To date Windham Fabrics has celebrated the glorious fabrics of the Civil War era by reproducing our favorite of these 19th century gems.  Civil War VII brings us more of the same stunning fabric, but let us all pay homage to the men and women that fought in this pivotal war by examining some of the better and lesser know facts.

• More than three million men fought in the war.
• Two percent of the population-more than 620,000-died in it.
• In two days at Shiloh the banks of the Tennessee River, more Americans fell than in all previous American wars combined.
• During the Battle of Antietam, 12,401 Union men were killed, missing or wounded; double the casualties of D-Day, 82 years later. With a total of 23,000 casualties on both sides, it was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War.
• Ulysses Grant was not fond of ceremonies or military music. He said he could only recognize two tunes. "One was Yankee Doodle," he grumbled. "The other one wasn't."
• Missouri sent 39 regiments to fight in the siege of Vicksburg: 17 to the Confederacy and 22 to the Union.
• During the Battle of Antietam, Clara Barton tended the wounded so close to the fighting that a bullet went through her sleeve and killed a man she was treating.
• At the start of the war, the value of all manufactured goods produced in all the Confederate states added up to less than one-fourth of those produced in New York State alone.
• George Pickett's doomed infantry charge at Gettysburg was the first time he took his division into combat.
• On July 4, 1863, after 48 days of siege, Confederate General John C. Pemberton surrendered the city of Vicksburg to the Union's General, Ulysses Grant. The Fourth of July was not to be celebrated in Vicksburg for another 81 years.
• African Americans constituted less than one percent of the northern population, yet by the war's end made up ten percent of the Union Army. A total of 180,000 black men, more than 85% of those eligible, enlisted.
• The words "In God We Trust" first appeared on a U.S. coin in 1864.
• In 1864, Ulysses Grant was promoted to Lieutenant General, a rank previously held by General George Washington, and led the 533,000 men of the Union Army, the largest in the world. Three years later, he was made President of the United States.
• Andersonville Prison in southwest Georgia held 33,000 prisoners in 1864. It was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy.
• On November 9, 1863, President Lincoln attended a theater in Washington, D.C., to see "The Marble Heart." An accomplished actor, John Wilkes Booth, was in the cast.

(Civil War facts courtesy of www.pbs.org)