A Civil War Find: 'The Trauma Is Just Unbelievable'

Nearly 160 years after the US Civil War, the conflict continues to reverberate, in part due to the "unbelievable" trauma caused. Just shy of 700,000 lives were lost in the conflict, including up to 13% of US-born white men in Confederate states, according to what researchers say is "the most precise national estimate" yet of wartime deaths. NYU Abu Dhabi political science researcher Jeffrey Jensen had sought an official count of deaths, only to find "the data set didn't seem to exist," per the New York Times. The Confederate Army's record-keeping fell apart toward the war's end, while existing records were burned. Demographic historian Dr. J. David Hacker previously used census records to produce an estimate of lives lost, but it ranged from 650,000 to 850,000.

Jensen and colleagues opted to calculate the losses afresh, again using census records. They found there were 496,332 more military-age white men in the US in 1860, the year before war erupted, than in 1870, five years after the war ended. After accounting for other lost soldiers, specifically Black men and men born abroad, they came up with a final estimate of 698,000 deaths across the Civil War, per the analysis published Monday in PNAS. Researchers then attempted to hone in on losses in the Confederate Army and Union Army camps, which meant using a sample of census records that tracked respondents over time and across state lines.

This showed Confederate states suffered the worst losses by far, with a mortality rate of 13% for white men born in the US, compared to 5% for the same group in Union states. Louisiana's mortality rate for this group was a peak 19%. In looking at eight Confederate states and 13 Union states, researchers found seven Confederate states lost at least 10% of white men of military age, compared to just one Union state. "The trauma is just unbelievable," Jensen tells the Times. Or, as University of Virginia history professor Caroline Janney puts it to the Times, "There's a reason that the memory still lingers. Those deaths very much did shape their respective societies, but in a far more complicated and nuanced way than sheer numbers can represent." (More Civil War stories.)