Posted on 09/21/2011 12:54:16 PM PDT by decimon
BINGHAMTON, NY – The Civil War — already considered the deadliest conflict in American history — in fact took a toll far more severe than previously estimated. That's what a new analysis of census data by Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker reveals.
Hacker says the war's dead numbered about 750,000, an estimate that's 20 percent higher than the commonly cited figure of 620,000. His findings will be published in December in the journal Civil War History.
"The traditional estimate has become iconic," Hacker says. "It's been quoted for the last hundred years or more. If you go with that total for a minute — 620,000 — the number of men dying in the Civil War is more than in all other American wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War combined. And consider that the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, about one-tenth the size it is today. If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million."
The 620,000 estimate, though widely cited, is also widely understood to be flawed. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy kept standardized personnel records. And the traditional estimate of Confederate war dead —258,000 — was based on incomplete battle reports and a crude guess of deaths from disease and other non-combat causes. Although it is impossible to catalogue the fate of each of the 3 million or more men who fought in the war from 1861-65, some researchers have tried to re-count deaths in selected companies, regiments and areas. But Hacker says these attempts at a direct count will always miss people and therefore always underestimate deaths.
"There are also huge problems estimating mortality with census data," Hacker explains. "You can track the number of people of certain ages from one census to the next, and you can see how many are missing. But the potential problem with that is that each census undercounted people by some unknown amount, and an unknown number of people moved in and out of the country between censuses."
However, new data sets produced in the last 10 years or so, instead of giving the aggregate number of people in certain age groups, identify each person and his or her age, race and birthplace. Hacker realized that civilian deaths were so low relative to soldiers' deaths that he could compare the number of native-born men missing in the 1870 Census relative to the number of native-born women missing and produce an estimate from that.
Hacker looked at the ratio of male survival relative to female survival for each age group. He established a "normal" pattern in survival rates for men and women by looking at the numbers for 1850-1860 and 1870-1880. Then he compared the war decade, 1860-1870, relative to the pattern.
His new estimate of Civil War deaths contains a wide margin: 650,000 to 850,000, with 750,000 as the central figure.
Pulitzer Prize-winner James McPherson, the preeminent living historian of the war, says he finds Hacker's estimate plausible.
"Even if it might not be quite as high as 750,000, I have always been convinced that the consensus figure of 620,000 is too low, and especially that the figure of 260,000 Confederate dead is definitely too low," McPherson says. "My guess is that most of the difference between the estimate of 620,000 and Hacker's higher figure is the result of underreported Confederate deaths."
Like earlier estimates, Hacker's includes men who died in battle as well as soldiers who died as a result of poor conditions in military camps.
"Roughly two out of three men who died in the war died from disease," Hacker says. "The war took men from all over the country and brought them all together into camps that became very filthy very quickly." Deaths resulted from diarrhea, dysentery, measles, typhoid and malaria, among other illnesses.
McPherson says the new figure should gain acceptance among historians of the era.
"An accurate tally — or at least a reasonable estimate — is important in order to gauge the huge impact of the war on American society," he says. "Even if the number of war dead was 'only' 620,000, that still created a huge impact, especially in the South, and a figure of 750,000 makes that impact — and the demographic shadow it threw on the next two generations of Americans — just that much greater."
Semi-sunken ping.
Something we can be proud of with regard to our civil war.
In most civil wars down through history civilians died in greater numbers than soldiers, often as a significant multiple.
An odd personal story on the Civil War. My GGGrandfather fought for Ohio. He was shot on the right side of his head and survived but was blind and deaf on the right. 60 years later, at the age of 80, he was hit and killed by a car. It was on his right and he never saw nor heard it. So 60 years later, the Civil War was peripherally responsible for his death.
A civil war in modern America would leave millions of non combatants dead. The cities would be pure hell inside of two weeks. No electricity, no food, no sanitation, no medicines.....
What about the next one?
Not really surprising, with so many thousands of wounded left after the battles.
There are many stories of soldiers going home to die, rather than waiting to die in the disease-ridden death camps called “Field Hospitals” in those days.
These likely would not have been accounted for.
Interesting.
I wonder if anyone has ever a done a study of wars and resultant impact on public morality?
If families are disrupted, and men are thrown together away from their homes and relatives, does that create some kind of negative social impact later?
I think of WW2 and what happened with the Baby boomers, the kind of society which developed in the west after the Civil War, etc.
Until Sherman and Sheridan, warfare among “civilized” armies was between field armies primarily - where it belongs.
Sherman and Sheridan started the policy of warfare against civilian populations in modern times and the Brits expanded it to horrific new levels in the Boer War.
—If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million.—
Yes, but the American culture had a completely different attitude about the meaning and impact of life and death in that time.
If the attitudes today were prevelant then, Lee would never have goten men to do a Picket’s charge. But it would have been moot because there is no way the north would have mustered the size of army they did. Not enough men would have been willing to sacrifice their lives to keep the southern states from secceeding. We’d be two countries. And we probably would have been on opposite sides during WWI.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to WW I in terms of the efficiency of killing troops. Technology had taken huge leaps, and it faced the old strategy of fixed, positional ( trench) warfare..with massed troops, where the generals viewed the infantry as expendible from the get go.
Take Passchendale..( because it's a finite battle , the stats are easy to analyze).Over a period of a few DAYS, about 600,000 members of the Canadian Forces were thrown into the battle...66,000 were KILLED.. ( and very few from sickness/disease..probably less than 5%) Because of the incredible bombardment..about 50% of the Canadian KIA..were never recovered..they were just vaporized by the artillery.
The Canadians took a few hundred yards of front lines at Passchendale, stabilized the front, and next spring, witht heir first offensive, the Germans recaptured all the land losat.
So, to quote Captain Kirk, Sherman and Sheridan showed us “why war is a thing to be avoided.”
He correctly notes that disease, not military action, was by far the biggest killer in America’s biggest war.
Modern medicine really dates from Lister’s germ theory of disease, popularized shortly after the US Civil War.
I cannot recall where I read it, but I have read that there were widespread concerns in society about fathers being forced to serve in the military and being away from their children, up to and including WWII. It was felt very strongly that families needed fathers/husbands present, not just as breadwinners (a military paycheck covers that) but as active leaders and a source of authority within the family.
As a result fathers tended to be exempted or ruled out from service through formal or informal measures. Hopefully others here can comment more knowledgeably on that, if you are interested. I also recall that there were proposals to rush back fathers ahead of non-fathers from serving overseas at the end of WWII.
In my opinion the next civil war will be race/ethnic based and would probably be more brutal than the last. Now that the good times have ended I wonder how much longer that white guilt will be able to keep the immigration floodgates open and what will happen when attempts are made to close them and force out the illegals?
If families are disrupted, and men are thrown together away from their homes and relatives, does that create some kind of negative social impact later?
I'm not sure if it has been studied in any "official" manner, but the presumption has long been that lengthy military deployments are morally challenging.
To use an example from the era of the Napoleonic Wars, I believe it was Admiral Lord Nelson who once remarked that "every sailor is a bachelor when beyond Gibraltar."
You may notice my reference was to “civil wars.” Would you care to point out an example of another large-scale civil war where the military/civilian death ratio was equal to or lower than that of ours?
Ever wondered how often the average man, woman, or child confuses the government? Answer —> normally never.
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