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The Election of 1860 & the Road to Disunion: Crash Course US History #18

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Battles of the Civil War: Crash Course US History #19

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The Civil War, Part I: Crash Course US History #20

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The Civil War Part 2: Crash Course US History #21

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"USS Cairo", an Iron Clad Gunboat from the American Civil War, Vicksburg, Mississippi

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Clara Barton - Famous Nurse | Mini Bio | BIO

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Clara Barton:  The Beginnings of the American Red Cross

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"Civil War Uniforms of Blue & Grey - The Evolution" Volume 1

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https://www.history.com/shows/america-the-story-of-us/videos/abraham-lincoln?playlist_slug=america-the-story-of-us-season-1-curated-list

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10 Notable Child Soldiers Of The United States Civil War || Child Army

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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In early 1862, the Union and the Confederacy were locked in one of the most influential arms races of the Civil War. While their navies still relied on wooden ships, both sides had gambled on building revolutionary "ironclad" vessels that boasted steam engines, hulking cannons and armor plating protecting their hulls. In Brooklyn, Federal forces were prepping the iron vessel USS Monitor. At Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, the rebels were finishing their own metal colossus, CSS Virginia.

The Union's Monitor was by far the more unusual of the two craft. Designed by Swedish-born engineer John Ericsson, the ship was around 173 feet long and featured a main deck that sat just 18 inches above the waterline. Its armaments were limited to two 11-inch Dahlgren guns, but they were housed in a revolving turret powered by a steam engine. This never-before-seen feature gave the ship's gun crews a 360-degree range of fire.

In contrast to the nimble and innovative Monitor, the Confederacy's Virginia was the maritime equivalent of a wrecking ball. Improvised from the ruins of the ruined American frigate USS Merrimack, the 275-footer was constructed from wood reinforced with four-inch-thick iron plate. Its most eye-catching feature was a large, sloping casemate that housed a floating battery of 10 cannons-four on each side and one at both ends. The ship's bow bristled with a 1,500-pound iron battering ram.

Neither of the ironclads was much to look at-the Monitor was labeled a "tin can on a shingle" and the Virginia a "floating barn roof"-but critics were silenced the minute their destructive power was put on display. On March 8, 1862, the Virginia left Gosport on its maiden voyage and steamed toward nearby Hampton Roads, a vital sea junction that was patrolled by a Union blockading fleet. As the ironclad neared the Federals' wooden flotilla, Confederate commander Franklin Buchanan addressed his crew. "Sailors," he announced, "in a few minutes you will have the long-expected opportunity to show your devotion to your country and our cause."

The men of the Union blockading fleet had heard rumors about the "great Southern bugaboo" lurking at Gosport, but nothing could have prepared them for actually facing the Virginia in combat. At around 2 p.m., the ironclad entered Hampton Roads and made a beeline for the American ships USS Cumberland and USS Congress. The Congress unleashed a broadside, but its cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the Virginia's metal armor. Ignoring the enemy guns, Buchanan steamed toward the Cumberland and plowed into it with his ram, cleaving a seven-foot-wide hole in its hull. The Cumberland instantly began to sink, and it nearly took the Virginia down with it before the ironclad's ram broke off. When the crippled Cumberland refused to surrender, the Virginia pummeled it with cannon fire. "The once clean and beautiful deck was slippery with blood, blackened with powder and looked like a slaughterhouse," one Cumberland crewman later remembered.

While the Cumberland sank, the Virginia turned its attention to USS Congress, which had intentionally run itself aground in shallow water to avoid being rammed. Despite knowing that his own brother was among its crewmen, Buchanan raked the Congress with cannon fire for several minutes, inflicting horrific casualties and eventually setting it ablaze. The ironclad would have moved on to the steam frigate USS Minnesota, which was also grounded in the shallows, but after Buchanan was wounded in the thigh, acting commander Catesby Jones elected to call off the attack and return the following morning. By then, the Virginia had sunk two Union ships and killed over 240 sailors. The battle would remain the bloodiest day in U.S. naval history until World War II.

The Virginia's rampage had been a serious blow to the Union navy, but the remainder of the blockading fleet soon received an imposing reinforcement. On March 6, the ironclad USS Monitor had left Brooklyn and sailed south under the command of Lieutenant John Worden. By dawn on March 9, its sleep-deprived crew had arrived in Hampton Roads and positioned their vessel alongside the stranded Minnesota. "I will stand by you to the last if I can help you," Worden vowed to the Minnesota's captain.

Later that morning, having steeled his crew with a ration of two jiggers of whiskey per man, the Virginia's acting commander Catesby Jones steered his ship back into Hampton Roads to finish off the Minnesota. It was only when he neared the grounded vessel that he noticed the Monitor floating alongside it. The rebels initially mistook the peculiar looking ironclad for a raft or even a ship's boiler, but they quickly set aside their surprise and let loose with the first cannon salvo of the day. Moments later, the Monitor replied with a burst from its twin Dahlgren guns.

For the next three hours, the Monitor and the Virginia engaged in a ferocious cannon duel-the first ever waged by ironclad warships. "The fight continued with exchange of broadsides as fast as the guns could be served and at very short range, the distance between the vessels frequently being not more than a few yards," the Monitor's executive officer Samuel Dana Greene later wrote. The waters of Hampton Roads soon filled with the groan of steam engines, the thunderclap of naval guns and the clang of cannonballs ricocheting off iron plate. Inside their sweltering and smoke-filled metal machines, the gun crews of both ships worked frantically to fire and reload their cannons. Virginia's chief engineer Ashton Ramsay later noted that the hellish scene could only be compared "with the poet's picture of the lower regions."

Both ship's armor plating fared well under the constant barrage of cannon fire, but their crews soon ran into technical problems. The Monitor's revolving turret continued to turn, but its operator could not easily stop it, which forced the gunners to fire on the fly. The Virginia, meanwhile, was finding it difficult to outmaneuver the faster and more agile Monitor. At one point, the Confederate ironclad even briefly ran aground in shallow water and had to push its engines to the breaking point to dislodge itself. Sensing that his guns were causing no serious damage to the Monitor, Jones eventually tried to ram it. The Virginia succeeded in colliding with the Yankee ship, but having lost its iron ram the previous day, it was unable to deal any significant damage.

The battle raged all morning with no clear advantage for either side. "Shot, shell, grape, canister, musket and rifle balls flew about in every direction," the Monitor's Greene wrote, "but did us no damage." Finally, at around 12 p.m., the Virginia's gunners fired a blast that struck the pilothouse near the Monitor's bow. Worden had been peering out the pilothouse's iron shutters at the time, and he was left temporarily blinded by powder and debris. "I cannot see, but do not mind me," he told Greene as he was carried away. "Save the Minnesota if you can."

The Monitor had pulled away from the battle while the crew saw to Worden's injury, yet to the Virginia, it appeared that the Union ship was giving up the fight. Catesby Jones was still eager to sink the Minnesota, but with the tide turning and his enemy seemingly in retreat, he decided to withdraw. When the Monitor finally tried to rejoin the battle, the Virginia had already started steaming back to Portsmouth for repairs. At that, the first ever clash of ironclads came to a sudden and inconclusive end.

Both the Union and the Confederacy would later claim victory in the Battle of Hampton Roads, but most historians now consider the contest a tactical draw. The fact that neither one of the ironclads had managed to destroy the other proved to be the most significant lesson of the fight. In the span of a morning, the Monitor and the Virginia had brought an end to the age of wooden warships. After hearing about the slugfest, navies around the globe devoted themselves to building steam-powered ironclads. The Confederacy and the Union would eventually launch over 70 of the metal behemoths before the Civil War ended.

Neither the Monitor nor the Virginia lasted long after Hampton Roads. During the Confederate evacuation of Norfolk in May 1862, the Virginia's crew intentionally blew up their ironclad to prevent it from falling into Yankee hands. Later that same year, the Monitor sank in rough seas off the coast of North Carolina. Both ships' careers had lasted less than a year, but for those who witnessed their historic duel, it was evident that sea combat would never be the same again. "This successful and terrible work will create a revolution in naval warfare," wrote one Southern reporter, "and henceforth iron will be the king of the seas."

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When Ironclads Clashed: How Hampton Roads Changed Naval Warfare Forever | HISTORY

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On March 9, 1862, the ironclad warships USS Monitor and CSS Virginia squared off in the most influential naval battle of the Civil War.

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GALVESTON, BATTLE OF | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)

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All copyrighted materials included within the Handbook of Texas Online are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 related to Copyright and "Fair Use" for Non-Profit educational institutions, which permits the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), to utilize copyrighted materials to further scholarship, education, and inform the public.

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Selected Biographies
Marcie Schwartz

Johnny Clem

John Clem tried to enlist in the Union army in 1861, but was refused on account of being not yet even 10 years old. Undeterred, Clem joined the 22nd Michigan, who let him follow the regiment, adopting him as a mascot and unofficial drummer boy before he officially enlisted in 1863. He became a national celebrity for his actions at Chickamauga. Armed with his drum and a sawed down musket, he fought with the 22nd Michigan at Horseshoe Ridge on September 20th, 1863. When cornered by a Confederate colonel who demanded his surrender, Clem shot the officer and returned to his unit. The " Drummer Boy of Chickamauga " was promoted to sergeant for his actions, the youngest soldier ever to become a noncommissioned officer in the United States Army.

Edwin Jemison

Edwin Jemison of Monroe, Louisiana enlisted in the Confederate Army at the age of 16 in 1861. He served in the 2nd Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment and participated in the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles in 1862. During the Battle of Malvern Hill, Jemison was one of the many Confederate soldiers that charged up the slope into Union artillery fire. He was found dead on the field of battle by his comrades, decapitated by a direct hit from a Federal cannon. His photograph has become one of the most famous portraits of Civil War and a monument in his honor stands at Memory Hill Cemetery in Georgia.

John Cook

John Cook enlisted in the Union Army in Cincinnati, Ohio as a bugler for the 4th U.S Artillery at the age of 14. During the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, the Union battery came under fire from Confederate infantrymen in the West Woods. After carrying a wounded officer to the rear, Cook returned to his unit find most of the gunners dead and cannons unmanned. Grabbing an ammunition pouch from a fallen comrade, he began to service the cannons and held his ground throughout the attack even when Confederate troops advanced to within five yards of his position. He also served at the Battle of Gettysburg, where he carried messages amidst heavy fire and destroyed a damaged caisson to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. For his courageous actions at Antietam, Cook was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Charlie King

Charlie King was enlisted into the 49th Pennsylvania at age 12 after a company captain heard him practicing his drum near the military camp. He participated in the Peninsula Campaign and was promoted to Drum Major of the Field Music for the regiment. During the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862, the 49th Pennsylvania suffered a direct hit from Confederate artillery fire in the East Woods, wounding several soldiers including King. He died three days later in a field hospital, the youngest known casualty of the Civil War on either side of the conflict.

Orion P. Howe

Orion P Howe enlisted at the age of 12 in the 55th Illinois Volunteer Infantry as a musician along with his brother, Lyston. During the Battle of Vicksburg on May 19th, 1863, Howe, severely wounded, limped his way through heavy enemy fire, reaching Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to report the critical need for more .54 caliber cartridges. Despite the serious wound, Howe recovered, reenlisted in the same regiment in 1863, rose to the rank of corporal by age 15, and was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at Vicksburg.

Joseph Evan Davis

Joseph Davis was born in April of 1859 while his father, Jefferson Davis, was serving as a senator for Mississippi. Bright and well behaved, he was a favorite of his father. On April 30th, 1864, five year old Joseph fell 15 feet from the east portico of the Confederate White House in Richmond. He was found with a severely fractured skull by a servant and lived until just about the time his parents returned home. Rumors spread in the press that Davis's older son, Jefferson Davis Jr., might have pushed the child, but nothing was ever proven and Davis had the east portico removed. Thousands of children attended the funeral, and in 1866, the children of the city of Richmond raised $40 for a monument to Joseph that still stands in Hollywood Cemetery.

Susie King Taylor

Susie King Taylor was born on a plantation in Georgia in 1848 and allowed to go to Savannah to live with her grandmother in 1855. Despite the harsh laws against the formal education of African Americans, she attended secret schools taught by black women and was tutored by two white youths. In April 1862, she fled to Union occupied St. Simons Island. Quickly noted for her advanced education, she became the first black teacher to openly educate African Americans in Georgia at the age of 14. She married Edward King, a black officer in the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment, and served as a nurse, laundress, and taught reading and writing to soldiers in his regiment until the end of the war. In 1902, she privately published a book of her experiences as a nurse entitled Reminiscences.

Learn More: Children of the Civil War: On the Home Front | Children of the Civil War: On the Battlefield

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Selected Biographies Marcie Schwartz Johnny Clem John Clem tried to enlist in the Union army in 1861, but was refused on account of being not yet even 10 years old. Undeterred, Clem joined the 22nd Michigan, who let him follow the regiment, adopting him as a mascot and unofficial drummer boy before he officially enlisted in 1863.

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"In these few months" wrote twelve year old Celine Fremaux of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, "my childhood had slipped away from me. Necessity, human obligations, family pride and patriotism had taken entire possession of my little emaciated body." Children on the Civil War home front encountered trials, hardships, and violence that forced them to grow up quickly amidst a nation at war with itself.
Responsibilities

On the home front, both northern and southern children became critical to the war effort in a variety of ways. Children took up jobs that their fathers or brothers had left vacant or those that their mothers could not manage alone as the new head of the household. Children would help tend to livestock and crops, serve as clerks or helpers for the family business, cook meals, and watch their younger siblings while still trying to attend school. At school, children would build little Fort Sumters of mud and wooden blocks [...] put up clothespins for soldiers, ruthlessly slaughtering them with shot from cannons made of old brass pistol barrels fastened to blocks of wood. Thirteen year old Dan Beard of Cincinnati, Ohio recalled making little Jefferson Davises "of potatoes and put sticks in them for legs. We hung the desperate potato men by their necks and shot them with squibs from firecrackers." In the classroom, patriotism was also alive and well. John Bach McMaster of New York City remembered "every morning after Bible reading, the young woman who presided at the piano would sing a war song, the boys joining in, and that done, a second and perhaps a third would follow." Many children, however, dropped out of school to support their families, and many others turned to homeschooling when their schools were closed for lack of funding or attendance, or when their schoolmaster went off to war.

"I was ten years old today. I did not have a cake;" mourned Carrie Berry of Atlanta "times are too hard. I hope that by my next birthday there will be peace in our land." Shortages of these little luxuries, as well as household goods, were common, especially in the less industrialized South, and children were often tasked with making ends meet by sewing clothes and blankets, as well as making soap, candles, and gathering herbs for medicinal purposes. As the war progressed, many children scrabbled to have enough to eat, becoming active participants in the Southern Bread Riots that broke out in most of the major southern cities by 1863. Suffering from a lack of provisions, food and money, children formed looting bands to obtain goods for their families, as evidenced by the ultimatum scratched into a young Richmond girl's journal: "We are starving. As soon as enough of us get together we are going to take the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men."

Entertainment

Despite these hardships, children managed to find ways to entertain themselves. "If it had not been for my books" wrote Emma LeConte of Columbia, South Carolina "it would indeed have been hard to bear. But in them I have lived and found my chief source of pleasure. I would take refuge in them from the sadness all around if it were not for other work to be done." Reading, either from magazines, dime novels or books, was a primary pastime for children on both sides of the conflict.

In the North, magazines like Student and Schoolmate, The Little Pilgrim, and Our Young Folks were popular and contained numerous age appropriate articles, fictional stories, trivia, songs, games, patriotic plays to be put up, and poems related to the war. Oliver Optic's produced entertaining wartime adventure tales such as The Young Lieutenant, Fighting Joe, Sailor Boy, and The Yankee Middy. While the magazine's prose and Optic's adventure stories focused on the drama and heroics of the war, they also promoted patriotism and virtue and the idea that the reader's individual actions, no matter how small, contributed to something greater than themselves. Children were also able to obtain more factual accounts of the war like Following the Flag or Days and Nights on the Battlefield, battlefield maps, as well as more sensational dime novels.

