The National Museum of Civil War Medicine

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2019

Frederick, MD, a town settled in 1745, is the location of the two-story National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Following the Battles of South Mountain and Antietam, the city of Frederick became one vast hospital with hospital beds in schools, churches, hotels, and any public buildings suitable for use. A photo exists of the interior of the Evangelical Lutheran Church looking like a hospital ward filled with hospital beds.


The museum is important in so many ways because the Civil War was described as a “watershed” in the history of medicine in regards to medical school education, recruiting and enlisting of soldiers, camp life, treatments, drugs, evacuation of the wounded, field dressing stations, field hospitals, and pavilion hospitals.


American medicine prior to the Civil War struggled with the general idea that disease was caused by a bodily poison triggered by a nervous constriction of the small blood vessels. Doctors used sweating, bleeding, cupping, blistering of the skin, and drugs to induce vomiting in order to purge the poison from the body. Bleeding was even used to stop internal hemorrhaging or to fix wounds to the chest. 


Few really believed in sterilization to stop the spread of disease from patient to patient. The [Henry] Craig Microscope was sold as a novelty through the mail, a single-fused lens in a tube mounting. But few understood microorganisms and the spread of disease through contact.

Battlefield first aid kit

Surgeons treated the death wounds, the burning fevers, the wasted bodies, and the broken constitutions and understood the life-long effects of battle – the shattered limbs, the pain, and the life-long physical and mental handicaps.

Surgical instruments and tools

Medicine was not entirely primitive as many are inclined to believe. The soldiers did not just “bite the bullet” in order to withstand surgery. Chloroform and ether were used in low doses in approximately 95 percent of Civil War surgeries in order to render the wounded oblivious to pain. 

Battlefield medicine chest, Museum 

Medicines used to treat diseases or pain included quinine and substitutes, alcohol, mercury-based drugs, creosote, morphine, chloroform, iodine, ether, opium, patent medicines (developed locally, of questionable efficacy and full of alcohol, opium, and mercury), iron supplements, tinctures for pain relief, and homeopathic medicines. Sutlers would sell patent medicines to soldiers or they received them in home packages.

Medicines found in care packages from home

Morphine and opium were used as painkillers and quinine was used to combat malaria. A hospital drug chest on display contained 48 medical containers made of glass and porcelain which were full of different compounded drugs or mixtures used to treat various diseases. A surgeon’s complete operating kit with stainless steel tools was manufactured by “Hernstein & Son of New York,” contracted suppliers for the Union physicians.

Autenrieth medical wagon

In 1864 the Union Medical Board approved the Autenrieth medical wagon for field use. The earlier 1862 medical wagon was improved and the Autenrieth version was presented with “sliding shelves and drawers to hold medicines and supplies as well as a sliding flat work surface that could be pulled out when the wagon was opened.” It held about 77 different drugs and tinctures, hospital stores, 16 surgical instruments, various dressings, furniture, and bedding (blankets and covers). It was a vast improvement over the hospital drug chest with 48 medicines.

It was not uncommon for military surgeons to use their private amputation kits such as the surgical instruments manufactured by Edward F. Snyder of Philadelphia who produced instruments from 1841-1855.


Middleton Goldsmith experimented with bromine to treat hospital gangrene after a severe outbreak in Memphis in 1863. He discovered that the survival rate improved dramatically with the use of bromine. The U.S. Sanitary Commission endorsed the use of bromine immediately and cases diminished in the last years of the war.


Despite the general belief that doctors were simple butchers, the reality is that most Civil War surgeons went to medical school and were trained with an established doctor. They had to pass an exam to serve as a war surgeon. 


Wounds were quite severe due to the new rifle musket technology and the French Minié ball which made repairing the damage impossible due to time constraints and potential deadly infections. For this reason, three out of four surgeries performed were amputation which resulted in nearly half a million soldiers coming out of the Civil War disabled.

