LibGuides: Primary Sources: Civil War

Civil War in the American South (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries)
Provides a central portal to access digital collections from the Civil War Era (1850-1865) held by members of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL). This site currently links to more than 10,000 items from 30 libraries. The shared collection continues to grow, providing ready access to a world-class collection of primary source materials from the American Civil War era.
Civil War @ The Smithsonian See some of the items in the Smithsonian's Civil War collection, in the following categories: Slavery & Abolition, Abraham Lincoln, First Blood, Soldiering, Weapons, Leaders, Calvaries, Navies, Life & Culture, Appomattox, Winslow Homer, Mathew Brady, and The Smithsonian. Plus, lists of external links & reference texts for each category.
American Civil War Museum (Richmond, VA) Home to one of the world’s most comprehensive and important collections of artifacts, documents and historic sites related to the Civil War and its legacies. It includes The Museum of the Confederacy Collection, which comprises in excess of 100,000 items including Confederate military artifacts, domestic items, photographs, documents, and more. The collection also features more than 3,000 items relating to African American history, in the John H. Motley Collection.
The National Civil War Museum (Harrisburg, PA) This site currently does not have any online digital collections. However, you can find information on how to contact the curator with research questions, what the museums offers to their visitors, how to schedule tours, etc.
Civil War Maps Collection (Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Library of Virginia) Includes nearly 3,000 maps in three online collections. Search by keyword and narrow with the facets to the left of the results page.
Pictures of the Civil War (National Archives and Records Administration) Includes photographs by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner which have been grouped into broad categories.
Gilmer Civil War Maps Collection (University of North Carolina) An extensive group of Civil War maps, including both manuscript maps and printed maps with manuscript annotations and engineers' drawings of military construction. This site currently includes 161 maps representative of the entire southern region, with particularly large groupings of North Carolina and Virginia maps. Most of the maps are dated 1861-1865.
Library of Congress Civil War Collection (Prints & Photographs) The Prints & Photographs Division holds thousands of images relating to the Civil War, found in many different collections, including: Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints; Gladstone Collection (photographs relating to the war); Liljenquist Family Collection (ambrotype & tintype portraits); Drawings, including eyewitness drawings; and Stereograph cards relating to the war
The Civil War Archive: Soldiers' Letters Includes transcribed letters from both Union and Confederate soldiers, organized by name and regiment. The letters are HTML text transcriptions and are not scanned originals.
Civil War Diaries & Letters Collections (Auburn University) Includes diaries and collections of letters from soldiers, spies and even a bodyguard of Abraham Lincoln. Letters include both private and official correspondence & include Rufus King and Ulysses S. Grant. Transcripts are provided.
Civil War Collections (University of Alabama) Scroll down to "Civil War" to browse digitized items relating to the war in the following categories: Confederate States of America Army in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee; CSA Navy; CSA Hampton's Legion and Lumsden’s Battery; United States Army in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and more.
First Person Narratives of the American South (UNC-Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South) Include diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives written by Southerners. Focuses on Southerners whose voices were less prominent in their time, including African Americans, women, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans.
Manuscripts of the American Civil War (Notre Dame) Includes topical collections, personal papers, diaries, correspondences and letters, and military records. All items are scanned and transcribed.
Civil War Collections (Virginia Military Institute) Includes resources on Stonewall Jackson (photographs, papers, biography, family genealogy, etc.), VMI Cadet Life (members of the VMI Corps of Cadets who fought at the Battle of New Market, Virginia, in 1864), and biographical sketches of VMI alumni who served as in the war.
Civil War Archive (University of Mississippi) Provides materials like correspondence, diaries, images and field reports which document troop movements, social conditions, battles, the home front and more. The online collection does not provide a comprehensive picture of the Ole Miss's entire Civil War Collections, but it does include highlights from their holdings.
Civil War Collections (University of Tennessee - Knoxville) Includes Tennessee-centric documents from both the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, including Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction Era Diaries (1839-1869), the Henry Pippit Diaries (1862-1865), Civil War Letters (1861-1865), and Old Nineteenth Tennessee Regiment, C.S.A. Manuscript (1902).
Civil War Resources (North Carolina Digital Collections & NC Dept. of Cultural Resources) Browse the following topics to find digitized items concerning North Carolina in the Civil War: Battles (Cold Harbor; Battle of Ream's Station; Campaigns of the Civil War; Seven Days' Battles; Sherman's March to the Sea; Siege of Petersburg), Casualties; Desertion; Economy; Food; Guerrilla fighting; Letters by year (1861-1865); Life on the homefront; Prisons; Railroads; Recruiting; Religion; and more.
Civil War Collections (Penn State) Pennsylvania Civil War Era Newspaper Collection contain all the words, photographs, and advertisements from selected newspapers published during the pivotal years before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Newspapers played a prominent role in the conflict. They helped mobilize public opinion for, or against, the war, relayed battlefield developments to their readers, and documented political life on the homefront. Beyond military or political concerns there is much on cultural topics including travel, arts and leisure, sports and contests, and local social events.
Civil War Resources (University of Iowa) Includes photographs, diaries, and letters from 1862-1865 mainly from Iowans who served in a variety of capacities in the war (including soldiers, nurses, and supply administrators).
Civil War Collections (Michigan State University) Includes scanned letters, newspaper articles, images, photographs, diaries, and much more; most collections focus on soldiers from Michigan.
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies (Making of America Project, Cornell) Includes the orders, reports, and correspondence from the Union and Confederate Navies. This scanned 30 volume set from the Naval War Records Office and the Government Printing Office documents naval activities from 1861-1866.
