So would either of you dispute that A LOT of civilians died as a result of the US Civil War?
My point stands whether 10,000 or 250,000 of civilians died as a result of our Civil War. All historians put the number in at least the 10s of thousands....and lately in the field of military deaths from that war, the estimates have gone up.
I think the “reported” vs “unreported” stats from CW1 were probably wildly different. Think about the data and communications systems then. Soldiers were “mustered in” and numbered, literally a known quantity. The casualties among active military units might be known to 10% + or -.
For civilians, white and black, the casualties—reported and unreported—across the rural South in an era of very limited and inconsistent reporting and data storage, might easily vary by 10 to 90%. It would take an incredible amount of new study to accurately tabulate civilian deaths. If there were (top of head) 500,000 military casualties, I could guess a number of civilian dead at 100K or a million, easily, if you include starvation and the BIGGER factor, deaths caused by illness as a direct result of dislocations caused by the war.
Something I’ve been studying recently is mass death caused simply by dislocating people. Think of Cromwell and the invasion of Ireland around the 1620s. Estimates are that a quarter to a half of the Irish population died in five years, millions of people. Cromwell didn’t set up gas chambers, he just dislocated people to places without food, where they had to drink ditch water and lived exposed to the elements.
In 1861-65, a lot of the same dynamics were in play. Who counted the civilian dead? Did they show up (as missing) in later census counts?
There is a lot of confusion (some of it no doubt deliberate) about the number of civilians killed as a direct result of military action (shot, killed by canon fire, bombing etc) as opposed to deaths that happened to civilians because there just happened to be a war and they were in the middle of it, or because of other things (were all the Jews who were shot in Kiev killed directly because of military action, or because of Nazi policies?).
R. J. Rummel has done a very scholarly work (look for the term “democide” that he coined). There is also a book of his: “Death by Government”.
Certainly many died in, for example, Vicksburg, due to the siege. Is this direct military action or not?
This pales in comparison to what happened in the siege of Leningrad. Go to Piskaryovskoe (I don’t have the correct font so can’t type it in Russian) cemetery there and see the ranks of mass graves.
Was the British bombing of Dresden the right thing to do? What about the American bombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945 and of other cities? I was struck in the latter case by a USAAF officer who walked through the wreckage after the war. He said although the houses were burned down, in most of them there was a piece of machinery (drill press. lathe, saw) still standing. The military had of course farmed out the military production to local homes as a cottage industry.
An interesting counterexample is Gettysburg. In that horrific three-day battle, as far as history tells, only one civilian was killed, even though on the first day the battle raged through the town as the Union forces retreated.
(Her name was Virginia Wade, shot while cooking in her kitchen. She was a friend of a guy named Wesley Culp, who grew up in that town on the Culp farm, joined the confederate army, and was it appears killed on his family farm.)