Surgeons were often spoken of as “sawbones” due to the large number of amputations performed. Soldiers often reached for their weapons when they saw a surgeon approach.  The damage done by the musket balls called Minié was so devastating that they had no choice but to amputate.

Not all broken limbs were amputated during the war. A fracture box was used to align the broken bones as well as various sizes and shapes of splints on display. 

The .58 caliber rifled musket used in the Civil War was different from the Revolutionary War musket. The cone-shaped bullet had a hollow grooved base that expanded and spun with full force when fired. The accuracy and velocity of these Minié lead bullets did more damage, shattered the bones into many splinters, destroyed the surrounding soft tissue, and the lead remained inside the body.  “Approximately 94 percent of all recorded injuries were caused by the new Minié ball. Seven out of ten injured soldiers were wounded in the arm or leg; two out of ten in the body; and one out of ten in the head or neck.”

Hospital cot - Museum

Orthopedic hospitals were established in the South starting in March 1865 where disabled soldiers were fitted with prosthetics – artificial hands, arms, legs, and cosmetic appliances for facial wounds. In the State of Mississippi, “One-third of the soldiers were killed or crippled during the War. In 1866 one-fifth of the state’s revenue was expended on artificial limbs and for amputees.” (from “God & General Longstreet” by Connelly & Belles)


Field hospitals were usually a barn or a tent, with the barn doors removed to serve as surgical tables. Casualties were triaged into three categories: mortally wounded (abdomen, chest, head), slightly wounded, and surgery candidates. 


Surgeon Z. Boylston Adams of the 32^nd Massachusetts Infantry describes the battle: “The front was filled with the sulfurous odor of smoke. There was a constant rattle of musketry mixed with the blood curdling yells and shouts. Artillery shells were exploding in the treetops. Leaves and branches fell about … Minié balls could be heard thudding into the surrounding trees. And so, the field hospital went into operation.”

One famous Confederate surgeon was John Julian Chisolm from Charleston, S.C. “In April 1861, Chisolm treated Union soldiers wounded at Fort Sumter.” He worked during the war in the military hospitals in Richmond.

Mary Edwards Walker, a New York surgeon, received her medical degree from Syracuse Medical College in June 1855. She treated wounded soldiers after the battles of Manassas and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Most of her medical colleagues did not support her when she was assigned with the 52^nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment in January 1864. On April 10, 1864 Walker was captured by Confederate troops, sent to prison in Richmond, and exchanged four months later for a Confederate officer. President Andrew Johnson awarded Walker the Congressional Medal of Honor for Meritorious Service in 1865.


According to the museum archives, prior to the Civil War, the U.S. Army had a 40-bed infirmary in Kansas. A hospital was a poor house where the poor went to die. However, by 1865 the Union Medical Department had 181,000 beds in 187 pavilion style hospitals and the Confederates had a similar number of beds to treat the wounded and the sick.


U.S. hospital railroad cars were retrofitted and used as early as August 1861 to transport the wounded from the battlefield to metropolitan hospital centers. Stretchers were suspended in railroad cars with vulcanized rubber rings in order to provide shock absorbers for a smoother ride and to be able to suspend more stretchers inside a car.


“River boats and later steamships were leased or purchased and refitted as hospital ships at first in the West and later in the East. The City of Memphis carried 11,024 sick and wounded in 33 trips up and down the Mississippi. The D.A. January transported and cared for 23,738 patients during the last 3 years of the war.” They were floating hospitals. 


Nursing care was provided at first by convalescent or non-combatant soldiers until such a time that they were able to return to their regiments. Since 1863 the Union Veteran Reserve Corps supplied nurses, clerks, ward masters, guards and cooks to the general hospital. A famous male nurse, L.A. Thorpe, head nurse at Foster Hospital in New Bern, NC, died of yellow fever in 1864. John C. Sinclair was nurse at Trinity Hospital in Washington, D.C. 

