At the outset of the war, neither army had mechanisms in place to handle the amount of death that the nation was about to experience. There were no national cemeteries, no burial details, and no messengers of loss.
The largest human catastrophe in American history, the Civil War forced the young nation to confront death and destruction in a way that has not been equaled before or since. Recruitment was highly localized throughout the war. Regiments of approximately one thousand men, the building block of the armies, would often be raised from the population of a few adjacent counties. Soldiers went to war with their neighbors and their kin. The nature of recruitment meant that a battlefield disaster could wreak havoc on the home community.
The 26th North Carolina, hailing from seven counties in the western part of the state, suffered casualties out of men during the Battle of Gettysburg. The 24th Michigan squared off against the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg and lost out of men.
Nearly the entire student body of Ole Miss out enlisted in Company A of the 11th Mississippi. Eighteen members of the Christian family of Christianburg, Virginia were killed during the war. It is estimated that one in three Southern households lost at least one family member. One in thirteen surviving Civil War soldiers returned home missing one or more limbs.
Pre-war jobs on farms or in factories became impossible or nearly so. This led to a rise in awareness of veterans' needs as well as increased responsibility and social power for women. For many, however, there was no solution. Tens of thousands of families slipped into destitution. Compiling casualty figures for Civil War soldiers is a complex process. Indeed, it is so complex that even years later no one has, and perhaps no one will, assemble a specific, accurate set of numbers, especially on the Confederate side.
A true accounting of the number of men in the armies can be approached through a review of three primary documents: enlistment rolls, muster rolls, and casualty lists. Following any of these investigative methods one will encounter countless flaws and inconsistencies--the records in question are little sheets of paper generated and compiled years ago by human beings in one of the most stressful and confusing environments to ever exist. Enlistment stations were set up in towns and cities across the country, but for the most part only those stations in major northern cities can be relied upon to have preserved records.
Confederate enlistment rolls are virtually non-existent. Muster rolls, generated every few months by commanding officers, list soldiers in their respective units as "present" or "absent. Overlooking the common misspelling of names and general lack of specificity concerning the condition of a "present" or "absent" soldier, muster rolls provide a valuable look into the past. 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. The new Civil War death toll numbers have stirred the pot afresh. Of the Union states, New York has the highest number of military deaths of approximately 39,, followed by Ohio and Illinois with about 31, each.
California and Colorado had the lowest number of deaths of any state, given their location to the war's battles. Military deaths were a combination of both combat deaths and disease deaths. Hover over Click on a tile for details. Most Casualties. Civil War Casualties By State Show Source. Estimated Casualties.
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