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."
Perhaps the American Revolution?
How about the English Civil War?
I think that is good start.
In the 1700’s wars were fought, for the most part, between field armies, and civilian deaths were collateral damage, not really the intent of fighting. The objective was to destroy the opposing military force. THis carried on into the American Civil War. Sherman and Sheridan changed that. There targets were the Civilian Population. Their objective was to destroy the will of the southern population to support the war.
This tradition went on in the Boer War which brought us the first official concentration camps and was expanded in WW1 and WW2.
I think that is the situation, no?
I am much less sanguine about the basic decency of modern Americans.
There is also the fairly obvious fact that the weaponry involved is so vastly different that you really cannot compare the two.
/johnny
--Rudyard Kipling, The Road To Mandalay
If you haven't done it, check out the YouTube video of Lawrence Tibbett singing the Olney Sparks setting of this poem.
Good example.
A recent study estimated the population of England was reduced during the wars by about 10%, Scotland by about 15% and Ireland by about 20%. Obviously the vast majority of these were civilians, as the armies just weren't that large.
An equivalent loss in the USA of the 1860s (comparing the 10% figure) would have been about 3M fewer Americans in 1870 than 1860.
In actual fact, of course, the US population increased during the 1860s from 32M to 38M, about 22%. With the 38M figure widely considered at the time and since to be inaccurate on the low side.
In the English Civil Wars many if not most civilians died not from massacre or intentional killing, but rather from malnutrition, disease, etc.
But of course these killers were also potentially present during our war.
I wonder what the long-term social memory of the toll of poor sanitation was on the installation of public water and sewer systems over the decades following the Civil War?
Excerpt of a short review from Publishers Weekly:
After two cataclysmic wars, argues Stanford historian Sheehan, Europe has been transformed from a place where the state was defined by its capacity to make war into a group of civilian states that have lost all interest in making war. Rather, they are marked by a focus on economic growth, prosperity and personal security. To explore this transformation, Sheehan examines the changes in modern warfare and in its infrastructure and the mobilization of national economies for war. Sheehan looks at the impact in the early 20th century of universal conscription, including its social consequences (such as bringing together different social classes), and its eventual decline; the peace movements marked by the 1899 and 1907 Hague conferences; the effects of the Cold War; the growth of the European Union; and the Euro-American split over the Iraq war.
A major complaint detailed in the Declaration of Independence had to do with warfare being waged on civilian populations through native proxies, a process that was waged the other direction with nearly equal deadliness. French, English and Spanish governments all tried that technique in one direction or another at one time or another.
As far as medicine goes, yes, to be wounded in battle during that time was often simply a slower way of dying due to wound sepsis, communicable diseases, and complications of the crude surgery of the day that sometimes took years to kill. Best of luck coming up with any epidemiological figures for that. Something a little worrisome is the assumption that any civil war fought today will be fought under conditions of modern medicine. It strikes me that dust-off flights, transfusions, antibiotics, et al, may come into short supply if we are unfortunate enough to have to go at it again. It would certainly be very, very ugly.
Had you noticed the article was about deaths, not property destruction?
Even at the time, nobody claimed Sherman or Sheridan intentionally or routinely massacred civilians. They destroyed crops and buildings, but that is not the same thing as killing people.
Population of GA , the state widely but inaccurately considered to have been most affected by Sherman's March, in 1860 was 1,057,000. In 1870 it was 1,184,000, not a total exactly indicating massive massacres.
SC, the state Sherman really hit hard, showed similar numbers. 703,000 in 1860, 705,000 in 1870.
What Sherman and Sheridan did was attack the war-making capacity of the other side. I am confused how one could possibly consider these actions war crimes without taking a similar position to US actions in WWII, Korea and Vietnam, in which we killed a great many more civilians that Sherman or Sheridan ever did.
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."
I will have to find the book/source .but I remember reading a comment by Bruce Catton that said if you include civilians that died as a result due to the blockade,being displaced,or caught in the crossfire. the death toll is well over a million
don't know how he came up with the number ,but there you go
You're kidding, right? The civilian casualties from the Napoleonic Wars alone are estimated at a low of 750,000 and a high of 3 million. The Seven Years war killed off another million or so. Hundreds of thousands died during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Tens of millions were killed in the Taiping Rebellion in China, which finished around the same time the Civil War was ending. The fact is that civilians have been targets in all wars. Sherman and Sheridan didn't invent the concept, and it had been perfected long before the Boer War came along.
Could I be the first on the thread to remind everyone that it was really a war of Northern aggression? I’m still fighting this war today and every day! ;)
I don't think many people realize how small our reserve medical capacity is. For us to have any significant such reserve, we'd have to have large buildings and many, many people waiting around for something bad to happen. Which we obviously don't.
At present additional capacity is added in disaster by bringing in out-of-area resources.
But what you do when all areas are affected?
750,000 is huge.
To put this in perspective keep in mind that there are nearly as many people living in Texas today as there were in the United States back in 1861 when the Civil War started.
I don't think either side would have opted for war if they could have foreseen what was coming.
The Union Army purposely targeted civilians and robbing and pillaging with the consent of the General staff. Especially Sherman. It is fact and to white wash that is adding insult to injury. There was some crime committed by Southerners in Northern areas but that was against the General orders not following it like the case of Sherman’s Bummers. So give it a break and take your reconstructed version of history somewhere else.
Given that most deaths to due starvation and malnutrition in any area are normally caused indirectly by damage to transport infrastructure. The quirks that most of the war was fought in the south and the south was closer to semi-subsitance than the north and that most of the damage to the transport systems was able to be fixed quickly, kept deaths from malnutrition and starvation down.
Disease is another cause that gets interesting, and US quirks may have had an effect on this. Communicable diseases traditionally decimated the farm boy conscripts that were the backbone of the armies before the industrial revolution. Much of this could be traced to many of them not gaining immunity to "childhood" diseases before entering the army. Any epidemic that started in the camp could be expected to affect nearby civilian populations. Armies on the move could and did spread epidemic around, A saying from the first world war was that it was more dangerous to shake a Russians hand than to have him shoot at you (typhus possibly)
You still have not addressed my comment that the article is not about robbing or destroying property, but about killing.
Dragging Sherman and Sheridan into the comments is an attempt to imply they killed civilians. Which they didn’t, in any quantity. It certainly was not their policy.
So who is the revisionist?
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