America may seem more divided today than ever, but the 1860s remind us the nation has endured much worse.

It’s no exaggeration to say the American Civil War (1861-1865) was the darkest chapter in our nation’s history. This national calamity touched nearly every American and shaped modern America.

Historian and author Shelby Foote may have said it best in Ken Burns’ groundbreaking documentary The Civil War:

“The Civil War defined us as what we are, and it opened us to being what we became — good and bad. And it is very necessary if you’re going to understand the American character in the 20th century to learn about this enormous catastrophe in the mid-19th century.”

Yet as the new decade dawned on New Year’s Day 1860, the front pages of several popular newspapers barely mentioned the simmering tension between North and South. For 2 cents, readers of the New York Herald could browse news from Europe, details about theaters, exhibitions and church services, or the latest local political intrigues. But little about the gathering storm.

That would change as the presidential race of 1860 heated up. Abraham Lincoln’s surprise nomination in May and subsequent election as the 16th president in November provided the spark that ignited the powder keg in the spring of 1861. The conflict would eventually take the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.

Beyond the battlefields, the Civil War profoundly affected medicine, communication, industry, banking and women’s rights. Let’s revisit some of the events and people that captured headlines in the 1860s.

Abraham Lincoln was unknown to many Americans in May 1860 when he narrowly won the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in Chicago. In November, Lincoln and his running mate, Sen. Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, defeated Southern Democrat John Breckinridge, Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas and Constitutional Union candidate John Bell. The Lincoln-Hamlin ticket won 180 electoral votes, despite earning only 40% of the popular vote in an election where more than 81% of eligible voters turned out.

“WHOOP-EE!” crowed the Republican-leaning Kansas Chief on Nov. 8, 1860. “We have the glorious tidings to proclaim that Lincoln and Hamlin are our next President and Vice President, by overwhelming majorities.”

Southerners were far less jubilant. Beginning with South Carolina in December 1860, seven Southern states seceded from the Union by early 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America.

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln tried to defuse the tension:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Still, Lincoln declared his intention to uphold the laws of the Union in all states:

“In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority.”

It was forced on April 12, 1861, when Confederate shore batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. The island fort surrendered after 34 hours of bombardment. On April 15, President Lincoln declared an insurrection and called for 75,000 volunteers to stop the rebellion. Four more states seceded in the following weeks and joined the Confederacy. The war was on.

The Union and Confederate armies clashed on July 21, 1861, near Manassas, Va. The battle became known as the “picnic battle” because curious civilians — including members of Congress — traveled from Washington, D.C., with opera glasses and picnic baskets, expecting to watch a quick Union victory.

At first the Union seemed poised to win. But Confederate reinforcements forced a Union retreat that turned into a rout, sending panicked soldiers and spectators scrambling for their lives.

The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 22 called it “A TERRIFIC BLOODY BATTLE.”

The bloodshed was only beginning.

By June 1862, the industrial North’s advantage in men and material pushed the largest army ever fielded in North America to the doorstep of Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.

Then the South unleashed its new secret weapon: Gen. Robert E. Lee. Replacing the wounded Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia and went on the offensive — driving back a vastly superior force during the Seven Days’ Battles.

Fighting in the East favored the underdog Confederates for the next two years under Lee’s brilliant leadership, while both sides claimed victories in the Western theater.

The casualty lists published in newspapers were staggering. At the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in April 1862, nearly 24,000 Americans were killed, wounded or missing during two days of battle — including more than 1,700 dead.

The slaughter at Shiloh was surpassed at Antietam in September 1862. The Union army halted the Army of Northern Virginia’s invasion of Maryland, but the cost was more than 22,000 killed, wounded or missing on both sides after 12 hours of furious combat — making it the single deadliest day in American history.

Stopping Robert E. Lee’s invasion gave President Lincoln the initiative he needed to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The Sept. 22 edict demanded the Southern states return to the Union by Jan. 1, 1863, or their slaves would be considered free.

The proclamation was printed in full on the front page of the New York Herald on Sept. 23, 1862. No Southern states complied.

The proclamation allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers, a move long advocated by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Nearly 180,000 African American men would enlist in the Union army by the end of the war.

Lee scored major victories over the following months at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in Virginia. In June 1863, he launched a second invasion of the North, with Confederate forces reaching as far as Harrisburg, Pa. Along the way, the Army of Northern Virginia pilfered food from Pennsylvania’s bountiful farms.

On July 1, the Confederate army clashed with the Union’s Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, a quiet crossroads village in southern Pennsylvania. Over three days of ferocious fighting, more than 51,000 American soldiers fell — including over 7,000 dead. Lee’s invasion was thwarted, but his army escaped to fight another day.

In November 1863, President Lincoln helped dedicate a national cemetery at Gettysburg. While not the keynote speaker, his brief address remains one of the most remembered in U.S. history:

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Gettysburg did not end the war. Fighting continued for nearly two more years. Large swaths of the South were laid to waste and tens of thousands more Americans died before Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on April 9, 1865.

