Portal:American Civil War

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The American Civil War Portal

Winfield Scott commanded all Union armies until November, 1861

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a sectional rebellion against the United States of America by the Confederate States, formed of eleven southern states' governments which moved to secede from the Union after the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States. The Union's victory was eventually achieved by leveraging advantages in population, manufacturing and logistics and through a strategic naval blockade denying the Confederacy access to the world's markets.

In many ways, the conflict's central issues – the enslavement of African Americans, the role of constitutional federal government, and the rights of states – are still not completely resolved. Not surprisingly, the Confederate army's surrender at Appomattox on April 9,1865 did little to change many Americans' attitudes toward the potential powers of central government. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution in the years immediately following the war did not change the racial prejudice prevalent among Americans of the day; and the process of Reconstruction did not heal the deeply personal wounds inflicted by four brutal years of war and more than 970,000 casualties – 3 percent of the population, including approximately 560,000 deaths. As a result, controversies affected by the war's unresolved social, political, economic and racial tensions continue to shape contemporary American thought. The causes of the war, the reasons for the outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of much discussion even today. (Full article)

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Watercolor of Missouri

CSS Missouri was a casemate ironclad built by the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War. Her propulsion machinery was taken from an existing steamboat, her armor was railroad T-rails, and she was armed with three captured cannon. She was difficult to steer and leaked badly. Additional equipment had to be added to allow her to reach her intended speed. Completed during 1863 on the Red River, she was trapped in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area by low water and never saw combat. The vessel's crew had desertion issues and some of her crewmen were pulled from the army. After traveling downriver for the first time, the ship was surrendered in June 1865 to the United States Navy—the last Confederate ironclad to be handed over—and sold in November. (Full article...)

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Grand Parade of the States

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Oregon raised the 1st Oregon Cavalry that was activated in 1862 and served until June 1865. During the Civil War, emigrants to the newfound gold fields in Idaho and Oregon continued to clash with the Paiute, Shoshone and Bannock tribes of Oregon, Idaho and Nevada until relations degenerated into the bloody 1864–1868 Snake War. The 1st Oregon Volunteer Infantry Regiment was formed in 1864 and its last company was mustered out of service in July 1867. Both units were used to guard travel routes and Indian reservations, escort emigrant wagon trains, and protect settlers from Indian raiders. Several infantry detachments also accompanied survey parties and built roads in central and southern Oregon.

Oregon's second United States Senator, Col. Edward Dickinson Baker was killed while leading Union troops at the Battle of Ball's Bluff near Leesburg, Virginia on October 21, 1861. His death in battle occurred exactly one month after another Oregonian, Captain James W. Lingenfelter of Company B, 71st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, was killed while on the picket line. In civilian life, Captain Lingenfelter had been a practicing attorney in Jacksonville, Oregon. He had been visiting in the East when the war started and enlisted to serve with Colonel Baker. (Full article...)

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Portrait of Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman at the Peabody Essex Museum

Timothy Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman (March 18, 1845 – February 27, 1863) was an American Union Army soldier of Native Hawaiian descent. Considered one of the "Hawaiʻi Sons of the Civil War", he was among a group of more than one hundred documented Native Hawaiian and Hawaii-born combatants who fought in the American Civil War while the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was still an independent nation.

Born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi, he was the eldest son of Kinoʻoleoliliha, a Hawaiian high chiefess, and Benjamin Pitman, an American pioneer settler from Massachusetts. Through his father's business success in the whaling and sugar and coffee plantation industries and his mother's familial connections to the Hawaiian royal family, the Pitmans were quite prosperous and owned lands on the island of Hawaiʻi and in Honolulu. He and his older sister Mary were educated in the mission schools in Hilo alongside other children of mixed Hawaiian descent. After the death of his mother in 1855, his father remarried to the widow of a missionary, thus connecting the family to the American missionary community in Hawaiʻi. However, following the deaths of his first wife and later his second wife, his father decided to leave the islands and returned to Massachusetts with his family in 1861. The younger Pitman continued his education in the public schools of Roxbury, where the Pitman family lived for a period of time. (Full article...)

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Image 1David Dixon Porter, by Mathew Brady
Image 2Ulysses S. Grant, by Thure de Thulstrup
Image 3Ambrose Burnside, by Matthew Brady
Image 4William Birney
Image 5First Battle of Bull Run map
Image 6Siege of Yorktown, by James F. Gibson
Image 7Charles Griffin
Image 8Christopher Raymond Perry Rodgers
Image 9Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Image 10Charles Pomeroy Stone
Image 11Christian Fleetwood
Image 12Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and biographer John Hay
Image 13Braxton Bragg
Image 14The print version of Sherman in South Carolina: The burning of McPhersonville at McPhersonville, South Carolina, by William Waud
Image 15Daniel McCallum, by the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery
Image 16United States President (and former Brigadier-General) Benjamin Harrison
Image 17Military execution of the conspirators in the Abraham Lincoln assassination
Image 18John F. Reynolds, by Alfred Rudolph Waud
Image 19Quaker guns, by George Barnard and James F. Gibson
Image 20George Armstrong Custer, by George L. Andrews
Image 21Confederate casualties at Chancellorsville during the American Civil War, by the National Archives and Records Administration
Image 22Allan Pinkerton, President Lincoln, and John A. McClernand in 1862 by Alexander Gardner
Image 23Richmond, Virginia after the American Civil War
Image 24Pickett's Charge, by Thure de Thulstrup
Image 25William H. Seward, United States Secretary of State during the American Civil War
Image 26Andersonville survivor
Image 27Battle of Franklin, by Kurz and Allison
Image 28The original sketch of Sherman in South Carolina: The burning of McPhersonville, at and by William Waud
Image 29President Rutherford B. Hayes was the 19th President of the USA
Image 30Battle of Harpers Ferry, by Robert Knox Sneden
Image 31John Lorimer Worden, by Mathew Brady
Image 32Andersonville Prison at Andersonville National Historic Site, by John L. Ransom
Image 33Lithographic facsimile of the Bixby letter, by Huber's Museum
Image 34Atlanta roundhouse ruin at History of Atlanta, by George Barnard
Image 35Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, by Thure de Thulstrup
Image 36The Chickahominy – Sumner's Upper Bridge at Peninsula campaign, by William McIlvaine
Image 37Harriet Tubman
Image 38Francis B. Spinola, Brigadier General for the Union in the American Civil War, and Congressman from New York
Image 39African-American Civil War soldiers
Image 40Robert E. Lee, by Levin Corbin Handy
Image 41The burning of Columbia at Columbia, South Carolina in the American Civil War, by William Waud
Image 42George Atzerodt, by Alexander Gardner
Image 43Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, by Alfred Waud
Image 44Battle of Fort Sanders, by Kurz and Allison
Image 45John A. Dahlgren, by Mathew Brady
Image 46Abner Doubleday

Did you know...

... that Justus H. Rathbone, founder of the Knights of Pythias, served as a hospital steward during the American Civil War?
... that Colonel Bradley Winslow was brevetted by US president Abraham Lincoln for "brave and gallant conduct" during the siege of Petersburg in the American Civil War?
... that CSS Beaufort fought USS Albatross in the first ship-versus-ship action of the American Civil War?
... that some historians believe that Steele's Greenville expedition marked a shift in the Union's war policy?
... that Francis Orray Ticknor was a country doctor whose fame as a poet relies on "Little Giffen", a poem about one of his patients who died in the American Civil War?
... that according to one historian, James S. Rains made a "significant contribution to the Confederate war effort" by getting drunk?