Museum Archives Photo

Walt Whitman visited hospitals in and around Washington, D.C. from December 1862 until December 1865, aiding the sick and wounded soldiers on both sides, talking to them, helping them write letters home, and bringing them small gifts of money, food, writing paper, and scarce items.

Civil War nurse - Museum photo

Slowly, the Catholic sisters and concerned female caregivers gained entrance into hospitals – they cooked, cleaned, bandaged wounds, reading and writing letters. Most “nurses” were anonymous but a few Southern women like Ella King Newsom, Sally Tompkins, Julie Opie Hopkins, and Northern women like Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton became recognized for their efforts. 


President Lincoln invited to the White House one famous nurse, Caroline Johnson, a former slave who nursed in Washington hospitals.


Black slaves built hospitals, cooked in hospital kitchens, and served as laundresses. Richmond, Virginia’s Chimborazo Hospital was built almost entirely by black labor. Often blacks were assigned the task of burying the dead. Three-quarters of the women who nursed at Chimborazo hospital in Virginia were black. “The use of black women in Northern hospital wards was not authorized until 1864.” 


“Susie King Taylor was the best known of the thousands of black Civil War nurses. Her memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, is the only surviving account of the Civil War experiences of a black nurse.”


Army chaplains assisted with surgeries and comforted the dying. “Of the approximately 165 regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops, only 14 had black chaplains.” Union Army regulations required that regimental officers elected chaplains.


“Mrs. D. H. Hastings, a hospital matron with the 30^th U.S. Colored Troops is listed as non-commissioned officer on the regimental muster roll – an extremely rare honor for a woman.”

The Chimborazo hospital in Richmond was like a small city that could serve “more than 8,000 patients in 150 wards, a bakery that produced 10,000 loaves of bread a day, a 400 keg brewery, a newspaper, five ice houses, a soap factory, cultivated fields, and a large herd of livestock.”


Benevolent societies raised money and donated to the U.S. Sanitary Commission for soldiers’ relief - $70 million in four years through contributions from every state and territory in the Union including almost $18,000 from the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). In 1861 the U.S. Christian Commission came up with the idea of “coffee wagons” in camp to compete with the “liquor sellers,” the sutlers.

Hospitals provided bands for the entertainment of the wounded, held lectures, concerts, and theatrical performances in addition to medical care. 


One of the Civil War doctors, Lewis Henry Steiner (1827-1892), was a fifth generation of the Steiner family to reside in Frederick, MD. He earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1849. Dr. Steiner was an inspector for the U.S. Sanitary Commission and was present when the Confederate troops entered Frederick. He remained there until the Union troops arrived. He described the Confederate troops on September 8, 1862:


“How the rebels manage to get along no one can tell. They are badly clad. Many of them without shoes. Uncleanliness and vermin are universal. The odor of clothes worn for months, saturated with perspiration and dirt, is intense and all-pervading. They look stout and sturdy, able to endure fatigue, and anxious to fight in the cause they have espoused.”


The Union Army of the Potomac counted 1500 days of service but only 45 were spent in battle. The rest of the time they fought diseases of the camp caused by contaminated water supply, refuse and excrement from humans and animals, fleas, lice, and flies which carried bacteria and viruses to the soldiers and their rations. “Of the nearly 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War, two-thirds died of disease and only one third died of wounds,” diarrhea being the number one killer. 

Civil War stretcher 

“The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion reported 44,558 deaths in the Union Army attributed to diarrhea and dysentery,” the deadliest diseases of the Civil War. Other killer diseases were: erysipelas (streptococcus pyogenes infection at the wound site), hospital gangrene (streptococcal flesh infection which also spreads through contact to nurse, other patients, and doctor), malaria (from mosquito bites), measles, rheumatism (actually RA or “reactive arthritis with joint swelling from rheumatic fever, venereal infections, intestinal disease, dysentery), smallpox, STDs (syphilis and gonorrhea, 182,800 cases among Union troops), typhoid fever (caused by bacterium Salmonella typhi), typhus (bacterium Rickettsia), tuberculosis (bacterial infection known as consumption), and scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph nodes of the neck). “For some reason, black troops were five times more likely to contract the scrofula.”