In the South, paper, ink, and skilled printers were scarce, so new material was restricted mainly to hymns and bowdlerized textbooks designed to meet the same aims as their northern counterparts: make children aware of the issues that caused the war and to rally support for the Confederate war effort. The new textbooks spouted nationalism with names like The Dixie Primer, A New Southern Grammar, and The Confederate Spelling Book and their contents promoted values and issues pertinent to the southern cause. The 1863 Geographical Reader for the Dixie Children briefly explained the war from a southern perspective: "Thousands of lives have been lost, and the earth has been drenched with blood; but still Abraham is unable to conquer the "Rebels" as he calls the South. The South only asked to be let alone, and to divide the public property equally. It would have been wise of the North to have said to her Southern sisters, 'If you are not content to dwell with us any longer, depart in peace.'"

While books were the primary forms of entertainment at home, children could venture outside of the home for public shows and events, many of which revolved around the subject of the war. Children and their families often frequented plays, concerts, photography displays, magic lantern shows, martial parades, traveling panorama shows, and, in the North, Sanitary Fairs. The US Sanitary Commission allowed communities to directly support the war effort. Dan Beard recalled "every home and every school, parents, teachers and children were picking lint [for the Sanitary Commission] which was carefully placed on a clean piece of paper and used by the field surgeons to stanch the blood." Held from late 1863 through 1865, Sanitary Fairs, sponsored by the Commission, raised more than four million dollars and provided some much needed levity and entertainment. After paying a small entrance fee, families could purchase donated goods, homemade pastries, locally grown crops, souvenirs, attend concerts and speeches, and gawk at war relics from the Revolution as well as captured Confederate armaments, trophies, and flags. Children would contribute their own handmade crafts to the fairs to be sold. "I made a model of a saddlebag loghouse which was very realistic," wrote Dan Beard "I proudly carried that all the way to the Sanitary Fair. It was sold for seven dollars and a half, which was a severe blow to my artistic soul, because I really thought it was worth about fifty dollars." Chicago closed its schools during the fairs of 1863 and 1865 so children could attend and support this patriotic event, and newspapers from the time depict children around the country running to see the Fair's "treasury of useful articles, toys and knickknacks" as well as magic shows, ventriloquists, a "Gipsey tent," and "a very remarkable animal called the Gorilla."

The War Comes Home

The "home front", however, especially in the South, was constantly under threat. Many of the battles were named after the towns that witnessed them, guerrilla raids harassed non-combatants, troops were garrisoned in houses and barns, and both armies left homes in ruins and fields littered with the dead and dying. In besieged cities, the situation for children and their families became desperate as the weeks turned into months of shelling. In Vicksburg, frightened citizens sought refuge in basements and even in caves. One young girl, Lucy McCrae, was almost hit by a shell and buried under flying rocks and dirt. "The blood was gushing from my nose, eyes, ears, and mouth," she wrote "but no bones were broken." On November 16, 1864, , ten year old Carrie Berry huddled with his family as occupied Atlanta burned around them: "They came burning the store house and about night it looked like the whole town was on fire. We all set up all night. If we had not sat up our house would have been burnt up for the fire was very near and the soldiers were going around setting houses on fire where they were not watched. They behaved very badly [...] nobody knows what we have suffered since they came in." Smaller southern cities and towns fared no better. In Winnsboro, North Carolina, a young girl witnessed "streets and vacant lots filled with homeless families [...] when bringing bedding, raiment or provisions out of their burning homes, these were destroyed by the brutal soldiers. They stole much that was useless to them, for even Bibles were taken." A seventeen year old widowed mother from Sandersville, Georgia lamented as soldiers "would walk up the steps of the back veranda on which we stood, and throwing down the hams and shoulders of our meat would cut them up in our very faces." After the soldiers left with the rest of their belongings, she "knew that now our last hope for food was gone. I went to bed supperless [...] sadder now was the thought, 'The cows are killed. I will be so hungry I cannot nurse Baby.'"

The northern home front also came face to face with the horrors of war, especially when armies collided in the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. On the first day of the fighting, fifteen year old Albertus McCreary watched from his porch as the street filled with "Union soldiers, running and pushing each other, sweaty and black from powder and dust. They called to us for water. While we were carrying water to the soldiers, a small drummer boy ran up the porch, and handing me his drum, said 'Keep this for me.' We were so busy that we did not notice how close the fighting was until, about a half a block away, we saw hand-to-hand conflict. An officer rode his horse up on the pavement and said 'All you good people go down in your cellars or you will all be killed.'" Even when the fighting ceased, townspeople were still left to pick up the pieces of their lives and care for the wounded thrust into their care.

Charles McCurdy, ten years old at the battle of Gettysburg, watched as the wounded in his barn "lay on the threshing floor [...]they had received no care and were a pitiful and dreadful sight." Fifteen year old Tillie Pierce's house was repurposed as hospital for the wounded of Gettysburg and when she returned home she "fairly shrank back the awful sight presented. The approaches were crowded with wounded, dying and dead. By this time amputating benches had been placed about the house [...]I saw the wounded throwing themselves wildly about, and shrieking with pain while the operation was going on. Just outside the yard I noticed a pile of limbs higher than the fence. It was a ghastly sight." Albertus McCreary's sister, seventeen year old Jennie, was tasked with rolling bandages. She and her next door neighbors "had not rolled many before we saw the street filled with wounded men. I never thought I could do anything about a wounded man but I find I had a little more nerve than I thought I had. [The first soldier] had walked from the field and was almost exhausted. He threw himself in the chair and said, 'O girls, I have as good a home as you. If I were only there!' He fainted directly afterward. That was the only time I cried."

Contraband Camps

Perhaps the lives most put in jeopardy by the Civil War were those of former slaves and their children. As news of the Confiscation Act of 1861 and the employment of 'contraband' (escaped slaves) by the U.S. Navy and U.S Army spread, escaped slaves and their families began to congregate at places like Fort Monroe to appeal to become contraband. More than one hundred camps formed around Union held forts or encampments to house the escaped slaves. Despite being a welcome refuge for many, the camps often became overcrowded, and illnesses such as smallpox became endemic in the more makeshift sites. Children maintained an overwhelming numerical majority in the camp and, despite the varied conditions, all camps had a school. Most refugee children and many adults were able to spend at least some of their time in school, often managed by white northern missionaries. The rest of the hours were used to work in the fields to earn enough money to eat, and children as young as ten were send out to labor beside adults and typically given "one-quarter pay." These camps were the center of the home front experience for escaped slaves, and presented a world of great contrast: they provided a glimpse of freedom, but poor living conditions and disease often ended the dream before it could truly begin.

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Children of the Civil War: On the Home Front

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"In these few months" wrote twelve year old Celine Fremaux of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, "my childhood had slipped away from me. Necessity, human obligations, family pride and patriotism had taken entire possession of my little emaciated body." Children on the Civil War home front encountered trials, hardships, and violence that forced them to grow up quickly amidst a nation at war with itself.

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Submarines were not the only innovation to come out of the Civil War, which some call the first "modern" war.

History Detectives has highlighted a few of the more important developments.

These not only changed the course of the Civil War, but also the face of warfare to this day.
Communications and Transport
Telegraph
The telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, and telegraph wires soon sprang up all along the East Coast. During the war, 15,000 miles of telegraph cable was laid purely for military purposes. Mobile telegraph wagons reported and received communications from just behind the frontline. President Lincoln would regularly visit the Telegraph Office to get the latest news. The telegraph also enabled news sources to report on the war in a timely fashion, leading to an entirely new headache for the government: how to handle the media.

Aerial reconnaissance
Both sides used hot air balloons for aerial reconnaissance of battlefields during the Civil War. A Balloon Corps was established by President Lincoln early on. The maiden voyage of the first official Union balloon occurred in late August, 1861. Balloon operators used another wartime innovation, the telegraph, to let commanders on the ground know of Confederates movements. This allowed Union guns to be repositioned and fired accurately at troops more than three miles away-a first in military history.

Railroads
The Civil War was the first war to use railroads, encouraged by President Lincoln - himself a former railroad lawyer - who understood how vital they were for moving men and supplies. The North had a distinct advantage, with superior infrastructure (20,000 miles of track), better equipment and their own locomotive factory. Whereas the South had just 9,000 miles of track and had converted its locomotive works into an armaments factory. The trains allowed generals to move their soldiers, supplies and armaments to where they were most needed. Rail centers and railroad infrastructure soon became targets for attack.

While the South's rail system was weak, they were the first to use trains to their advantage, transporting supplies and soldiers to vital areas. The North was stymied by railroad owners more concerned with how much they could charge, than how quickly they could aid the cause. In fact, Secretary of War Simon Cameron was forced to resign when it was discovered he was trying to profit from War Department contracts for railroad shipping.

Army ambulance corps
Jonathan Letterman, Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, was responsible for creating the first organized transport of the wounded. Ambulance units usually consisted of a ragtag group of soldiers who were otherwise unfit for fighting. Letterman innovated and regimented the process. The ambulances of a division moved together under the direction of a line sergeant, with two stretcher-bearers and one driver per ambulance. They would go into the field, pick up the wounded, deliver them to dressing stations and then to field hospitals. To this day the military bases its ambulance system on Letterman's ideas.
Weapons and Ships
Long-Range Weapons and the Minie Bullet
Prior to the Civil War, most combatants used smooth-bore muskets which had a maximum range of about 300 feet. However, shortly before the start of the war, the invention of rifling (grooves in the musket barrel) meant bullets could spin and travel up to 900 feet. This was an important defensive development and increased the range and accuracy of muskets.
The Minie bullet made defense even safer. When used in the rifled musket it spun faster, traveled further and was five times more accurate than any single-man weapon. Able to kill at half a mile, it was the largest contributor to battle wounds (more than 90%).

The Gatling Gun
The ancestor of the modern machine gun, it was the most successful of several rapid-fire guns that were born before the war. Richard Gatling invented the gun in the hopes that a weapon so catastrophic in its damage would convince men to stop waging war. Unfortunately, its efficiency in killing only made war more deadly. It was not used extensively during the Civil War.

Ironclad Warships
At the start of the Civil War the North had a distinct naval advantage as the South didn't have a dedicated Navy. Both recognized the importance of armor-cladding their ships. The first engagement between two iron-clad ships was between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia. The first fight between iron clad ships of war, in Hampton Roads, March 9, 1862, in which the Monitor whipped the Merrimac and the whole school of Confederate steamers.

Naval mines and torpedoes
Naval mines were developed by the Confederates in the hopes of counteracting the Union's blockades of Southern ports. Mines and later, torpedoes, were very effective sinking 40 Union ships. The success of these mines led to the creation of land mines and grenades that would be used in later wars.

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Civil War Innovations | History Detectives | PBS

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Submarines were not the only innovation to come out of the Civil War, which some call the first "modern" war. History Detectives has highlighted a few of the more important developments. These not only changed the course of the Civil War, but also the face of warfare to this day.

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The Civil War was a time of great social and political upheaval. It was also a time of great technological change. Inventors and military men devised new types of weapons, such as the repeating rifle and the submarine, that forever changed the way that wars were fought. Even more important were the technologies that did not specifically have to do with the war, like the railroad and the telegraph. Innovations like these did not just change the way people fought wars-they also changed the way people lived.

New Kinds of Weapons

Before the Civil War, infantry soldiers typically carried muskets that held just one bullet at a time. The range of these muskets was about 250 yards. However, a soldier trying to aim and shoot with any accuracy would have to stand much closer to his target, since the weapon's "effective range" was only about 80 yards. Therefore, armies typically fought battles at a relatively close range.

Did you know? The rifle-musket and the Minié bullet are thought to account for around 90 percent ofCivil Warcasualties.

Rifles, by contrast, had a much greater range than muskets did-a rifle could shoot a bullet up to 1,000 yards-and were more accurate. However, until the 1850s it was nearly impossible to use these guns in battle because, since a rifle's bullet had roughly the same diameter as its barrel, they took too long to load. (Soldiers sometimes had to pound the bullet into the barrel with a mallet.)

In 1848, a French army officer named Claude Minié invented a cone-shaped lead bullet with a diameter smaller than that of the rifle barrel. Soldiers could load these "Minié balls" quickly, without the aid of ramrods or mallets. Rifles with Minié bullets were more accurate, and therefore deadlier, than muskets were, which forced infantries to change the way they fought: Even troops who were far from the line of fire had to protect themselves by building elaborate trenches and other fortifications.

"Repeaters"

Rifles with Minié bullets were easy and quick to load, but soldiers still had to pause and reload after each shot. This was inefficient and dangerous. By 1863, however, there was another option: so-called repeating rifles, or weapons that could fire more than one bullet before needing a reload. The most famous of these guns, the Spencer carbine, could fire seven shots in 30 seconds.

Like many other Civil War technologies, these weapons were available to Northern troops but not Southern ones: Southern factories had neither the equipment nor the know-how to produce them. "I think the Johnnys [Confederate soldiers] are getting rattled; they are afraid of our repeating rifles," one Union soldier wrote. "They say we are not fair, that we have guns that we load up on Sunday and shoot all the rest of the week."

Balloons and Submarines

Other newfangled weapons took to the air-for example, Union spies floated above Confederate encampments and battle lines in hydrogen-filled passenger balloons, sending reconnaissance information back to their commanders via telegraph-and to the sea. "Iron-clad" warships prowled up and down the coast, maintaining a Union blockade of Confederate ports.

For their part, Confederate sailors tried to sink these ironclads with submarines. The first of these, the Confederate C.S.S. Hunley, was a metal tube that was 40 feet long, 4 feet across, and held an 8-man crew. In 1864, the Hunley sank the Union blockade ship Housatonic off the coast of Charleston but was itself wrecked in the process.

The Railroad

More important than these advanced weapons were larger-scale technological innovations such as the railroad. Once again, the Union had the advantage. When the war began, there were 22,000 miles of railroad track in the North and just 9,000 in the South, and the North had almost all of the nation's track and locomotive factories. Furthermore, Northern tracks tended to be "standard gauge," which meant that any train car could ride on any track. Southern tracks, by contrast, were not standardized, so people and goods frequently had to switch cars as they traveled-an expensive and inefficient system.

Union officials used railroads to move troops and supplies from one place to another. They also used thousands of soldiers to keep tracks and trains safe from Confederate attack.

The Telegraph

Abraham Lincoln was the first president who was able to communicate on the spot with his officers on the battlefield. The White House telegraph office enabled him to monitor battlefield reports, lead real-time strategy meetings and deliver orders to his men. Here, as well, the Confederate army was at a disadvantage: They lacked the technological and industrial ability to conduct such a large-scale communication campaign.

In 1861, the Union Army established the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, led by a young railroad man named Andrew Carnegie. The next year alone, the U.S.M.T.C. trained 1,200 operators, strung 4,000 miles of telegraph wire and sent more than a million messages to and from the battlefield.

Civil War Photography

The Civil War was the first war to be documented through the lens of a camera. However, the era's photographic process was far too elaborate for candid pictures. Taking and developing photos using the so-called "wet-plate" process was a meticulous, multi-step procedure that required more than one "camera operator" and lots of chemicals and equipment. As a result, the images of the Civil War are not action snapshots: They are portraits and landscapes. It was not until the 20th century that photographers were able to take non-posed pictures on the battlefield.

Technological innovation had an enormous impact on the way people fought the Civil War and on the way they remember it. Many of these inventions have played important roles in military and civilian life ever since.

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Civil War Technology - Weapons, Military, Advancements | HISTORY

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While the American Civil War saw the use of new weapons like the repeating rifle, other technological innovations from the era also impacted the fighting.

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Field artillery in the American Civil War - Wikipedia

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Field artillery in the American Civil War refers to the artillery weapons, equipment, and practices used by the Artillery branch to support the infantry and cavalry forces in the field. It does not include siege artillery, use of artillery in fixed fortifications, or coastal or naval artillery.

