2. Sickness accounted for a full one-third of all casualties in the Civil War.

The 12th Connecticut Regiment

entered the war with a compliment of 1,000 men. Before it entered its first engagement, sickness had
reduced its strength to 600 able bodied soldiers.

3. There were more than 10,000 soldiers serving in the Union Army that were under the age of
18.

4. Union and Confederate forces stationed at Fredericksburg during the winter of 1862 traded items by
constructing small boats and floating them back and forth across the Rappahannock river.

5. General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces, traveled with a pet hen that laid one egg
under his cot every morning.

6. Approximately 130,000 freed slaves became Union soldiers during the war.

7. The artillery barrage at the battle of Gettysburg during Pickett’s charge was heard over 100 miles away
in Pittsburgh.

8. The famous Confederate blockade - runner, the C.S.S. Alabama, never entered a Confederate port during
the length of her service.

10. During the Civil war a person who had been drafted could hire a substitute. This bounty system was
exploited by so called “bounty jumpers”. These men would hire out to more than one draftee and then
make a hasty exit once they were paid. The record for bounty –jumping was held by John O’Connor. He
admitted to hiring himself out 32 times before being caught. He received a 4 year prison term.

11. Black soldiers were paid $10 per month while serving in the Union army. This was $3 less than white
soldiers.

Approximately 2,000 men served in the 26th North Carolina Regiment during the course of the Civil War.
With Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox courthouse, there were only 131 men left to receive their paroles.

More than three million men fought in the war.

• Two percent of the population—more than 620,000—died in it.

• In two days at Shiloh on the banks of the Tennessee River, more Americans fell than in all previous
American wars combined.

• During the Battle of Antietam, 12,401 Union men were killed, missing or wounded; double the casualties
of D-Day, 82 years later. With a total of 23,000 casualties on both sides, it was the bloodiest single day of
the Civil War.

• At Cold Harbor, Va., 7,000 Americans fell in 20 minutes.

• Senator John J. Crittendon of Kentucky had two sons who became major generals during the Civil War:
one for the North, one for the South.

• Ulysses S. Grant was not fond of ceremonies or military music. He said he could only recognize two
tunes. "One was Yankee Doodle," he grumbled. "The other one wasn’t."

• Missouri sent 39 regiments to fight in the siege of Vicksburg: 17 to the Confederacy and 22 to the Union.

• During the Battle of Antietam, Clara Barton tended the wounded so close to the fighting that a bullet
went through her sleeve and killed a man she was treating.

• At the start of the war, the value of all manufactured goods produced in all the Confederate states added
up to less than one-fourth of those produced in New York State alone.
• In March 1862, European powers watched in worried fascination as the Monitor and Merrimack battled off
Hampton Roads, Va. From then on, after these ironclads opened fire, every other navy on earth was
obsolete.

• In 1862, the U.S. Congress authorized the first paper currency, called "greenbacks."

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., future chief Justice, was wounded three times during the Civil War: in the
chest at Ball’s Bluff, in the back at Antietam and in the heel at Chancellorsville.

• Confederate Private Henry Stanley fought for the Sixth Arkansas, and was captured at Shiloh, but
survived to go to Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.

• George Pickett’s doomed infantry charge at Gettysburg was the first time he took his division into
combat.

• On July 4, 1863, after 48 days of siege, Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city of
Vicksburg to the Union’s General, Ulysses S. Grant. The Fourth of July was not be celebrated in Vicksburg
for another 81 years.

• Disease was the chief killer during the war, taking two men for every one who died of battle wounds.

• North and South, potential recruits were offered awards, or "bounties," for enlisting, as much as $677 in
New York. Bounty jumping soon became a profession, as men signed up, then deserted, to enlist again
elsewhere. One man repeated the process 32 times before being caught.

• African Americans constituted less than one percent of the northern population, yet by the war’s end
made up ten percent of the Union Army. A total of 180,000 black men, more than 85% of those eligible,
enlisted.

• In November 1863, President Lincoln was invited to offer a "few appropriate remarks" at the opening of a
new Union cemetery at Gettysburg. The main speaker, a celebrated orator from Massachusetts, spoke for
nearly two hours. Lincoln offered just 269 words in his Gettysburg Address.

• Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had 30 horses shot from under him and personally killed 31
men in hand-to-hand combat. "I was a horse ahead at the end," he said.

• The words "In God We Trust" first appeared on a U.S. coin in 1864.

• In 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to Lieutenant General, a rank previously held by General George
Washington, and led the 533,000 men of the Union Army, the largest in the world. Three years later, he
was made President of the United States.

• Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia held 33,000 prisoners in 1864. It was the fifth largest city in
the Confederacy.

•By the end of the war, Unionists from every state except South Carolina had sent regiments to fight for
the North.

• On November 9, 1863, President Lincoln attended a theater in Washington, D.C., to see "The Marble
Heart." An accomplished actor, John Wilkes Booth, was in the cast.

• On March 4, 1865, Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term. Yards away in the crowd was John Wilkes
Booth with a pistol in his pocket. His vantage point on the balcony, he said later, offered him "an excellent
chance to kill the President, if I had wished."

• On May 13, 1865, a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Private John J. Williams of the 34th
Indiana became the last man killed in the Civil War, in a battle at Palmito Ranch, Texas. The final skirmish
was a Confederate victory.

• Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black man ever elected to the U.S. Senate. He filled the seat
last held by Jefferson Davis.
General Benjamin Butler, Union Army, attempted to use a floating bomb against Fort Fisher, North
Carolina. It was a barge loaded with 235 tons of gunpowder. It ran aground 800 yards before its target and
exploded, causing no damage or casualties, but certainly a good fireworks show.

