Status Updates From Battle Cry of Freedom

The Union states grew more wheat in both 1862 and 1863 than the entire country had grown in the previous record year of 1859.

Black men could vote in only 6 northern states and the possibility of them doing so elsewhere was no more popular among many northern voters.

Recognized today as an illness, alcoholism in General Grant's time was considered a moral weakness.

German revolutionary Karl Marx viewed the American war against the "slave oligarchy" as a "world transforming revolutionary movement".

The Black Union regiments reflected the Jim Crow mores of the society that reluctantly accepted them: they were segregated, given less pay then white soldiers, commanded by white officers who called them "niggers" and intended for use mainly as garrison and labor battalions.

The Civil War marked a milestone in the transformation of nursing from a menial service to a genuine profession.

For 5 hours a dreadful slaughter raged on the Confederacy in Antietam left 12 thousand dead and wounded.

The Civil War solider was 8x more likely to die of a wound and 10x more likely to die of disease than an American soldier in World War I.

Frederick Douglass believed that Lincoln was "allowing himself to be the miserable tool of traitors and rebels."

Some of the worst violence occurred in Cincinnati where the replacement of striking Irish dockworkers by Negroes set off a wave of attacks on Black neighborhoods.

Of all the army commanders on both sides, Lee had the highest casualty rate.

The Democrats exploited the race issue for all they thought it was worth in 1862. The Republican party "the party of fanaticism" and they intended to free 2 or 3 million semi savages to overrun the North and enter competition with the white laboring masses.