recognized the Confederacy as a nation. The war ended by surrenders and proclamations, not by a signature on a treaty.

The American Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It ended four years later, in the spring of 1865, but on which day depends on what you mean by “ended.” Robert E. Lee surrendered in April, the last Confederate general in the field laid down his arms in June, a Confederate warship was still attacking American ships in the Pacific that summer, and the President of the United States did not proclaim the insurrection over until August 20, 1866. This article gives the standard dates, then walks through each ending in order.

The Short Answer, and Why It Is Not the Whole Answer

The dates in most textbooks are April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865, or simply 1861 to 1865. Those dates are not wrong. April 12, 1861 is the day organized armies began fighting in earnest, and April 9, 1865 is the day the Confederacy’s most important army surrendered, after which its collapse was a matter of weeks. Reference works that need a single end date pick different days from that spring: Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, dates the war April 12, 1861 to April 26, 1865, choosing the surrender of the largest remaining Confederate army rather than Lee’s.

The reason no single end date commands total agreement is structural. Wars between recognized nations usually end with a treaty, one document and one date. The Civil War could not end that way. In the view of the United States government, the Confederacy was not a country but an insurrection, so there was no enemy state to sign peace. Instead, the war ended as a sequence: army by army, department by department, until no Confederate force remained in the field, and then, more than a year later, a presidential proclamation closed the legal file. Each stage has its date, and each date is the correct answer to a slightly different question.

Before the Shooting: The Secession Winter

The war’s start date is cleaner than its end date, but the crisis began months earlier. On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party, won the presidential election. Southern states that had threatened to leave the Union if an antislavery president were elected began to act. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. Six more followed in quick succession: Mississippi (January 9), Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), Louisiana (January 26), and Texas (February 1). In February 1861, delegates from the seven seceded states met at Montgomery, Alabama, organized the Confederate States of America, and chose Jefferson Davis as its provisional president.

The immediate dispute concerned the federal forts sitting inside seceded states, above all Fort Sumter, a United States Army post on an island in Charleston Harbor. Major Robert Anderson held the fort with a small garrison and dwindling supplies. In January 1861, shots were already fired: on January 9, 1861, cadets from The Citadel manning a battery on Morris Island fired on the unarmed steamer Star of the West, which was attempting to carry supplies to Sumter, and drove it off. Those shots are sometimes called the first of the Civil War, though the ship was a civilian vessel and no war had been declared or organized. Lincoln, inaugurated on March 4, 1861, decided to resupply the fort with food only, and notified South Carolina that a relief expedition was coming. The Confederate government under Davis chose to fire first.

The Beginning: Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries around Charleston Harbor, under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard, opened fire on Fort Sumter. The bombardment lasted about 34 hours. Remarkably, no soldier on either side was killed during the shelling itself; the only deaths came from an accident on April 14, when a cannon exploded during the surrender salute, killing a Union private, Daniel Hough, outright and mortally wounding another, Edward Galloway, who died in hospital days later. Anderson surrendered the fort on April 13 and marched his men out the next day.

Sumter settled the question of whether there would be a war, and it expanded the Confederacy. On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Four states of the Upper South that had been holding back now seceded rather than supply troops against their neighbors: Virginia (April 17), Arkansas (May 6), Tennessee (May 7), and North Carolina (May 20), bringing the Confederacy to eleven states. The first major battle followed on July 21, 1861, at Bull Run in Virginia, where a Confederate victory ended Northern hopes that the war would be short. By then, the conflict had the shape it would keep for four years.

This is why April 12, 1861 is the standard start date. Earlier dates mark the approach of war: the election, the secessions, the Star of the West incident. April 12 is when two organized governments began fighting each other with armies, which is what makes a war a war rather than a political crisis.

The Spring of Surrenders: April to June 1865

The end came in reverse order of fame. By April 1865 the Confederacy was collapsing. Richmond, its capital, was evacuated on April 2 and occupied by Union troops the next day, and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, worn down to roughly 28,000 men, was cornered in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. There, on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant’s terms were generous and became the template for what followed: officers and men were paroled, not imprisoned, and soldiers who owned horses could take them home for the spring planting. Lee’s surrender is the war’s symbolic end, and April 9 is the date most Americans learn. Five days later, on April 14, Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, and Vice President Andrew Johnson inherited the task of finishing the war.

