Union Army / USCT
A mass army that became a freedom army after 1863 -- in policy and in Black enlistment.
Both sides built mass volunteer armies, then used conscription (Confederacy 1862, Union 1863). The Union added a naval blockade and, after 1863, a Black army.
Confederate cavalry and interior rail helped early; Union industry and river gunboats decided the west.
Systems
Confederate armies
A slaveholding republic's field forces, strong in the east, unravelled in the west.
Union Navy
Blockade and riverine war -- the Anaconda as practice.
Rail and telegraph
Lincoln's War Department as an information state.
Freedmen's Bureau
A postwar institution of the war's freedom aim -- underfunded and brief.
State militias / draft
Both sides learned conscription and its urban riots.
Meters
US cultural memory
94
Intensity (US dead)
88
Constitutional impact
90
Geographic scale (global)
30
Industrial methods
70
Unresolved memory
85
Hotspots
Virginia corridor
Bull Run to Petersburg -- the eastern meat-grinder.
Gettysburg
The northernmost large battle; the address as afterlife.
Mississippi valley
Vicksburg and the river war.
Georgia 1864
Atlanta and the March -- political war.
Washington-Richmond
Two capitals as magnets for strategy and raids.
Materials
Cotton
The Confederate diplomatic hope that failed.
Rail iron
Union mileage as a weapon.
Rifled muskets
Range that made Napoleonic assaults costlier -- a tech fact, not a drill book.
Food and salt
Southern civilian shortage as the blockade tightened.
This is not a reenactor manual. It is a historical force picture of two improvised states.
USCT service is part of the force, not a sidebar.