Civil War Info and Resources
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was present in the room when President Abraham Lincoln died on April 15th, 1865, after he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater the night before....
Gideon Welles kept an extensive diary during his time in office as Secretary of the Navy under Abraham Lincoln and his successor, Andrew Johnson. At that time, the Secretary of the Navy was a...
In 1851, the U.S. Army constructed a fort along the Santa Fe Trail in northeastern New Mexico territory. Fort Union, as it was called, was one of the more important such installations in the...
The battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (a.k.a. Merrimack) was the most famous Naval action of the Civil War. They fought to a draw on March 9th, 1862 in the first...
After losing the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, the Army of the Potomac withdrew across the Rappahannock River to its camps at and around Falmouth, Virginia, and went into winter quarters. Except for...
By the middle of the summer of 1864, Union offensives in Virginia and Georgia had bogged down into near stalemates. It was an election year, and with the Civil War dragging on, President Abraham...
On March 28th, 1862, an ambitious plan to expand the Confederacy into the Southwest ended with the defeat of invading Rebel forces at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, on the Santa Fe Trail between...
The Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1st, 1863, declared that anyone held as a slave in the rebellious states of the Confederacy “are, and henceforward shall be free”. Enforcement of the proclamation was essentially impossible...