According to the Museum, the 65^th U.S. Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.) had the most deaths from disease (755) of all Union regiments. The 49^th U.S.C.T. lost 465 men to disease compared to 62 killed in action. Ten thousand black sailors served in the Union Navy and 179,000 black soldiers enlisted in the Union Army.


As ghastly as the Civil War was, forcing brother to fight against brother, in the end, a lot of the measures developed to deal with casualties of war became the basis for modern military medicine. For example, the ambulance system developed by Jonathan Letterman is still part of the present-day military evacuation plans.

Medical personnel, just like today, treated the wounded from both sides of the war. A field dressing station, the precursor of our modern first responders, bandaged wounds and administered whiskey for shock and morphine for pain.


Triage was first developed during the Civil War in order to set priorities for treatment of the wounded based on the severity of the injury.


The Civil War used embalming to send home soldiers killed in battle. It was a chemical process that had not been used prior to the Civil War.


The physical and mental impact of 60,000 amputees forced the reunited country to deal with the casualties and establish mental hospitals and care for the veterans.


The condition first diagnosed as nostalgia and irritable heart during the Civil War, shell shock during WWI, became PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) today.


Apothecary wagons developed during the Civil War to ensure medication was available to soldiers for treatment.


Water and sewer systems used in pavilion hospitals during the Civil War paved the way for our modern hospitals. Wards were self-contained to minimize the spread of disease.


Modern military medicine has roots in these advancements made during the Civil War and in turn, civilians today benefit from continuing medical developments made in military medicine.

In 1863, the first veterans’ organizations were established in both the North (Grand Army of the Republic) and the South (United Confederate Veterans), with the goal to care for veterans, honor the dead, preserve friendships of those who survived, honor the dead, and provide for widows and orphans.


Soldiers were not the only enlisted in the fight, horses and mules were unwilling beasts of burden and victims in the war. Every cannon and its attached limber (two-wheeled ammunition chest) was pulled by six horses. Six-horse teams also pulled each of the six four-wheeled caissons that carried additional ammunition. An artillery battery consisted of six guns which means that 72 horses were necessary to move the battery. Additional horses were necessary to pull the forge, carry the officers, and be replacements. 


The Army of the Potomac used in 1864 more than 4,000 six-mule team wagons in the Wilderness Campaign, with a total of 56,499 horses and mules that moved the war machine. Veterinary surgeons tended to the animal injuries and tried to maintain the health of their charges. “Large infirmaries were developed to treat horses and mules which were too sick or worn-down to serve the armies.”

A soldier spent most of his day in camp or marching rather than in battle. Marching means that they had to carry extra clothing, personal hygiene items, blankets, tin utensils, a “soldier’s housewife” (items necessary to mend clothing and darning socks:  scissors, needles, thread, patches, pins, buttons, and yarn), items from home, and their weapons. And some also carried items such as pressed flowers, homemade identification tags, business cards (carte de visite), the New Testament, the Book of Common Prayer, and the daguerreotype photo of a loved one.


Most soldiers marched 13 miles daily, carrying 30-50 lbs. of equipment, and such strenuous outlay of energy caused many health problems:  “dehydration, malnutrition, hypothermia, sunstroke, headaches, nerve damage, bone spurs, bone degeneration, muscle soreness and tearing, torn or early loss of cartilage in knees and hips, leaking fluid sacks in knees, joint and back pain, blisters, bruises, lacerations, infections, and chronic cough.”


