I have always thought Dixie one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it ... I now request the band to favor me with its performance.
Abraham Lincoln (April 10, 1865)
The meeting lasted approximately an hour and a half. When it was over, the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered.
The guns have long since ceased to sound. The zest and fury of the time have gone. But the salient and polarizing force, ushered forth by a strong-willed and God-fearing people who pitted their strength and energy against each other, reflects the vanguard of pre-eminence by which this nation was built and thrives on today - shall not these memories live on?
W.K. Vardaman, Jr.
The War Between the States
Robert E. Lee
Born: 1807 (Virginia)
Died: 1870
Military Education: West Point, 1829 (2nd in a class of 46)
Military Experience: Mexican War, put down John Brown raid.
Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee had the formidable task of checking the Federal army's advance into Virginia. Outnumbered and poorly equiped, Lee's army struggled with what became a war of attrition.
Personal Description: Great leader of the lost Confederate cause.
After the War: Became President of Washington College.
Ulysses S. Grant
Born: 1822 (Ohio)
Died: 1885
Military Education: West Point, 1843 (21st in a class of 39)
Military Experience: Mexican War, frontier duty
After his victories around Chattanooga, he was made General-in-Chief of the U.S. army and took over the strategic direction of the war. Directed the "relentless pounding" of Lee's army in a costly campaign.
Personal Description: "His face has three expressions: deep thought; extreme determination; and great simplicity and calmness."
After the War: Became President of the U.S.
United States 1861
Red:
the federal, non-slaveholding states
Blue:
the border slaveholding states
Yellow:
the confederate states
Green:
Indian territory, or present day Oklahoma
Remainder:
U.S. territories
U.S. Census Population In 1860 - 31,443,321
Admission & Secession Dates Of States At Time Of Civil War Period
Free and Slave
State
Admission
Seceded
Free
27,489,561
Alabama
Dec 14, 1819
Jan 11, 1861
Slave
3,953,760
Arkansas
Jun 15, 1836
May 06, 1861
Cities Over 100,000
California
Dec 09, 1850
New York
805,651
Connecticut
Jan 09, 1788
Philadelphia
562,529
Delaware
Dec 07, 1787
Baltimore
212,418
Florida
Mar 03, 1845
Jan 10, 1861
Boston
177,812
Georgia
Jan 02, 1788
Jan 19, 1861
New Orleans
168,675
Illinois
Dec 03, 1818
Cincinnati
161,044
Indiana
Dec 11, 1816
St. Louis
160,773
Iowa
Dec 28, 1846
Chicago
109,260
Kansas
Jan 29, 1861
Cities Over 50,000
Kentucky
Jun 01, 1792
Buffalo
81,129
Louisiana
Apr 30, 1812
Jan 26, 1861
Newark
71,914
Maine
Mar 15, 1820
Louisville
68,033
Maryland
Apr 28, 1788
Albany
62,367
Massachusetts
Feb 06, 1788
Washington
61,122
Michigan
Jan 26, 1837
San Francisco
56,802
Minnesota
May 11, 1858
Providence
50,666
Mississippi
Dec 10, 1817
Jan 09, 1861
Other
Missouri
Aug 10, 1821
Charleston
40,578
New Hampshire
Jun 21, 1788
Richmond
37,910
New Jersey
Dec 18, 1787
Montgomery
35,967
New York
Jul 26, 1788
Mobile
29,606
North Carolina
Nov 21, 1789
May 20, 1861
Memphis
22,623
Ohio
Mar 01, 1803
Savannah
22,292
Oregon
Jan 14, 1859
Horse Population
Pennsylvania
Dec 12, 1787
Federal
4,417,130
Rhode Island
May 29, 1790
Confederate
1,698,338
South Carolina
May 23, 1788
Dec 20, 1860
Mule Population
Tennessee
Jun 01, 1796
Jun 08,1861
Federal
328,890
Texas
Dec 29, 1845
Feb 01, 1861
Confederate
800,665
Vermont
Mar 04, 1791
Working Oxen
Virginia
Jun 25, 1788
Apr 17, 1861
Federal
856,645
West Virginia
Jun 20, 1863
Confederate
1,382,430
Wisconsin
May 29, 1848
Best Available Number Of Major And Minor Military Actions - 10,458
Total Union Prisoners Held In The South:
Approximately 126,950, With The Prisoner Fatality At 22,576.