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During the Civil War, both sides were devastated by battle and disease. Nurses, surgeons, and physicians rose to the challenge of healing a nation and advanced medicine into the modern age.
From the stench of putrefying flesh wafting through unsanitary and crowded camps to the unglamorous illnesses of syphilis and dysentery, our modern disgust toward Civil War medical practices is generally justified.

However, while "advanced" or "hygienic" may not be terms attributed to medicine in the nineteenth century, modern hospital practices and treatment methods owe much to the legacy of Civil War medicine. Of the approximately 620,000 soldiers who died in the war, two-thirds of these deaths were not the result of enemy fire, but of a force stronger than any army of men: disease. Combating disease as well treating the legions of wounded soldiers pushed Americans to rethink their theories on health and develop efficient practices to care for the sick and wounded.

At the beginning of the Civil War, medical equipment and knowledge was hardly up to the challenges posed by the wounds, infections and diseases which plagued millions on both sides. Illnesses like dysentery, typhoid fever, pneumonia, mumps, measles and tuberculosis spread among the poorly sanitized camps, felling men already weakened by fierce fighting and meager diet. Additionally, armies initially struggled to efficiently tend to and transport their wounded, inadvertently sacrificing more lives to mere disorganization.

For medical practitioners in the field during the Civil War, germ theory, antiseptic (clean) medical practices, advanced equipment, and organized hospitalization systems were virtually unknown. Medical training was just emerging out of the "heroic era," a time where physicians advocated bloodletting, purging, blistering (or a combination of all three) to rebalance the humors of the body and remedy the sick. Physicians were also often encouraged to treat diseases like syphilis with mercury, a toxic treatment, to say the least. These aggressive "remedies" of the heroic era of medicine were often worse than patients' diseases; those who overcame illness during the war owed their recoveries less to the ingenuity of contemporary medicine than to grit and chance. Luck was a rarity in camps where poor sanitation, bad hygiene and diet bred disease, infection, and death.

The wounded and sick suffered from the haphazard hospitalization systems that existed at the start of the Civil War. As battles ended, the wounded were rushed down railroad lines to nearby cities and towns, where doctors and nurses coped with the onslaught of dying men in makeshift hospitals. These hospitals saw a great influx of wounded from both sides and the wounded and dying filled the available facilities to the brim. The Fairfax Seminary, for example, opened its doors twenty years prior to the war with only fourteen students, but it housed an overwhelming 1,700 sick and wounded soldiers during the course of the war.

On his many tours of these improvised hospitals, the great American poet and Civil War nurse Walt Whitman noted in his Memoranda during the War the disorderly death and waste of early Civil War medicine. At the camp hospital of the Army of the Potomac in Falmouth, Virginia in 1862, Whitman saw "a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c, a full load for a one-horse cart" and "several dead bodies" lying near. Of the "hospital" itself, which was a brick mansion before the battle of Fredericksburg changed its use, Whitman observed that it was "quite crowded, upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody." Of the division hospitals, Whitman noted that these were "merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs or small leaves."

However, the heavy and constant demands of the sick and wounded sped up the technological progression of medicine, wrenching American medical practices into the light of modernity. Field and pavilion hospitals replaced makeshift ones and efficient hospitalization systems encouraged the accumulation of medical records and reports, which slowed bad practices as accessible knowledge spread the use of beneficial treatments.

Several key figures played a role in the progression of medicine at this time. Jonathan Letterman, the Medical Director of the Army of the Potomac, brought "order and efficiency in to the Medical Service" with a regulated ambulance system and evacuation plans for the wounded. As surgeon general of the Union army, William A. Hammond standardized, organized and designed new hospital layouts and inspection systems and literally wrote the book on hygiene for the army. Clara Barton, well-known humanitarian and founder of the American Red Cross, brought professional efficiency to soldiers in the field, especially at the Battle of Antietam in September of 1862 when she delivered much-needed medical supplies and administered relief and care for the wounded. Disease and illness took a heavy toll on soldiers, but as these historic characters show, every effort was made to prevent death caused by human error and ignorance through the development of organized and more advanced practices.

The sheer quantity of those who suffered from disease and severe wounds during the Civil War forced the army and medical practitioners to develop new therapies, technologies and practices to combat death. Thanks to Hammond's design of clean, well ventilated and large pavilion-style hospitals, suffering soldiers received care that was efficient and sanitary. In the later years of the war, these hospitals had a previously unheard of 8% mortality rate for their patients.

Though the mortality rate was higher for soldiers wounded on the battlefield, field dressing stations and field hospitals administered care in increasingly advanced ways. Once a soldier was wounded, medical personnel on the battlefield bandaged the soldier as fast they could, and gave him whiskey (to ease the shock) and morphine, if necessary, for pain. If his wounds demanded more attention, he was evacuated via Letterman's ambulance and stretcher system to a nearby field hospital.

Under Hammond and Letterman's encouragement of triage organization that is still used today, field hospitals separated wounded soldiers into three categories: mortally wounded, slightly wounded and surgical cases. Most of the amputations performed at field hospitals were indeed horrible scenes, but the surgery itself was not as crude as popular memory makes it out to have been. Anesthetics were readily available to surgeons, who administered chloroform or ether to patients before the procedure. Though gruesome, amputation was a life-saving procedure that swiftly halted the devastating effects of wounds from Minié balls (which, by the way, not many "bit" to fight the pain-the chloroform usually did the trick).

In field hospitals and pavilion-style hospitals, thousands of physicians received experience and training. As doctors and nurses became widely familiar with prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, anesthetics, and best surgical practices, medicine was catapulted into the modern era of quality care. Organized relief agencies like the 1861 United States Sanitary Commission dovetailed doctors' efforts to save wounded and ill soldiers and set the pattern for future organizations like the American Red Cross, founded in 1881.

Death from wounds and disease was an additional burden of the war that took a toll on the hearts, minds, and bodies of all Americans, but it also sped up the progression of medicine and influenced practices the army and medical practitioners still use today. While the Union certainly had the advantage of better medical supplies and manpower, both Rebels and Federals attempted to combat illness and improve medical care for their soldiers during the war. Many of America's modern medical accomplishments have their roots in the legacy of America's defining war.
Originally published on October 29, 2013

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A Civil War Trust article exploring the legacy of the Civil War in modern medicine.

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Prelude to war

The secession of the Southern states (in chronological order, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina) in 1860-61 and the ensuing outbreak of armed hostilities were the culmination of decades of growing sectional friction over slavery. Between 1815 and 1861 the economy of the Northern states was rapidly modernizing and diversifying. Although agriculture-mostly smaller farms that relied on free labour-remained the dominant sector in the North, industrialization had taken root there. Moreover, Northerners had invested heavily in an expansive and varied transportation system that included canals, roads, steamboats, and railroads; in financial industries such as banking and insurance; and in a large communications network that featured inexpensive, widely available newspapers, magazines, and books, along with the telegraph.

By contrast, the Southern economy was based principally on large farms (plantations) that produced commercial crops such as cotton and that relied on slaves as the main labour force. Rather than invest in factories or railroads as Northerners had done, Southerners invested their money in slaves-even more than in land; by 1860, 84 percent of the capital invested in manufacturing was invested in the free (nonslaveholding) states. Yet, to Southerners, as late as 1860, this appeared to be a sound business decision. The price of cotton, the South's defining crop, had skyrocketed in the 1850s, and the value of slaves-who were, after all, property-rose commensurately. By 1860 the per capita wealth of Southern whites was twice that of Northerners, and three-fifths of the wealthiest individuals in the country were Southerners.

The extension of slavery into new territories and states had been an issue as far back as the Northwest Ordinance of 1784. When the slave territory of Missouri sought statehood in 1818, Congress debated for two years before arriving upon the Missouri Compromise of 1820. This was the first of a series of political deals that resulted from arguments between pro-slavery and antislavery forces over the expansion of the "peculiar institution," as it was known, into the West. The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the roughly 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square km) of new territory that the United States gained as a result of it added a new sense of urgency to the dispute. More and more Northerners, driven by a sense of morality or an interest in protecting free labour, came to believe, in the 1850s, that bondage needed to be eradicated. White Southerners feared that limiting the expansion of slavery would consign the institution to certain death. Over the course of the decade, the two sides became increasingly polarized and politicians less able to contain the dispute through compromise. When Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the explicitly antislavery Republican Party, won the 1860 presidential election, seven Southern states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) carried out their threat and seceded, organizing as the Confederate States of America.

In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, rebels opened fire on Fort Sumter, at the entrance to the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. Curiously, this first encounter of what would be the bloodiest war in the history of the United States claimed no victims. After a 34-hour bombardment, Maj. Robert Anderson surrendered his command of about 85 soldiers to some 5,500 besieging Confederate troops under P.G.T. Beauregard. Within weeks, four more Southern states (Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina) left the Union to join the Confederacy.

With war upon the land, President Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to serve for three months. He proclaimed a naval blockade of the Confederate states, although he insisted that they did not legally constitute a sovereign country but were instead states in rebellion. He also directed the secretary of the treasury to advance $2 million to assist in the raising of troops, and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, first along the East Coast and ultimately throughout the country. The Confederate government had previously authorized a call for 100,000 soldiers for at least six months' service, and this figure was soon increased to 400,000.
Jennifer L. Weber

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American Civil War | History, Summary, Dates, Causes, Map, Timeline, Battles, Significance, & Facts

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American Civil War, four-year war (1861-65) fought between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded to form the Confederate States of America. It arose out of disputes over slavery and states' rights. When antislavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president (1860), the Southern states seceded.

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As the Civil War raged on the land, the two national navies- Union and Confederate -created another war on the water. The naval war was one of sudden, spectacular lightning battles as well as continual and fatal vigilance on the coasts, rivers, and seas.

Union President Abraham Lincoln set the Union's first naval goal when he declared a blockade of the Southern coasts. His plan was to cut off Southern trade with the outside world and prevent sale of the Confederacy's major crop, cotton. The task was daunting; the Southern coast measured over 2,500 miles and the Union navy numbered less than 40 usable ships. The Union also needed a "brown water navy" of gunboats to support army campaigns down the Mississippi River and in Northern Virginia.

The Southern states had few resources compared to the North: a handful of shipyards, a small merchant marine, and no navy at all. Yet the Confederates needed a navy to break the Union blockade and to defend the port cities. Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, scrambled to find ships and even took on an offensive task: attacking Union merchant shipping on the high seas.

The first task for Lincoln's naval secretary, Gideon Welles, was a straightforward, but huge, fill-in-the-blank: acquire enough vessels to make every Southern inlet, port, and bay dangerous for trade. The Northern navy immediately began building dozens of new warships and purchased hundreds of merchant ships to convert into blockaders by adding a few guns. The result was a motley assortment that ranged from old sailing ships to New York harbor ferryboats. Critics called it Welles' "soapbox navy."

The Union's blockading squadrons needed not only ships, but also bases on the Southern coast from which to operate. In 1861 the Union began a series of attacks on port cities like Hatteras, North Carolina and Port Royal, South Carolina along the southeastern seaboard. Poorly defended, they fell to Union gunnery and were seized to use as bases. Though never air-tight, by late 1862 the blockade had become a major impediment to Rebel trade.

With a smaller fleet and fewer shipyards than the North, the Confederates counted on making the ships they had as formidable as possible. They decided to challenge the Union navy with the latest technology: ironclads. Though iron-armored ships had appeared in Europe in the 1850s, Union warships were still built of wood. The first Confederate ironclad began its career as a Union cruiser, the Merrimack, captured by the Southerners when they seized Norfolk navy yard in Virginia. The Confederates ripped off nearly everything above the waterline of the ship-which they renamed Virginia-and replaced it with a casemate of heavy timbers covered by four inches of iron plating. Though underpowered and crude, as yet there was no match for her in Lincoln's wooden navy.

The Union quickly met this challenge with the ingenuity of inventor John Ericsson. Most of his ironclad-the Monitor-was underwater. All that appeared above board was a flat main deck and a circular housing carrying two guns. This "tin can on a raft" was the world's first rotating gun turret, and it was protected by eight inches of iron. Monitor met Virginia in March 1862 at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Their three-hour engagement-often fought at point-blank range-was the world's first battle between ironclad vessels. The engagement itself was a draw but the very existence of Virginia deterred Union army operations in the area for some months afterwards. Suddenly the wooden naval vessel-and most of the Union fleet-was obsolete. Shipyards North and South began to turn out ironclads as quickly as possible.

Early 1862 also marked the beginning of the Union campaigns to split the Confederacy apart along the Mississippi River. A fleet of gunboats was built to support Ulysses S. Grant's army as it moved from Illinois down the Mississippi River into the heart of the South. Most of these vessels were little more than flat-bottomed, steam-driven barges with heavy timbered sides; the most powerful, like the Cairo, were also iron plated. Grant's army and the brown water navy captured Rebel strongholds such as Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. At the same time, a squadron in the Gulf of Mexico, under David G. Farragut, boldly took on the defenses of New Orleans, Louisiana, with the intention of moving past the city and northward up the Mississippi River. In April 1862, Farragut's fleet fought past two formidable forts and forced New Orleans to surrender. In July, 1863, after a series of hard-fought campaigns against both Rebel forts and fleets, these two Union forces-one moving south and one moving north-would meet at Vicksburg, Mississippi and sever everything west of the River from the rest of the Confederacy.

In April 1863, the Union navy turned with force on the Southern port cities when it took on the defenses of Charleston, South Carolina. The Confederates were well prepared-having had two years to position guns, floating obstructions and mines (torpedoes)-and the attack failed. Charleston did not fall until the war was nearly ended. After the debacle at Charleston, two other major port cities were targeted: Mobile, Alabama-the last major port in the Gulf-and Wilmington, North Carolina-the last and most important Atlantic gateway in the Confederacy. Mobile was defended by two large forts but these fell under Farragut's assault in August 1864. In January, 1865, after a failed first attempt, the largest Union fleet ever assembled attacked Fort Fisher -the key to Wilmington's defense-and the stronghold fell. Its loss deprived Confederate General Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia of a major supply source and contributed directly to the end of the war.

While the war rumbled along on the home front, the Confederates outfitted a series of commerce raiders, vessels such as Sumter, Alabama, and Shenandoah to attack Union merchant shipping worldwide. These ships were acquired by Confederate agents in Europe and most never entered a Southern port. Alabama, under Raphael Semmes, was the most famous. Destroying over 60 ships in a 21-month cruise and sending the Union shipping interests into a frenzy, Alabama was finally confronted by the Union cruiser Kearsarge off Cherbourg, France in 1864. In one of history's last classic one-on-one sea duels, the famed Confederate raider was sunk by accurate Union gunfire.

Finally, the last official act of the Confederate States of America was a naval one. The Confederate raider Shenandoah, far at sea in Pacific waters, only learned of the Civil War's end four months after the Confederate armies surrendered. Shenandoah finally lowered her flag in England on November 6, 1865.

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As the Civil War raged on the land, the two national navies- Union and Confederate -created another war on the water. The naval war was one of sudden, spectacular lightning battles as well as continual and fatal vigilance on the coasts, rivers, and seas.

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Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack | Summary & Facts

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Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, naval engagement during the American Civil War on March 9, 1862, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, a harbor at the mouth of the James River, notable as history’s first duel between ironclad warships and the beginning of a new era of naval warfare.

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Battle of the Ironclads (U.S. National Park Service)

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The battle between the two vessels began on the morning of March 9 and continued for four hours. The ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk.

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Ironclad Gunboats - Fort Donelson National Battlefield (U.S. National Park Service)

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In 1861, the Union War Department purchased several boats for conversion to gunboats and decided to build seven new ironclad gunboats. These gunboats formed the basis of the Union's western flotilla. The War Department awarded James B. Eads, a civil engineer with riverboat experience, the contract to build the new ironclad boats.

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"Hard crackers, hard crackers, come again no more!"

