The American civil war ended on this day. It should be a national holiday | Steve Phillips

Rather than celebrate this milestone of multiracial democracy, our leaders conspicuously ignore the occasion

April 9 should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces - marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multi-racial democracy, the country's leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step.

Boiled down to its essence, the civil war began because the presidential candidate sympathetic to African Americans, Abraham Lincoln, won the election of 1860, and the losing side refused to accept the election results (sound familiar?). That defiance of democracy led to eleven states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederacy, which was founded, in the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition". The civil war was a truly existential conflict that raged for four years of killing and carnage that resulted in the deaths of 2% of the country's residents - the equivalent of 7 million people, based on today's population.

Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good