“War is an organized bore,” one said. But Private Wilbur Fisk of 2^nd Vermont wrote, “If a man wants to know what it is to have every bone in his body to ache with fatigue, every muscle sore and exhausted, and his whole body ready to sink to the ground, let him … shoulder his knapsack, haversack, gun and equipment, and make one of our forced marches, and I will warrant him to be satisfied that the duties of war are stern and severe.”


Food focused on “hard-tack” (a hard wheat flour cracker) and salt-cured pork.  Fresh meat and vegetables were issued sometimes in camp and canned food, meat and seafood. Confederate letters describe meals of canned food captured from Union supply trains.  The deficient diet caused major nutritional diseases such as scurvy (vitamin C), night blindness (vitamin A) and malnutrition. There were 46,000 cases of scurvy in Union records.


Coffee, tea, birch beer, and sarsaparilla were available.  The soldier had to grind the beans included in their rations in order to make coffee. Alcohol was not allowed in camp, but officers were not restricted. Sutlers made alcohol available to anyone though just outside the camp.


Tallow and lard were used to make candles for illumination. The “Betty Lamp,” a simple pot filled with oil and a wick, provided light at night. Soldiers entertained themselves in camp with cards, dice, and playing baseball. 


After the bombardment at Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C. in April 1861, President Lincoln called for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers to squash the rebellion. Companies were organized with 100 volunteers; ten companies formed a regiment; the volunteers chose officers, one regimental surgeon, and two assistant surgeons. 

Johnny Clem, Museum photo

The average volunteer soldier was 25 years old, but Curtis King of 37^th Iowa Infantry was 80 years old. Boys younger than 18 served as musicians, stretcher-bearers, nurses, ships boys, and even soldiers. Avery Brown of the 31^st Ohio Infantry and Edward Black of the 21^st Indian Infantry were 8 years old. At the age of 10, Johnny Clem ran away from home and became a drummer in the Union Army. He enlisted at 12, fought in several battles, was captured and briefly jailed by Confederate soldiers.


Women served in the Civil War, with a documented number of over 300 Union and Confederate females serving disguised as men. This happened because physical examination was often superficial or nonexistent in the rush to gain more recruits for the war. Many joined the army already seriously sick with bronchitis, fevers, TB, STDs, etc.


Soldier’s clothing was made of rough-hewn wool in the North and a mixture of cotton, linen, and wool in the South. The material was itchy and of poor quality and did not last long. Soldiers wore softer underwear to prevent itching. When uniforms wore out, they put on civilian shirts and clothes, even in battle. Shoes did not last long due to long marches.


The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion recorded the staggering numbers of enlistment and the final tally of combatants who were killed, injured, and died from their wounds and disease:

Union Army Enlistment 2,893,304                                   Confederate Army Enlistment 1,317,035
Battlefield deaths               110,070                                   Battlefield deaths                          94,000
Death from Disease            224,586                                  Death from Disease                     164,000       
Death from Accidents in the Union Army        24,872 (suicides were also included in this number)

A high percentage of soldiers on both sides died from gunshot wounds (94%). Artillery fire killed 5.5% of them and 0.4% of men perished from sabre or bayonet. 

The final death toll percentage of soldiers fighting their own countrymen in the Civil War was 12.4% (Union) and 19.6% (Confederates). 

The museum was a somber place to reflect on our country’s history forgotten by so many.

American Civil War Museum and Historic Tredegar

Historic Tredegar
Photo: Wikipedia

Nestled on the bank of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, near the American Civil War Museum, the Tredegar Iron Works began operating in 1837. The name Tredegar honored engineers Rhys Davies and his crew who were recruited from the Tredegar Mills in Wales. The proximity to railroads and canal boats made this location ideal.

On this very hot and lazy Saturday afternoon, with temperatures upwards of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, locals were sunbathing on the beach nearby.

First producing iron for railroads and then cannon, Tredegar Enterprise did not rise to fame until 1842 when the U.S. Navy ordered 100 cannon. Within eighteen years, Tredegar became the largest ironworks in the South, an important factor in the Confederate decision to move its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia in 1861.

