No one disputes that the American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history. But for decades historians and demographers have had difficulty pinpointing the exact number of casualties, especially on the Confederate side, due to poor record-keeping and records that were destroyed when Richmond fell at the end of the war.
The long-standing consensus figure of 618,222 dead was reached by applying the percentage of Union soldiers lost to Confederate forces. In 2012, demographic historian J. David Hacker dramatically revised that number upward to 750,000 by using a sample of U.S. Census data to compare wartime to peacetime deaths. But that method was liable to sampling errors and couldn’t account for people who moved between states. It also couldn’t separate out Union and Confederate deaths.
A novel method of calculating the war’s dead using newly available individual census records from 1850 to 1880 and data that accounted for migration across state lines pioneered by NYU political scientist Jeffrey Jensen and colleagues estimates 698,000 deaths as a result of the conflict. And for the first time, the researchers were able to calculate Northern and Southern casualties. They found that Southern states had an average excess mortality rate of 13.1 percent for white men, versus just 4.9 percent for Northern states—a dramatic example of the difference of the war’s toll between the North and the South. (Researchers were not able to calculate excess mortality for Black men because prior to the war enslaved people were not listed individually in the census.)
Virginia had an excess mortality rate of 12.3 percent as a result of the war. By comparison, only one Northern state—Illinois—had an excess mortality rate approaching double-digits at 9.97%. But five southern states—North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—registered higher excess mortality than Virginia. In Louisiana, the hardest-hit state, nearly 20 percent more men died than would have otherwise.
In total, by adding existing data of 36,000 deaths among Black Union soldiers, the researchers estimate that 300,000 men died in the South versus 400,000 in the North, which had a much larger population. Seven of the eight states in the Old South, including Virginia, lost at least 10 percent of their native-born white male population of military age and anywhere from 20 to 33 percent of the native-born white male population between the ages of 15 and 34, “triggering economic, political, and social legacies for generations,” note the researchers.
“The legacies of war trauma likely had consequential effects on political behavior for both the surviving soldiers and their families,” they conclude. They will continue their work to understand the effects of this trauma and how it has been memorialized.
