By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead. It was the largest fire in American history.
Today, our government provides services for surviving veterans and their families, but it took the mass casualties of the Civil War to bring about this standard. Support Provided by: Learn More. It's good to remember that. Prof Hacker's figure of , would translate into about 7. In proportion to Britain's population of Previous to Prof Hacker's work, historians had widely relied on an estimate that , 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. Does it really matter when we are assessing the morality of the slave trade? Reporting by Daniel Nasaw in Washington.
About 23, soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after the Battle of Antietam, making 17 September one of the bloodiest days in US history. Proportionate to the US's population, 7. About a third of US citizens are said to have an ancestor who lived through the war.
Hundreds of thousands died of disease. Taken as a percentage of today's population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls. The human cost of the Civil War was beyond anybody's expectations. The young nation experienced bloodshed of a magnitude that has not been equaled since by any other American conflict. The numbers of Civil War dead were not equaled by the combined toll of other American conflicts until the War in Vietnam.
Some believe the number is as high as , The American Battlefield Trust does not agree with this claim. New military technology combined with old-fashioned tactical doctrine to produce a scale of battle casualties unprecedented in American history.
Even with close to total conscription, the South could not match the North's numerical strength. Southerners also stood a significantly greater chance of being killed, wounded, or captured.
This chart and the one below are based on research done by Provost Marshal General James Fry in His estimates for Southern states were based on Confederate muster rolls--many of which were destroyed before he began his study--and many historians have disputed the results.
The estimates for Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas have been updated to reflect more recent scholarship. Given the relatively complete preservation of Northern records, Fry's examination of Union deaths is far more accurate than his work in the South. Note the mortal threat that soldiers faced from disease. A "casualty" is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, capture, or through being missing in action.
In practice, officers would usually be responsible for recording casualties that occurred within their commands. If a soldier was unable to perform basic duties due to one of the above conditions, the soldier would be considered a casualty.
This means that one soldier could be marked as a casualty several times throughout the course of the war. Most casualties and deaths in the Civil War were the result of non-combat-related disease. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease.
The primitive nature of Civil War medicine, both in its intellectual underpinnings and in its practice in the armies, meant that many wounds and illnesses were unnecessarily fatal. Our modern conception of casualties includes those who have been psychologically damaged by warfare.
This distinction did not exist during the Civil War. Soldiers suffering from what we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder were uncatalogued and uncared for.
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