Richmond, the state capital of Virginia, becomes the capital of the Southern Confederacy

Shots are fired against the Federal military garrison in Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, launching the American Civil War

Mathew Brady sends teams ot photographers to the various battle fronts to ensure a thorough photographic record of the American Civil War

The first battle of the American Civil War, fought near Manassas and the Bull Run Creek, is a clear Confederate victory

Longfellow's narrative poem Paul Revere's Ride dramatizes a turning point at the start of the American Revolution

Julia Ward Howe publishes The Battle Hymn of the Republic, inspired by a visit to Union troops in the American Civil War

The Monitor and the Merrimack fight all morning off the Virginia coast, in history's first clash between ironclad ships

A two-day engagement at Shiloh is the first Civil War battle to bring massive casualties, with more than 23,000 dead, wounded or missing

In a surprise raid, Union forces sail up the Mississippi estuary to capture New Orleans

George B. McClellan brings a Union army within a few miles of Richmond, but withdraws after the Seven Days Battle against Robert E. Lee

The Homestead Act grants 160 acres in the west of the USA to any family farming them for five years

Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee defeat a Union army in the second battle of Bull Run or Manassas

The Federal victory at Antietam comes at a cost of more than 22,000 casualties in a single day

Lincoln declares in his Emancipation Proclamation that all slaves in any state opposing the Union government 'are and henceforward shall be free'

Unpublished American poet Emily Dickinson writes more than 300 poems within the year

It is discovered in the US that wood pulp can be used to make paper, and the Boston Weekly Journal is the first to use the new substance

Samuel Clemens uses the pseudonym Mark Twain for the first time on an article in Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise

Mobs of women destroy shops in Richmond, Virginia, in protest at food prices inflated by the war

The three-day Battle of Gettysburg, inconclusive but more damaging to the Confederates, brings casualties on both sides of more than 50,000

After a six-week siege the city of Vicksburg surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the entire Mississippi under Union control

Four days of riots in New York greet Lincoln's new conscription or draft laws, with exemptions for the rich

The Seventh-day Adventists become an organized church, with a first General Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan

President Lincoln, in honouring the Union dead at Gettysburg, captures in three minutes the essence of American democracy

Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman become Lincoln's two leading generals in the final thrust of the Civil War

Grant moves south in a hard-fought campaign to pin down Lee's Confederate army at Petersburg, near Richmond