Total Confederate Prisoners Held In The North:
Approximately 220,000, The War Department Lists Prisoner Fatalities At 26,436.
*Size Of Armies
*Size Of Navies
*Total Cost Of War
Army Deaths
Total War
Federal
1,550,000 to 2,300,000
132,554
$6,190,254,700
360,222
623,026
Deaths
Confederate
800,000 to 1,600,000
5,827
$714,379,372
258,000
471,427
Wounded
*Estimate Only
1,094,453
Casualties
Missouri Compromise Of 1820
Congress had acceded to Missouri's request for admission as a slave state in 1820, but was careful at the same time to draw a line through the rest of the old Louisiana Purchase and bar slavery north of it in the wistful hope that a permanent border would thereby be created between freedom and slavery: That compact would hold for a quarter century.
But slavery would not be compromised. "This momentous question," wrote the aged Thomas Jefferson, "like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union." President John Quincy Adams agreed: "I take it for granted that the present question is a mere preamble — a title page to a great tragic volume."
The Kansas - Nebraska Act
An Act to Organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas.
The act would let the settlers in the new territories decide for themselves whether slavery was to be barred. Effectively eliminating the lines drawn in 1820 between slave an free soil. "If the people of Kansas want a slaveholding state," said Stephen A. Douglas (Lincoln-Douglas), "let them have it, and if they want a free state they have the right to it, and it is not for the people of Illinois, or Missouri, or New York, or Kentucky, to complain, whatever the decision of the people of Kansas may be."
A new political organization grew out of northern protests against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a curious amalgam of nativists and temperance advocates, disillusioned free-soil Democrats and disaffected Whigs, but united now in their opposition to seeing slavery extended into hitherto forbidden territory. They were first called simply the "Anti-Nebraska men," then the Republican party; their enemies called them the "Black Republicans." "Come on then, Gentlemen of the Slave States," said Senator William Seward of New York. "We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers and is in the right."
Five thousand proslavery Missourians crossed into Kansas illegally, seized polling places, and installed a legislature that made even speaking against slavery a crime. Antislavery settlers set up their own government, backed by northerners who sent in reinforcements and crates of Sharps rifles — called "Beecher's Bibles" after the Brooklyn clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother, who had pledged that his congregation would buy and ship twenty-five of them to Kansas. There were shootings, stabbings. A proslavery sheriff was killed at Lawrence. Eight hundred southerners raided the town to search out the assassin, got drunk, and instead burned down the hotel that had been antislavery headquarters.
Echoes of the Kansas violence reached the floor of the United States Senate itself. After the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had finished a two-day denunciation of proslavery Missourians as "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization," Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina caned him into unconsciousness. "I gave him about thirty first-rate stripes," Brooks told reporters proudly. "Towards the last, he bellowed like a calf. I wore my cane out completely but saved the head — which is gold." Admirers sent him new canes. Northern and southern senators alike began to carry knives and pistols into the chamber. It was the news of Sumner's beating that had first driven John Brown to murder in Kansas; it had caused him to become "crazy," his eldest son remembered, "crazy."
In the next three months, more than two hundred men were killed in "Bleeding Kansas." The killing along the Missouri border would not stop for ten years.
Civil War Battle Names
So many battlefields of the Civil War bear double names that we cannot believe the duplication has been accidental. It is the unusual which impresses. The troops of the North came mainly from cities, towns, and villages, and were, therefore, impressed by some natural object near the scene of the conflict and named the battle from it. The soldiers from the South were chiefly from the country and were, therefore, impressed by some artificial object near the field of action. In one section the naming has been after the handiwork of God; in the other section it has been after the handiwork of man. Thus, the first passage of arms is called the battle of Bull Run at the North — the name of a little stream. At the South it takes the name of Manassas, from a railroad station.
Nearly 20 percent of America's Civil War battlefields have already been destroyed - denied forever to future generations. Of those that remain, only 15 percent are protected by the Federal government. There is only one national organization working to save all of these battlefields: The Civil War Preservation Trust is America's largest non-profit organization (501-C3) devoted to the preservation of our nation's endangered Civil War battlefields.