On April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina, signaling the beginning of the Civil War. The war would last four long, bloody years, nearly succeeding in ripping the country apart. Southern states seceded from the United States to form the Confederate States of America, with Texas being the 7th state to join the Confederacy. The fight to leave the Union was predicated largely on the continuation and expansion of the institution of slavery, thereby protecting the southern economy and way of life. And yet the traditional “north vs. south” or “slavery vs. abolition” that we are often presented may be too simplistic an explanation for the realities that gripped this country. The road to the Civil War was more complex among its individual citizens. Not all Southerners were secessionists; not all secessionists supported slavery; not all unionists opposed slavery. The list of variations on the stereotype can go on. In the years leading up to the Civil War, through the war years, and the Reconstruction period after the war, Austin was a frontier capital divided between slave and free, Union and Confederate sympathies, those who labored for subsistence and those few living in comfort and ease, and politically powerful and disenfranchised. “Divided City” explores these divisions in the people, places, and events in and around Austin, from the men who fought the war to those left behind. The exhibit also explores the difficulties in reconstructing the town after the war and how the newly freed slaves created their new lives.