By far, the food soldiers received has been the source of more stories than any other aspect of army life. The Union soldier received a variety of edibles. The food issue, or ration, was usually meant to last three days while on active campaign and was based on the general staples of meat and bread. Meat usually came in the form of salted pork or, on rare occasions, fresh beef. Rations of pork or beef were boiled, broiled or fried over open campfires. Army bread was a flour biscuit called hardtack, re-named "tooth-dullers", "worm castles", and "sheet iron crackers" by the soldiers who ate them. Hardtack could be eaten plain though most men preferred to toast them over a fire, crumble them into soups, or crumble and fry them with their pork and bacon fat in a dish called skillygalee. Other food items included rice, peas, beans, dried fruit, potatoes, molasses, vinegar, and salt. Baked beans were a northern favorite when the time could be taken to prepare them and a cooking pot with a lid could be obtained. Coffee was a most desirable staple and some soldiers considered the issue of coffee and accompanying sugar more important than anything else. Coffee beans were distributed green so it was up to the soldiers to roast and grind them. The task for this most desirable of beverages was worth every second as former soldier John Billings recalled: "What a Godsend it seemed to us at times! How often after being completely jaded by a night march... have I had a wash, if there was water to be had, made and drunk my pint or so of coffee and felt as fresh and invigorated as if just arisen from a night's sound sleep!"

Soldiers often grouped themselves into a "mess" to combine and share rations, often with one soldier selected as cook or split duty between he and another man. But while on active campaign, rations were usually prepared by each man to the individual's taste. It was considered important for the men to cook the meat ration as soon as it was issued, for it could be eaten cold if activity prevented cook fires. A common campaign dinner was salted pork sliced over hardtack with coffee boiled in tin cups that each man carried.

The southern soldier's diet was considerably different from his northern counterpart and usually in much less quantity. The average Confederate subsisted on bacon, cornmeal, molasses, peas, tobacco, vegetables and rice. They also received a coffee substitute which was not as desirable as the real coffee northerners had. Trades of tobacco for coffee were quite common throughout the war when fighting was not underway. Other items for trade or barter included newspapers, sewing needles, buttons, and currency.

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"Hard crackers, hard crackers, come again no more!" By far, the food soldiers received has been the source of more stories than any other aspect of army life. The Union soldier received a variety of edibles. The food issue, or ration, was usually meant to last three days while on active campaign and was based on the general staples of meat and bread.

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Only a tiny fraction of any soldier's time was spent in front line combat. Instead, the vast majority of his existence revolved around the monotonous routines of camp life, which presented its own set of struggles and hardships.

Once in the ranks, military life turned out to be far different than what the majority of Civil War soldiers had expected. Patriotic zeal blinded most of these volunteers to the realities and hardships they were signing up to experience. The passage of several generations had muted the country's memory of the deprivations of the American Revolution. Few had participated in the war with Mexico, which left a popular legacy of glorious victory. Certainly, argued the conventional wisdom, this sectional crisis would be resolved in a few short, painless months.

Volunteers viewed the battlefield as a great stage upon which they would either "secure their liberty" or "save the Union." While they acknowledged that losses would occur, no one envisioned their potential demise in any but heroic circumstances, but four years of the daily struggle to survive in military camps would prove otherwise. Twice as many Civil War soldiers succumbed to death from disease as from bullets, shells and bayonets. By varying estimates, between 400,000 and 500,000 soldiers lost their lives on this less gallant of stages. What was the basis of this noncombat struggle, and how did the common soldier cope?

During the fair-weather campaign season, soldiers could expect to be engaged in battle one day out of 30. Their remaining days were filled with almost interminable drilling, punctuated with spells of entertainment in the form of music, cards and other forms of gambling. The arrival of newspapers or mail from home - whether letters or a care package - in camp was always cause for celebration. Despite such diversions, much time was still left for exposure to the noncombatant foes of poor shelter, unhealthy food, and a lack of hygiene, resulting in waves of sickness and disease.

After the first months of the war, the shelter half, or "dog tent," became the most practical means of overnight shelter. While portable and lightweight, shelter halves provided minimal protection for their two inhabitants. Sgt. Austin C. Stearns of the 13th Massachusetts described his shelter as "simply a piece of cloth about six feet square with a row of buttons and button holes on three sides; two men pitched together by buttoning their pieces together and getting two sticks with a crotch at one end and one to go across at the top and then placing their cloth over it and pinning it down tight." To protect the soldier from the damp ground, a tarred or rubberized blanket could be used. A stout wool blanket kept the chill off. Unfortunately, many soldiers discarded these heavy items on a long march or when entering combat, and lived (or died) to regret it when the weather changed. As the war moved forward, an exhausted soldier often merely lay on his blanket at night in an effort to simplify his life and maximize periods of rest. Such protracted exposure to the elements boded ill for his life expectancy.

Rations on the march varied from plentiful to scarce. On paper, the Union army enjoyed the best rations of any army in history up to that time, but logistical difficulties inherent in feeding armies of tens of thousands resulted in occasional shortages. The Confederacy, while fighting on predominately "home turf," often found it difficult to consistently deliver full rations to its troops on the march, largely due to procurement and transportation problems.

The full Union marching ration consisted of one pound of hard bread (the infamous hardtack), three-quarters of a pound of salted pork or one-and-a-quarter pound of fresh meat, along with coffee, sugar and salt allotments. At the beginning of the war, the Confederacy adopted the Union ration, but reduced it by 1862. Fresh meat and coffee became increasingly scarce. As fresh fruits and vegetables disappeared from military diets, soldiers' immune systems deteriorated and vitamin deficiency diseases such as scurvy proliferated. The Union army responded by issuing desiccated vegetables. As described by Corp. Joseph Van Nest of the 101st Ohio, these delicacies consisted of "a combination of corn husks, tomato skins, carrots and other kinds of vegetables too numerous to mention." This bounty had been dried and compressed into a sheet or block and, when boiled, expanded to many times its previous size. While denigrated as "desecrated vegetables" by the boys in blue, they consumed them with alacrity as a variation in an otherwise bland diet. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the culinary science of the era, most of the needed vitamins disappeared during processing.

Confederate soldiers usually had to forage for fresh vegetables. During the deprivations of the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, one Johnny Reb wrote, "Our men get a vegetable diet by cooking up polk, potato tops, May pop vines, kurlip weed, lambs quarter, thistle and a hundred kind of weeds I always thought poison. I thought it trash...but the boys call it 'long forage'..." On the march, "foraging" - a convenient euphemism for theft - would be employed by both sides in an attempt to improve the daily diet. Despite orders to the contrary, some Confederates liberally practiced this thievery during their forays into the North and even when marching and camping in friendly territory.

The commissary took a back seat on the march to the needs of the ordinance department, but still trumped the quartermaster, whose top priority was to provide forage for draft animals, not replacing uniform components. Threadbare patriots consequently appeared, particularly in the Confederate armies, and the "battlefield requisition" became a prime means of supply for the South. As Sgt. John Worsham noted at the end of the war:
"Nearly all equipment in the Army of Northern Virginia were articles captured from the Yankees.... Most of the blankets were those marked 'US," and also the rubber blankets or cloths. The very clothing that the men wore was mostly captured, for we were allowed to wear their pants, underclothing and overcoats. As for myself, I purchased only one hat, one pair of shoes, and one jacket after 1861."
Soldiers North and South also shared in the infestation of body lice in their clothing and bedding. Due to constant outdoor living, often under poor sanitary conditions, the "grey back vermin" became a visible manifestation of all of the invisible bacteria and germs whose presence was unknown to mid-19th-century science.

The seasonal movement to permanent winter camps would simultaneously improve and harm the physical condition of the Civil War soldier. While the men remained in one place, the supply chain of wagons and railroads caught up to their daily needs. Union logisticians employed their superior resources in overcoming commissary and quartermaster problems, but the Confederates also managed to supply their men in winter camp under more challenging conditions.

Periodic shortages did exist, but were vividly remembered by the Southerners. Both sides shared the difficulties that emerged from remaining in one place for an extended period of time. The majority of soldiers, being from rural backgrounds, had not been exposed to such a wide cross section of the human population and its communicable diseases. When accumulated in camps of tens of thousands, soldiers without natural immunities would succumb to the likes of measles and chickenpox. Those same large numbers, residing in one spot for more than a month, caused horrendous situations in relation to sanitation. The use of "sink pits" as latrine mechanisms ultimately led to the presence of human fecal bacteria in the water supply. That water supply, in many instances, did not need much help in the area of contamination. Swift running, clear water would be the exception more often than the rule. These conditions created the greatest killer of the war: amoebic and bacterial dysentery.

Whimsically called a case of the "quickstep," dysentery did more damage than the infernal killing creations of man. The creation of penicillin and other antibiotics was still decades away, leaving medical staffs of the Civil War few tools to combat the war's greatest killer. By the end of the war, the Union Sanitary and Christian Commissions made great strides in improving camp hygiene and clean water. The Confederacy had nothing on such a scale, although experience also improved camp conditions for the boys in gray.

After four long years of war, the military encampments had taken their toll. Although the 2:1 rate of death from disease over combat may seem alarming to us today, it represented a significant improvement from earlier conflicts, like the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when that number was closer to 5:1. Not until World War II did the number of battle casualties approach the losses from disease.

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Only a tiny fraction of any Civil War soldierâ€™s time was spent in front line combat. Instead, the vast majority of his existence revolved around the monotonous routines of camp life, which presented its own set of struggles and hardships.

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Civil War Soldiers: Decimated by Disease

By Glenn W. LaFantasie

Disease and primitive medical knowledge were the Civil War soldier's worst enemies. For every soldier killed in battle, two died of disease. During their first summer of service in the Confederate army, William C. Oates and his comrades of the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment watched as the first casualties dropped from their ranks, not from wounds inflicted by their Federal foes but from the deadlier onslaught of microbes and viruses in their camp. The Alabamians learned before they ever fired a single shot in anger that war often brought suffering and death where they were least expected, and that this particular war would seldom show mercy to anyone caught in the swath of its deadly scythe.

The 15th Alabama Infantry fell victim to an enemy more powerful than any Union army in the summer and autumn of 1861

Oates was a lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor, as well as a former fugitive from justice who had spent part of his youth as a gambler in Texas. In July 1861 he formed a militia company in Henry County, Alabama-the "Henry Pioneers"-that become Company G of the newly established 15th Alabama Infantry, under the command of Colonel James Cantey. Oates was named captain of Company G. From Fort Mitchell on the Chattahoochee River, Cantey moved his regiment-about 1,000 men strong-north by train to Richmond, where the 15th Alabama spent a few weeks drilling and training. Then, on August 21, the regiment received orders to proceed to the front. When they heard the news, the men cheered and sang all through the night.

The next morning, Cantey led the regiment through the streets of Richmond to the railroad depot, where President Jefferson Davis reviewed the troops and complimented Cantey on their fine appearance. The newly elected governor of Alabama, John Gill Shorter, a prominent Democrat from Eufaula with whom Oates was politically allied, was also there to see the 15th off, and he delivered a short address before the men boarded the cars. According to one Alabama soldier, Gill's speech "did our hearts good," for apparently the governor stirringly invoked the memory of Patrick Henry who, 80 years before, had denounced King George III by declaring, "Give me liberty, or give me death!" Once on the train, the men gave a rousing Rebel yell, the whistle blew, and the wooden stock cars lurched forward toward Manassas Junction.

All around Centreville and Manassas, near where the Confederates had won their first major victory in a battle fought on July 21, Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston had extended the Southern lines. Reinforcements from all over the South were being rushed to the Manassas defenses as recruits poured into the army in the wake of the fighting along Bull Run. By August, Johnston's army numbered less than 40,000 soldiers, and the general believed he needed more men to keep the Federal army from contemplating-and perhaps succeeding in-another southward push.

As the train carrying the 15th Alabama passed through little hamlets-places no bigger or even smaller than Abbeville, the county seat where Oates had mustered in the Henry Pioneers-on its ambling journey north, Virginians stood by the tracks cheering the soldiers and waving their hats and handkerchiefs. At each stop, Gus McClendon, one of Oates's privates in Company G, remembered that "the patriotic ladies and beautiful Virginia girls would be gathered...to welcome us, distributing their fruits and flowers and cheering us on with expressions of delight when informed we were from Alabama."

It took all day for the train to reach Manassas Junction, where the men of the 15th Alabama got off the cars, formed ranks, and marched about five miles from the station to an old field called Pageland, a flat open plain just north of Warrenton Turnpike where the Page family had intended to build a mansion and develop a plantation. On the march, Captain Benjamin Gardner of Company I led his men while he held a great umbrella over his head. "It had a most unmilitary appearance," Oates remembered years later, "but the captain was large and corpulent, a lawyer by profession, unused to the sun, 52 years old, and therefore excusable."

The 15th Alabama went into camp beside the 21st North Carolina, the 16th Mississippi, and the 21st Georgia Regiments. Across the broad expanse of field, practically nothing but row upon row of tents could be seen. The noise of camp-officers shouting, feet plodding on dry sod, bugles blowing, drums tapping-echoed over Pageland in one vast discord of sound. Although the water in the camp was bad, the weather was hot, and many thirsty soldiers decided to drink the tainted water rather than suffer from dehydration. Colonel Cantey saw to it that his companies drilled hard every day, and from miles around one could see the dust rising from Pageland like the billowing smoke of a forest fire.

"Drilling and performing the routine of camp duty was the regular order," recalled Oates. Despite the arduous regularity of drilling every day for at least four hours, the men did have some respite and moments of gaiety and laughter. Oates fondly remembered "the fife of old Hildebrand, and Jimmie Newberry's and Pat Brannon's drums, as they were heard at reveille and tattoo." Colonel Cantey's teamster also brought a smile to the men's faces: He "was the only man connected with the regiment," Oates said, "who could surpass the Colonel in profanity." But camp life involved mostly endless marching and backbreaking work. As Gus McClendon remembered: "The fatigue duty consisted of policing the camp, looking after its sanitary condition, cutting and hauling wood, and going with the forage and commissary wagons to the depot at Manassas Junction, to assist in loading them with the supplies for man and beast."

With the camp less than two miles from the fields where the Battle of Manassas had been fought, Oates decided to take Company G and some other men from the regiment on a tour of the ground. It had just been a month since the Confederate victory, and the Alabamians were all curious to see what a battlefield really looked like. At first, the terrain matched their own romantic conceptions of the battle and the heroes who had fallen fighting for their righteous cause. Oates recalled that white posts "had been set up to mark each of the places where fell General [Bernard] Bee, of South Carolina, Colonels [Francis] Bartow, Georgia; [Charles] Fisher, of North Carolina, and [Egbert] Jones, of Alabama."

The men walked over the ground with expressions of awe and wonder on their faces. Caspar W. Boyd, a private in Company I, wrote home to his parents that he "found a sight ther that I never saw befor." Some of the dead from the battle had been hastily buried and their arms and hands protruded from beneath thin mounds of dirt. Boyd and his comrades even discovered severed hands and feet on the ground. The carcasses of dead horses still littered the field. He remarked that they strolled by the Widow Henry house, where the widow herself had been "kiled on her bed" during the battle.

Oates distinctly remembered, almost 45 years later, the pungent smell of fennel and pennyroyal-weeds growing on the battlefield that had been mashed down during the fight and still gave off their recognizable aromas. Some of Oates's men thought the odor came from "dead Yankees," concluding that Northerners must have a different smell in death than Southerners. A few of the Alabamians reacted to the battlefield with less solemnity than did Oates or Caspar Boyd. Gus McClendon reported that some of the men treated the outing like a picnic, and they felt "like birds turned out of a cage." Nevertheless, he and his companions could not avoid being amazed at the sight of the remnants of a stand of pine where the 7th Georgia was known to have held its ground during the battle. The trees had been chopped to pieces by musket volleys. "It was a wonder to us," wrote McClendon, "how a man could live in such a place."

If nothing else, the excursion to the Manassas battlefield gave the Alabama boys reason to ponder war and its grim realities. Oates and his men roamed fields where the grass was still stained red with dried blood, where unexploded shells lay exposed to view, and where minié balls covered patches of ground in a thick lead carpet. To McClendon, the "horrible" battlefield offered "sad scenes" that "furnished food for reflection." Although some tried to treat the tour as a frolic, no one who visited the battlefield that day would ever regard war in quite the same fashion as he had done before.

