New Estimate Raises (American) Civil War Death Toll

[Kamikaze Pilot]

New Estimate Raises (American) Civil War Death Toll

By GUY GUGLIOTTA

Published: April 2, 2012

For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000.

The new figure is already winning acceptance from scholars. Civil War History, the journal that published Dr. Hacker’s paper, called it “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear” in its pages. And a pre-eminent authority on the era, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, said:

“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. It helps you understand, particularly in the South with a much smaller population, what a devastating experience this was.”

The old figure dates back well over a century, the work of two Union Army veterans who were passionate amateur historians: William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore.

Fox, who had fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, knew well the horrors of the Civil War. He did his research the hard way, reading every muster list, battlefield report and pension record he could find.

In his 1889 treatise “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865,” Fox presented an immense mass of information. Besides the aggregate death count, researchers could learn that the Fifth New Hampshire lost more soldiers (295 killed) than any other Union regiment; that Gettysburg and Waterloo were almost equivalent battles, with each of the four combatant armies suffering about 23,000 casualties; that the Union Army had 166 regiments of black troops; and that the average Union soldier was 5 feet 8 1/4 inches tall and weighed 143 1/2 pounds.

Fox’s estimate of Confederate battlefield deaths was much rougher, however: a “round number” of 94,000, a figure compiled from after-action reports. In 1900, Livermore set out to make a more complete count. In his book, “Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-65,” he reasoned that if the Confederates had lost proportionally the same number of soldiers to disease as the Union had, the actual number of Confederate dead should rise to 258,000.

And that was that. The Fox-Livermore numbers continued to be cited well into the 21st century, even though few historians were satisfied with them. Among many others, James M. McPherson used them without citing the source in “Battle Cry of Freedom,” his Pulitzer-winning 1988 history of the war.

Enter Dr. Hacker, a specialist in 19th-century demographics, who was accustomed to using a system called the two-census method to calculate mortality. That method compares the number of 20-to-30-year-olds in one census with the number of 30-to-40-year-olds in the next census, 10 years later. The difference in the two figures is the number of people who died in that age group.

Pretty simple — but, Dr. Hacker soon realized, too simple for counting Civil War dead. Published census data from the era did not differentiate between native-born Americans and immigrants; about 500,000 foreign-born soldiers served in the Union Army alone.

“If you have a lot of immigrants age 20 moving in during one decade, it looks like negative mortality 10 years later,” Dr. Hacker said. While the Census Bureau in 1860 asked people their birthplace, the information never made it into the printed report.

As for Livermore’s assumption that deaths from disease could be correlated with battlefield deaths, Dr. Hacker found that wanting too. The Union had better medical care, food and shelter, especially in the war’s final years, suggesting that Southern losses to disease were probably much higher. Also, research has shown that soldiers from rural areas were more susceptible to disease and died at a higher rate than city dwellers. The Confederate Army had a higher percentage of farm boys.

Dr. Hacker said he realized in 2010 that a rigorous recalculation could finally be made if he used newly available detailed census data presented on the Internet by the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

The center’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series had put representative samples of in-depth, sortable information for individuals counted in 19th-century censuses. This meant that by sorting by place of birth, Dr. Hacker could count only the native-born.

Another hurdle was what Dr. Hacker called the “dreadful” 1870 census, a badly handled undercount taken when the ashes of the war were still warm. But he reasoned a way around that problem.

Because the census takers would quite likely have missed as many women as men, he decided to look at the ratio of male to female deaths in 1870. Next, he examined mortality figures from the decades on either side of the war — the 1850s and 1870s — so that he could get an idea of the “normal” ratio of male to female deaths for a given decade. When he compared those ratios to that of 1860-70, he reasoned, he would see a dramatic spike in male mortality. And he did. Subtracting normal attrition from the male side of the equation left him with a rough estimate of war dead.

It was a better estimate than Fox and Livermore had produced, but Dr. Hacker made it clear that his was not the final answer. He had made several assumptions, each of which stole accuracy from the final result. Among them: that there were no war-related deaths of white women; that the expected normal mortality rate in the 1860s would be the average of the rates in the 1850s and 1870s; that foreign soldiers died at the same rate as native-born soldiers; and that the War Department figure of 36,000 black war dead had to be accepted as accurate because black women suffered so terribly both during and after the war that they could not be used as a control for male mortality.

The study had two significant shortcomings. Dr. Hacker could make no estimate of civilian deaths, an enduring question among historians, “because the overall number is too small relative to the overall number of soldiers killed.” And he could not tell how many of the battlefield dead belonged to each side.

“You could assume that everyone born in the Deep South fought for the Confederacy and everyone born in the North fought for the Union,” he said. “But the border states were a nightmare, and my confidence in the results broke down quickly.”

With all the uncertainties, Dr. Hacker said, the data suggested that 650,000 to 850,000 men died as a result of the war; he chose the midpoint as his estimate.

He emphasized that his methodology was far from perfect. “Part of me thinks it is just a curiosity,” he said of the new estimate.

“But wars have profound economic, demographic and social costs,” he went on. “We’re seeing at least 37,000 more widows here, and 90,000 more orphans. That’s a profound social impact, and it’s our duty to get it right.”

