The Battle of Shiloh occurred on April 6 and 7, 1862, at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston attacked a Union army under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant, hoping to repel the Northern advance.
In the previous few months, the Union military had won several victories in Kentucky and [...]

Submitted by K.M. Johns
President Abraham Lincoln, after years of slave-owner and industrialist opposition, signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The law, which was to take effect on January 1, 1863, permitted adult citizens, and those immigrants who declared their intention to seek naturalization, to apply for grants of one [...]

On September 1, 1862 the 103rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry had been camped at University Heights, Cleveland, Ohio for several weeks. A few days later the company was given orders to immediately go to Cincinnati. It was reported that General Henry Heth was advancing on Cincinnati from Kentucky after capturing Lexington. Prior to the arrival of [...]

On August 11, 1862, the federal government directed that 5,000 soldiers stationed in and near Charleston be brought to Washington, to be used in the more active eastern theater of war. This reduction of federal strength in the Kanawha Valley did not pass unnoticed. On August 18, Confederate Gen. William Wing Loring began planning an [...]

On March 3, 1863 Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1863. The Conscription Act required states to draft men to serve in the American Civil War if individual states did not meet their enlistment quotas through volunteers. The federal government oversaw the draft and created provost marshals to enforce it. All white men between the [...]

When Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1863 in March the proposed draft was immediately met with resistance. Copperheads, Northerners who opposed the draft and demanded immediate peace be made with the South, encouraged people to resist the draft and encouraged draftees to abandon camp once they were drafted.
Many people associate Union draft resistance to [...]

On July 8, 1863, Brigadier-General John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate cavalry leader, led approximately two thousand soldiers across the Ohio River into southern Indiana. Morgan’s superiors had dispatched the cavalry leader into northern Kentucky to cause disorder among the Union military. Morgan exceeded these orders by crossing north of the Ohio River, but he did [...]

View of the entry of Morgan's Raiders into Washington, Ohio, from Harper's Weekly, Saturday, August 15, 1863. In July 1863 Confederate Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan lead approximately 1,400 calvarymen on a 13 day raid through southern and eastern Ohio. At the Battle of Buffington Island, 750 men were captured and 300 escaped across the [...]

The 127th Ohio Volunteer Infantry was designated as the 5th U.S. Colored Infantry. The 127th O.V.I. began organizing in August through November 1863 at Camp Delaware, Ohio. Before the regiment was mustered out on September 20, 1865 the 127th O.V.I.   lost   4 Officers and 77 enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 2 Officers [...]

In 1864, during the American Civil War, Ohioan Benjamin Franklin Wade, a United States Senator, and Henry Winter Davis, a United States Representative from Maryland, introduced the Wade-Davis Bill. This legislation sought to create a policy for how seceded states would rejoin the United States following the war’s conclusion. It required fifty percent of white [...]

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln was attending a play, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. He died the next day from the wound.
Carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln's casket laying in state in the rotunda of the Ohio Statehouse [...]

In 1864, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wildes of the 116th Ohio Volunteer Infantry refused to burn the town of Dayton, Virginia, a Mennonite community, despite orders to do so from General Phil Sheridan. Although threatened with court-martial, Lieutenant Colonel Wildes refused to carry out the order until it was countermanded. A monument [...]