"At the time," wrote McClendon, "I was full of malice and hatred for the 'Boys in Blue' and was just as anxious to kill him as he was to kill me, yet when I would stop and take a second thought, and gaze upon those little mounds I could truthfully say of the dead 'Boy in Blue' that sometime, and somewhere, he had been 'somebody's darling.' " When the men walked solemnly back to Pageland and reached their camp, they thought their short journey had showed them the worst of war. They had no idea of the far worse horrors yet to come.

Those horrors began at Pageland. It was in the Confederate camps there that, in the words of one private in the 15th Alabama, "the reaper commenced the harvest of death" that would continue for the regiment until its surrender at Appomattox. When the 15th Alabama had first arrived at Pageland, its closest neighbor in the camp, the 21st North Carolina, was already struggling with an epidemic of measles and serious outbreaks of mumps and typhoid. All of these diseases were-and still are-highly contagious, although in our modern times we have grown accustomed to dealing with them during childhood and have vaccines that prevent their spread and other medicines that quickly wipe them out. In the Civil War, measles was by far, as Oates himself declared, "the worst enemy of our army," for it spread rapidly among the adult soldiers who had developed no immunity to the disease and who could do nothing to fight it.

Measles cut through the ranks of the 15th Alabama at the encampment like a biblical plague or the medieval Black Death. No one, including the small number of surgeons assigned to the army, knew that the disease was carried on droplets through the air and that proximity to the virus meant almost certain infection. In this respect, it is somewhat miraculous that the entire Confederate camp at Pageland was not stricken with the disease. Infected soldiers experienced high fever, rash, runny noses, watery eyes, and coughing. Due to the lack of a vaccine and effective treatments, few men who were infected survived the illness. After the initial symptoms, their condition generally worsened. Some soldiers came down with pneumonia and encephalitis (brain inflammation) as a result of measles; others suffered middle-ear infections, severe diarrhea, and convulsions. The worst cases-and there were hundreds of them among the troops of the 15th Alabama-resulted in death.

The first man in the regiment to die was Andrew J. Folmar, 18, a private in Company I. Then many others quickly became sick and had no strength or immunity to fight off the overwhelming disease. About 100 of the regiment's men died over the span of six weeks. A military funeral and burial were performed for each death, and obsequies soon became part of the camp's daily routine. Overcome with emotion from this profusion of sickness and death, one private wrote in despair: "Beneath the soil of Prince William [County], now slumber in quiet repose, secure from summer's heat and winter's cold, from the cares of life and shock of strife, the noblest and best of the regiment."

Those who fell to sickness were stricken by the fear-and the near certainty-of approaching death. Sick and well alike yearned for the comforts of home and to be magically transported from this strange land where so many men were dying. For those on death's doorstep, the longing for home was even more pronounced. "The thought of home is ever uppermost in the mind," admitted one Alabamian, "and a wish exists to be buried with their fathers and the companies of their youth." Their wish would not be granted. At Pageland, the "Dead March" was so frequently heard that men became inured to it and soon did not even inquire as to who had died or was being buried. The endless deaths produced a "crude shock" among the men of the 15th Alabama and, as anyone might expect, "threw a gloom" over the camp that could not be shaken off.

So many men were sick that the routine camp duty for those who remained healthy became more strenuous than ever, for now there were fewer hands to do the work. Throughout the desolation of this epidemic, the 15th Alabama-just like all the other regiments-was ordered to keep up its drill four hours a day, although those who were not sick began to lose their strength under the physical burdens they had to bear.

Oates became outraged at the desperate situation. He faulted the army for keeping the sick in the same camp with the healthy men, which ensured that those who were not yet sick soon would be. Years later he wrote in anger:

I do not know who was responsible for it, but it was a great mistake. There was not that care taken of the men of any regiment, so far as my observation extended, which foresight, prudence and economy of war material-leaving humanity out of the question-imperatively demanded....Had the Confederate authorities made more persistent efforts than they did, hospitals could have been more established in sufficient numbers to have saved the lives of hundreds and thousands of good men, which were for the want of them unnecessarily sacrificed.

Oates believed that the surgeons could be blamed as well. They were "criminally negligent," he said, "for not earnestly protesting against such sacrifices of human life." He reached a bitter, but obvious, conclusion: "This folly lost to the service more men than were put out of it by the enemy's bullets."

Someone in Johnston's high command eventually decided that the Alabamians had stayed in Pageland long enough, and around the middle of September the 15th Alabama, along with several other regiments, received orders to transfer their camps closer to Centreville. Oates and the other capable officers and men of the 15th struck their tents under a sweltering sun, leaving about 300 of the regiment's sick behind, and marched up and down the swales of the Warrenton Turnpike toward Bull Run. Surely the sights and sounds of death had been more than enough for them at Pageland, but the Alabamians once more had to march across the Manassas battlefield, where those dour reminders of war and combat remained exposed in their shallow graves. One of Oates's men later wrote that the decomposing carcasses of humans and beasts spoke "in dumb eloquence" of man's inhumanity.

From the battlefield, Oates led his men-beaten down by the heat, their own fatigue, and somber thoughts of death-along the Alexandria Pike until they reached a vast open field, not altogether unlike Pageland, about five miles east of Centreville and three miles west of Fairfax Court House. There they established Camp Toombs, named in honor of Robert Augustus Toombs of Georgia, who had resigned his appointment as Confederate secretary of state to become a brigadier general. (Oates called him "Georgia's most erratic and greatest talker.") Not far from the camp were "bold springs" of water, the kind Virginia was noted for, Oates said happily.

The measles predictably followed the column from Pageland to Camp Toombs, even though the sickest men had been quarantined at Pageland. The men of the 15th Alabama, and of a good number of other regiments as well, kept dying. Barnett "Bud" Cody, a private in the 15th Alabama who was the son of a clergyman and Oates's playmate in their younger days, became ill and began to fear for his life. The doctor told him to stay in his tent, which soldiers were not allowed to do, especially when it came time for drill and dress parade. Oates, however, released Cody from duty from several days and allowed him to get stronger.

The army had an epidemic on its hands, and no one seemed to know quite what to do about it. The men turned to religion, as people-and particularly soldiers-do in times of doubt or utter despair. They were desperate, these young Confederate boys who cherished their Bibles and wrote home to their families to inform them that they kept up with their Scripture readings despite the taxing demands that the army placed on them every day. While Gus McClendon was on guard duty one day, a little girl gave him a Bible as a present, all carefully inscribed with the girl's name. He carried the book through several battles, treasuring the gift and honoring the girl who had given it to him. In camp, an itinerant preacher arrived to do some Bible thumping and held a prayer meeting that attracted large numbers of soldiers. The preacher handed out Bibles to the men, but only if they would promise to carry the Good Book with them, which many of them did.

As the Confederates camped around Fairfax Court House and Centreville waited for the war to erupt into battle again, which it did not do during these long weeks in the early autumn of 1861, separate hospitals for each regiment's roster of sick men were finally established. The 15th Alabama's was set up at Haymarket, a little village of a handful of houses and shops 10 miles west of Manassas Junction. Ill and dying soldiers from the 15th Alabama, including the ones who had been left behind at Pageland and those who had more recently succumbed to disease in Camp Toombs, were transported in uncomfortable springless wagons to the field hospital in Haymarket.

The village, located about six miles southwest of the Manassas battlefield, was not a perfect place to set up a hospital. South and west of the town a marshy stretch of woods produced more than a sufficient quantity of "bad air" and "bad water" that Civil War doctors incorrectly believed were the causes of contagious diseases.

The men of the 15th Alabama were brought to St. Paul's Episcopal Church, and as many of them as would fit were laid out on the pews in this house of God. For some, those who held to their faith, knowing they were housed in a church gave them succor and hope. For others, they must have been pleased, at the very least, to have a sturdy and dry roof over their heads. Many of the sick, however, were quartered in tents raised in the fields around the church, the fields that already held those soldiers who had not recovered from their wounds after the Battle of Manassas. Others were given beds of straw and hay under the only protection available-the tall trees that shaded the yard around the church.

The sick were attended by Dr. Francis A. Stanford, a native of Georgia who had enlisted in the 15th Alabama at Fort Mitchell on the Chattahoochee, and by a Dr. Shepherd of Eufaula, Alabama, who was nearly 75 years old. Stanford had carefully selected Haymarket as the site of the regimental hospital. One soldier said of Stanford that he missed "no opportunity to provide for the well-being of the invalids." This Alabamian had nothing but praise for the good doctor: "All of his time and talent is devoted to his profession and the amelioration of the suffering. Day by day we see him on his rounds of mercy from the rising of the sun until 'the going down thereof,' and from dark until midnight, in fair weather and foul, and oh! ungrateful humanity; we hear him abused the remaining six [hours of the day]."

Convalescents provided the nursing care to their comrades at the hospital. Oates visited St. Paul's and described with a critical eye what he saw there:

At this improvised hospital there was neither accommodations nor comfort; no bedding but the soldier's blanket, with his knapsack for a pillow, and no nourishment but army rations; a scant supply of medicine and no medical attention worth having, except such as old Dr. Shepherd...could give....The nights in October were cold, and early in the month there was frost, and the suffering of the sick men was intolerable....It was no uncommon sight at that hospital to see six or seven corpses of 15th Alabama men laid out at once.

There were probably worse places to die than under those high trees (heavenly trees, the locals call them) or in the peaceful fields surrounding the church or in the quiet chancel of St. Paul's in Haymarket. But the men did die, and whether the place was good or bad, serene or bedlam, the only thing that mattered was that poor boys who could not do anything to save themselves, young men a very long way from their homes in Alabama, were slipping away. In time, the epidemic abated and the deaths finally ceased, but the Confederate forces in northern Virginia had already paid a very stiff price by losing good men, young men who had not yet even experienced the horror of combat but who had come to know of hell by confronting an invisible enemy against whom they had no defense.

At Camp Toombs, where the remainder of the 15th Alabama spent that autumn, camp life fell into the same old routines. Company and battalion drill, said Oates, was the daily occupation. Years afterward he remembered: "Occasionally we were aroused by a rumor, incident to such a life, concerning the advance or other movements of the enemy; but, having no foundation, the excitement soon subsided. Later in the war the soldiers denominated such rumors as 'grapevine telegrams' and paid no attention to them." In the loneliness of an army camp, with thousands of fellow soldiers all around, some of the men, Oates claimed, died of homesickness.

As for the sick and dying at Haymarket, Oates could not take his mind off them. Their suffering, as he had said, was unbearable-to them and to their comrades who survived. It is not known precisely how many men the 15th Alabama buried in the fields around St. Paul's Church, where their remains still lay after all this time. A stone marker near the entrance to the church states flatly, without mention of the dead of the 15th Alabama: "In this area are buried 80 unknown Confederate soldiers who died of wounds after the battle of Manassas, July 21, 1861."

Oates thought that at least 150 men died there and were buried in the churchyard, but in old age, as he wrote his memoirs and strained to remember the details of the Haymarket hospital, he caught himself and confessed that the number must have been much greater. The adjutant's report for the month of November 1861 alone listed 60 dead. With sadness in his heart, Oates said he thought the estimates were all low. And he was probably right. It seems likely that no less than 200 men from the 15th Alabama, and perhaps considerably more than that, fell from disease at Haymarket and are buried in the fields (or what is left of them) to the north and west of the church building.

Haymarket was not unique in the autumn of 1861, for there were hospital sites just like the one at St. Paul's near practically every army camp, Union and Confederate, from Virginia to Texas. The hell faced by the men of the 15th Alabama at Haymarket was experienced by thousands of soldiers on both sides. Few of the men who got sick in their camps recovered from their illnesses; most who contracted measles or mumps or whooping cough or typhoid-or any of the other highly contagious and highly lethal diseases that sliced through Civil War armies-died without ever really understanding what had happened to them or why they had to die. Over the next four years, disease continued to take its toll in the Confederate and Union ranks, and the terrible scenes that had taken place at Pageland, Camp Toombs, and Haymarket would repeat themselves across the American countryside until the war, and all its hard suffering, finally ended.

What William C. Oates and the boys of the 15th Alabama learned in the late summer and autumn 1861 was a lesson learned by every soldier in every war. It was a lesson as old as time. War is all misery, cruelty, and hell. And all too often young soldiers-brave and true boys-give their lives for no good reason at all.

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life of William C. Oates (Oxford University Press, 2006).

This article was first published in MHQ, Spring 2004.

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By Glenn W. LaFantasie Disease and primitive medical knowledge were the Civil War soldier's worst enemies. For every soldier killed in battle, two died of disease. During their first summer of service in the Confederate army, William C.

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Family life in Virginia and across the South suffered devastating effects during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Few households, whether slave or free, or located in the Tidewater, Piedmont, or mountainous Southwest, could remain insulated from a war fought on their lands and in their towns.

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NPS

The residents of the Shenandoah Valley witnessed 325 engagements and 14 battles during the Civil War. They faced large armies of both friend and foe. During the war it was heart wrenching to live amongst such scenes. Rampant devastation was brought to all aspects of civilian life.

Before the war the Valley was a land of beauty, diversity, and economic prosperity. A variety of people called the Valley home. The area was settled by Germans, Scots-Irish, Swissers, Mennonites, Quakers, Methodist, and Dunkers, making the Valley a multi-cultural region. The people who called the area home were hard working and ambitious. Economically the Valley was tied to the North, with easy trade access due to arteries such as the Valley Pike, Shenandoah River, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. These avenues drove most of the Valley's commerce to DC, Baltimore and beyond.

Life was disrupted in the peaceful Valley when John Brown attempted a slave insurrection at the armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia on October 16, 1859. This incident drove fear into local residents about other possible successful slave insurrections. Militia units started to spring into life as a way to monitor any possible threat.

When President Abraham Lincoln was elected in November 1860, cooler heads prevailed in the Shenandoah Valley, as the Valley was tied economically to the North and was not a slave dependent society. The nation began to crumble when South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860. The Virginia General Assembly convened in February 1861 to discuss secession. The Assembly stayed in session until April 1861. Virginia ultimately seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861 in the aftermath of the firing on Ft. Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops. While the majority in Virginia voted to secede, 12 of the 19 Valley delegates voted to remain within the Union.

The varied beliefs of the Valley residents made the area divided in their loyalties. During the war, approximately ten percent of Winchester residents remained loyal to the Union. There was also a large number of pacifists in the region due to the many religious beliefs. Overall, the area was largely pro-Confederate during the war.

An example of one couples' disagreements with secession is best said by Caroline Heater of Middletown, "We shall have graveyards at every door. My husband and I had some discussion in regard to the merits of war in the beginning. He was a Virginian and perhaps his sympathies were more for Virginia than for the North but he never voted for the ordinance of secession. I was not a Virginian and opposed to secession."

As companies assembled through the Valley in the spring of 1861, people went on with their daily business, excitement in the air, still innocent to the realities of war. Industrial establishments in the Northern Valley were thriving in 1861. Yet, with trade cut off to the north and west, prices of commodities soon went sky high.

Julia Chase, a pro Unionist living in Winchester wrote in 1861, "Yet in spite of lack of military action, there was an ever increasing impact on the daily lives of Winchester residents. The war consumed everything and the simple everyday task of feeding one's family became troublesome, as food shortages were commonplace and the few supplies that can be found demanded a higher price. Our winter I fear will be a hard one. I hope we shall not have a severe one in regards to weather."

Stonewall Jackson's 1862 Valley Campaign marked a great transition for Valley residents. No longer would they experience war from reading newspapers or letters; they would witness war's dreadful hand personally as the campaign transformed the valley region from a home front to a front line. From this point forward, the Valley residents would be caught between the constant struggle between the North and the South.

Mary Stickley commented after the war about her families struggles, "Yankees were here in '62. They broke into our granary and smokehouse in the night, and the doors were all open in the morning when our folks were astir. Besides, they destroyed the bolting cloths in the flouring mill. One army of the other got all of our horses, and we couldn't use our sawmill anymore because we had no teams to draw logs. We couldn't keep anything that was good, and we thought we were having a hard time, but affairs weren't quite so dizzy those days as they were later in the war. We planted our garden every year, but we never knew who'd gather what we raised in it."

