Favorite Websites

I'm often asked about my favorite websites so I am providing the following list for your enjoyment.

PENNSYLVANIA IN THE CIVIL WAR ONLINE RESOURCES

Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/civilwar/page1.asp?secid=31

Camp Curtin Historical Society
http://www.campcurtin.org/

Gettysburg National Military Park
http://www.nps.gov/gett

Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania
http://www.libertynet.org/gspa/

Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society
http://www.rootsweb.com/~panepgs/

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
http://www.state.pa.us/PA_Exec/Historical_Museum/DAM/psa.htm

Pennsylvania State Archives
http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/dam/overview.htm

Vital Records
http://webserver.health.state.pa.us/health/cwp/view.asp?a=168&Q=229939

Pennsylvania Links to Civil War Rosters
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Lair/3680/cw/cw-pa.html

Pennsylvania Civil War Soldiers
http://www.pacivilwar.com

ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES

American Battlefields: The Civil War
Contains information on Civil War parks and battlefields from the National Park Service.
http://www.cr.nps.gov/hps/abpp/civil.htm

American Civil War Collections at the Electronic Text Center
This website at the University of Virginia, contains "primary source materials on the American Civil War, including letters, diaries, texts and newspapers."
http://etext.virginia.edu/civilwar/

Antietam on the Web
This site contains a broad overview of the conflict, battle maps, a number of well-written articles on various aspects of that fateful day, and a full listing of the participants. Also included are 278 official reports filed by military officers from both the Union and Confederate sides.
http://aotw.org/

Civil War Maps
From the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, this website "collection contains approximately 2,240 Civil War maps and charts and 76 atlases and sketchbooks."
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/cwmhtml/

Civil War Preservation Trust
http://www.civilwar.org

Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System.
A searchable database, provided by the National Park Service, of all soldiers and sailors who served in the Civil War.
http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/

Civil War Treasures from the New York Historical Society
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/nhihtml/cwnyhshome.html

Civil War Women: Primary Sources on the Internet
From the Special Collections Library at Duke University.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/women/cwdocs.html

Digital History and the American Civil War
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ela/spring98.html

The Crisis of the Union
"Contains material related to 'the causes, conduct, and consequences of the US Civil War.' The collection is comprised of books, broadsides, cartoons, pamphlets, and other printed ephemera from 1830 to 1880."
http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/abolitionism/

Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894 - 1922)
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/ofre.html

Selected Civil War Photographs
From the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/

The United States Civil War Center
This Website at Louisiana State University seeks "to locate, index and make available all appropriate private and public data on the Internet regarding the Civil War."
http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/

The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880 - 1901) The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.- an essential source for the war and one that also provides social and political material. Consequently, it’s an often overlooked source by social historians. It was printed by the government from 1880 to 1901 and the original run contained 128 volumes. It has been put on line by Cornell
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/waro.html

Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress
http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html

American Civil War Home Page
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/warweb.html

American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
http://databases.library.yale.edu:8331/V/?func=find-db-1-locate&mode=locate&restricted=all&F-IDN=YUL03274

Civil War Resources on the Internet: Abolitionism to Reconstruction (Rutgers)
http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/history/civwar.shtml

Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
A source for links documenting the American South run out of the Wilson Library at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/index.html

Images of Battle: Selected Civil War Letters from the Southern Historical Collection (UNC)
http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/exhibits/civilwar/

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
http://209.10.16.21/TEMPLATE/FrontEnd/index.cfm

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War
Archive of experiences of Northerners and Southerners in two neighboring communities
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/

Primary source materials for the classroom with a number of standard documents
http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/cw/

Weapons of the Civil War

My apologies for not posting in a while, but a fellow blogger and Keystone Technology Integrator made a comment and I figured I better spend some time working on another post.

Civil War infantry soldiers, Union and Confederate, carried what was known as a musket. These muskets came in numerous varieties and flavors, however for the purpose of this post, we will discuss only the more common models.

1861 percussion rifle-musket



The Model 1861 Springfield Musket was the standard and most widely used rifle-musket of the Civil war. The musket was manufactured by the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts at a cost of approximately $18 as well as a number of other private contractors. It is estimated that approximately 1 million of these muskets were made during the Civil War.

The Model 1861 was quite accurate featured a rifled bore, parts that could be interchanged and percussion cap ignition system The musket weighed about 9lbs and was 58" in length and fired a .58 caliber lead minie ball.


Enfield rifle


In order to meet the demands of suppling the armies with weapons, both Union and Confederate governments imported large quantities of weapons from England. The most common was the British Model 1853 Enfield rifle-musket which was similar to the Model 1861 Springfield in that it weighed about 9lbs, and fired a .577 caliber minie ball. This musket was said to be accurate at 1,000 yards. There were approximately 400,000 of these weapons used by both sides during the course of the war although they were more common in the South.

An important factor in selecting the Enfield was that the .58 caliber bullet used in the Springfield model by both Union and Confederate forces was interchangeable with the .577 Enfield.


The lead minie ball



The standard bullet used during the Civil War for both the North and South was the minie ball. French army Captain Claude Minie created this conical shaped lead bullet that had a hollowed out bottom in 1848. The bottom was hollow because after the bullet was rammed into the bore of the musket, it packed better into the powder charge and once fired, the bottom would expand into the grooves of the barrel (rifling). This process caused the bullet to spin as it traveled down the barrel thus making it more accurate. Think of it like a quarterback throwing a football. A quarterback puts a spin on the football in order to make it fly farther and more accurately. These bullets could travel a half-mile or more, and the average soldier could hit a target at 300 yards.

Neither side anticipated the impact that the minie ball would have on the battlefield. The minie-ball forced commanders to fight defensive battles rather than traditional frontal assaults. Since the bullet was made from soft lead, when it entered the body and struck a bone, it would flatten out and shatter the bone thus inflicting more damage. There are even reports from Gettysburg of trees dying from lead poisoning from being shot so many times.

The Civil War Preservation Trust has a nice table on its page that shows the differences in accuracy from smoothbore muskets to rifled-muskets.

The average Civil War Solder could load and fire his musket 3 times per minute (in 9 distinct steps). If the soldier were to fire non stop for 30 minutes, how many shots would he have fired? What about a company of 100 men? Or a regiment of about 750 men?

UPDATE 2/22/07: Check out this photo of how two bullets hit each other in midair on the Civil War Photos blog.

Until next time...

************
References:

Minie ball photo credit: http://www.relicman.com/images/MM357.jpg

http://www.civilwarhome.com/civilwarweapons.htm

http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/soldierlife/webguns.htm

Woodhead, Henry, ed., Echoes of Glory: Arms And Equipment Of The Union and Echoes of Glory: Arms And Equipment Of The Confederacy. Morristown, N.J.: Time-Life Publishers, 1991