Guy Gugliotta is the author of the new book “Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War.”

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

3 April 2012 Last updated at 23:37 GMT

Who, What, Why: How many soldiers died in the US Civil War?

A study suggests a previously widely accepted death toll of the US Civil War may actually be way under the mark. How many did perish in this conflict, fought before the era of modern record-keeping and DNA identification?

The US Civil War was incontrovertibly the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history, and it remains unknown - and unknowable - exactly how many men died in Union and Confederate uniform.

Now, it appears a long-held estimate of the war's death toll could have undercounted the dead by as many as 130,000. That is 21% of the earlier estimate - and more than twice the total US dead in Vietnam.

The Civil War began in 1861 when southern slave-holding states, fearing the institution of slavery was under threat in a nation governed by northern free states, seceded from the US after the election of President Abraham Lincoln.

It ended in 1865 with the surrender of the southern, or Confederate forces, to the Union army; slavery was officially abolished by constitutional amendment that year.

The war devastated the economy and society of the agrarian southern states where most of the fighting occurred, and killed so many Americans it was impossible directly to tally the dead.

"The Civil War left a culture of death, a culture of mourning, beyond anything Americans had ever experienced or imagined," says David Blight, a Civil War historian at Yale University.

"It left a degree of family and social devastation unprecedented for any Western society."

In the 1860s, governments in the US and the Confederacy (the name the southern states took for their secessionist entity) were shoddy record keepers.

They had no comprehensive system of registering births and deaths, and military muster rolls were intended more for tabulating troop strength than recording fatalities.

And in the US Civil War, like all wars, men deserted or defected, bodies sank forever into the mud or were blown to bits or were misidentified, and troops initially listed as wounded in action subsequently perished from their injuries.

Confederate records were largely destroyed in the war's final stages, when the Union army captured its capital Richmond, Virginia.

For more than a century, it has been accepted with a grain of salt that about 620,000 Americans died in the conflict, with more than half of those dying off the battlefield from disease or festering wounds.

All along, however, historians sensed that number underrepresented the death toll.

Nor had any historian undertaken the mammoth task of devising and executing a new count.

That was until December, when historian J David Hacker published a paper that used demographic methods and sophisticated statistical software to study newly digitised US census records from 1850 to 1880.

His finding: An estimated 750,000 soldiers died in the war - 21% higher than the 19th Century estimate.

"We already knew that the war was devastating," Prof Hacker says.

"In one sense, increasing that total by 20% or so doesn't change that story. On the other hand, I'm a demographic historian, and we need to do the most precise job we can at determining what the impact of the war was."

Prof Hacker's findings, published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War History, have been endorsed by some of the leading historians of the conflict.

The publication's editors wrote that his scholarship was "among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal's pages".

Prof Hacker began by taking digitised samples from the decennial census counts taken 1850-1880.

Using statistics software SPSS, he counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870.

He compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 - the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War.

He controlled for other demographic assumptions, including mortality rates of foreign-born soldiers, added the relatively small number of black soldiers killed, and compared the numbers with the rates of female survival over the same periods.

The calculations yielded the number of "excess" deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 - the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war.

Prof Hacker acknowledges the method must account for a large margin of error, and he declines to make bold claims about its accuracy.

He acknowledges further it cannot distinguish between Union and Confederate dead, between deaths on the battlefield or from illness, nor tally postwar deaths from wounds incurred in battle.

US Civil War deaths therefore could range from 617,877 to 851,066, and he settles on an estimate of 750,000 dead.

"I have been waiting more than 25 years for an article like this one," writes James McPherson, author of the seminal popular Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom, in a commentary on Prof Hacker's piece.

Prof Hacker's finding "ups the ante on just how destructive the Civil War is", says Joshua Rothman, a 19th Century US historian and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama.

"The moral weight of the Civil War is so large and the consequences of emancipation loom so large that we forget just how brutal the war actually is. It's good to remember that."

Prof Hacker's figure of 750,000 would translate into about 7.5 million US deaths in proportion to America's current population, Prof McPherson notes.

In proportion to Britain's 2010 population of 62.3 million, it's about 1.5 million people.

Previous to Prof Hacker's work, historians had widely relied on an estimate that 620,000 soldiers died in the war, a figure reached through the combined efforts of two former Union army officers in the late 19th Century.

William Fox and Thomas Livermore based their estimates on battlefield reports, pension filings of Civil War widows and orphans, and other sources that, historians have acknowledged, significantly undercounted the war dead.

It remains to be seen whether Prof Hacker's new estimates will diffuse into mainstream American thinking, supplanting Fox and Livermore's estimates. (The new numbers have already been incorporated into the Wikipedia page on the war.)

In any case, Columbia University historian Eric Foner questions the values of focusing on the death toll of such a horrific period in US history.

"A numbers game gets us only so far in understanding the war's impact on American life," he says.

"There is an ongoing debate about the number of slaves brought from Africa to the New World during the slave trade era - nine million, 12 million, 14 million. Does it really matter when we are assessing the morality of the slave trade?"

Reporting by Daniel Nasaw in Washington

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

How long before I can insert interesting images?

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

RAW made April Fool of CIA.