The Civil War profoundly disrupted the lives of ordinary men and women in the Shenandoah Valley. Those that stayed during and after the war struggled to keep going. They did what they could to continue running the farms and industries. Although they had to make do despite shortages, in the end they emerged strong from the utter devastation of war.

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Civilian Life during the Civil War - Cedar Creek & Belle Grove National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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The residents of the Shenandoah Valley witnessed 325 engagements and 14 battles during the Civil War. They faced large armies of both friend and foe. During the war it was heart wrenching to live amongst such scenes. Rampant devastation was brought to all aspects of civilian life.

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White women and children were left to fend for themselves, and many became widows and orphans when one in five Confederate soldiers died.

In the countryside, armies destroyed and appropriated property, seized food, burned fences, and turned houses into hospitals. Governments, schools, and churches in their path were closed.

In Confederate-controlled cities, overcrowding, shortages, inflation, and hunger plagued everyone. Residents of northern Virginia, the Eastern Shore, and Norfolk were subjected to curfews, confiscation of property, and sometimes exile by occupying Union forces. The western counties suffered pitiless guerrilla warfare.

Free and enslaved African Americans were separated from their families to labor for the army. Free blacks saw their freedom further restricted as white southerners questioned their loyalty to the Confederacy. Some of the enslaved were removed far from Union lines to prevent their escape. Some families of those who did escape were abused.

The Plight of the Refugees

An artist observed the flight of refugees in anticipation of the advance of Union general Robert Patterson's forces and both drew and wrote what he saw: "On the advance of Genl. Patterson in the direction of Winchester. Many Wealthy families of Berkeley, Clark, & Jefferson Counties who from their Secession proclivities considered it unsafe to remain at home, deserted their farms and plantations taking their Servants and such articles of Comfort as could be conveniently carried, and moved off up the Valley, beyond Woodstock of Harrisonburg. For some days after Genl. [Joseph] Johnson fell back on Winchester numbers of Carriages could be seen containing the female portion of a family, the Master of the House riding in advance with fowling piece or rifle slung to his back, such of the woman servants not left behind to take care of the property being sent ahead in a Wagon, the Males marching beside the Carriage each armed with a gun, as they say, ' to keep de d---- Yankees and abunlishioners from harmin de Ladies.'"

The Lees Lose Their Property

Once Virginia seceded, Robert E. Lee's family knew that Arlington, their home overlooking Washington, D.C., would soon be occupied. By war's end, it would be lost to them forever. On leaving, they were able to carry away some family portraits and heirlooms, including this silver spoon that had once belonged to Martha Washington's son. It is marked "T.T." for Thomas Tookey, carries London hallmarks for the year 1774, and is engraved with the crest of John Parke Custis (Mrs. Lee's grandfather).

Many books were taken from the Lee library, and Pvt. Henry E. Rowell of the 1st Michigan Infantry even took as a souvenir their doormat. After the war, Selina Gray, a former slave still living at Arlington, wrote Mrs. Lee that "Your things at the time of the war was taken a way by every body."

"This Unfortunate Town"-Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle

Winchester was strategically located at the head of the agriculturally rich Shenandoah Valley. Union troops occupied the town often. On May 25, 1862, Federal troops were driven out. One eyewitness observed "old men and women, ladies and children, high and low, rich and poor" lining the streets, many "weeping or wringing their hands over the bodies of those who had fallen before their eyes . . . others shouting for joy at the entrance of the victorious Stonewall Brigade." Virginia artist William D. Washington considered the incident a fit subject for this large patriotic painting. The town changed hands so often-around seventy-two times-that Mary Greenhow Lee "did not get up to see whether they were Confederates or Yankees."

Death

Twenty-five thousand Virginia soldiers died during the Civil War, and rarely did next of kin receive timely notification-if any. But when the battlefield was nearby, the horror of death could be quickly conveyed and especially shocking.

At her home in Richmond on July 1, 1862, Elizabeth Munford heard the thunder of cannon fire from the nearby battle of Malvern Hill, where her son Lt. Charles Ellis Munford served with the Letcher Light Artillery. She wrote her daughters that she expected to "hear from Ellis tonight." Late that evening, his lifeless body was brought directly from the field. Charles Munford, Sr., suffered a "dreadful attack." Following the funeral the next day he consoled himself with the thought that his son died "standing up to his duty like a true born Virginian defending his home & his Country."

"Broken and Smashed"

In December 1862, a Union army of 110,000 soldiers was halted by 75,000 Confederates at Fredericksburg, a small community of 5,000 residents. Confederate general Robert E. Lee ordered women and children to leave Fredericksburg for their safety. They took refuge in churches, barns, and tents. Among them were Douglas and Anne Gordon and their three children.

On their return, the Gordons found "every room" in their house "torn with shot, and . . . all the elegant furniture and works of art broken and smashed." One ambitious soldier even carried off the Gordons' heavy bronze replica of a European statue of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, a sixteenth-century soldier-prince. The Gordons had acquired it on a wedding trip to Italy. The looter sold the statue to Union colonel Joshua Owen of Pennsylvania.

Less than a year later, Anne Gordon's sister-in-law Anne Thomas overheard a Union soldier near her Baltimore home give such an exact description that Mrs. Thomas knew he was talking about her brother's statue of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy. Using President Lincoln's physician as an emissary, she demanded and got General Order No. 360 returning the statue to its owner.

The Federals Lose Patience

Countries at war, frustrated by dogged resistance and military setbacks, often become less discriminating in their targets and tactics. Confederate general Robert E. Lee called Union general John Pope "a miscreant" for ordering in 1862 that personal property (food, forage, animals, and other supplies) could be seized for army use; that civilians could be conscripted for railroad, wagon road, or telegraph repair; that civilians who fired on Union troops would be executed without trial; and that "disloyal" male civilians would be expelled outside Union lines. Pope's reversal of the initial federal policy of conciliation was actually only a return to brutal warfare as it had been practiced for centuries throughout the world.

The whole southern economy that supported Confederate armies became an explicit target of war. Union troops left a ninety-two mile stretch of the lower Shenandoah Valley with "little in it for man or beast."

"A Fiancée of Three Years, a Bride of Three Weeks, Now a Widow"

Hetty Cary of Baltimore-said to be one of the most beautiful women in the South-escaped to Richmond in the early days of the war. It was there in 1862, at age twenty-six, that she met thirty-two-year-old John Pegram-one of Virginia's most eligible bachelors. The couple was soon engaged, and their January 1865 wedding was a major social event in the besieged Confederate capital. Shortly after the wedding, Hetty took up residence in the Petersburg farmhouse that served as her husband's headquarters.

After eighteen days of marriage, John was killed at the battle of Hatcher's Run. Hetty returned to Richmond with her husband's body, and exactly three weeks after their wedding, John's funeral took place in the church where the couple had been married.

In a condolence letter to Hetty, Gen. Robert E. Lee wrote, "I cannot find words to express my deep sympathy in your affliction.... As dear as your husband was to you, as necessary apparently to his Country and as important to his friends, I feel assured it was best for him to go at the moment he did....We are left to grieve at his departure, cherish his memory and prepare to follow."

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White women and children were left to fend for themselves, and many became widows and orphans when one in five Confederate soldiers died.In the countryside, armies destroyed and appropriated property, seized food, burned fences, and turned houses into hospitals. Governments, schools, and churches in their path were closed.

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Railroads in the Civil War would play a pivotal role in deciding how the campaign transpired. The North not only held a commanding advantage in total mileage but also boasted a mighty industrial machine across New England. There were many reasons for the South's failure to achieve victory. One of the most noteworthy was its inability to properly utilize the railroad. It also faced an unforeseen problem of suffering tremendous damage from Union forces which were successful in regularly disrupting operations. Since most of the fighting occurred below the Mason-Dixon Line this issue was only magnified as the conflict wore on. For its part, the North suffered setbacks as well. Most notably was the venerable Baltimore & Ohio which lay in the heart of the fighting. Initially, the B&O was an ardent Southern sympathizer but that changed after a series of Confederate attacks severely crippled its network. As Mike Schafer notes in his book, " Classic American Railroads," it proved an invaluable asset for the Union. Aside from the war railroads dealt with other issues throughout the 1860's, such as numerous track gauges and a lack of sufficient bridges spanning major waterways. Issues like these resulted in a lack of fluidity.

When discussing railroads during the Civil War their role is often overlooked. They proved a vital asset in the movement of troops and materiel, ultimately allowing the North to achieve total victory. After fighting broke out in 1861 the country had a rail network totaling more than 30,000 miles. Of this, 21,300 miles (along with 45,000 miles of telegraph wire), or about 70%, was concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest while the Confederacy enjoyed only 9,022 miles (and 5,000 miles of telegraph wire). Despite this discrepancy the South did command one advantage; most of its trackage was brand new at the time. As William Thomas points out in his book, " The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, And The Making Of Modern America," 75% of its lines had been constructed only in the 1850s. The railroad may have still been a relatively new technology during the mid-19th century but the need for heavier rail, reinforced bridges, and durable rights-of-way to handle ever-increasing tonnage had become well understood by that time.

Railroads In The Civil War: Related Reading...
The Civil War's Legendary, "Great Locomotive Chase"
A Record Decade, Railroads In The 1880's
"Civil War Rails: How Railroads Changed The American Civil War," By John P. Hankey "Railroad Generalship: Foundations Of Civil War Strategy," By Dr. Christopher Gabel "Railroad's Critical Role In The Civil War" (HistoryNet)
"The Impact Of Railroads On Warfare During The American Civil War," By David Hollis

The Confederacy's lack of such infrastructure was further compounded by its inability to effectively harness the iron horse for military purposes as historian John P. Hankey articulately points out in his excellent essay from the March, 2011 issue of Trains Magazine entitled, " The Railroad War: How The Iron Road Changed The American Civil War." For instance, Southern leaders believed civilian rail movements should take precedence over military transports. It was not until the war's final years did the Confederacy understand the railroad's usefulness. In contrast, by 1862 the North began laying the groundwork for what became a unified and efficient transportation network. It began with President Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Pacific Railway Act into law on July 1, 1862, authorizing construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The project was launched within a year and formally completed on May 10, 1869 when Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Summit, Utah. The idea for such a coast-to-coast railroad dated back to 1854-1855 when then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis led surveying efforts west of the Mississippi River. Mr. Thomas goes on to note that leaders in the North viewed railroads a bit differently than their Southern counterparts. While both understood their importance, the South saw trains as a means of maintaining slavery's status quo for economic growth.

By comparison, the North employed them as a means of developing new territories for trade and economic prosperity, which led to the Transcontinental Railroad's creation. There were four potential routes chosen; a northern, central, and two southern corridors. Unfortunately, none could satisfy parities both for, and against, slavery and the plan was shelved. However, once the war broke out, states seceded, and Davis became President of the Confederate State of America, the Union was free to do as it wished. Northern leaders subsequently settled on the central route which was projected to run due west of the Missouri River at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa and terminate at San Francisco. While Union Pacific's and Central Pacific's project is best remembered it was not the only transcontinental project undertaken at that time. On July 2, 1864 President Lincoln signed an updated Pacific Railroad Act into law which created the Northern Pacific Railroad Company to build a northern route into the Pacific Northwest. The NP was dealt a series of logistical and financial problems that delayed its completion by nearly two decades. However, once finished it too was instrumental in opening another segment of the country to economic growth. In time, three other systems reached Puget Sound; Union Pacific, Great Northern, and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific (Milwaukee Road).

The original Pacific Railway Act was not the only important event of 1862; that year also witnessed creation of the United States Military Railroad. The USMR did not take direct command of the North's rail network ( Unlike a half-century later when the United State Railroad Administration operated the nation's railroads during World War I from 1917 to 1920.). Instead, it acted as its own enterprise and made use of trackage when needed to offer the best tactical advantage. The North fully understood the railroad's importance and mobility. As Mr. Hankey notes virtually all major conflicts were located either at or near important rail junctions. The USMR was under the command of General Daniel C. McCallum (former general manager of the Erie Railway) and General Herman Haupt (former chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad). These expert railroaders were incredibly effective at putting together a skilled workforce to maintain efficient operation. The two men were also adept at preventing field officers from interrupting everyday affairs through either meddling or special requests.

As previously mentioned, for the significant damage Southern railroads received the B&O was also hit hard since its main line was situated right along Union and Confederate lines within the border states of Maryland and Virginia (West Virginia after 1863). John Stover notes in his book, " The Routledge Historical Atlas Of The American Railroads," the B&O rescinded its Southern support when Confederate militia, under the command of then-Colonel Thomas " Stonewall" Jackson, laid siege to its line through Northern Virginia. He believed that by crippling B&O's network the Union could not effectively wage war. While this tactic was unsuccessful the Confederacy did cause more than $2.5 million in damages (over $35 million in today's dollars) which required 10 months to repair. In an attempt to curb further property destruction the railroad built the first-ever armored rail car. It looked quite similar to the South's famous Merrimack ironclad warship except that it rode on wheels! Interestingly it was the very B&O that initially proved the railroad's tactical effectiveness; on June 2, 1861, more than a month prior to the war's first major engagement at the "First Battle of Bull Run" (known within the Confederacy as the "Battle of First Manassas") it transported troops from Grafton, Virginia to a location about six miles east of the city to capture the town of Philipi ("Battle of Philippi"). The speed of the movement caught Southern forces off-guard, demonstrating just what the railroad could do.

For the Union's many successes the South enjoy its own triumphs with this technology. There was the previously mentioned "Battle of First Manassas" when General Joe Johnston used the Manassas Gap Railroad to move his troops into position, eventually securing a Confederate victory. Also, the "Battle of Chickamauga" in early September of 1863 saw a Southern victory after General James Longstreet quickly moved his force of 12,000 men from Virginia to Georgia, which bolstered Confederate lines as part of the Army of Tennessee. Thanks in large part to this effort U.S. forces were defeated after three days of fighting. More often than not it, however, it was military strategy and not the railroad which led to Southern victory. With a belief in unilateral states' rights there was no central oversight or management of its network. By the time leaders realized this fallacy all hopes for total victory had, to a greater extent, been lost. Perhaps the most famous railroading event of the war took place in the South, best remembered as the Great Locomotive Chase. It all began in April of 1862 when disguised Union soldiers stole the General, a Western & Atlantic 4-4-0 "American Type" steamer in an attempt to destroy Confederate supply lines. Also known as the "Andrews Raid" it began at Marietta, Georgia and lasted for nearly 91 miles until a Confederate crew caught up with the locomotive near Ringgold. During the chase the Southerns used a hand-powered track car as well as the locomotives Yonah, Shorter and Texas before finally catching the raiders.

The twenty-two Union soldiers attempted to flee after abandoning the General but were soon discovered. For their bravery the U.S. troops were awarded the Congressional Medal Of Honor, some posthumously. During the war's final years Southern railroads were in such horrid condition they offered virtually no strategic military importance. In particular was the Louisville & Nashville which saw the most destruction of any system. The Confederacy's idea to win the war had largely been predicated on outlasting its aggressor. A similar tactic was successful just over a century later when North Vietnam caused enough American casualties during the Vietnam War to cause the U.S. government to give up. The Confederacy faced a much more determined leader in President Lincoln who, for a number of reasons, did everything within his power to reunite the country and was eventually successful in that effort. Looking back, the South may have achieved its desired result if Lincoln had never found an effective commander. As Mr. Hankey points out, had the U.S. lost one battle here or there it may have turned the tide. Today, this is all conjecture, of course, but the questions and rhetoric regarding such are still brought up among historians.
Below is an interesting set of statistics concerning Union and Confederate railroad operations during the war.

419

Number of USMR locomotives.

6,330

Total USMR rolling stock.

2,105

Mileage operated by the USMR.

$10,000

Average cost in the north for a new 4-4-0.

6, 0

There were six railroads serving Richmond but not one interchanged with the other.

60 Pounds

Average rail weight (per yard) during the Civil War. Today, rail is roughly twice as heavy.

220,000: 26,000

The amount of rail produced annually by the North (220,000) and South (26,000) at the start of the war.

