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After President Lincoln's election on the 6th of November 1860, the eleven Confederate states did not secede immediately. South Carolina, and then the remaining six states of the lower south (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas) seceded from the Union between the 20th of November and 1st of February 1861, leaving Arkansas, Tennessee, ...

The sights on the Springfield Model 1861 had settings for three distances: 100, 300, and 500 yards. In the civil war, however, many battles were fought at much closer range. According to Battle Tactics of the Civil War (Paddy Griffith) many were fought inside of 100 yards. At this shorter range, the bullet didn't drop as much as the sights were calibrated ...

As far as Union states go, this table seems to provide accurate information. However, the info on Confederate army is very incomplete. You can find statements that North Carolina supplied the most soldiers (125,000) to the Confederate army all over the Internet. The original source seems to be a speech from 1904 by Hon. Theodore F. Davidson in Raleigh: ...

The fundamental cause of southern secession (and ultimately the Civil War) was the US's inability to solve slavery at the national level. The Civil War was not fundamentally about "states rights". Asserting a state's right to secede doesn't speak to why the state wants to secede. Steven's citation of reasons in his answer only serve to underline this. When ...

Gettysburg was pretty much a last ditch effort by Lee and Jefferson Davis to save the Confederacy or at least give it some credibility. There were different objectives that led to the attack in the first place. For one thing, the war in the West was going against the Confederates, and if the West fell, and more importantly access to the Mississippi River, ...

Besides the battle losses, the period around the battle of Gettysburg had two important strategic effects. 1) It established the winner, George G. Meade, as the General of the army of the Potomac. 2) More to the point, it established U.S. Grant, who captured Vicksburg at about the same time as Meade's boss. The Army of the Potomac began the 1864 campaign ...

In 1861, the US issued an announcement that they were looking for designers to submit plans for an ironclad ship. They did this in response to information they were obtaining indicating that the South had already begun building their own ironclad ships. Realizing that there was no way they could defeat an ironclad navy with their own wooden ships, the US ...

It's unclear what you mean by "good enough reason to use them"? If you mean "won't lead to strategically affecting resource losses", then it depends entirely on resources your country/army has. If you mean "won't lead to strategically affecting morale", then I'd say this depends in large part on the circumstances surrounding the war. Morale is affected by ...

The ends justify the means. I'm sure we've all heard that statement before, but it's never more true than in a war of attrition. As long as your goals are met, then the tactics are justified. If Grant had failed to break the Confedrates, then he would have been just one more Union general who proved to be inept, and his tactics would have been questioned ...

I think this may be a(nother) case of alleged American exceptionalism :) Is there any known intrinsic reason as to why American Civil War generals might have led their troops into multi-day battles as a result of new invention in warfare, or is it perhaps simply the case that this war consisted of a long string of battles, hence also of relatively many ...

The first battle occurred at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. After its seccession, South Carolina demanded that the US withdraw its military presence from Charleston, but instead the Army commander relocated his forces to the island fortress at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. This led to a standoff, and when the fort's supplies grew thin ...

George McClellan was a "whiz kid" promoted to commander of the Army of the Potomac at the young age of 34. He was superbly trained (at West Point) and trained his men well, but lacked the confidence for serious fighting that comes with experience. http://legacy.bishopireton.org/faculty/jaspere/McClellan.htm He himself admitted, “It would have been better ...

Unlike the Army, where a disproportionate number of officers came from the South, the U.S. navy was pretty much dominated by the North. One evidence of this was the fact that the fleet in Norfolk, Virginia, was scuttled by its sailors to prevent in from falling into the hands of the South. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monitor A major reason that the ...

Sherman's "March to the Sea" hurt the CSA's economy and helped to end the war. An estimate of the damage in dollars, made by Sherman stated that the campaign had inflicted about 100 million dollars worth of damage. To put that into context, the CSA, in 1863, had only 700 million dollars worth of bonds, (money in those days did not work as it does today) and ...

Ironclad (and iron-hulled) warships were just beginning to be built when the American civil war broke out. There was no established design for them, and none had been tested in actual battle. This was the beginning of a period of rapid evolution of designs, which culminated 40 years later in the a somewhat standardized form, the dreadnought or battleship. ...

