Information about historical documents from across the country regarding the outbreak of the Civil War—with links to the home historical societies and repositories of the materials—has been placed online by the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC).

The online presentation is the first of a five-year, five-part program highlighting Civil War collections for the sesquicentennial. The current online information focuses on the election of Abraham Lincoln, the secession crisis, the outbreak of hostilities, mobilizing for war and foreign public opinion.

NUCMC is a cooperative cataloging program operated by the Library of Congress. The mission of the NUCMC program is to provide and promote bibliographic access to the nation’s documentary heritage. This mission is realized by NUCMC’s production of cataloging, which describes archival and manuscript collections held by repositories located throughout the United States and its territories.

Future updates to "NUCMC and the Documentary Heritage of the American Civil War" will include personal narratives of members of the Union and Confederate armed forces (2012); the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and the African American experience from slavery to the end of the Civil War (2013); the home front, women in the war, the role of charitable organizations, economic aspects of the war and patriotic societies (2014); and the sesquicentennial of the death of Abraham Lincoln, Reconstruction, Confederate exiles and the rise of veterans’ organizations (2015).

To enhance the Library of Congress observance of the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, NUCMC seeks the assistance of eligible repositories in identifying and describing archival collections relating to the conflict. Eligible repositories must be located in the United States or its territories, must regularly admit researchers, and must lack the capability of entering their own archival cataloging into the bibliographic database managed by OCLC, the world’s largest library cooperative.

The Library also has an exceptional collection of nearly 700 ambrotype and tintype photographs showing both Union and Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War.

In addition, there are several American Memory collections related to the Civil War, including the diary of Horatio Nelson Taft, Civil War maps and band music from the era.