These days, people use the term 'infernal machine' to describe a machine that is unreliable or otherwise
defective. The Confederacy used the term to describe hidden weapons, such as mines.

After the Battle of Fredricksburg, Confederate troops scavenged the battlefield looking for weapons. More
than 11,000 rifles and revolvers were gleaned.

Confederate artillerymen sometimes placed the tails of their cannon in ditches to elevate the barrels,
making them a somewhat useful anti-observation balloon weapons.

The Whitworth Rifle, so prized by Confederate snipers, was so accurate that a shot was only 12 feet off
target on the average after travelling one mile.

The firing of black powder muzzle-loaders was a touchy business. If fired too rapidly, the barrel would
become too hot to touch. At many battles in which soldiers fired quickly, men were known to have urinated
on their gun barrels in the middle of a fight to cool them.

Under ideal circumstances, artillery of the time, when fired produced a sound that could travel more than
10 miles.

The .36 Colt Navy Revolver was not designed for sea service. Early production weapons were made with an
engraving of a naval battle on the cylinder, conspicuously absent from the larger .44 Colt. The .36 Colt was
ever after referred to as the Navy, which later applied to all .36 revolvers. For the sake of simplicity, the
term 'Army' came to identify the larger .44 revolver. The term 'Navy' was used whether a .36 revolver had
the aforementioned Naval scene or not.

The largest cavalry battle of the war, the Battle of Brandy Station, is thought to be the only battle in which
the saber caused a large percentage of deaths and wounds. Surgeons on both sides reported that they had
never before seen so many sword wounds in any battle.

The massive Rodman smoothbore cannon had a maximum range of 3.5 miles.

It is believed that more men were killed or wounded by being clubbed with rifle butts than with bayonets.

When Texans began to report for duty with their regiments, they usually brought their bowie knives with
them. Some soliders even attempted to discard their bayonets, with the hope that they would be able to
use their knives in close-quarters combat. Although they were usually allowed to keep their knives, the
men were ordered quite bluntly to retain their bayonets.

Confederate Colonel Zachariah Deas spent $28,000 of his own money to equip his regiment, the 22nd
Alabama, with British-made Enfield rifles.

When a Union regiment of roughly 550 men used Colt revolving rifles with their 5-shot cylinders, they put
up such a horrifying fire that captured Confederates, upon seeing the number of men they had been
fighting, they were astonished to see that they were not facing a force of division strength.

When Southern supplies of lead ran low, families were asked to donate lead window weights, resulting in
several tons of lead for the troops.

Chain shot, or two small cannonballs connected by a length of chain, were designed for use against the
sails and rigging of ships. Used by some artillery units on both sides, their trajectory was different from
solid shot, and were almost never (if ever) used effectively in land warfare.

A 12-pound 1841 mountain howitzer was light enough to break down into components and transported on
the backs of a few mules.
The Parrott gun, one of the most popular cannons used by the Union, could still be used if the muzzle
broke by sawing it smooth.

Aboard the USS Hartford, David Faragut planned (but to my knowledge did not) to drop his ship's heaviest
anchor on the CSS Arkansas to scuttle her.

Some observers believed that massive artillery barages caused rain.

The Confederate Observation Balloon program came to a sudden halt when their second balloon floated
away in a high wind with the screaming observer holding on for dear life. He was never found, and call me
crazy, but I think he might have fallen to his death.

Strange and Interesting Facts about the Civil War

Did you know that in the Civil War, General Stonewall Jackson walked around with his right hand in the air
to balance the blood in his body? Because he was right-handed, he thought that his right hand was getting
more blood than his left, and so by raising his hand, he’d allow the excess blood to run into his left hand.
He also never ate food that tasted good, because he assumed that anything that tasted good was
completely unhealthy.

During the Civil War, glasses with colored lenses were used to treat disorders and illnesses. Yellow-
trimmed glasses were used to treat some diseases, blue for insanity, and pink for depression. Thus we get
the term, To see the world through rose-colored glasses.

Did you know that the average American in the 1860’s could not afford to paint his house, and a painted
house was a sign of affluence? In order to keep up appearances, they used cedar clapboards.

Did you know that when a woman mourned for her husband in the 1860’s, she spent a minimum of two-
and-a-half years in mourning? That meant little or no social activities: no parties, , no outings, no visitors,
and a wardrobe that consisted of nothing but black. (Shame on Scarlet O’Hara) The husband, when
mourning for his wife, however, spent three months in a black suit.

Surgeons never washed their hands after an operation, because all of the blood was assumed to be the
same.

Did you know that when a child died, parents would have a photograph taken of the child? They wanted to
preserve the memory for as long as possible. A lot of photographs taken of sleeping children are actually
of deceased sons or daughters.

After the Battle of Gettysburg, the discarded rifles were collected and sent to Washington to be inspected
and reissued. Of the 37,574 rifles recovered, approximately 24,000 were still loaded; 6,000 had one round
in the barrel; 12,000 had two rounds in the barrel; 6,000 had three to ten rounds in the barrel. One rifle,
the most remarkable of all, had been stuffed to the top with twenty-three rounds in the barrel.

Did you know that President Lincoln had a mild form smallpox (varioloid) while he gave the Gettysburg
Address. On the train back to Washington he quipped, “Now I have something that I can give everybody.”

Did you know that President Lincoln’s favorite tune was “Dixie”?

The Civil War was also known as The Brothers’ War, the War for the Union and the War of the Rebellion.

General Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA, had twenty-nine horses shot from beneath him during the war years.