Photo: Wikipedia

The American Civil War Museum is located in the Gun Foundry which was built in 1861. The opening salvo on April 12, 1861 at Ft. Sumter was fired by a cannon cast at Tredegar Iron Works. By the end of the American Civil War, Tredegar cast more than 1,160 cannon.

Tredegar also made iron products, ammunition for the Spanish American War, WWI, and WWII, eventually closing in 1986 due to slow demand for iron goods which were replaced by steel.

Gen. Joseph Reid Anderson
Photo: Wikipedia

Joseph Reid Anderson bought out various stockholders and became the sole owner of Tredegar in 1860 when it was the fourth largest ironworks in the country.

A secessionist, Anderson wanted to unite the South and requested a Brigadier General appointment in the Confederate Army which he held until the summer of 1862. At that time, he resigned his commission as he was more valuable to the confederacy as leader of the iron works.

After the federal government confiscated the Confederate war industry, Anderson persuaded President Andrew Johnson to pardon him and to return his property which had been confiscated. He ran Tredegar until his death in 1892.

One of the largest employers in Virginia, Tredegar had recruited workers from Great Britain, Germany, the North, and even hired slaves who were trained as blacksmiths, teamsters, boatmen, and skilled ironworkers.

According to the American Civil War Museum archives, “In 1847, the white workers who usually held these skilled jobs, demanded that Anderson stop bringing in slaves and went on strike. Anderson fired the striking white workers, recruited new workers, and placed slaves in yet more sought-after positions.”

The white labor force shrank between 1861 and 1864 from 86 percent to 25 percent due to Confederate draft and the resignation of Union workers. Until its closing, Tredegar employed between 700 and 1,000 men.

A January 1862 list of “negroes” hired at Tredegar shows 131 slaves and four “free negroes.” The slaves were “housed, fed, clothed, and provided medical care. They earned cash by working overtime or exceeding their daily quota; several bought their own or family members’ freedom. Free black earned the same wages as white workers.” (American Civil War Museum archives)

Abraham Lincoln and his son
Photo: Wikipedia

The outdoor exhibits surrounding Historic Tredegar and the American Civil War Museum display a modern bronze statue of a child sitting on a bench by a man, Abraham Lincoln and his son, with the words engraved in stone on a wall behind them, “To bind up the nation’s wounds;” three bronze cupolas from the Virginia State Penitentiary that stood not far from Tredegar and was torn down in 1992, making room for Ethyl Corporation’s laboratories; various Tredegar tools and furnaces; an overshot waterwheel like the many that produced the mechanical energy needed by Tredegar’s furnaces and machinery from 1837 until after the American Civil War.

The waterwheel ran with water from the Kanawha Canal, guided to the top of the wheel and spilled over each bucket, causing the wheel to turn. As it turned, a wind box (a small fan) forced air into the furnace to stoke the fire.

The Historic Tredegar is operated by the non-profit American Civil War Center and the Richmond National Battlefield Park of the National Park Service. Three stories talk about wartime Richmond, its government, the military, refugees, prisoners, the wounded, and locals whose lives were displaced from 1861-1865 by a civil war that brought national attention to places like Cold Harbor, Gaines’ Mill, Malvern Hill, New Market Heights, and transformed farms into battlefields.

The National Park Service displays cannon, memorabilia, limber wagons with six-team of horses that pulled cannon, drums, letters, a well-worn Confederate flag carried in battle by the Richmond regiment, and narrates other interesting facts about southern life, the role of slavery, spies such as Elizabeth Van Lew, most famous Union spy, and other sympathizers who cooperated with the Union. There were Union spies in Richmond just as there were Confederate spies in Washington.