Lee, however, commanded only one army. The largest Confederate force still in the field belonged to General Joseph E. Johnston, facing William T. Sherman in North Carolina. After an initial set of terms so sweeping that Washington rejected them as a political settlement rather than a military surrender, Johnston surrendered on April 26, 1865, at Bennett Place, a farmhouse near Durham Station. His capitulation covered some 89,000 Confederate soldiers across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the largest single surrender of Confederate troops in the war. It is this date that Britannica takes as the war’s end.

The surrenders rolled west. General Richard Taylor gave up the Confederate forces in Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana on May 4. On May 5, at Washington, Georgia, Jefferson Davis formally dissolved the Confederate government; he was captured by Union cavalry near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. Fighting, meanwhile, had not read the surrender documents. On May 12 and 13, 1865, at Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas, Union and Confederate troops fought the war’s last land battle, more than a month after Appomattox. In an irony the textbooks rarely include, the Confederates won it. A Union private, John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana, killed there, is often identified as the last soldier to die in battle in the Civil War.

The Last Surrenders: A General in June, a Warship in November

The Trans-Mississippi Department, the Confederacy west of the river, held out longest among the land forces. Its commander, General E. Kirby Smith, agreed to surrender terms in late May; the convention was signed on June 2, 1865, aboard the U.S. steamer Fort Jackson off Galveston, Texas. Even then, one general kept his command in the field. Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader and the only Native American to reach the rank of brigadier general in Confederate service, commanded the First Indian Brigade in the Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. On June 23, 1865, at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation, Watie signed a cease-fire and surrendered his men. He was the last Confederate general in the field to lay down his arms.

The strangest ending happened at sea. The Confederate commerce raider CSS Shenandoah had sailed from England in 1864 and spent 1865 destroying American whaling ships in the North Pacific. In late June 1865, ten weeks after Appomattox, she captured and burned whalers near the Bering Strait, firing what are counted as the last shots of the war, because her captain, James Iredell Waddell, did not believe the newspaper reports found aboard his prizes. Only on August 2, 1865, when the British bark Barracouta showed him conclusive proof, did Waddell accept that the Confederacy was gone. Fearing his crew would be treated as pirates, he disarmed the ship, sailed some 9,000 miles around Cape Horn, and on November 6, 1865, surrendered Shenandoah at Liverpool, England, to the Royal Navy. It was the last Confederate surrender of the war, and the only one that took place in a foreign port, nearly seven months after Lee had given up at Appomattox.

Armies can stop fighting before a war is legally over, and the Civil War shows the gap clearly. Because the federal government treated the conflict as an insurrection, its formal close required a presidential finding that the insurrection no longer existed. President Johnson issued that finding in two steps. On April 2, 1866, he proclaimed the insurrection at an end in ten of the former Confederate states: Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Virginia. Texas, where civil authority was still shakiest, was excepted.

On August 20, 1866, Johnson completed the process. His proclamation declared the insurrection in Texas ended as well, and went on, in the words of the document itself, to proclaim “that the said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.” For legal purposes, including questions the Supreme Court later considered about wartime measures, that is the war’s official end: not a battlefield in Virginia but a proclamation signed in Washington sixteen months after the fighting stopped.

Timeline of the Beginning and the End

DateEvent
December 20, 1860South Carolina secedes, the first of eleven states to leave the Union
January 9, 1861Southern battery fires on the steamer Star of the West in Charleston Harbor
April 12, 1861Confederates bombard Fort Sumter; the war begins
April 15, 1861Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers; four Upper South states secede over the following weeks
July 21, 1861First Battle of Bull Run, the war’s first major battle
April 9, 1865Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House
April 14, 1865Lincoln is assassinated; Andrew Johnson becomes president
April 26, 1865Johnston surrenders some 89,000 men, the largest Confederate capitulation
May 12 to 13, 1865Palmito Ranch, Texas, the last land battle of the war
June 2, 1865Kirby Smith signs the surrender of the Trans-Mississippi Department
June 23, 1865Stand Watie surrenders, the last Confederate general in the field
November 6, 1865CSS Shenandoah surrenders at Liverpool, the last Confederate surrender
April 2, 1866Johnson proclaims the insurrection ended in every former Confederate state except Texas
August 20, 1866Johnson proclaims peace throughout the whole United States; the legal end of the war

So How Long Did the Civil War Last?

