Chapter 112: A Tally of the Dead
“It is easy for historians to mark points on a calendar and say that date or this day ended some conflict or a treaty was ratified. In truth, the wounds of conflicts can last far in advance of when they supposedly ended. For the Great American War, it was no different. Though when the war ended by decree on July 25th 1865, the nation had been fighting for four years, enduring blood and death before any formal peace treaty was signed. Even up until the final pen strokes at Havana, blood was being spilt in skirmishes and the bitter feuds from unresolved tensions which would mark 1866 on either side of the new borders in North America.
The casualties of the war were, even to today, staggering. It was the bloodiest conflict the United States had engaged in up to that point. Roughly 1.6 million men would participate in the war from the Loyal States at one point or another, while another estimated 750,000 would fight for the Confederacy in total. As many as 2,500,000 men would bear arms for the whole conflict. When one includes the 300,000 Anglo-Canadian soldiers who fought on land and sea at one point or another in the conflict, the true scale of the Great American War becomes clear. Almost three million men would fight, but a quarter of them would never return home.
While arriving at exact numbers of dead is difficult, official returns do offer at least some sense of the vast scale of death unleashed on North America from the Pacific slope to the Bay of Fundy. Approximately 140,000 men from the North would die in battle, while another 250,000 died of disease during the whole course of the war. Another 50,000 would perish in British or Confederate prison camps. While these numbers cannot be found to be completely accurate, and modern scholarship argues to this day over the number, it may be reliably estimated that the United States suffered upwards of 450,000 men who died in uniform.
The Confederate States suffered no less heavily. Through a combination of aggressive commanders, poorer infrastructure and other logistics issues, the Confederacy would have a larger proportion of battlefield deaths in comparison to the United States. Approximately 100,000 men died in combat fighting for the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, while a further 29,000 died in Union prison camps. A further 166,000 are known to have died of accident or disease while in Southern service. In total, 295,000 men died while wearing Confederate gray.
Though most scholars of the Great American War have focused solely on the Union or Confederate armies, often thanks to the scholarship of the New Men in the post-war world, no tally of the dead would be complete without an examination of the Anglo-Canadian forces. Roughly 140,000 British soldiers and sailors would serve at one time or another in North America from California to the West Indies, whether in garrison, on sea or in the armies in Canada. These were supported by 145,000 militia from the colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Though it was mostly the soldiers in Canada who fought, some West Indies regiments did serve important garrison duties, which does include them in the tally of the dead. 35,000 Canadians died of all causes during the war, mainly from disease. 15,400[1] soldiers and sailors would die in combat or from wounds on the British side, while 35,500 would die from disease or accidents, including those in American prison camps. While these numbers are considerably smaller than the American losses, the British forces involved were also much smaller, in limited campaigns, with a better understanding of camp sanitation compared to the Crimean War.
Nor were the innocent spared. Whether the 85 year old widow Judith C. Henry killed by cannons at Bull Run or 19 year old William Tempest, shot at Davenport Ridge, civilians were hardly immune to the hard hand of war. The exact number of civilian deaths and the reasons for them are harder to qualify. Modern estimates place the number of dead at roughly 50,000 dead free citizens and enslaved noncombatants. That means at least 52,000 civilians died during the war. The true number may indeed be higher[2].
While estimates are difficult to discern, many who died of disease while refugees could be counted as civilian losses, but those who died from military action or persecution by military authorities are much easier to calculate as civilian casualties. Only the nascent Canadian colonies kept a firm tabulation of civilian casualties, stating that 2,089 civilians died from “Yankee cruelties” which can be considered an accounting of hostages killed in the anti-guerilla campaigns, but also those who died in battles such as Delaware Crossroads and Davenport Ridge and numerous skirmishes in between.
Many inflated claims have been floated over the years for the number of the dead, but today there is a rough consensus of how many people were killed by the conflict. All told, at least 830,000 people died between 1861 and 1866.
When all this is considered, roughly 2.5% of the American population in 1860 died during the course of the war. That roughly 1% of the Canadian population died at the same time is staggering when considering the steady climb in population numbers otherwise during this period. It could be reasonably speculated that between 1861-66 roughly 3% of the population of North America comprising the United States and modern Canada died in this whole period[3].
Though much smaller compared to the casualties of the early 20th century, it is still a sobering testament to the ferocity of the engagement across the North American continent…” - To Arms!: The Great American War, Sheldon Foote, University of Boston 1999.
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1] If that does seem small, the battle casualties are three times those incurred in the Crimean War for instance. The larger number of disease deaths includes prison camps and anyone unlucky enough to come down with camp diseases in the West Indies.
2] This is based on James MacPherson’s estimation of 50,000 civilian deaths in the war. If I included the estimates of slaves who died, it would be higher but those are much harder to verify.
3] If I included the number of people killed in Mexico during the French invasion as part of North America, it would be smaller as a whole proportion, but still nearly 900,000 people overall. This is a massive death toll.