Wars on Map

United States, 1861–1865

American Civil War Map & Timeline: 1861–1865

The American Civil War is usually taught through the eastern theatre, where Washington and Richmond sat a hundred miles apart and armies fought over the same Virginia rivers for four years. The war was won in the west, along the Mississippi and through Tennessee and Georgia, and on the sea, where a blockade slowly closed 3,500 miles of Confederate coast. A map holds all three at once.

Sources checked 2026-09-11 · Estimates are given as ranges, not single figures

≈750,000Deaths on both sides, from a census-based reconstruction published in 2011. The older figure was 620,000.
≈2%Share of the 1860 population of the United States that died — proportionally the country’s costliest war by a wide margin.
≈179,000African American soldiers who served in the United States Army, with a further 19,000 in the Navy.

Three wars at once

The eastern theatre was a corridor about a hundred miles deep between two capitals, crossed by rivers running the wrong way for an attacker. It produced the war’s most famous battles and the least movement: Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and the Wilderness were fought over overlapping ground.

The western theatre was continental. Union forces used the rivers as axes of advance — the Tennessee and Cumberland in 1862, the Mississippi through 1863 — and each success cut the Confederacy into smaller pieces. When Vicksburg surrendered on 4 July 1863, the Mississippi was open and the states west of it were effectively detached.

The third war was economic and naval. The blockade proclaimed on 19 April 1861 never sealed the coast, but it made Confederate imports expensive and irregular, and the capture of New Orleans in April 1862 removed the South’s largest port and commercial city in the war’s first year.

Sources
McPherson, J. M. (1988), Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press

Timeline of the American Civil War

The catalogue codes the war as running from the bombardment of Fort Sumter to 11 May 1865. Confederate forces in the field continued to surrender after that date, the last of them in June.

  1. 12–13 April 1861Fort Sumter is bombarded

    The garrison surrenders and evacuates on 14 April. Four more states secede over the following weeks.

  2. 21 July 1861First Battle of Bull Run

    The first major engagement ends in Union defeat and ends expectations of a short war.

  3. February 1862Forts Henry and Donelson fall

    Grant opens the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and takes some 12,000 prisoners at Donelson.

  4. 8–9 March 1862Battle of Hampton Roads

    The first engagement between ironclad warships. Neither is sunk, and every wooden navy in the world is obsolete.

  5. 6–7 April 1862Battle of Shiloh

    Nearly 24,000 casualties in two days — more than in all previous American wars combined, and a shock to both publics.

  6. 29 April 1862New Orleans is captured

    The Confederacy loses its largest city and principal port.

  7. 25 June – 1 July 1862The Seven Days battles

    Lee takes command of the Army of Northern Virginia and drives McClellan back from the outskirts of Richmond.

  8. 17 September 1862Battle of Antietam

    About 22,700 casualties in a single day, the bloodiest day in American history. Lee’s invasion of Maryland is halted.

  9. 22 September 1862The Emancipation Proclamation is issued

    Effective 1 January 1863, it redefines the war’s purpose and opens Union service to Black soldiers in large numbers.

  10. 1–3 July 1863Battle of Gettysburg

    The largest battle of the war, with roughly 51,000 casualties across three days. Lee withdraws to Virginia and never invades the North again.

  11. 4 July 1863Vicksburg surrenders

    With Port Hudson five days later, the Mississippi is under Union control for its whole length.

  12. 19–20 September 1863Battle of Chickamauga

    A Confederate victory that leads to the siege of Chattanooga — broken by Union attacks in late November.

  13. 5 May – 12 June 1864The Overland Campaign

    The Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor cost Grant some 55,000 casualties in six weeks, and he keeps moving south regardless.

  14. 15 June 1864The siege of Petersburg begins

    Nine months of trench warfare that anticipate 1914 in their form and their futility.

  15. 2 September 1864Atlanta falls

    Sherman’s capture of the city transforms Northern morale and Lincoln’s re-election prospects.

  16. 15 November – 21 December 1864The March to the Sea

    Sherman moves from Atlanta to Savannah, destroying railways, industry and supply, and demonstrating that the Confederacy cannot defend its interior.

  17. 15–16 December 1864Battle of Nashville

    The Confederate Army of Tennessee is effectively destroyed as a field force.

  18. 2–3 April 1865Petersburg and Richmond fall

    Lee abandons the capital and moves west, hoping to join Confederate forces in North Carolina.

  19. 9 April 1865Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House

    Lincoln is shot on 14 April and dies the next morning. Johnston surrenders on 26 April; the last Confederate forces west of the Mississippi give up in late May and early June.

Sources
McPherson, J. M. (1988), Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University PressTucker, S. C. (ed.) (2010), A Global Chronology of Conflict. ABC-CLIOClodfelter, M. (2017), Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia, 4th ed. McFarland

How many died — and why the number changed

For a century the accepted total was about 620,000, a figure assembled in the late nineteenth century from Union records and estimates for the Confederacy, whose own records were incomplete and partly destroyed.

In 2011 the demographic historian J. David Hacker approached the problem differently, comparing survival rates across the 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 censuses for men of military age. His estimate is about 750,000 deaths, with a plausible range of 650,000 to 850,000. It is now the figure most historians use, and the reason is methodological rather than ideological: census-based reconstruction catches deaths that record-based counting misses, particularly among Confederate soldiers and men who died after discharge.

About two-thirds of all deaths came from disease rather than combat — dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia and malaria in camps that concentrated rural populations with no immunity and no understanding of infection. Any map of battles therefore shows the minority of the killing.

Sources
Hacker, J. D. (2011), "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead". Civil War History 57(4)Faust, D. G. (2008), This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. KnopfMcPherson, J. M. (1988), Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press

The war’s costliest battles

Casualty figures for Civil War battles are counts of killed, wounded, captured and missing together, which is the convention in the American literature and is not comparable with figures for twentieth-century battles that count deaths only.

BattleDateCombined casualties
Gettysburg1–3 July 1863≈51,000
Chickamauga19–20 September 1863≈34,600
Chancellorsville30 April – 6 May 1863≈30,500
Second Bull Run28–30 August 1862≈25,300
Antietam17 September 1862≈22,700 in one day
Shiloh6–7 April 1862≈23,700
Stones River31 December 1862 – 2 January 1863≈24,600

Battle casualty figures are estimates reconciled from both sides’ returns and differ between compilations by a few thousand.

Sources
Tucker, S. C. (ed.) (2010), A Global Chronology of Conflict. ABC-CLIOClodfelter, M. (2017), Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia, 4th ed. McFarlandMcPherson, J. M. (1988), Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press

What the map shows for this war, and what it gets wrong

In the underlying catalogue the Civil War is an intra-state war with two participants, the United States and the Confederate States. Because the Confederacy has no modern territory, the map can only place the record using the one participant it can resolve — and the result is a marker at the geographic centre of the modern United States, in South Dakota, more than a thousand miles from any battlefield.

That is a genuine limitation and worth being blunt about: the marker locates a record, not a war. The atlas’s detailed movement layers, where arrows follow sourced campaign geography, currently cover the Second World War only. Reading this war on a map still means reading a good printed atlas of the campaigns alongside it.

Sources
Correlates of War — war datasets and codebooks ↗Dixon, J. S. & Sarkees, M. R. (2016), A Guide to Intra-State Wars: An Examination of Civil, Regional, and Intercommunal Wars, 1816–2014. CQ Press

Open the atlas at 1863 — Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga ↗