On Aug, 20, 1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War Over. The bloodiest conflict in America’s history was now officially over.

Although bloodshed ended more than a year before, there had never been a formal declaration of peace and reunification in the country before that day,

To commemorate this day in history, we take a look at some facts of the Civil War with thee help od History.com:

  • One-third of the soldiers who fought for the Union Army were immigrants, and nearly one in 10 was African American.
  • Black Union soldiers refused their salaries for 18 months to protest being paid lower wages than white soldiers.
  • Harriet Tubman led a raid to free slaves during the Civil War.
  • Lincoln was shot at—and almost killed— nearly two years before he was assassinated.
  • Before William Tecumseh Sherman became a great Union general, he was demoted for apparent insanity.
  • General Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t the bloodiest general of the war—Robert E. Lee was.
  • Both before and during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln pushed to send freed slaves abroad.
  • Robert E. Lee’s Virginia estate was confiscated by the Union and turned into a cemetery during the war.
  • Privates weren’t cannon fodder during the Civil War—generals were.
  • More men died in the Civil War than any other American conflict, and two-thirds of the dead perished from disease.

Approximately 625,000 men died in the Civil War, more Americans than in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. If the names of the Civil War dead were arranged like the names on the Vietnam Memorial, it would stretch over 10 times the wall’s length, according to History.com.

Two percent of the population died, the equivalent of 6 million men today. Rifles were by far the war’s deadliest weapons, but deadlier still was disease. In 1861, as armies massed, men once protected from contagion by isolation marched shoulder to shoulder and slept side by side in unventilated tents. Camps became breeding grounds for childhood diseases such as mumps, chicken pox and measles. One million Union soldiers contracted malaria, and epidemics were common.

Image Sources

  • Civil War: Pixaby