1.  A Union soldier in camp equipped with backpack and musket.  The muzzle loading musket was still the basic weapon on both sides.  Military camps could be as deadly as the battlefield, however, as infectious disease easily spread among the troops.

2.  A Confederate soldier with an artillery gun of the kind common on both sides of the war.  The South had great difficulty producing necessary military supplies, however, because so few factories existed in the region before the war.

3.  A town in flames during the war.  The conflict caused great physical destruction in the South, which crippled the Confederate States economically long after the war itself ended.

1.  "My paramount object in this struggle..."

   These lines are from a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1862.  They reveal Lincoln's position early in the war that slavery was not the immediate issue, but rather, keeping all the states together as part of the United States.  Politically, Lincoln could not afford to center the conflict on the slavery issue, since the North was itself deeply divided over the subject. 

2.  "All we ask is to be let alone."

   This line from Confederate President Jefferson Davis expresses the view of many Southerners as the Civil War began.  The Confederate States felt they had every right to leave the Union, and leave in peace.  Southerners saw the North as the aggressor in the conflict, and fought valiantly, as they saw it, in defense of their states, their homes, and ways of life.

   This passage is from the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in preliminary form by Abraham Lincoln in September, 1862.  It took effect January 1, 1863.  Notice, however, that it declared slaves free only in the areas controlled by the Confederacy.  It did not free slaves in the states that permitted slavery and were still part of the Union, such as Maryland. 

4.  "...We here highly resolve that these dead..."