Comparative Synoptical Chart Co., History of the Civil War in the United States 1860-1865 (1897)

This chart was created by the Comparative Synoptical Chart Co. in 1897 for the purpose of visualizing the entire five year Civil War in one singular chart. They published this chart along with an explanatory text and index to help viewers understand what they were looking at. The chart is divided vertically into 21 columns with the Confederacy represented on the left and the Union on the right. The two outermost columns on each side show the value of money for each side and the strength of each army. Each subsequent column represents a state in which fighting took place during the war, with those that saw the most action located towards the center of the chart. The chart is also divided with horizontal lines. These lines break the chart up into the months and years of the Civil War, with the bottom starting at 1860 and moving upwards to 1865. The chart also includes circles and dots to represent engagements and battles throughout the war. The size of the circles indicates the importance of the battle, with larger circles indicating greater importance. The color of the circles indicates whether it was an army battle (red) or naval engagement (blue). There are also lines throughout the chart connecting the dots that show the movements of the army. The yellow lines represent the Union troops and the green lines represent the Confederate troops. The directions of the lines indicate movement toward or away from the capitals of each side. Located at the bottom of the chart is a map of the states where the Civil War was fought, including railroad lines in red. There is also a bar graph that depicts the number of men that contributed to the federal army in each state as well as tables of statistics from both the Confederate and Union sides of the war. This chart is extremely complex and impressively manages to depict the entirety of the Civil War in one infographic.