SPECIAL EDITION – A Few Civil War Facts

Here are some fast facts about our nation’s Civil War I uncovered at battlefields.org:

• The war began when the Confederates bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861.  The war ended in Spring, 1865.  Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.  The last battle was fought at Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 13, 1865.  

• The Civil War was fought in thousands of different places, from southern Pennsylvania to Texas; from New Mexico to the Florida coast.  The majority of the fighting took place in the states of Virginia and Tennessee.  The Civil War was also contested on the Atlantic Ocean as far off as the coast of France, the Gulf of Mexico, and the brown water of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

• At the beginning of the war the Northern states had a combined population of 22 million people. The Southern states had a combined population of about 9 million. This disparity was reflected in the size of the armies in the field. The Union forces outnumbered the Confederates roughly two to one.

• Approximately 620,000 soldiers died from combat, accident, starvation, and disease during the Civil War. This number comes from an 1889 study of the war performed by William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore. Both men fought for the Union. Their estimate is derived from an exhaustive study of the combat and casualty records generated by the armies over five years of fighting.  A recent study puts the number of dead as high as 850,000.

• Roughly 1,264,000 American soldiers have died in the nation’s wars–620,000 in the Civil War and 644,000 in all other conflicts.  It was only as recently as the Vietnam War that the amount of American deaths in foreign wars eclipsed the number who died in the Civil War.

• The Northern armies were victorious, and the rebellious states returned to the Union.

• The election of 1860 was one of the most unusual in American history. In a four-way race brought on by a split in the Democratic Party, Abraham Lincoln’s name did not even appear on the ballot in most Southern states.  In the electoral college, Lincoln solidly carried the free states of the Northeast and Northwest.  Breckenridge won the slaveholding states, with the exception of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky in the Upper South, which went to Bell.  Douglas, though he made a solid showing in the popular vote, only took electoral votes from Missouri and New Jersey.

• Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, Republican Party: 39.8%
  Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Northern Democratic Party: 29.5%
  John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, Southern Democratic Party: 18.1%
  John Bell of Tennessee, Constitutional Union Party: 12.6%

• The Seceding Southern States:

South Carolina – December 20, 1860
Mississippi – January 9, 1861
Florida – January 10, 1861
Alabama – January 11, 1861
Georgia – January 19, 1861
Louisiana – January 26, 1861
Texas – February 1, 1861
Virginia – April 17, 1861
Arkansas – May 6, 1861
North Carolina – May 20, 1861
Tennessee – June 8, 1861

• While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, “The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states, over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won the election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.”

What were the bloodiest battles of the Civil War?

• Gettysburg–51,000 casualties
  Chickamauga–34,624 casualties
  Spotsylvania–30,000 casualties
  The Wilderness–29,800 casualties
  Chancellorsville–24,000 casualties
  Shiloh–23,746 casualties
  Stones River–23,515 casualties
  Antietam–22,717 casualties
  Second Manassas–22,180 casualties
  Vicksburg–19,233 casualties

• Too often, people take ‘casualty’ and ‘fatality’ to be interchangeable terms. In fact, a casualty is “a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture, or through being missing in action.” Essentially, a casualty is any soldier who goes into a fight and does not return fit to take part in the next battle. Many soldiers, especially in the Confederate ranks, became casualties several times: some soldiers were captured multiple times; some were wounded in non-consecutive engagements.

• What caused casualties during a battle?

• Typically, soldiers were buried where they fell on the battlefield. Others were buried near the hospitals where they died. At most battlefields the dead were exhumed and moved to National or Confederate cemeteries, but because there were so many bodies, and because of the time and effort it took to disinter them, there are undoubtedly thousands if not tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers in unknown battlefield graves.

• More than 400,000 soldiers were captured over the course of the Civil War. In the first years of the conflict, equal numbers of captured troops were regularly exchanged for one another, helping to keep the total number of prisoners manageable for both sides. Over the course of the war, however, that practice faded from use. By the end of the war, the plight of prisoners of war on both sides had become bleak indeed. Thousands of Southerners died in the freezing camp at Elmira, New York. And the camp at Andersonville, Georgia, which held Union prisoners, has become one of the most infamous in the history of war. (I recommend looking at this on your own.  It’s abominable and I think, speaks to the minds of the Southerners about their lack of sanctity for human life.  And it caused the death of the man in charge, the only person convicted of war crimes in the Civil War.)  Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as died fighting in Vietnam.

• Two thirds of those killed in the Civil War died of disease. Germ theory had not been widely accepted in the medical world at the time of the Civil War and modern antiseptics, which could have greatly reduced the spread of bacteria and the outbreak of disease, did not exist. As George Worthington Adams famously wrote, “The Civil War was fought in the very last years of the medical middle ages.” Chloroform, ether and whiskey were the main anesthetics. Still, many survived their wounds and had only the dedicated doctors and nurses and their selfless efforts to thank. Medicine is an ever-evolving science. Unfortunately for those who fought in the Civil War, the technology of warfare had surpassed the technology of health care.

• A white Union private made thirteen dollars a month; his black counterpart made seven dollars until Congress rectified the discrepancy in 1864.  A Confederate private ostensibly made eleven dollars a month, but often went long stretches with no pay at all.  (I checked. The Union wages are approximately ¼ of the typical wages received in other occupations at the time.)

• With the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, African-Americans – both free and runaway slaves – came forward to volunteer for the Union cause in substantial numbers. Beginning in October, approximately 180,000 African-Americans, comprising 163 units, served in the U.S. Army, and 18,000 in the Navy. That month, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers repulsed a Confederate attack at Island Mound, Missouri. Men of the U.S.C.T. (United States Colored Troops) units went on to distinguish themselves on battlefields east and west – at Port Hudson, Louisiana; Honey Springs, Oklahoma; Fort Wagner, South Carolina (This is what the movie, “Glory” {1989 – Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Matthew Brodrick, remember?} was based on, and according to sources, it was a fairly accurate portrayl); New Market Heights, Virginia. African Americans constituted 10% of the entire Union Army by the end of the war, and nearly 40,000 died over the course of the war.

• When they were not drilling, which made up a considerable portion of their time in camp, soldiers passed the time writing letters, playing games like checkers, dominoes and poker, drinking, smoking, whittling, making music and praying. One soldier summed it up when he wrote to his wife, “Soldiering is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror.”

• Civil War soldiers’ fare varied substantially from army to army and throughout the course of the war for both sides. For the most part, neither side ate particularly well. Hardtack (a hard cracker made from flour and water and sometimes salt) and coffee were the staples, in addition to salt pork, corn meal and whatever fruits, vegetables and berries could be collected on the march. Many Confederate soldiers were in a state of near-starvation by the war’s end.

• The average Union soldier was 25.8 years old; there is no definite information on the average age of Confederate soldiers, but by the end of the war old men and young boys, who otherwise would have stayed home, were being pressed into service. The average soldier on both sides was a white, native-born, protestant farmer.

• The Confederacy instituted the first draft in American history in April of 1862. It was clear that the South, with a total population of 9 million (including 4 million slaves), would have to muster all of its manpower to repel the North, which had an 1860 population of around 22 million. The Confederate draft exempted those who owned twenty slaves or more, however, arousing resentment amongst the poor whites who constituted the vast majority of the army. Abraham Lincoln instituted a draft on the Northern states a year later, likewise calling on all able-bodied 18-35 year old men to serve. There were exemptions in the North, too, if those drafted could pay a significant fee or provide a substitute.