It's Much Worse Than We Thought.
Just read the second article that appeared in the last six months in the NY Times that discusses the latest estimates for deaths in the Civil War. Interesting that they would run two columns, especially with one linked to the first.
The real message in the updated estimates is of course that the Civil War was far more devastating than we acknowledge. The latest estimates for deaths during the Civil War are based on analysis of censuses by SUNY Binghamton's J. David Hacker.
Former estimates: Total Soldiers Killed in Civil War: 618,222 men (360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South: There is no breakdown of deaths by side in the new estimate for accuracy reasons, but 150 years later it seems only appropriate not to divide the death totals as the wounds hopefully continue to heal and we have become one again.)
New estimate from the analysis: "A more realistic probable range, rounded to the nearest 50,000 deaths, might be from 650,000 to 850,000 excess deaths, with a preferred estimate of 750,000."
One of the interesting tidbits comes from a "commentary" on the study written by historian James M. McPherson: "The figure of 750,000 soldier deaths would translate into 7.5 million American deaths in a war fought in our own time by the United States…." Gives us a scale to weigh the loss.
An important caveat from the study: "Veterans mustered out of the Union and Confederate armies with diseases or mental disorders related to their service no doubt faced a significantly elevated risk of death in the years immediately after the war.
This is an important caveat not only in terms of deaths from the war, but if we consider the shear misery caused by the war: I'm currently reading "Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War," a book by Eric T. Dean, Jr., which based on what I've read to date will conclude that surviving Civil War soldiers suffered much like veterans from Vietnam, in spite of the different circumstances in the war and society. Some of Civil War examples Dean cites are devastating. He mentions increased crime levels North and South after the war, that Union surgeons reported more than 100 men from the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse of Union shooting off their own fingers and toes to get discharges. My notes from reading the book list these words as some of the symptoms of those who survived: disoriented thinking, startle reactions, social numbing, depression, anxiety. It tells of men sleeping out of doors in the woods because they were frightened to sleep in their own beds, making their homes fortresses so the Confederates couldn't take them, and repeated reports of men thinking that someone was trying to kill them.
Hacker's analysis of Civil War deaths ends with the great line: "The human cost of the Civil War was greater than historians have long believed."
But I'm left thinking, the number of deaths doesn't begin to tell the horror and impact of it. How did they (and other courageous soldiers of modern war) endure it?
