How many died during the civil war

Inevitably, the new death-counting process proved more complicated than even this. Hacker admits it also remains difficult to count civilians who died in wartime. Union medical care, he further points out, was far superior to Confederate—and more Johnny Rebs might have died of disease than Billy Yanks.

Deaths among African-American troops have long had a widely accepted numerical accounting, but these numbers, too, Hacker believes, deserve reconfiguring, though no one is quite sure how to do it. Capitol and the coming of the rebellion.

Drew Gilpin Faust was right. The rush to build cemeteries, monuments and memorials, together with the overwhelming responsibility merely to bury dead bodies, filled survivors with an abiding reverence for, and obsessive fascination with, those who sacrificed that the nation might live and even those who gave their lives that it might die. Exhumations were common as survivors and widows struggled with competing notions of sacred ground.

Soldiers cemeteries became part of the American culture—and not just at Gettysburg. Those old emotions remain raw. It still holds several notorious records, such as the highest number of average deaths per day Read more of the shocking statistics from the War that divided our nation. Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America.

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.