Civil War Battles by State: All 383 Principal Battles, Counted
How many Civil War battles were fought in each state? A count of the 383 principal battles in the National Park Service's battlefield survey, with the bloodiest of each.
By Thomas van der Bruggen, Cartouche Maps · Published
Between April 1861 and May 1865 the Civil War was fought in hundreds of places, but historians do not count every skirmish. In 1993 the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission (CWSAC), set up by Congress, identified the war’s principal battles and graded each by its importance. The National Park Service still publishes a summary for every one of them.
We used those summaries to draw The Battlefields of the Civil War. Counting them by state gives a clear picture of where the war was actually fought.
The short answer
Our dataset holds 383 principal battles in 26 states and territories. Virginia alone saw 122 of them, about 32%, more than Tennessee (38), Missouri (29) and Georgia (27) combined. Only 2 principal battles were fought in Pennsylvania, though one of them was Gettysburg.
Civil War battles by state
Class A battles are those the Commission judged to have had a decisive influence on a campaign and a direct impact on the course of the war. The last column names the battle with the highest casualty estimate in that state.
| State | Principal battles | Class A | Highest casualties |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia | 122 | 18 | Spotsylvania Court House (1864) |
| Tennessee | 38 | 6 | Shiloh (1862) |
| Missouri | 29 | 2 | Westport (1864) |
| Georgia | 27 | 2 | Chickamauga (1863) |
| Louisiana | 23 | 3 | Port Hudson (1863) |
| North Carolina | 20 | 2 | Bentonville (1865) |
| Arkansas | 18 | 1 | Arkansas Post (1863) |
| Mississippi | 16 | 3 | Vicksburg (1863) |
| West Virginia | 15 | 0 | Harpers Ferry (1862) |
| South Carolina | 11 | 1 | Fort Wagner/Morris Island (1863) |
| Kentucky | 11 | 1 | Perryville (1862) |
| Oklahoma | 7 | 0 | Honey Springs (1863) |
| Maryland | 7 | 1 | Antietam (1862) |
| Alabama | 7 | 2 | Fort Blakely (1865) |
| Florida | 6 | 0 | Olustee (1864) |
| Texas | 5 | 0 | Galveston (1863) |
| North Dakota | 5 | 0 | Whitestone Hill (1863) |
| Kansas | 4 | 0 | Mine Creek (1864) |
| New Mexico | 2 | 1 | Valverde (1862) |
| Minnesota | 2 | 0 | Wood Lake (1862) |
| Pennsylvania | 2 | 1 | Gettysburg (1863) |
| Ohio | 2 | 0 | Buffington Island (1863) |
| Idaho | 1 | 0 | Bear River (1863) |
| Indiana | 1 | 0 | Corydon (1863) |
| District of Columbia | 1 | 0 | Fort Stevens (1864) |
| Colorado | 1 | 0 | Sand Creek (1864) |
Battles per year
The fighting grew every year until the last spring of the war:
| Year | Principal battles begun |
|---|---|
| 1861 | 35 |
| 1862 | 91 |
| 1863 | 94 |
| 1864 | 130 |
| 1865 | 29 |
1864, the year of the Overland Campaign, Atlanta and the March to the Sea, has the most, with 130. The war’s last principal battles fell in the spring of 1865.
The ten bloodiest battles
Casualty figures are the Commission’s estimates of killed, wounded, captured and missing on both sides. They are estimates, and other sources give different numbers.
| # | Battle | State | Year | Casualties (est.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gettysburg | Pennsylvania | 1863 | 51,000 |
| 2 | Chickamauga | Georgia | 1863 | 34,624 |
| 3 | Spotsylvania Court House | Virginia | 1864 | 30,000 |
| 4 | Wilderness | Virginia | 1864 | 29,800 |
| 5 | Chancellorsville | Virginia | 1863 | 24,000 |
| 6 | Shiloh | Tennessee | 1862 | 23,746 |
| 7 | Stones River | Tennessee | 1862 | 23,515 |
| 8 | Antietam | Maryland | 1862 | 23,100 |
| 9 | Manassas, Second | Virginia | 1862 | 22,180 |
| 10 | Vicksburg | Mississippi | 1863 | 19,233 |
Who won?
By the Commission’s own verdicts, 193 principal battles ended in a Union victory, 121 in a Confederate victory and 61 were inconclusive. The rest have no verdict in the summaries. Victories in the field are only part of the story: many Confederate wins in Virginia came while the Union was winning the war in the West.
About the data
The battle list, dates, results and casualty estimates come from the National Park Service’s CWSAC battle summaries (public domain). Battle locations are the centroids of the core areas the American Battlefield Protection Program has mapped. The CWSAC report itself lists 384 principal battlefields; our dataset holds 383 battle summaries. Where sources disagree, we follow the Park Service.
All of this is drawn on one sheet in The Battlefields of the Civil War, together with The Civil War, Day by Day, which sets every dated battle on a single timeline.
On the wall
The Civil War