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Making of America, Cornell) 70 volume work from the US War Dept. & the Government Printing Office consisting of formal reports for both the Union & Confederate armies, including correspondence & orders, from 1860-1865.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 (Library of Congress, American Memory Project) Contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves (Speed Library has these volumes; call number 301.451 Y48v)
North American Slave Narratives (UNC-Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South) Collection of books and articles that document the individual and collective story of African Americans struggling for freedom and human rights in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of fugitive and former slaves published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920.
Slavery & Abolition in the US: Select Publications of the 1800s (Dickinson College & Millersville University) Collection of books and pamphlets that demonstrate the varying ideas and beliefs about slavery in the United States as expressed by Americans throughout the 19th century. The works reflect arguments on both sides of the slavery debate and include first person narratives, legal proceedings and decisions, anti-slavery tracts, religious sermons, and early secondary works.

Civil War Sheet Music Collection (Library of Congress) Consists of over 2500 pieces culled from the Library's collections. The collection is limited to music about the war and therefore does not include every piece of sheet music published during the war. In addition to the music, many of the covers are worth noting. They treat a variety of subjects ranging from conventional portraits of generals to battlefield scenes to the popular image of Jefferson Davis escaping in petticoats.
President Lincoln's Papers (Library of Congress) Includes approximately 20,000 documents, such as correspondence with enclosures of newspaper clippings, drafts of speeches, notes, pamphlets, and other printed material by Lincoln. Most of the material dates from the presidential years. Each piece is scanned, includes a transcription, and is searchable by keyword.
Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library (Mississippi State) Collection consists of some 15,000 linear feet of correspondence, research notes, artifacts, photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia and includes information on Grant's childhood from his birth in 1822, his later military career, Civil War triumphs, tenure as commanding general after the war, presidency, and his post-White House years until his death in 1885. There are also 4,000 published monographs on various aspects of Grant's life and times, including The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant [Speed Library has a copy of the 32 volume set; call number 973.8 G767p]
James Wills Bollinger Collection of Lincolniana [President Lincoln Archive] (University of Iowa) Includes correspondence, a pamphlet collection relating to Abraham Lincoln, and a collection of objects and ephemera, many of which are digitized.
Papers of Jefferson Davis (Rice University) Includes a bibliography, genealogy, and chronology of Davis; excerpts from the Papers of Jefferson Davis [library has 14 volumes in print; call number 973.713 D294p]; information on people and places associated with Davis, (mainly his direct family).
Civil War Letters of Forrest Little and Diary of Captain Edward Hill (St. Mary's College of California) Links to 2 small collections pertaining to the Civil War: letters from a private in the Fifth Vermont regiment and a diary from a Union captain in the Sixteenth Michigan regiment.
South Carolina and the Civil War (University of South Carolina) Includes books, diaries, sheet music, maps, letters, photographs and illustrations from the Civil War time period. This collection includes primary sources on the Confederate and Union soldiers, women, African Americans, and others who lived in camps and on battlefields, in urban and rural areas, at the homefront and on both sides of the blockade.
Confederados Collection (Auburn University) Contains correspondence from the Norris family [1861-1909] and John R. Buford [1862-1876] as well as early Southern Methodist-Episcopal Mission Reports about the Confederados community [c. 1867-1874], and memoirs of some of the descendants [1970s-1988]. Transcripts are provided for all in English but the letters are written in old Portuguese.
Valley of the Shadow [Virginia & Pennsylvania] (University of Virginia) Offers documents that compare & contrast life in two communities on two sides of the war (Franklin County, PA, and Augusta County, VA) from the time of the Jim Brown raid through Reconstruction.
Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, 1855-1865 Documents the lesser-known conflict between Missouri and Kansas (also referred to as Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas or the Border War). This site contains primary sources from 25 Missouri and Kansas archives, thematic essays, encyclopedia entries about the events/people of the time, and interactive timeline and maps of the period.
Vermonters in the Civil War (University of Vermont) Includes materials dating from 1861-1863 written by private soldiers and officers, as well as a few civilians, that are part of the collections at the University of Vermont and the Vermont Historical Society.
Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience (University of Wisconsin) Includes first person narrative accounts of Wisconsin soldiers and citizens. The first phase of the collection consists of 630 pages of materials dating from the years 1861 – 1866. Most documents are handwritten; some items are typed transcriptions of originals.
Antietam on the Web Covers the events of the Battle at Sharpsburg, a turning point in the American Civil War. Site includes an overview and t imeline of the battle and the Maryland Campaign of 1862; sets of Campaign and Battle Maps, with a Gazetteer; List of participants, including the 13,000+ people and 816 units at Sharpsburg and nearby; Union and Confederate Orders of Battle and the commanders' After-Action Reports; original articles and primary documents about the battle; and more.
The Civil War: Women and the Homefront (Duke University) Links to multiple online collections of diaries & letters from women in South during the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass Papers (Library of Congress) Contains approximately 7,400 items (38,000 images), spans the years 1841-1964, with the bulk of the material dating from 1862 to 1865. Items include a diary, family papers, correspondence, speeches, articles, & more.
Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 (Library of Congress, American Memory Project) Contains just over a 100 pamphlets and books (published between 1772 and 1889) concerning the difficult and troubling experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. Significant names include John Quincy Adams, Roger B. Taney, John C. Calhoun, Salmon P. Chase, Dred Scott, William H. Seward, Prudence Crandall, Theodore Parker, Jonathan Walker, Daniel Drayton, Castner Hanway, Francis Scott Key, William L. Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Denmark Vesey, and John Brown.