Wealthy Richmonders ran a spy network, “the best-organized one in the Confederacy, utilized safe houses, codes, signals, and clever hiding places, as well as smuggled newspapers, personal letters, and access to Confederate high command.” (National Park museum archives)

Richmond’s 1860 population of 38,000 grew to 80,000 due to the war and the cost of living rose through the roof while housing space became scarce. People had to flee in order to survive. Even a coal cellar was used as living quarters.

Women had to take unsavory jobs in order to survive, even jobs generally done by men. Some turned to prostitution or selling writing paper, sewing kits, and small pies in the streets.

Children had a difficult life in war-torn Richmond. Older ones joined gangs, bullying blacks and poor whites alike. Younger children who sought refuge in Richmond were petty thieves who vandalized property and created general disturbance. Some escaped to Union lines.

Well-to-do Richmonders sent their girls to boarding schools or to live with relatives out of harm’s way. Others were hired to sign Confederate Treasury notes. Poor girls worked in factories and stores. Upper class boys were sent to military schools and became officers.

By 1860, Richmond had five black churches and many black charities. Blacks worked as “domestic and day laborers, but also in tobacco factories, coal mines, flour mills, ironworks, bakeries, construction sites, hotels, and print shops. Free blacks dominated barbering, blacksmiths, street vendors, musicians, and cooks.” (National Park archives)

Blacks and free blacks had to carry passes or free papers at all times, an indignity to the human spirit. Richmond’s war chaos provided opportunities for some to escape to the Union lines.

Massive stonework on the first floor and brick walls on the second floor of the Historic Tredegar show evidence of the woolen mill that burned in 1854 on whose foundation the ironworks building was reconstructed.

The National Park Service describes the atmosphere in Richmond before the Virginia Convention voted to secede on April 17, 1861. “Although some Richmonders were passionate secessionists, many immigrants, merchants, and politicians had little enthusiasm for the Confederacy. Slaves and free blacks waited to see where their advantage lay.” (National Park museum archives)

Richmond became the Union prisoners’ destination. Officers were kept in Libby Prison. Enlisted men, upwards of eight thousand, were held prisoners on Belle Isle on James River. Lew and other Union sympathizers helped officers escape from Libby Prison.

The American Civil War Museum displays on two floors historical accounts and the time line of the Civil War. Films present evidence, facts, and opinions about the war that had torn a nation apart and caused so many casualties on both sides.

Interestingly, the museum presents the causes of the American Civil War as four possible choices and invites the visitor to decide by making careful insinuations:

a.     Disagreement over Federal vs. State Powers

b.     Competing Economies and Cultures (Industrial vs. Farming)

c.      Westward Expansion

d.     Slavery

The U.S. population in 1790 was four million, including 800,000 enslaved Africans in the North and the South. By 1860, the population grew to 31 million, 4 million of which were slaves concentrated in the South.

“While the average value of enslaved women, children, and the elderly was $750 a person, a single field hand could sell for $1,500 (about $25,000 in today’s dollars). The market value of slaves totaled nearly $3 billion, exceeding other U.S. assets such as railroads and factories.” (American Civil War Museum archives)

It is hard to understand man’s inhumanity to man but human trafficking and slavery continue to this day around the world and is swept up under the rug. Few people actually mention it or seriously try to stop it.

The true cost of the American Civil War was tallied at the end by taking into account soldiers lost to disease, battle wounds, and injuries. According to the museum archives, there were “10,455 skirmishes and recorded battles which resulted in over one million casualties (killed, wounded, missing in action, captured, or sick).” Survivors had to live with amputated limbs, depression, and persistent disease which forever changed their quality of life.

The museum had been somewhat sanitized in its revisionist historical opinions presented as a “balanced way to explore the Union, Confederate, and African-American perspectives.” The causes of war, the war years, and its legacy, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in reference to freedom, citizenship, and equal protection were explored from different angles.

As we left the somber American Civil War Museum grounds, children’s laughter and playful beach banter echoed from the banks of the James River.