On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Union troops at Fort Sumter, forcing them to surrender, and began the war.

On April 15, Lincoln called on all the states to send detachments totaling 75, 000 troops to recapture forts, protect Washington, and " preserve the Union ", which, in his view, still existed intact despite the actions of the seceding states.

On April 19, secessionist mobs in Baltimore that controlled the rail links attacked Union troops traveling to the capital.

Union enlistments from Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri increased by over 40, 000 troops.

" With Grant in command, Lincoln felt the Union Army could relentlessly pursue a series of coordinated offensives in multiple theaters, and have a top commander who agreed on the use of black troops.

Gen. Felix Zollicoffer with 4, 000 men to occupy Cumberland Gap in Kentucky in order to block Union troops from coming into eastern Tennessee.

Zollicoffer decided it was impossible to obey orders to return to the other side of the river because of scarcity of transport and proximity of Union troops.

As the Confederate forces overran the Union camps, Johnston seemed to be everywhere, personally leading and rallying troops up and down the line on his horse.

* 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Shiloh begins – in Tennessee, forces under Union General Ulysses S. Grant meet Confederate troops led by General Albert Sidney Johnston.

* 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Gainesville – Confederate forces defeat Union troops near Gainesville, Florida.

By that September Johnson declared he was in favor of emancipation, describing slavery as a " cancer on our society ", and also succeeded in enlisting 20, 000 black troops for the Union.

* 1863 – American Civil War: Grierson's Raid begins – troops under Union Army Colonel Benjamin Grierson attack central Mississippi.

* 1865 – American Civil War: The Siege of Petersburg is broken – Union troops capture the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, forcing Confederate General Robert E. Lee to retreat.

* 1988 – In a United Nations ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, the Soviet Union signs an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

Carnegie helped open the rail lines into Washington D. C. that the rebels had cut ; he rode the locomotive pulling the first brigade of Union troops to reach Washington D. C.

* 1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Baton Rouge – along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Confederate troops attempt to take the city, but are driven back by fire from Union gunboats.

* 1945 – Cold War: Yugoslav leader Josip " Tito " Broz signs an agreement with the Soviet Union to allow " temporary entry of Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory ".

* 1861 – American Civil War: Battle of Wilson's Creek – the war enters Missouri when a band of raw Confederate troops defeat Union forces in the southwestern part of the state.

* 1865 – American Civil War: A day after his surrender to Union forces, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his troops for the last time.

Even though Bulgaria did not send any troops to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Navy was involved in a number of skirmishes with the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which attacked Bulgarian shipping.

While the CIA and MI6 and the People's Liberation Army of China financed the operation along with the Pakistan government against the Soviet Union Eventually the Soviet Union began looking for a withdrawal route and in 1988 Geneva Accords were signed between Communist-Afghanistan and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ; under the terms Soviet troops were to withdraw.

Lumumba demanded that Belgium remove its troops immediately, threatening to seek help from the Soviet Union if they did not leave within two days.

In September 1861, Atchison led 3, 500 State Guard recruits across the Missouri River to reinforce Price, and defeated Union troops that tried to block his force in the Battle of Liberty.

* 1864 – American Civil War: Sherman's March to the Sea – Major General William Tecumseh Sherman's Union Army troops reach the outer Confederate defenses of Savannah, Georgia.

Author of the Albany Plan Of Union, which, had it been adopted, might have avoided the Revolution, he fought the colonists' front-line battles in London, negotiated the treaty of alliance with France and the peace that ended the war, headed the state government of Pennsylvania, and exercised an important moderating influence at the Federal Convention.

The people everywhere had grown meanwhile in devotion to basic democratic principles, in understanding of and belief in the federal balance, and in love of their Union.

The champions of the Union maintained that the Constitution had formed, fundamentally, the united people of America, that it was a compact among sovereign citizens rather than states, and that therefore the states had no right to secede, though the citizens could.

But though each of its members had asserted this right against the Union, the final Constitution which the Confederacy signed on March 11 -- nearly a month before hostilities began -- included no explicit provision authorizing a state to secede.

But though the Southern States, when drafting a constitution to unite themselves, narrowed the difference to this fine point by omitting to assert the right to secede, the fact remained that by seceding from the Union they had already acted on the concept that it was composed primarily of sovereign states.

If the Union conceded this to them, the same right must be conceded to each remaining state whenever it saw fit to secede: This would destroy the federal balance between it and the states, and in the end sacrifice to the sovereignty of the states all the liberty the citizens had gained by their Union.

It is much less difficult now than in Lincoln's day to see that on both sides sovereign Americans had given their lives in the Civil War to maintain the balance between the powers they had delegated to the States and to their Union.

At one time it seemed as if the Soviet Union had done us a favor by providing a striking example of how not to behave towards other peoples and other nations.

and in her forthright way, Henrietta, who in her story of Sara had indicated her own unwillingness `` to think of men as the privileged '' and `` women as submissive and yielding '', felt obliged to defend vigorously any statement of hers to which Morris Jastrow took the slightest exception -- he objected to her stand on the Corbin affair, as well as on the radical reforms of Dr. Wise of Hebrew Union College -- until once, in sheer desperation, he wrote that he had given up hope they would ever agree on anything.

A friend of Pat's named Frank Sposato had just muscled into the Portwatchers' Union.

At least the Union officer had been decent enough to provide a candle.

While obliged to concede governments in East Europe allied with the Soviet Union instead of opposed to it, we thought we had preserved our social and economic system in East Europe.

Elementary school desegregation came to Owen and Union Counties, which already had high school desegregation.

Two companies now had headquarters with Clark J. Wait, who by then had his own drugstore at Factory Point -- the `` Northern Union Telegraph Company '' and the `` Western Union ''.

I insisted on takeing the field and prevailed -- thinking that I had better die by rebel bullets than ( by ) Union quackery ''.

By March 1861, no leaders of the insurrection had proposed rejoining the Union on any terms.

In addition, Lincoln had to contend with reinforcing strong Union sympathies in the border slave states and keeping the war from becoming an international conflict.

Lincoln arranged for an intermediary to make inquiry into Grant's political intentions, and being assured that he had none, submitted to the Senate Grant's promotion to commander of the Union Army.