0

The amount of rail and number of locomotives produced in the South after the war began.

4,000: 400

Rail mileage laid annually in the North (4,000) and South (400) during the conflict.

$15: $500

Average cost of new cast-iron wheels in the South in 1861 ($15) compared to 1865 ($500).

Source: " The Railroad War: How The Iron Road Changed The American Civil War," by John P. Hankey (March, 2011 issue of Trains Magazine).

While the Civil War had emotionally and physically scarred the country, the railroad paved the way for further expansion and growth after hostilities ended. Between 1850 and 1871 the federal government offered more than 170 million acres of western land to railroads in exchange for establishing new routes between the Midwest and the west coast. Along with the aforementioned Transcontinental Railroad the Northern Pacific, financed by banker Jay Cooke, began a northerly route from Lake Superior at Duluth, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington in 1864. Building through the very rugged and remote regions of western Montana, northern Idaho and Washington it took NP nearly twenty years before its completion in 1883 (hampered, partially, by the financial Panic of 1873). Finally, two major technological advances were introduced just a few years after the war; George Westinghouse's automatic air brake of 1869 and Eli Janney's automatic coupler of 1873. These two devices were so revolutionary they remain in regular use today as the most practical and efficient way to stop a train and join/detach equipment. As the century came to a close railroads were rapidly opening new routes, branches, and corridors throughout the country. Even though track widths were still prolific and a standard gauge had not yet been established the 1860's did witness improved cooperation, particularly in railroads' willingness to exchange freight.

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Railroads in the Civil War would play a pivotal role in deciding how the campaign transpired. The North not only held a commanding advantage in total mileage but also boasted a mighty industrial machine across New England. There were many reasons for the South's failure to achieve victory.

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During the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passes a conscription act that produces the first wartime draft of U.S. citizens in American history. The act called for registration of all males between the ages of 20 and 45, including aliens with the intention of becoming citizens, by April 1. Exemptions from the draft could be bought for $300 or by finding a substitute draftee. This clause led to bloody draft riots in New York City, where protesters were outraged that exemptions were effectively granted only to the wealthiest U.S. citizens.

Although the Civil War saw the first compulsory conscription of U.S. citizens for wartime service, a 1792 act by Congress required that all able-bodied male citizens purchase a gun and join their local state militia. There was no penalty for noncompliance with this act. Congress also passed a conscription act during the War of 1812, but the war ended before it was enacted. During the Civil War, the government of the Confederate States of America also enacted a compulsory military draft. The U.S. enacted a military draft again during World War I, in 1940 to make the U.S. ready for its involvement in World War II, and during the Korean War. The last U.S. military draft occurred during the Vietnam War.

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Congress passes Civil War conscription act

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During the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passes a conscription act that produces the first wartime draft of U.S. citizens in American history. The act called for registration of all males between the ages of 20 and 45, including aliens with the intention of becoming citizens, by April 1.

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In America, the draft is a controversial subject. Many people support it, as they feel it is necessary for a country at war, while many people are against it, as they feel they should not be forced to go to war. Whatever your stance is, the draft has always created some controversy, from Vietnam to way back in the past, as in the Civil War draft.

The rules and regulations used in the Civil War, are similar to that employed today. A group of men, who were a certain age, would be drafted - up to a certain amount. Both the North and the South ran drafts during the war. It was to make sure there were enough troops available.

The Southern Draft

The Confederate states' draft began in 1862, not too long after the war broke out. It differed from the North's draft. At first, men between the ages of 18 and 35 were called up and were required to serve three years if selected. The age group grew as the war went on, with the final draft covering those aged between 17 and 50 years. With the increased age group, there came more ways to get out of serving if selected.

The Northern Draft

At first, some of the Northern States used the threat of the draft to increase enlistment. If people were scared, they might be more inclined to sign up. It helped, but government officials knew it would not be enough.

The Militia Act of 1862, allowed the Union Army to utilize African Americans. It gave a boost to the front line of the Army. African Americans were treated differently from their white counterparts. In general, they made $10 a month. White men made $13 a month. Both were subjected to a $3 deduction for clothing. They were also, at times, not provided with proper medical care. In 1864, Congress changed the pay structure, approving equal pay.

The act gave the Union a boost in soldiers, but still, there were not enough volunteers. They needed more troops. The Enrollment Act of 1863, sometimes called the Civil War Military Draft Act, was the answer to that problem.

It came with a lot of controversies, mostly due to who had to enroll, which was every male that was a citizen, between the ages of 20 and 45. Included, were immigrants who had requested citizenship. If called to duty, they had to go. One exception was that married men could not be drafted until all available unmarried men had been drafted.

Exemptions and Substitution

The overall idea of this draft caused a lot of issues and rioting, but there were ways to get out of it if selected. For example, a draftee could call in a substitute. If his brother had not been drafted but was more suitable, he could be substituted.

However, the easiest option of all was to pay a fee. As with a lot of things in life, issues can usually be resolved with cold, hard cash. A draftee could pay his way out of the draft, but it was a hefty price. If he wanted out, he had to pay a $300 fee. Most servicemen received just $10-$15 a month.

There was a catch. The payment might only exempt a draftee from that particular lottery. If called up again six months later another payment would have to be made. Some historians estimate around 160,000 to 200,000 men either paid the $300 fee or found a substitute to avoid being drafted.

The ability to buy your way out was repealed in the Spring of 1864. While $300 is a lot of money, it was cheaper than hiring a substitute. Estimates for hiring a random sub are around $1,000; an enormous amount of money. Towns could choose to raise their taxes and the increased revenue paid for substitution fees. They did not want to lose their local workforce. If most of the men went to war, the town would suffer in loss of workers and loss of revenue.

These options, however, were only available to those who could afford them. They separated the rich and the poor. The wealthy could afford to get out of the draft; the poor could not.

Unrest

As the decision to draft men unfolded in 1863, people rioted. When the government tried to institute the draft in New York City in July 1863, things quickly got out of hand. Government buildings were torched, and rioters fought in the streets against troops. At the time, it was claimed over 1,000 people were killed in the incident. It is now believed around 120 people died in the riots. About 300 people were injured with around half of them police and troops of the Union Army.

The reason for the riots came down to wealth. People were upset that you could buy your way out of the draft, and if you could not, you would be forced to fight or hire a substitute, with money you did not have. The riots lasted just three days and came to an end after several clashes with soldiers turned deadly.

Punishment for Evasion

The penalty for evasion was defined in March 1865. If a draftee evaded or deserted, his punishment was losing citizenship. The war, however, ended shortly after this was passed.

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The Drafts - Building the armies of the American Civil War

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In America, the draft is a controversial subject. Many people support it, as they feel it is necessary for a country at war, while many people are against it, as they feel they should not be forced to go to war.

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Civil War law keeps millions from voting

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Civil War law keeps millions from voting

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Nearly 180,000 free black men and escaped slaves served in the Union Army during the Civil War. But at first they were denied the right to fight by a prejudiced public and a reluctant government. Even after they eventually entered the Union ranks, black s, Nearly 180,000 free black men and escaped s…

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Background

"Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."
Frederick Douglass

The issues of emancipation and military service were intertwined from the onset of the Civil War. News from Fort Sumter set off a rush by free black men to enlist in U.S. military units. They were turned away, however, because a Federal law dating from 1792 barred Negroes from bearing arms for the U.S. army (although they had served in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812). In Boston disappointed would-be volunteers met and passed a resolution requesting that the Government modify its laws to permit their enlistment.

The Lincoln administration wrestled with the idea of authorizing the recruitment of black troops, concerned that such a move would prompt the border states to secede. When Gen. John C. Frémont (photo citation: 111-B-3756) in Missouri and Gen. David Hunter (photo citation: 111-B-3580) in South Carolina issued proclamations that emancipated slaves in their military regions and permitted them to enlist, their superiors sternly revoked their orders. By mid-1862, however, the escalating number of former slaves (contrabands), the declining number of white volunteers, and the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the Union Army pushed the Government into reconsidering the ban.

As a result, on July 17, 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act, freeing slaves who had masters in the Confederate Army. Two days later, slavery was abolished in the territories of the United States, and on July 22 President Lincoln (photo citation: 111-B-2323) presented the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet. After the Union Army turned back Lee's first invasion of the North at Antietam, MD, and the Emancipation Proclamation was subsequently announced, black recruitment was pursued in earnest. Volunteers from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Massachusetts filled the first authorized black regiments. Recruitment was slow until black leaders such as Frederick Douglass (photo citation: 200-FL-22) encouraged black men to become soldiers to ensure eventual full citizenship. (Two of Douglass's own sons contributed to the war effort.) Volunteers began to respond, and in May 1863 the Government established the Bureau of Colored Troops to manage the burgeoning numbers of black soldiers.

By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war-30,000 of infection or disease. Black soldiers served in artillery and infantry and performed all noncombat support functions that sustain an army, as well. Black carpenters, chaplains, cooks, guards, laborers, nurses, scouts, spies, steamboat pilots, surgeons, and teamsters also contributed to the war cause. There were nearly 80 black commissioned officers. Black women, who could not formally join the Army, nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts, the most famous being Harriet Tubman (photo citation: 200-HN-PIO-1), who scouted for the 2d South Carolina Volunteers.

Because of prejudice against them, black units were not used in combat as extensively as they might have been. Nevertheless, the soldiers served with distinction in a number of battles. Black infantrymen fought gallantly at Milliken's Bend, LA; Port Hudson, LA; Petersburg, VA; and Nashville, TN. The July 1863 assault on Fort Wagner, SC, in which the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers lost two-thirds of their officers and half of their troops, was memorably dramatized in the film Glory. By war's end, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their valor.

In addition to the perils of war faced by all Civil War soldiers, black soldiers faced additional problems stemming from racial prejudice. Racial discrimination was prevalent even in the North, and discriminatory practices permeated the U.S. military. Segregated units were formed with black enlisted men and typically commanded by white officers and black noncommissioned officers. The 54th Massachusetts was commanded by Robert Shaw and the 1st South Carolina by Thomas Wentworth Higginson-both white. Black soldiers were initially paid $10 per month from which $3 was automatically deducted for clothing, resulting in a net pay of $7. In contrast, white soldiers received $13 per month from which no clothing allowance was drawn. In June 1864 Congress granted equal pay to the U.S. Colored Troops and made the action retroactive. Black soldiers received the same rations and supplies. In addition, they received comparable medical care.

The black troops, however, faced greater peril than white troops when captured by the Confederate Army. In 1863 the Confederate Congress threatened to punish severely officers of black troops and to enslave black soldiers. As a result, President Lincoln issued General Order 233, threatening reprisal on Confederate prisoners of war (POWs) for any mistreatment of black troops. Although the threat generally restrained the Confederates, black captives were typically treated more harshly than white captives. In perhaps the most heinous known example of abuse, Confederate soldiers shot to death black Union soldiers captured at the Fort Pillow, TN, engagement of 1864. Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest witnessed the massacre and did nothing to stop it.

The document featured with this article is a recruiting poster directed at black men during the Civil War. It refers to efforts by the Lincoln administration to provide equal pay for black soldiers and equal protection for black POWs. The original poster is located in the Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780's-1917, Record Group 94.
Article Citation
Freeman, Elsie, Wynell Burroughs Schamel, and Jean West. "The Fight for Equal Rights: A Recruiting Poster for Black Soldiers in the Civil War." Social Education 56, 2 (February 1992): 118-120. [Revised and updated in 1999 by Budge Weidman.]

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Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During the Civil War

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Background "Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship."

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https://www.britannica.com/event/Anaconda-plan

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Anaconda plan, military strategy proposed by Union General Winfield Scott early in the American Civil War. The plan called for a naval blockade of the Confederate littoral, a thrust down the Mississippi, and the strangulation of the South by Union land and naval

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During the 1860s, doctors had yet to develop bacteriology and were generally ignorant of the causes of disease. Generally, Civil War doctors underwent two years of medical school, though some pursued more education. Medicine in the United States was woefully behind Europe. Harvard Medical School did not even own a single stethoscope or microscope until after the war. Most Civil War surgeons had never treated a gunshot wound and many had never performed surgery. Medical boards admitted many "quacks," with little to no qualification. Yet, for the most part, the Civil War doctor (as understaffed, underqualified, and under-supplied as he was) did the best he could, muddling through the so-called "medical middle ages." Some 10,000 surgeons served in the Union army and about 4,000 served in the Confederate. Medicine made significant gains during the course of the war. However, it was the tragedy of the era that medical knowledge of the 1860s had not yet encompassed the use of sterile dressings, antiseptic surgery, and the recognition of the importance of sanitation and hygiene. As a result, thousands died from diseases such as typhoid or dysentery.

The deadliest thing that faced the Civil War soldier was disease. For every soldier who died in battle, two died of disease. In particular, intestinal complaints such as dysentery and diarrhea claimed many lives. In fact, diarrhea and dysentery alone claimed more men than did battle wounds. The Civil War soldier also faced outbreaks of measles, small pox, malaria, pneumonia, or camp itch. Soldiers were exposed to malaria when camping in damp areas which were conductive to breeding mosquitos, while camp itch was caused by insects or a skin disease. In brief, the high incidence of disease was caused by a) inadequate physical examination of recruits; b) ignorance; c) the rural origin of my soldiers; d) neglect of camp hygiene; e) insects and vermin; f) exposure; g) lack of clothing and shoes; h) poor food and water. Many unqualified recruits entered the Army and diseases cruelly weeded out those who should have been excluded by physical exams. There was no knowledge of the causes of disease, no Koch's postulates. Troops from rural areas were crowded together for the first time with large numbers of other individuals and got diseases they had no immunity to. Neglect of camp hygiene was a common problem as well. Ignorance of camp sanitation and scanty knowledge about how disease was carried led to a sort of "trial and error" system. You can read Surgeon Charles Tripler's report on sanitation that is included in this web site for a contemporary view of camp hygiene. An inspector who visited the camps of one Federal Army found that they were, "littered with refuse, food, and other rubbish, sometimes in an offensive state of decomposition; slops deposited in pits within the camp limits or thrown out of broadcast; heaps of manure and offal close to the camp." The Federal government even founded a Sanitary Commission to deal with the health problems in army camps. Mary Livermore, a nurse, wrote that... "The object of the Sanitary Commission was to do what the Government could not. The Government undertook, of course, to provide all that was necessary for the soldier . . . but, from the very nature of things, this was not possible. . . . The methods of the commission were so elastic, and so arranged to meet every emergency, that it was able to make provision for any need, seeking always to supplement, and never to supplant, the Government." Both Armies faced problems with mosquitos and lice. Exposure turned many a cold into a case of pneumonia, and complicated other ailments. Pneumonia was the third leading killer disease of the war, after typhoid and dysentery. Lack of shoes and proper clothing further complicated the problem, especially in the Confederacy. The diet of the Civil War soldier was somewhere between barely palatable to absolutely awful. It was a wonder they did not all die of acute indigestion! It was estimated that 995 of 1000 Union troops eventually contracted chronic diarrhea or dysentery; their Confederate counterparts suffered similarly. Disease was particularly rampant in the prisoner-of-war camps, whose conditions were generally worse than the army camps.

To halt disease, doctors used many cures. For bowel complaints, open bowels were treated with a plug of opium. Closed bowels were treated with the infamous "blue mass"... a mixture of mercury and chalk. For scurvy, doctors prescribed green vegetables. Respiratory problems, such as pneumonia and bronchitis were treated with dosing of opium or sometimes quinine and muster plasters. Sometimes bleeding was also used. Malaria could be treated with quinine, or sometimes even turpentine if quinine was not available. Camp itch could be treated by ridding the body of the pests or with poke-root solution. Whiskey and other forms of alcohol also were used to treat wounds and disease ... though of questionable medical value, whiskey did relieve some pain. Most medicines were manufactured in the north; southerners had to run the Union blockade in order to gain access to them. On occasion, vital medicines were smuggled into the South, sewn into the petticoats of ladies sympathetic to the Southern cause. The South also had some manufacturing capabilities and worked with herbal remedies. However, many of the Southern medical supplies came from captured Union stores. Dr. Hunter McGuire, the medical director of Jackson's corps, commented after the War on the safeness of anesthesia, saying that in part the Confederacy's good record was due in part from the supplies requisitioned from the North.

