Civil war Casualties.

[FryeVRCCDS0067]

The new Gun Digest Collectors Guide has a article on collecting civil war firearms. In it they mention there were over one million casualties and over 620,000 war related deaths during the civil war. They go on to state that the entire population of the US at that time was 34.3 million. In other words one out of every 34 US citizens was wounded or killed in the War Between the States. That is an unimaginable percentage.

A guy I used to hunt with 30 years ago told me while sitting in the woods eating lunch long ago that his family had the original land grant for the farm we were hunting on. In other words it had been in his family since we became a country or before. He said they also had letters one of his ancestors had written while he was a (doctor?) in the civil war. One letter spoke of being wounded in an extremity and the overwhelming fear of infection and subsequent death or amputation.

The weapons were brutal, more likely to wound you immediately and kill you miserably later. Medical care was barely above the voodoo stage. Those were some tough, determined people.

I know there are many here who are very knowledgeable concerning the civil war. If any of the numbers I quoted from Gun Digest were wrong, please feel free to correct them.

We’re riding into a truly historical area next week. Man, I can't wait.

[thumper]

The United States Census for 1860 lists the population at 31,443,321.

There were 624,511 soldiers North and South killed in the Civil War.  This amounts to approximately 2 percent of the entire population of the country died as a result of the war.  When you factor in that almost all of the casualties would have been male then you have 4 percent of the male population killed.

One out of every four Southern soldiers never returned home.

It is generally assumed that only 1/3 of the dead were killed in battle.  The other 2/3 died of disease.

Now, consider this.  The current population of the United States is approximately 306,000,000 people or 10 times the population of 1860.

If this war were fought today there would be almost 6,250,000 dead in four years of fighting!

Casualty figures for the Civil War are absolutely staggering.

You folks are traveling to America's most hallowed ground.....I just wish I could be there with you.

Paul

[Smokinjoe-VRCCDS#0005]

The Ten Costliest Battles of the Civil War
Based on total casualties (killed, wounded, missing, and captured)
 

#1
Battle of Gettysburg
Date: July 1-3, 1863

Location: Pennsylvania
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: George G. Meade
Confederate Forces Engaged: 75,000
Union Forces Engaged: 82,289
Winner: Union
Casualties: 51,112 (23,049 Union and 28,063 Confederate)


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#2
Battle of Chickamauga
Date: September 19-20, 1863

Location: Georgia
Confederate Commander: Braxton Bragg
Union Commander: William Rosecrans
Confederate Forces Engaged: 66,326
Union Forces Engaged: 58,222 
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 34,624 (16,170 Union and 18,454 Confederate)


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#3
Battle of Chancellorsville
Date: May 1-4, 1863

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Joseph Hooker
Confederate Forces Engaged: 60,892
Union Forces Engaged: 133,868
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 30,099 (17,278 Union and 12,821 Confederate)


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#4
Battle of Spotsylvania
Date: May 8-19, 1864

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 50,000
Union Forces Engaged: 83,000
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 27,399 (18,399 Union and 9)000 Confederate)


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#5
Battle of Antietam
Date: September 17, 1862

Location: Maryland
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: George B. McClellan
Confederate Forces Engaged: 51,844
Union Forces Engaged: 75,316
Winner: Inconclusive (Strategic Union Victory)
Casualties: 26,134 (12,410 Union and 13,724 Confederate)


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#6
Battle of The Wilderness
Date: May 5-7, 1864

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 61,025
Union Forces Engaged: 101,895
Winner: Inconclusive
Casualties: 25,416 (17,666 Union and 7,750 Confederate)


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#7
Battle of Second Manassas
Date: August 29-30, 1862

Location: Virginia
Confederate Commander: Robert E. Lee
Union Commander: John Pope
Confederate Forces Engaged: 48,527
Union Forces Engaged: 75,696
Winner: Confederacy
Casualties: 25,251 (16,054 Union and 9,197 Confederate)


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#8
Battle of Stone's River
Date: December 31, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: Braxton Bragg
Union Commander: William S. Rosecrans
Confederate Forces Engaged: 37,739
Union Forces Engaged: 41,400
Winner: Union
Casualties: 24,645 (12,906 Union and 11,739 Confederate)


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#9
Battle of Shiloh
Date: April 6-7, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: Albert Sidney Johnston/ P. G. T. Beauregard
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 40,335
Union Forces Engaged: 62,682
Winner: Union
Casualties: 23,741 (13,047 Union and 10,694 Confederate)


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#10
Battle of Fort Donelson
Date: February 13-16, 1862

Location: Tennessee
Confederate Commander: John B. Floyd/Simon B. Buckner
Union Commander: Ulysses S. Grant
Confederate Forces Engaged: 21,000
Union Forces Engaged: 27,000
Winner: Union
Casualties: 19,455 (2,832 Union and 16,623 Confederate)

[fudgie]

Wow those numbers are staggering! Theres more people dead at G-burg then in my whole county!

[thumper]

In reviewing these numbers it is essential to understand the terms being used.

The term "casualties" referrs to those soldiers listed as killed, wounded, and missing.  While there were approximately 51,000 casualties at Gettysburg, the actual number of battlefield deaths is somewhere around 11,000 combined Union and Confederate for the three days of fighting.

When the two armies left Gettysburg, a small central Pennsylvania town of 2,500, they left behind over 25,000 wounded men. 

While it has been romanticised in movies like Gone With the Wind and Glory, the fact is the American Civil War was a brutal and bloody affair.

[Don07tncav]

There's a poignant post war southern song that brings the attitudes of some former Confederate soldiers to mind, here's a couple of stanzas:

Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us;

They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot,
I wish they was three million
Instead of what we got.

The war was indeed a horrible one, some of the soldiers diaries are something else.