Civil War Facts

The seeds of civil war are different for each nation that is experiencing it. Most civil wars today occur in nations that are poor, ruled by dictators, and regionally divided upon tribal lines. During the US Civil War, neither of those reasons were the cause for America's bloodiest war ever.

The cause of the US Civil War lay in a series of issues with slavery being at the root. The issue of slavery led to a compromise in 1850 after the Mexican-American War and helped to avert a looming political crisis for the time being. Many Northerners considered slavery a national outrage while many Southerners considered slavery a national right and you should be able to own slaves if you wanted to. That belief was passed down over the centuries because up to that time slavery and slave trading was considered a normal and accepted practice.

The first shot of the American Civil War was fired at 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861. It was mortar round fired from Fort Johnson which exploded over Fort Sumter. This signaled the the start a bombardment from 43 guns and mortars from Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, and Cummings Point and was the beginning of a war that had been stirring for some time.

The war lasted 4 years from 1861 to 1865 and was responsible for over 600,000 soldiers deaths which even today outnumbers all the soldiers who have died in every war combined since. One of the reasons for the high death rate is because of the brutality of the weapons and the conditions in which the battles took place. They had no antibiotic to treat wounds, amputations were their preferred method of treating extremity wounds and if you were wounded in the torso, you did not have a good chance of surviving. If the bullets or artillery didn't get you, the disease would.

There are many historic Civil War battle sites you can visit today that will allow you think about the past and how far we come. Some of the sites actually still have unfound bullets and artifacts, although it's illegal to remove them if you do find them while visiting.

That's why the preferred method of collection Civil War memorabilia is to buy and trade it on line preferably at an auction so you can get the best price.