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NYGiant
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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Four of the bloodiest years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”
As early as 1858, the ongoing conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery had led Southern leadership to discuss a unified separation from the United States. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November 1860, South Carolina immediately initiated secession proceedings. On December 20, the South Carolina legislature passed the “Ordinance of Secession,” which declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana—had followed South Carolina’s lead.
In February 1861, delegates from those states convened to establish a unified government. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was subsequently elected the first president of the Confederate States of America. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, a total of seven states (Texas had joined the pack) had seceded from the Union, and federal troops held only Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Fort Pickens off the Florida coast, and a handful of minor outposts in the South. Four years after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was defeated at the total cost of 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-civil-war-begins?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2023-0412-04122023&om_rid=21539c69abde70e4e3fda02b9d14d1819c3badeaf5a2bcab48a023eefe0cd3d2
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It is now believed by Civil War Historians that 750,000 soldiers died.
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Phil Andrade
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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It is now believed by Civil War Historians that 750,000 soldiers died.
That’s quite a controversial claim, NYG, not endorsed by all Civil War historians.
It’s based on extrapolation from long term demographic studies, based on pension records etc.
Even the usually cited figure of 620,000 deaths is an estimate, based on an informed guess that 258,000 confederate soldiers died.
As for this recently pitched figure of 750,000, this is allowing for great numbers of “ premature “ deaths of men who perished from illnesses or wounds attributable to their war service, and extends the remit well beyond the end of the war. This might include deaths well over a decade afterwards. This might well be valid and plausible, but if we use that criterion for the Civil War, we should use it for other conflicts, too.
Whatever method we choose, circumspection is required.
Regards, Phil
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"Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox!"
"That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Earl of Sandwich and John Wilkes
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NYGiant
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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Demographic historian Dr. J. David Hacker published “A Census-Based Count of Civil War Dead,” in the scholarly quarterly, Civil War History, reporting that his in-depth study of recently digitized census data concluded that a more accurate estimate of Civil War deaths is about 750,000, with a range from 650.000 to as many as 850,000 dead.
Hacker, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, believed that a fresh, detailed examination of the numbers from the 1850, 1860 and 1870 U.S. census tabulations might reveal a massive reduction for the young male population in 1870 that would reflect the human toll of the war. And that is what he found. Hacker’s research concluded that the normal survival pattern for young American men from 1860 to 1870 was far less—by about 750,000—than it would have been had no war occurred.
Civil War History called Hacker’s findings “among the most consequential pieces” it has ever published. “It even further elevates the significance of the Civil War and makes a dramatic statement about how the war is a central moment in American history,” said Civil War historian Eric Foner.
Many Civil War historians have believed the 620,000 estimate to be too low, especially on the Confederate side, given the lack of written records and the estimate’s questionable assumption that men in the Confederate army died of disease at the same rate as men in the Union army.
https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths
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Phil Andrade
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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Hacker’s extrapolation is controversial.
I certainly don’t dismiss it, but I do have misgivings.
As for the widely accepted estimate of 258,000 Confederate deaths being perceived as too low , I really would hesitate to endorse such an argument.
The figure of a quarter of a million dead from a white male population of barely one million of military age in 1861 is staggering : very close to one fourth of the military population perished, and then the number of wounded and invalids to be reckoned with. My God, isn’t that enough ?
I do appreciate that post war mortality amongst those damaged cohorts of veterans was bound to compound the toll of the war, but then the same applies to so many other wars, before and since.
My father died at the age of sixty one, and while I could never prove it, I’ve long suspected that his experience of the war in North Africa and Italy did him lasting damage and depleted his lifespan. The same must apply to many other veterans of 1939-45, and even more so to the generation of 1914-18, at least as far as the British people are concerned.
If memory serves me , a census of veterans in the 1880s identified well over 400,000 ex Confederate soldiers alive at that time. I reckon that makes something of a challenge to Hacker’s thesis.
Life expectancy in those times was bound to be straitened, especially in the South.
It must be hard to identify how far mortality was attributable to the effects of the war.
Regards, Phil
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"Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox!"
"That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Earl of Sandwich and John Wilkes
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NYGiant
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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Hackler's number are new information and we will have to se if its stands the test of time.
Some of the boys I knew who returned from Viet Nam, never were the same again. And a few took their own lives. And what I have read about WW 2, the same things occurred. Those suicides should be included in the war death tolls.
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Phil Andrade
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Confederacy starts the Civil War
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Now things begin to consolidate in my memory. I saw a big citation of Hacker’s work in the New York Times, and investigated further. Hacker relied on the data provided by an official in the US government in the 1890s (?), who flagged up some startling demographic implications as a result of his duties as a Pensions bureau officer. He certainly gave compelling evidence that something rather dreadful had happened to the generation of men who had survived until the war ended, but succumbed in significant numbers to its long term effects. I can definitely cite an example from the Italian experience of WW1 : in the eighteen month period between the Armistice in late 1918 and the early summer of 1920, more than eighty thousand Italian males who had served in the war died as a result of their wounds or illness suffered in the fighting of 1915-1918. This equated to fifteen per cent of the deaths recorded when the war was raging. A British Official Historian of WW1, James Edmonds, made an allusion to the American Civil War and cited the work of the US official that I mentioned earlier. This British account was written in the 1920s, so it seems that Hacker’s information is not new, and had been used a century ago. Edmonds opined that the Union dead, including premature deaths in the following two decades, would have been close to half a million, with Confederate deaths approaching 400,000. One million deaths ? Or a trope of rhetorical exaggeration?
Editing : what agitates me about the ever upward adjustment of the estimated death toll of the American Civil War, is the prospect that commentators forget that the boats on the lake rise together. It’s often stated , for example, that the dead of the American Civil War exceeded that of the US deaths in both the World Wars combined, along with the Korean and Vietnam wars thrown in for good measure. With the Hacker figures we’ve been discussing being bandied about, we might see the reckoning of the Civil War preponderance being increased still further. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander : if the American Civil War dead must be reassessed by an increase of twenty five to thirty percent , then shouldn’t the toll of the other conflicts be likewise recalculated ?
Regards, Phil
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"Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox!"
"That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."
Earl of Sandwich and John Wilkes
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