The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 and ended on May 9, 1865. It was an extremely deadly war, with approximately 625,000 soldiers losing their lives over the course of the conflict, primarily due to disease rather than battle injuries. The Union army was quite diverse, with many immigrant and African American regiments helping to contribute to the Northern victory. Key events included General Grant accepting the Confederate surrender in Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 and the assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865.

1. The Civil War
On July 4, 1863, after 48 days of siege, Confederate General
John C. Pemberton surrendered the city of Vicksburg to
the Union’s General, Ulysses S. Grant. The Fourth of July
was not be celebrated in Vicksburg for another 81 years.
Disease was the chief killer during the war, taking two
men for every one who died of battle wounds.
North and South, potential recruits were offered
awards, or "bounties," for enlisting, as much as $677 in
New York. Bounty jumping soon became a profession, as
men signed up, then deserted, to enlist again elsewhere.
One man repeated the process 32 times before being
caught. American Civil War began on Friday, April 12, 1861
and ended on Tuesday, May 9, 1865.

2. The Civil War
 Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia held 33,000 prisoners in 1864.
It was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy.
•By the end of the war, Unionists from every state except South Carolina
had sent regiments to fight for the North.
• On November 9, 1863, President Lincoln attended a theater in
Washington, D.C., to see "The Marble Heart." An accomplished
actor, John Wilkes Booth, was in the cast.
• On March 4, 1865, Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term. Yards
away in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth with a pistol in his pocket. His
vantage point on the balcony, he said later, offered him "an excellent
chance to kill the President, if I had wished."
• On May 13, 1865, a month after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Private
John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana became the last man killed in the
Civil War, in a battle at Palmito Ranch, Texas. The final skirmish was a
Confederate victory.
• Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black man ever elected to
the U.S. Senate. He filled the seat last held by Jefferson Davis

4. THE CIVIL WAR
. One-third of the soldiers who fought for the
Union Army were immigrants, and nearly one in 10
was African American.
The Union Army was a multicultural force—even a
multinational one. We often hear about Irish soldiers
(7.5 percent of the army), but the Union’s ranks
included even more Germans (10 percent), who
marched off in regiments such as the Steuben
Volunteers. Other immigrant soldiers were
French, Italian, Polish, English and Scottish. In
fact, one in four regiments contained a majority of
foreigners. Blacks were permitted to join the Union
Army in 1863, and some scholars believe this infusion
of soldiers may have turned the tide of the war

5.  . More men died in the Civil War than any other American
conflict, and two-thirds of the dead perished from disease.
Approximately 625,000 men died in the Civil War, more
Americans than in World War I, World War II, the Korean War
and the Vietnam War combined. If the names of the Civil War
dead were arranged like the names on the Vietnam Memorial, it
would stretch over 10 times the wall’s length. Two percent of the
population died, the equivalent of 6 million men today. Rifles
were by far the war’s deadliest weapons, but deadlier still was
disease. In 1861, as armies massed, men once protected from
contagion by isolation marched shoulder to shoulder and slept
side by side in unventilated tents. Camps became breeding
grounds for childhood diseases such as mumps, chicken pox and
measles. One million Union soldiers contracted malaria, and
epidemics were common