An 1861 Currier & Ives lithograph showing Columbia, armed with a sword and grasping an American flag, advances toward the left. She strikes an aggressive pose and has a stern, almost fierce demeanor. The motto "GOD, OUR COUNTRY AND LIBERTY,!!" appears above the flag. Columbia's dress is closer in style to that of the Revolutionary War period than to either Victorian or classical garb. She wears a vest with a scale-like pattern (resembling armor or chain mail) over a skirt emblazoned with stars, and a laurel wreath round her brow. Atop the staff of her flag is a small Phrygian cap. The American Civil War was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after seven Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America knowns as the "Confederacy" or the "South". The states that remained in the Union were known as the "Union" or the "North". After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.