Battlefield surgery (see separate web page describing an amputation) was also at best archaic. Doctors often took over houses, churches, schools, even barns for hospitals. The field hospital was located near the front lines -- sometimes only a mile behind the lines -- and was marked with (in the Federal Army from 1862 on) with a yellow flag with a green "H". Anesthesia's first recorded use was in 1846 and was commonly in use during the Civil War. In fact, there are 800,000 recorded cases of its use. Chloroform was the most common anesthetic, used in 75% of operations. In a sample of 8,900 uses of anesthesia, only 43 deaths were attributed to the anesthetic, a remarkable mortality rate of 0.4%. Anesthesia was usually administered by the open-drop technique. The anesthetic was applied to a cloth held over the patient's mouth and nose and was withdrawn after the patient was unconscious. A capable surgeon could amputate a limb in 10 minutes. Surgeons worked all night, with piles of limbs reaching four or five feet. Lack of water and time meant they did not wash off hands or instruments

Bloody fingers often were used as probes. Bloody knives were used as scalpels. Doctors operated in pus stained coats. Everything about Civil War surgery was septic. The antiseptic era and Lister's pioneering works in medicine were in the future. Blood poisoning, sepsis or Pyemia (Pyemia meaning literally pus in the blood) was common and often very deadly. Surgical fevers and gangrene were constant threats. One witness described surgery as such: "Tables about breast high had been erected upon which the screaming victims were having legs and arms cut off. The surgeons and their assistants, stripped to the waist and bespattered with blood, stood around, some holding the poor fellows while others, armed with long, bloody knives and saws, cut and sawed away with frightful rapidity, throwing the mangled limbs on a pile nearby as soon as removed." If a soldier survived the table, he faced the awful surgical fevers. However, about 75% of amputees did survive.

The numbers killed and wounded in the Civil War were far greater than any previous American war. As the lists of the maimed grew, both North and South built "general" military hospitals. These hospitals were usually located in big cities. They were usually single storied, of wood construction, and well-ventilated and heated. The largest of these hospitals was Chimbarazo in Richmond, Virginia. By the end of the War, Chimbarazo had 150 wards and was capable of housing a total of 4,500 patients. Some 76,000 soldiers were treated at this hospital.

There were some advances, mainly in the field of military medicine. Jonathan Letterman, revolutionized the Ambulance Corps system. With the use of anesthesia, more complicated surgeries could be performed. Better and more complete records were kept during this period than they had been before. The Union even set up a medical museum where visitors can still see the shattered leg of flamboyant General Daniel Sickles who lost his leg at the Trostle Farm at the battle of Gettysburg when a cannon ball literally left it hanging by shreds of flesh.

The Civil War "sawbones" was doing the best he could. Sadly when American decided to kill American from 1861 to 1865, the medical field was not yet capable of dealing with the disease and the massive injuries caused by industrial warfare.

USCivilWar.Net wants to thank Jenny Goellnitz for compiling this information.
jgoellnitz@yahoo.com

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Civil War Medicine: An Overview of Medicine

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During the 1860s, doctors had yet to develop bacteriology and were generally ignorant of the causes of disease. Generally, Civil War doctors underwent two years of medical school, though some pursued more education. Medicine in the United States was woefully behind Europe. Harvard Medical School did not even own a single stethoscope or microscope until after the war.

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Samuel F. B. Morse, elevated to fame and fortune by his invention of the telegraph, styled himself "an American who knows no North nor South nor East nor West, but who feels that everyone within the United States is his fellow countryman." Lean, restless and pulsating with energy, the "Lightning Man" cherished the Union.

Library of Congress

Yet the acute phase of North-South sectionalism coincided with the arrival of the telegraph, which rocketed information ahead at speeds that seemed miraculous. Was this merely a coincidence? Or could the telegraph somehow have made Americans more distrustful of one another, and placed the country on the high road toward civil war?

War between the United States and Mexico created the angry irritant that ultimately tore the Union apart - the question of slavery in the territories. An enormous region was about to come under America control - all of today's California, Nevada and Utah, most of Arizona, plus parts of three other future states. Free soil advocates demanded that any lands seized from Mexico be declared off limits to slavery. But many white Southerners insisted they should have the right to take slaves wherever they pleased.

In 1846 and 1847, as fighting took place in Mexico, a war of words raged in Washington - and it did not cease when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended military hostilities in early 1848. Although the climate of the newly acquired southwest was too arid for plantation slavery, nothing could still the contest between those who would prohibit it there and those who would protect it.

One observer noted astutely that the two factions each wielded one side of "a pair of shears, neither of which could cut until joined together." But with each side pulling its blade, the shears threatened to sever the Union. Abraham Lincoln's election as president in November 1860 ultimately brought matters to a head. He and the Republican Party were pledged to prevent slavery's further expansion. And many white Southerners considered that an intolerable affront.

Notwithstanding his New England origins, Morse was well-disposed toward white Southerners. In his earlier career as a painter, he had traveled South to do commissioned portraits. He found no fault there. He regarded slavery as a benefit to everyone involved - it allowed "a weak and degraded race" to labor productively, protected and guided by Christian masters. And he held abolitionists in particular contempt - "a more wretched, disgusting, hypocritical crew, have not appeared on the face of the earth since the times of Robespierre."

Morse's telegraph, first successfully demonstrated in May 1844, became a booming business during the next four years. By the summer of 1846, just as American forces headed south into Mexico, the poles and wires were in place to inaugurate the first telegraphic connection between New York and Washington. Almost immediately afterwards, the line between New York and Boston opened. By September, New York was linked to Buffalo and soon to points west. Work then began on a Southern line from Washington to New Orleans, via Richmond, Charleston and Mobile. By 1848, when the Mexican War concluded, the telegraph linked North and South more closely than ever before.

Telegraphy transformed journalism. Newspaper publishers quickly grasped the new technology's potential. The magical words "By Magnetic Telegraph" alerted readers to events that had just taken place hundreds of miles away.

Steam-powered rotary presses - another new invention - enabled publishers to rapidly print newspapers in great quantities, and with far lower per unit costs. So mid-century Americans bought and read more newspapers than any other people on the face of the earth. The telegraph and newspapers combined to exert a uniquely powerful influence on American culture. No other part of the world was so affected.

Library of Congress

By 1860, there were 50,000 miles of telegraph in the United States, all built during the previous 16 years. Some 3,725 American newspapers were published daily or weekly. Fewer than 200 million newspaper copies were printed in 1840, but almost 900 million in 1860. New York City became the nerve center of American journalism - led by the New York Herald, the New York Tribune and the New York Times, founded in 1851. Even in many small and medium-sized localities, rival newspapers, each typically with a strongly partisan orientation, took hold.

These startling advances in communications were closely tied to huge improvements in overland transport. Railroads - yet another new technology - vaulted forward in the late 1840s and 1850s. Railroad mileage jumped from fewer than 3,000 miles in 1840, mostly in the East, to over 36,000 miles that stretched West and South by 1860, across all settled parts of the Union. Bigger, faster, more powerful trains sped both passengers and freight to their destinations. The telegraph proved to be an essential mechanism for coordinating these far-flung operations.

"Antebellum futurologists" expected that improved communications and transport would knit the Union together. They anticipated that Americans would become "more and more one people, thinking and acting alike," writes Samuel F. B. Morse's biographer, Kenneth Silverman. Prominent among the optimists was Morse himself. His famous motto - "What hath God wrought!" - fused personal success with national greatness.

Instead, of course, national unity unraveled as antagonistic North-South stereotypes hardened during the 1850s. The dominant modern narrative of mid-19th century American history suggests that North and South began to see each other more clearly - and that each discovered how genuinely different the other had become. While a fast-changing North embraced progress and improvement, the South remained wedded to an archaic, retrogressive labor system. Under the circumstances, Northern and Southern outlooks and values necessarily diverged.

There are powerful reasons why this image of a modern North and a static South is attractive - it so neatly seems to explain the bloodbath that soon followed. It says that two incompatible regions could not peacefully remain together. And the stereotypes at first glance make sense - nobody could mistake Massachusetts for Mississippi.

But there were other reasons why each section viewed its counterpart in such a harsh light. Partisan managers during the 1850s had motive to play up North-South differences. Republicans warned that a "slave power conspiracy" stood poised to rob free white Northerners of access to the fertile West, while Southern Democrats depicted Republicans as dangerous radicals whose success would lead to a violent abolitionist invasion of the slave states. As Elizabeth Varon recently wrote here, North-South acrimony also included deliberately offensive gendered insults - its Northern critics saw a white South filled with lustful sadists, whereas some Southerners satirized Northern men as effeminate weaklings.

By any reasonable standard, all of these images were overblown. And they especially distorted the border regions - the Upper South and the Lower North. Southern Illinois and Indiana actually had much in common with Kentucky and Missouri. And few whites living in the Upper South wanted their states to become more like the Deep South.

New communications technologies must have played a key role in transforming exaggerated stereotypes into compelling realities, and persuading Northerners and Southerners that they were more different from each other than they actually were. "It was surely no accident," Edward L. Ayers has written, "that a long-brewing sectional animosity boiled over when railroads, telegraphs, and newspapers proliferated in the 1840s and 1850s." Both North and South, "rival editors wrenched the most inflammatory words out of context, underlining their danger, amplifying their threat." The "frantic rush in every direction" that accompanied new railroads sharpened anxieties about the future of the territories. Even though North and South "shared a great deal," part of what they shared was popular politics and a print media that depicted the opposite section in sinister terms.

The possibility just sketched here - that his brainchild may somehow have fueled the fire - is one that Samuel F. B. Morse could not have accepted. Horrified by the course of events in early 1861 as the Union fractured and war threatened, he and some friends organized an "American Society for Promoting National Unity." But it was too little and too late. The "Lightning Man" may have unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control.
Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. References: Kenneth Silverman, "Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse" (New York: Knopf, 2003); Tom Standage, "The Victorian Internet" (New York: Walker and Co., 1998); Edward L. Ayers, "What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History" (New York: Norton, 2005); James M. McPherson, "Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question," Civil War History 29 (Sept. 1983); Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., "Fanatics and Fire-Eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War" (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); David M. Potter, "The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861″ (New York: Harper and Row, 1976). Daniel W. Crofts is a professor at the College of New Jersey and author of "A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and 'The Diary of a Public Man.'"

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Samuel F. B. Morse, elevated to fame and fortune by his invention of the telegraph, styled himself "an American who knows no North nor South nor East nor West, but who feels that everyone within the United States is his fellow countryman." Lean, restless and pulsating with energy, the "Lightning Man" cherished the Union.

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This page gives a brief description of the education system of the 1860s

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By Madison Cline, North Carolina State University, 2013

No one was untouched by the Civil War, especially in the South. With casualties and a significant population of men away at war, tremendous hardships were created for the women and children left on the home front. Children of all races and circumstances endured a vast array of experiences during the Civil War.

Children shared an excitement for the war, with enthusiasm and interest in the political and military affairs going on in the country. Boys, both black and white, showed excitement during military festivities and drills by running alongside militia teams as they paraded through the streets and fields. They created their own militia play and incorporated their own political views into their war play. The war brought a natural curiosity to the children in the South, where some watched the action from the sidelines. In The Children's Civil War, James Marten tells the story of a mother whose two oldest sons begged her to allow them to investigate a battle near their home. Later that evening she deeply regretted her decision to let them go. When the boys returned home, they were not the same boys that left earlier that day. In Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children, Anya Jabour describes that same enthusiasm children had for witnessing the war up close, depicted in a wartime photograph of several children getting as close as possible to see the soldiers at Sudley Ford, Virginia as they were on their way to what would become the Battle of Bull Run. The photograph comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, and in the image the boys wear military style hats.

Children of the Civil War, both black and white, stepped up to contribute to the war effort and to fill the void of absent fathers and brothers on the home front. This proved especially true for many children in North Carolina. Throughout the South, like in North Carolina, older boys and girls worked in ammunition factories as well as in government offices. Children scraped lint to make bandages for wounded soldiers, and younger children gathered supplies and food for local soldiers. According to Marten's research on this topic, a few former slave children, including Booker T. Washington, felt little impact when the war started because they were already laden with responsibilities and hard work. For other slave children, the war did bring an even heavier workload. In some cases, young slaves were forced into fields at a much younger age. Marten added that it was not unusual for a teenage slave boy to accompany his master into war or for a teenage slave girl to sew for soldiers and nurse the wounded rebels.

As the war progressed and conditions worsened, both black and white children in the South faced greater and greater hardships and devastation. There was a shortage of food, a lack of clothing, much disease, and homelessness. White children and their families fled their homes and land to escape Union soldiers, while black children and their families fled to the Union soldiers for protection. Families were split apart and displaced. Black children felt disruption and chaos as well. Many former slaves fled plantations to seek refuge at "contraband" camps. These camps were an important part of North Carolina's history in the Civil War. Refugees were able to earn wages, work for food and clothing, get an education, and worship. There were six camps established by the Union in North Carolina (at Hatteras, Plymouth, Washington, Beaufort, New Bern and Roanoke Island), and eventually all six camps came under Confederate attack.

Southern children suffered not only physical hardships but emotional hardships. Fear was a dominant emotion among both black and white children with the fear of home invasions by the Yankees, physical violence and death, and separation of family. Jabour recounts children's fears in Topsy-Turvy with their stories, including some North Carolina children. George Robertson, an eight-year-old white boy from Asheville, North Carolina, feared the Union soldiers. He wrote how intimidating and loud the Union soldiers were when they took over his family's home and how they thumped and clanged and banged all over the house as if to intentionally create chaos, yet they hurt nothing. In fact, they posted a guard at young George's home to protect his family from further invasion. George reminisced how fond his family grew of this young Yankee soldier and that he actually addressed George's mother as Mother and helped out with work around the house. Children in the south had a real fear of violence with the fear of being shot and killed as a Union sympathizer. Enslaved children feared the reality of being torn from their families.

The end of the Civil War brought different meanings and emotions for white and black children. The Civil War officially ended when General Johnston surrendered to General Sherman at the Bennett Place farm near Durham Station, North Carolina, in April of 1865. Once the news of Confederate defeat and the emancipation of slaves began to arrive, black children responded to the news with jubilation and hope for the future while white children were more despondent and dreaded the future. White children saw a role reversal and now perceived themselves as enslaved and oppressed by the Union troops and Northern politicians who forced the end to slavery on them. Black children perceived the Union troops as their liberators and trusted the politicians to protect them and their newfound freedom.

Although historians do agree that the Civil War was hard on everyone, especially Southern children, the greatest impact, however, was actually to the enslaved African American child. Following the war, Reconstruction brought new challenges and hardships to African American children, as their families were suddenly given a choice between continuing to work for former masters or being uprooted with the strong possibility of being subjected to crushing poverty. Continued racism meant that black children in the South encountered white hate groups, segregation, and racial violence in the aftermath of the war.

The Civil War touched the lives of children in both similar and vastly different ways. The Civil War molded children's lives as adults and shaped their attitudes, opinions, and prejudices that would pass from generation to generation. The children of the Civil War shared enthusiasm for the war, were burdened with greater responsibilities, and endured physical and emotional hardships. The end of the war for a Northern child meant victory, excitement, and success. The end of the war for a Southern child meant defeat, disappointment, and a transformed way of living. For enslaved African American children, the end of the Civil War meant freedom and hope, which did not come without years of tremendous sacrifices, challenges, changes, and hardships.

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By Madison Cline, North Carolina State University, 2013 No one was untouched by the Civil War, especially in the South. With casualties and a significant population of men away at war, tremendous hardships were created for the women and children left on the home front.

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Women in the Civil War - Role, Spies & Soldiers | HISTORY

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Women in the Civil War - Role, Spies & Soldiers | HISTORY

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The American Civil War challenged the ideology of Victorian domesticity and prompted women on both sides to get involved as nurses, fundraisers and soldiers.