Five days later, an assassin’s bullet killed Lincoln, forever altering the country’s path toward recovery and healing.

Even some Southern newspapers expressed shock, sympathy and alarm. The Raleigh Standard conveyed “profound grief,” while the Richmond Whig called it “the heaviest blow which has fallen on the people of the South.”

“God help us,” Alabama Sen. Clement C. Clay said.

When the bloodshed finally ended, the nation had to face the legacy of slavery. Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan would have offered pardons to most Southerners who took an oath of loyalty to the Union and supported emancipation. Once 10% of a state’s voters had taken the oath, the state could establish a new government.

With Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. His version of Reconstruction was more lenient. Southern states were granted considerable leeway in governing, and many enacted Black Codes requiring African Americans to sign yearly labor contracts in an attempt to preserve the plantation system.

Congress thought differently. Ratified in December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery. In 1866, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist the newly freed four million slaves. It also passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson’s veto. In 1868 the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, granting citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” and extending legal rights to former slaves.

Congress also passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which divided the South into five military districts, outlined terms for Southern states’ readmission to the Union and marked the beginning of Radical Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877.

Despite its horrors, the Civil War led to advances in health and medicine.

Inspired by the First Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln approved the creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission in June 1861. The civilian-run and funded organization helped organize hospitals, transport the wounded and distribute food, clothing and medical supplies.

Dr. Jonathan Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac, reorganized battlefield medicine. He established aid stations near front lines, created field hospitals for each division and designed an efficient ambulance system. At Antietam in 1862, all 10,000 Union wounded were transported to hospitals within 24 hours. Letterman also implemented a triage system that prioritized care based on urgency — a practice still in use today.

The war also opened medical careers to women. Clara Barton, later founder of the American Red Cross, gained fame as a nurse working near the front lines.

The Civil War spurred innovation. Railroads moved troops and supplies at unprecedented speeds and sometimes determined the outcome of battles. Ironclad railcars carrying artillery foreshadowed modern armored vehicles.

Ironclad ships revolutionized naval warfare. In 1862, the Union’s USS Monitor battled the Confederate CSS Virginia (formerly the Merrimack). Metal vessels would eventually replace wooden ships.

The telegraph, paired with Morse Code, revolutionized wartime communication. By war’s end, the North had built 15,000 miles of telegraph lines. The technology also connected the East and West coasts in 1861.

New weapons changed warfare forever, including the repeating rifle and the Gatling gun — the first machine gun.

Other inventions of the 1860s transformed daily life for the average American: the vacuum cleaner, paper clip, barbed wire, pipe wrench, clothes hanger and even breakfast cereal.

Americans relied on newspapers for their news, and the telegraph allowed reporters to send battle accounts to their editors with unprecedented speed.

Photography came of age during the Civil War, the first conflict to be extensively documented. Images of battlefield dead shocked the nation.

Alexander Gardner’s photos of Antietam’s aftermath, displayed in Matthew Brady’s New York gallery, stunned viewers. The New York Times wrote:

“Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it …”

America’s favorite pastime has roots in the Civil War. Baseball mania was already growing by the 1840s, but the Civil War spread it nationwide. Soldiers on both sides played in camp, and veterans carried the game home after the war, cementing its place in American culture.

Another sport was gaining in popularity in the 1860s: American football. Many consider the first college football game to have been played between Rutgers and Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) on Nov. 6, 1869.

When they weren’t fighting, Civil War soldiers avidly read novels by Charles Dickens and dime novels that grew in popularity among the working class. Music also sustained them, from sentimental ballads to patriotic tunes like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “John Brown’s Body” and “Dixie.”

Walt Whitman published Drum-Taps in 1865, inspired by his wartime experiences. Louisa May Alcott released Hospital Sketches, drawn from her time as a Civil War nurse, and later the beloved novel Little Women. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catherine published The American Woman’s Home in 1869.

In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward signed a treaty with Russia to purchase Alaska for $7 million — about 2 cents per acre. Horace Greely’s New York Tribune mocked the deal as “Seward’s Folly,” thinking it a waste of money.

Completed in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad linked the nation from coast to coast. It fueled migration and commerce, offering faster and cheaper travel to the West. Many Civil War veterans headed west seeking land, wealth and adventure.

Gold discoveries in Montana during the 1860s drew miners along the Bozeman Trail, which cut through Lakota hunting grounds. Led by Red Cloud, warriors attacked wagons traveling to the mine fields. The federal government built forts to protect travelers. But in December 1868, Capt. William Fetterman and 80 soldiers were ambushed and killed by hundreds of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors.

“Terrible Massacre At Fort Laramie” the New York Times inaccurately blared on Dec. 27. “Three Officers and Ninety Soldiers Surrounded and Butchered.”

Shaken by the loss, the U.S. agreed to abandon the forts. Red Cloud’s War remains the only conflict Native Americans won against the United States.

There is no escaping the impact the Civil War had on America, during the 1860s and beyond. Its legacy continues to fascinate, inspire and haunt us, shaping the nation we’ve become — for better or worse.