The schoolbook answer is four years. The arithmetic is more precise and slightly less tidy. From April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865 is 1,458 days, three days short of exactly four years. Measured to Johnston’s surrender on April 26, the war runs four years and two weeks. Measured in the field, to Stand Watie’s surrender, it runs four years and a little over two months. Measured to the last surrender of all, the Shenandoah at Liverpool, it runs just under four years and seven months. And measured in law, from Fort Sumter to Johnson’s final proclamation, the insurrection lasted five years and four months. All five answers are defensible; they differ only in which ending you count.

Why the Textbooks Stop at Appomattox

If so many dates compete, why does April 9, 1865 dominate? Partly because it deserves to: Lee’s army was the Confederacy’s principal force and its symbol, and once it was gone, no realistic path to Confederate survival remained. Partly because Appomattox offers a clean story, two famous generals in a farmhouse, where the real ending was administrative and spread across a continent. And partly because of what the later dates involve: an obscure farm in Texas, a Cherokee general in the Indian Territory, a raider surrendering to a foreign navy, and a lawyerly proclamation. Textbooks are not wrong to use April 1865. They are incomplete when they let readers believe that on April 10 the war was simply, wholly over. The fighting, the killing, and the legal state of war each ended on their own schedule.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the American Civil War start?

On April 12, 1861, at 4:30 in the morning, when Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The crisis that produced it began with Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the secession of seven Southern states over the following winter.

When did the Civil War end?

The most common answer is April 9, 1865, the day Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Fuller answers give April 26, 1865 (Johnston’s surrender of the largest Confederate force, the date Britannica uses), or run the ending out to the last surrenders in June and November 1865, with the legal end proclaimed on August 20, 1866.

Who surrendered last in the Civil War?

Among generals in the field, Stand Watie, the Cherokee brigadier who surrendered his First Indian Brigade at Doaksville on June 23, 1865. The last Confederate surrender of all was naval: Captain James Iredell Waddell gave up CSS Shenandoah at Liverpool, England, on November 6, 1865.

Was there a peace treaty ending the Civil War?

No. A treaty requires two recognized governments, and the United States never recognized the Confederacy as a nation, treating the war as an insurrection. The war therefore ended through military surrenders in 1865 and presidential proclamations in 1866, not through a negotiated peace treaty.

How long did the Civil War last?

Just under four years of major fighting, from April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865, a span of 1,458 days. Counting the trailing surrenders extends the conflict into November 1865, and the legal state of insurrection lasted until August 20, 1866.

How many people died in the Civil War?

The traditional figure is about 620,000 soldiers. Demographic research published since 2011, notably by the historian J. David Hacker, has argued the true total is higher, closer to 750,000. The exact number cannot be recovered from surviving records, which is why both figures continue to circulate.

Conclusion

When was the Civil War? It began at a specific moment, 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, in Charleston Harbor, and it refused to end at a single moment in return. Its most famous army surrendered on April 9, 1865; its largest on April 26; its last general on June 23; its last warship, in an English port, on November 6; and its legal existence was closed by President Johnson on August 20, 1866. The pair of dates to carry away is 1861 to 1865 for the war of armies, with 1866 for the war on paper. The debate over the end date is not pedantry. It is the difference between a war that stopped being fought and a war that stopped, at last, being an open question of law.

Keep reading: When Did World War 2 End? The Two Surrenders and the Paperwork

Keep reading: Due Process, the Bill of Rights and the 10th and 14th Amendments: Explained in Plain English

Sources & references

Emma Hudson

Editor of Amberaisle — clear, thoughtful explainers for curious readers. More about the editor →