Yesterday, April 12th, was the 155th anniversary of the start of The Civil War.
The war began when the Confederates bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. The war ended in Spring, 1865. Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The last battle was fought at Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 13, 1865.
Interesting Civil War Factoids
Army Sizes
At the beginning of the war the Northern states had a combined population of 22 million people. The Southern states had a combined population of about 9 million. This disparity was reflected in the size of the armies in the field. The Union forces outnumbered the Confederates roughly two to one.
Military Deaths
The human cost of the Civil War was beyond anybody’s expectations. The young nation experienced bloodshed of a magnitude that has not been equaled since by any other American conflict. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died from combat, accident, starvation, and disease during the Civil War. This number comes from an 1889 study of the war performed by William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore. Both men fought for the Union. Their estimate is derived from an exhaustive study of the combat and casualty records generated by the armies over five years of fighting. A recent study puts the number of dead as high as 850,000.
Bloodiest Civil War Battles
Gettysburg–51,000 casualties
Chickamauga–34,624 casualties
Spotsylvania–30,000 casualties
The Wilderness–29,800 casualties
Chancellorsville–24,000 casualties
Shiloh–23,746 casualties
Stones River–23,515 casualties
Antietam–22,717 casualties
Second Manassas–22,180 casualties
Vicksburg–19,233 casualties
The Battle of Franklin is also known as one of the bloodiest battles. It decimated the Army of Tennessee. Around 10,000 men became casualties on both sides, roughly 7,000 of them Confederates. Fourteen Southern generals became casualties, more than any other battle in the war.
The Election of 1860
The election of 1860 was one of the most unusual in American history and a precursor to The Civil War. In a four-way race brought on by a split in the Democratic Party, Abraham Lincoln’s name did not even appear on the ballot in most Southern states. In the electoral college, Lincoln solidly carried the free states of the Northeast and Northwest. Breckenridge won the slaveholding states, with the exception of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky in the Upper South, which went to Bell. Douglas, though he made a solid showing in the popular vote, only took electoral votes from Missouri and New Jersey.
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, Republican Party: 39.8%
Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Northern Democratic Party: 29.5%
John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, Southern Democratic Party: 18.1%
John Bell of Tennessee, Constitutional Union Party: 12.6%
While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, “When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.”
