Union privates were paid $13 per month until after the final raise of 20 June '64, when they got $16.

John Beauchamp Jones was a popular novelist and a well-connected literary editor and political journalist in the two decades leading up to the American Civil War.

Disease was the chief killer during the war, taking two men for every one who died of battle wounds.

Nathaniel Lyon was killed while trying to rally his outnumbered soldiers at the Battle of Wilson's Creek. However, Lyon's efforts prevented the state of Missouri from joining the Confederacy.

More than 3 million men fought in the war.

After getting shot 3 times by his own men, Stonewall Jackson had his left arm amputated. Soon afterwards, he contracted pneumonia and died.

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had 30 horses shot from under him and personally killed 31 men in hand-to-hand combat. "I was a horse ahead at the end," he said.

Abraham Lincoln's first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron served less than a year, resigning after stories of his unscrupulous dealings in contracting for war materiel came to light.

The Battle of Port Hudson was the final engagement in the Union campaign to recapture the Mississippi. While Union General Ulysses Grant was besieging Vicksburg upriver, General Nathaniel Banks was ordered to capture the Confederate stronghold of Port Hudson, in order to go to Grant's aid. When his assault failed, Banks settled into a 48-day siege, the longest in U.S. military history.

The Compromise of 1877 was an informal, unwritten deal that settled the intensely disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election. It resulted in the national government pulling the last federal troops out of the South, and formally ended the Reconstruction Era.