Traditional estimates of Civil War deaths have been too low:
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.”
Difficult to imagine.
This number makes me think of the 2003 Civil War drama, Cold Mountain. The movie itself is rather “blah,” but one thing I enjoy (if that’s the right word) about it is the rather apocalyptic, “end of days” feel they give to the Civil War in the South. These new numbers seem to support such a take.
I wouldn’t put too much credence in his estimate. Instead of counting people listed as dead on muster sheets and pay records, it’s a guess based on census numbers a decade apart.
In Lincoln’s famous letter to the widow Bixby who had five sons killed in combat, which was quoted in Saving Private Ryan and by Bush at the 10th anniversary ceremony for 9/11, an import fact goes unreported. Bixby was a Copperhead Confederate sympathizer who only had two sons killed in combat. One was just wounded, one deserted, and one probably defected to the Confederacy. They were erroneously listed as all KIA. If anything it’s evidence of an overcount, not an undercount.
Secondly, the analysis assumes that in the bloodiest war in American history, with brother fighting against brother and loyalties all confused, nobody fled to Mexico, Canada, or headed West. It also assumes that census takers in 1870 were completely unaffected by the sharp increase in homelessness and residential confusion caused by the Civil War, even though they still are notoriously unable to get a count of homeless people accurate to within a million.
Third, by similar analysis of census data Bill Clinton killed tens of thousands of pregnant teens, probably having them picked up in black vans and hauled off to secret concentration camps, because during his Presidency the number of pregnant teens listed in the census plummeted. What could’ve happened to them, aside from secret government extermination? That many pregnant teens can’t just die of old age or natural causes in just eight years.