Posted on 04/03/2012 11:07:36 PM PDT by U-238
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I suppose the country lying between Corinth and Pittsburg Landing could boast a few inhabitants other than alligators. What manner of people they were it is impossible to say, inasmuch as the fighting dispersed, or possibly exterminated them; perhaps in merely classing them as non-saurian I shall describe them with sufficient particularity and at the same time avert from myself the natural suspicion attaching to a writer who points out to persons who do not know him the peculiarities of persons whom he does not know. One thing, however, I hope I may without offense affirm of these swamp-dwellers - they were pious. To what deity their veneration was given - whether, like the Egyptians, they worshiped the crocodile, or, like other Americans, adored themselves, I do not presume to guess. But whoever, or whatever, may have been the divinity whose ends they shaped, unto Him, or It, they had builded a temple. This humble edifice, centrally situated in the heart of a solitude, and conveniently accessible to the supersylvan crow, had been christened Shiloh Chapel, whence the name of the battle. The fact of a Christian church - assuming it to have been a Christian church - giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.
-What I Saw of Shiloh, by Ambrose Beirce
Could be the defining example of “the fog of battle”.
http://www.online-literature.com/poe/2037/
. . . a point that was made inWashington's General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution Nathaniel Greene was a Washington loyalist, and Washington relied on Greene’s logistical skills. Which meant that Greene wasn’t in position to earn glory in the field (ultimately, however, Greene was sent to the South when it looked like the British were going to roll up the revolutionary cause from the South up. Starting from a very weak posture, Greene managed to get Cornwallis into a defensive position and in need of resupply, at Yorktown).
I think the real loss is even greater. Many didn’t die in the war but had considerably shortened life spans due to wounds and deprivations of the war. My great great grandfather never recovered from wounds and disease but died several years after the war ended.
To understand pacificism in Western Europe, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 Britain had nearly 60,000 casualties (of whom 20,000 were killed). In one day.
The troops didn’t know it at the time, but the French were about to lose Verdun (which may have taken them out of the war if breached); they relayed this to the British, who sent their troops over the top to draw German troops away from Verdun. By the end of the day, the British weren’t even running towards the German trenches any more; they simply walked towards them and were mowed down by machine guns.
25 years later they were asked to do it again, and much of Europe said “no thanks”; they realized all those men lost in the “war to end all wars” had died for nothing. It has given them a healthy skepticism that holds their governments much more accountable to their populations than we have here.
The North grew economically much more than the South did during the 1850s. There’s your logistic problem, right there.
He was unforgivably caught unaware at Shiloh
Bragg should have been shot for practically giving Grant Missionary Ridge
Grant lost BOTH flanks in the Wilderness...
But his saving grace was that Lincoln had his back
My G-G Grandfather fought in Mississippi with thue 16th SC Volunteers (there was nothing “voluntary” about it. LOL). I have tried to find where he is buried to no avail. His last muster roll slip says “Sick in hospital-Corinth, MS.
Family legend says that he came home and died and was buried around here, but he is not with his wife in the family plot.
I always wondered if he had been counted among the dead.
That's a tricky question, but Grant didn't have a typical alcoholic pattern. He never drank when anything was going on. No drinking in inappropriate times and places. No drinking under pressure. It was a hard-drinking age, and the stories of Grant's drinking presumably had some basis in fact, but the stories were also all rumor and innuendo, mostly hearsay and mainly spread by people who had personal scores to settle. Grant continued to drink socially throughout his life after the war without any significant incident; he authored a minor literary classic, a model of clarity and precision, as he was dying of cancer; and he had an exemplary marriage and family life. This is not the pattern of a typical drunk.
One of the historians -- I think it may have been Shelby Foote -- concluded that Grant probably got drunk easily and had some accidents along the way, but that he was not a drunk. His Old Army reputation for drinking was based on his period in the Northwest, where by all accounts he terribly missed his wife, fell into what we would today probably diagnose as depression, and self-medicated. The Army was a small, ingrown, and gossipy place, and Grant never outran whatever happened at that time. But that is not the same thing as being alcoholic, which today we undertand as an addiction and view as being chronic and progressive.
