Chronological History of the American Civil War

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consider the population in the South to be 12,500,000. This disparity was reflected in the size of the armies in the field. The Union forces outnumbered the Confederates roughly two to one. In total during the 4-year war some 2,128,948 fought for the North, while 1,082,119 fought for the South. With Memorial Day just passing should bring us all to remember that 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. The 23,000 casualties at Antietam was almost 4 times the number on Normandy Beach in WW II. More American soldiers lost their lives during the Civil War (U.S. and C.S.A.) than in all the American wars combined from before or since the Civil War to present day. What caused the Civil War? A few facts you might not know about the Great American Civil War. Most people still today don’t understand what caused the Civil War and why did it happen? The country was growing westward all the time since the Revolutionary War. Some states had declared themselves as “Free States,” while some were still slaveholding states. The Southern slave holding states want to expand slavery in the new territories being settled in the West. While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, President Lincoln's Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson wrote 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 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.” Casualties of War... A few facts you might not know about the Great American Civil War. Too often, people take 'casualty' and 'fatality' to be interchangeable terms. Death is only one way to be listed as a casualty, 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. Most casualties and deaths in the Civil War were the result of non-combat- related disease. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died of disease. The primitive nature of Civil War medicine, both in its intellectual underpinnings and in its practice in the armies, meant that many wounds and illnesses were unnecessarily fatal. One in thirteen surviving Civil War soldiers returned home missing one or more limbs. The fatal casualties typically, were soldiers 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 exhume them, there are undoubtedly thousands if not tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers in unknown battlefield graves. Many Southerners were buried in mass graves, as it was left for the victor in most battles to bury both side’s dead. Our modern conception of casualties includes those who have been psychologically damaged by warfare. This distinction did not exist during the Civil War. Soldiers suffering from what we would now recognize as “post-traumatic stress disorder” were uncatalogued and uncared for. Post-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.