Civil War Encyclopedia

Welcome!

Thank you for visiting our Civil War Encyclopedia website.

The purpose of this site is to provide those interested in the American Civil War with an extensive body of historic reference works on the war. 

This is the culmination of many years of collecting and scanning historic published works.

We will be making these documents available in two forms.  One will be a PDF file of the original document and the other will be searchable text (OCR). 

This site will be an updated version of our Civil War Library website, CivilWarLibrary.org.

We will be dealing with all aspects of the Civil War, including the political and social history of the war.  The central part of this website will be an exhaustive, encyclopedic reference document on the Civil War.  This will include biographies of soldiers, political leaders, inventors, financiers, and others involved in the war effort.  It will also include a list of all of the Civil War battles, arranged alphabetically.  Also included will be a list of military terms and concepts.  Other documents will include citations from Union and Confederate Army and Navy regulations and the Articles of War.

In addition to the Encyclopedia, we will be including numerous historic biographies and autobiographies of Civil War veterans and leaders.  We will also be including a large body of historic material regarding the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements in America.  Please click here for our AmericanAbolitionists.com website.

All of the material available in this Civil War Encyclopedia was published in the United States before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain.  The material is out of copyright and can be utilized freely.  Many of the references were published during or in the decades immediately after the war.  For a list of works that will be included in this website, please click here.

Please feel free to utilize any material in this website as you wish for research, and you can share it with others.  However, we ask that you please cite CivilWarEncyclopedia.org.

Please check back regularly, as we will be adding large amounts of material. 

We would like to hear what you think.  Please email me at visasforlife@cs.com.

Eric Saul

About Us

The editor of the Civil War Encyclopedia is Eric Saul, assisted by Amy Fiske.  Eric Saul is a military historian with more than 40 years of experience in the field of America’s wars.  He was the Director of the Presidio Army Museum in San Francisco and curated a number of exhibits, including on the Civil War.  Amy Fiske is the great great grand-niece of General Henry Warner Slocum, who was the commander of the Union 12th Corps and, later, the left wing of Sherman’s Georgia and Carolinas campaigns.

Here is a link to my biographical website, EASaul.com.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the following individuals and organizations their cooperation, access to their special collections, their friendship and their inspiration:

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Library of Congress
Company of Military Historians
West Virginia University Libraries
Martin Dunlap, West Virginia University Libraries
Columbia University Library
University of Southern California Library
Morgantown Public Library, Morgantown, West Virginia
Lesley and Michael Klishis, Friends of the Public Library
Mason-Dixon Civil War Roundtable
Lonnie Bunch, III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Founding Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Patt Gilliard Gunn
Lieutenant General Ray R. Peers, OSS Detachment 101
Chester Tanaka, 442nd Regimental Combat Team
Ted Tsukiyama, Military Intelligence Service
John Lee, United States Navy
Robert Ash