The Confederates had 644 troops under the command of Colonel William Oates, compared to the 358 Union soldiers under the command of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. At the end of the day, Oates reported that only 223 enlisted men and 19 officers responded to roll call, which means he lost nearly half of his men. The 20th Maine under Chamberlain reported having ...

I do not think that there exists evidence to show that the founding fathers anticipated a civil war would break out over the issue of slavery. The founding fathers were largely against the institution of slavery, but the southern delegates (where the economy was completely dependent upon slavery) were for the institution. There were some steps taken to ...

In 2 court rulings this century the pre civil war secession situation was described as either unresolved or unsettled, not illegal nor unconstitutional. In 2004 the SCOTUS observed that inclusion of the word “indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance was significant because “the question whether a State could secede from the Union had been intensely ...

In June 1864, as General (later President) Ulysses S. Grant was leading the Army of the Potomac against Richmond, Lee DID order an offensive by one of his better remaining subordinates, General Jubal Early. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubal_Early Early debouched from the Shenandoah Valley, cut a swath across Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and ...

From this article: http://postalmuseum.si.edu/letterwriting/lw04.html Although the purpose of stopping mail service to the South was to isolate and corner the Confederate states, some mail still managed to cross the border in what were known as “flag-of-truce” ships. When the Union began blockading southern ports, letters were often carried across the ...

From Wikipedia: In spite of all this American growth in the game, it was slowly losing ground to a newcomer. In many cities, local cricket clubs were contributing to their own demise by encouraging crossover to the developing game of baseball. After the United States Civil War the Cincinnati Red Stockings brought a talented young bowler from the St. ...

Sectionalism was in fact a major element of the civil war. At the risk of oversimplifying, the strongest conflict was between the Northeastern industrial states (New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), and the "South,"( basically the 11 states that made up the Confederacy). In addition, there were two other sections: the Midwest, and border ...

As a resident of Loudoun County, Virginia, and the owner of two houses that changed hands multiple times during the war, I find it far more reasonable to tie the variation not to climate, but rather to the crops grown in said climate. (John Monroe’s house is less than 3 miles from my own, and I live on Bull Run Mountain — yes, that Bull Run.) Virginia gets ...

Lincoln's Election: Lincoln was elected from Northern Votes alone. Combined with Northern monopolies in the other branches of government, this was the warning bell to the South that they no longer had any say in politics at all. Taxes: The North was industrial, and the South was agricultural. This meant that the South's exports earned more (though ...

There's nothing in the Constitution specifically allowing it. The closest any part really comes to addressing seccession is the following (from Article 4, Section 3): Section. 3.New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by ...

This was an ongoing problem with musket armed soldiery; in the Peninsular and Napoleonic wars, in-experienced infantry often shot high, and given that Brown Bess was the standard musket for the British Army from 1722, presumably an issue at least since then. As such I am doubtful whether the sights of Springfield rifles are a key factor in this problem! At ...

Consider the strategic situation. The South was losing. The Mississippi was Union-controlled except around Vicksburg (until Grant took it too), cutting off a good chunk of the Confederacy. The Union blockade was in effect, making it very difficult for the Confederacy to trade abroad. The Emancipation Proclamation had made it politically impossible for ...

In fact it is because of the ballistic trajectory that the soldiers were advised to aim low. If a soldier aimed too high (and this seemed to be the natural tendency, given the frequent admonishment), the bullets would pass over the heads of the advancing enemy. See this wikipedia article on the Springfield Model 1861, and page 196 of Daily Life in Civil War ...

There are lengthy discussions on the topic of factions and mitigating the risks of insurrection in the Federalist Papers and in the responses written by anti-Federalists. The most notable paper on this subject was Federalist No. 10.

The question refers to "problems" without defining them, so I am going to cast my answer in terms of which states rejoined the Union earlier (supposedly fewer "problems") rather than later. I will try to tie the rejoining order to the best correlation I can find. According to the link below, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Florida were the first ...