The American Civil War

A civil war in the heartland of the United States of America started to brew in 1861 when Abraham Lincoln and the state of Texas got into some serious shit with each other. Slaves, or something. One way or another, Texas wasn't going to be messed with, so it raised its middle fingers to the sky and moved to Mexico. Seeing Lincoln as a sucka who was going to lie down and take it, all the other southern states followed suit except for Florida, who was playing shuffleboard and didn't want to be bothered.

North v. South

The division between the North and the South was accentuated by hurt feelings, but there were not many differences between the two after all. Sure, one was physically more North than the other, which was physically more South, but they had lots of things in common. For example, they both had people. Americans, to be specific. And buildings! Well, some of the South had buildings (not after the war though). And, uh, Irishmen. There were Irishmen in both of them. And blacks. Except they were slaves in one and free in the other, though to be fair they were prejudiced against in both sections of the United States.

At the time, it wasn't really the United States, since the states were, y'know, all separated and shit, so they had to call it something else. Now, instead of going with the easy-to-understand North and South, some jackanapes in each respective congress decided to call themselves the Union and the Confederacy. The Union called themselves the Union so that they'd appear more centralized, unified, and determined than their enemies. The Confederacy were called so because they used Confederate dollars.

Important Battles

Each battle fought in the Civil War was important, since nothing holds more philosophical and emotional gravity than the loss of a human life, but some battles were more important than others. For example:

• The Battle of Antietam - The bloodiest battle in the history of the world. Each army mutually agreed to postpone it for a day due to weather, since the torrential pouring of boiling hot blood from the sky didn't help morale much. Regardless of the postponement, it was still the bloodiest battle of all time, with over 50,000 people killed in a period of 24 hours. Damn.
• The Battle of Gettysburg - Abraham Lincoln led the Union army on horseback through the world's largest cemetery into sleeping Confederate forces, causing the largest military massacre since the last battle mentioned.
• Merrimack v. Monitor - A limited edition battle available on Pay Per View, over two million Confederates and Unionites tuned in on their TV screens to watch the two heavyweight ironclads duke it out to a stalemate over two days and 631 rounds.
• The Battle of the Alamo - Texas got upset since, though they were clearly the most separatist of all the Confederate states, all of the freeloaders like Virginia and South Carolina were getting all the good battles. Therefore, they decided to reenact the Alamo to feel good about themselves.
• The Zimmerman Telegram - Traitorous northerner Robert Zimmerman was going to try to convince the Mexicans to join the side of the Confederacy by pretending to be the head of the Union and secretly sending a sternly worded letter to Generalissimo Che Guevara. All would have gone according to plan, but the powerful Mexican army got sidetracked in Texas and ended up completely ruining the reenactment of the Alamo.

Wars of Teh Universe