Each month, I will try to add 10 items of interest usually not found in your normal reading about the American Civil War or in your High School or College history books. This and other trivia can be found in the Civil War Fact Book by Rod Gragg. 31. According to a report released by the U.S. Congress in 1863, the financial cost of fighting the war was $2.5 million per day.
32. Confederate presidents were to be limited to one six-year term.
33. The owner of Ford's Theater, John T. Ford, was imprisoned for more than a month after Lincoln's assassination until the government admitted that it had no evidence that he conspired with the others to kill the president.
34. According to the census taken in 1860, the three largest cities in the Union and the Confederacy were New York (805,651), Philadelphia (562,529) and Brooklyn (266,661); the Confederacy's three largest were New Orleans (168,675), Charleston, South Carolina (40,578), and Richmond (37,910).
35. Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States on February 18, 1861, on the steps of the Alabama capital while Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, on the portico of the U.S Capital in Washington, D.C.
36. When the South's supply of coal was exhausted, city dwellers mixed coal dust, sawdust, sand and wet clay into hardened lumps called "fireballs" which they used to heat their homes.
37. Of the 583 generals in the Union army, 217 were West Point graduates; of the 425 Confederate generals, 146 had graduated from West Point.
38. Despite wartime restrictions on communications and transportation, the Northern-based American Bible Society donated more than 100,000 New Testaments to Southern groups like the Confederate Bible Society, which then distributed the scriptures to the Southern Armies.
39. The song "All Quiet Along the Potomac" was written as a poem by Ethelind Beers and was based on a dispatch from General George McClellan which reported a lack of enemy action near Washington, D.C.
40. Battle deaths were higher for the North, which recorded an estimated 110,000 killed or mortally wounded in battle, compared with an estimated 94,000 Confederate battle deaths.
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