Notes

The South's economy drastically decreased due to the war. The farmland and crops were all destroyed when the army marched through. The blockades for the South's ports also made the South have limited supplies all throughout the war. Throughout the war, the North and South both expected it to end quickly. After the war, John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, actually making the South's process joining the Union again much more difficult and rougher than before. Usually, soldiers were buried where they fell on the battlefield. More than 400,000 soldiers were captured over the course of the Civil War. In the first years of the conflict, equal numbers of captured troops were regularly exchanged for one another, helping to keep the total number of prisoners manageable for both sides. Over the course of the war, however, that practice faded from use. By the end of the war, the plight of prisoners of war on both sides had become bleak indeed. Thousands of Southerners died in the freezing camp at Elmira, New York, and the camp at Andersonville, Georgia, which held Union prisoners, has become one of the most infamous in the history of war. Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as died fighting in Vietnam. Also, disease was not very curable at the time. Two thirds of those killed in the Civil War died of disease. Germ theory had not been widely accepted in the medical world at the time of the Civil War and modern antiseptics, which could have greatly reduced the spread of bacteria and the outbreak of disease, did not exist.