Before the Civil War, the constant pace of inventions, such as the improved steam engine by James Watt in 1776. Robert Fulton’s steamboat, The Clermont, in 1807. Michael Faraday’s electric motor in 1821. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s photography in 1839. The telegraph, with its first message on May 24, 1844., “What hath God wrought?” And 30,000 miles of railroad tracks, 21,300 miles concentrated in the northeast. Together with a growing population. The market was transitioning how it made goods, from creating them by hand to using machines; these changes were slowly making slavery obsolete.
The war began at Fort Sumter in South Carolina when the Confederates attacked Union soldiers on April 12, 1861. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865., ending the war. It lasted four years, but the destiny of slavery, and that of the Confederate army, for that matter, was written long before when Benjamin Franklin flew his kite during a thunderstorm to prove that lightning was electrical in 1752—this moment in history lighted up the Industrial Revolution—the one revolution which brought the end of slavery in America.