Bottom line, if Grant was an alcoholic as we understand the term today, he spent the last 40 years of his life as the greatest dry drunk in U.S. history. But his personal demeanor, family life, and professional bearing don't look like a dry drunk. So I tend to agree with the "sloppy drinker but not a drunk" theory.
P.S. The definitional issue is important here. Most people in the U.S. today drink and are not drunks -- despite the fact that the vast majority of people who drink have an occasional drinking-to-excess episode on their records. If it's with your buddies on a fishing trip and no one falls into the lake and drowns, nothing comes of it. If you kill someone on the highway or humiliate your wife in public or disgrace yourself in front of your boss, it gets more serious. But such an event, however painful, does not necessarily mean you are a drunk. The pattern is the key.
I think that people need to realize that the brilliance of Lee as a general was brought forth precisely because the strategic situation for him was so desperate. He HAD to accept a higher level of risk in his dispositions.
Grant had a similar capacity when you look at his western campaigns. He also knew when to gamble. But the consensus view of Grant as a brute-force general was formed during the Wilderness Campaign & the Seige of Petersburg. It’s a view of Grant that still is with us today.
Then history steps in.
You are so right and your point is proven by how all the traitors of the South were tried and hung after the war. Oh, wait there were no treason trials after the civil war, never mind.
Lee's capabilities were certainly known prior to his dealing with that desperate strategic situation; Lincoln did offer command of the Union army to him in 1861.
Corinth contains the largest number of mass graves that are unmarked on the North American continent in my opinion. There are 1200 buried somewhere unmarked from the Battle of Corinth and another 5-7K buried from the time before and after the Battle of Shiloh. At the present time, there are only around a dozen of marked graves from that time period in Corinth recognized today. Soldier’s letters and dairies from that period mention the mass graves. A few hundred of soldiers that died from wounds at Shiloh are buried at Meridian,Ms, and Holly Springs, Ms,.
Grant also had Donelson, Henry, and Vicksburg, which is arguably the most brilliant campaign of the war.
Even in the Overland Campaign, Grant showed great imagination and operational flexibility. The initial conception and movement were perfectly sound. The movement to the North Anna was creative: a baited trap that Lee didn't take. The flanking movements across the Pamunkey and James were brilliant; Grant breached multiple river lines without major battles. But he was determined to deny Lee any opportunity to take the initiative; he wanted to defeat Lee in the field before the war became a siege; and he began with the perception, IMHO correct, that the Army of the Potomac had had Lee on the ropes on multiple occasions, but that its commanders had failed to press the advantage. Hence his willingness to pound away when he got Lee to grips.
It's also important to remember that during the Overland Campaign, other federal armies were supposed to be advancing on all fronts. Grant made sure that the Army of the Potomac did its job. Had David Hunter in the Valley and Ben Butler on Bermuda Hundred done theirs, the campaign would have been very different.
What was his name, if you don’t mind? I’ve done a lot of research on finding people. I agree with others, though, that he may be buried around Corinth.
My great-grandfather was in The Cornfield with the 1st Div, 12th Corps under Brig Gen Alpheus Williams. I had the opportunity to walk that field over to the Dunker Church a few years ago. What an awesome experience. Sobering, too, as a slightly different path for some wandering mini-ball would mean I’m not here writing this post.
Oops sorry that was supposed to be private.
My great-grandfather was in The Cornfield with the 1st Div, 12th Corps under Brig Gen Alpheus Williams. I had the opportunity to walk that field over to the Dunker Church a few years ago. What an awesome experience. Sobering, too, as a slightly different path for some wandering mini-ball would mean I’m not here writing this post.
Ironically, those former generals-in-charge who remained in the army did a good job in subordinate positions under Grant and Sherman. Joe Hooker, for example.
That is what makes a general great.
Lee was a better tactician, but he didn’t have the grand strategic outlook that Grant did. Grant and Sherman knew that an army marches on its stomach, and acted accordingly.
Sheridan knew it to, and won the west.
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