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Statistical Analysis Raises Civil War Death Count By 20%
Hugh Pickens writes "For more than a century, it has been accepted that about 620,000 Americans died in the the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history. But now, BBC reports that historian J. David Hacker has used sophisticated statistical software to determine the war's death toll and found that civil war dead may have been undercounted by as many as 130,000. Hacker began by taking digitized samples from the decennial census counts taken from 1850-1880. Using statistical package SPSS, Hacker counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870 and compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 — the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War. The calculations yielded the number of 'excess' deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 — the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war. Hacker's findings, published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War History, have been endorsed by some of the leading historians of the conflict. 'The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war,' writes Hacker. 'The war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.'"
He has a nice name, indeed. Sounds like "John Doe Hacker".
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'd like to see the same analysis applied to WW2 and Vietnam, especially the excess fatalities for 5 years after the wars. I am pretty sure the real costs of wars are systematically concealed by governments.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Shitloads died.
Let's focus on why it happened and how to prevent things like it to happen again.
Like, for instance, the government not being hellbent on forcing it's will above the states.
Not even written like an american, but as a person who saw what government trying to force it's will down upon unwilling states resulted in.
And, yeah, the same thing is happening right now, both in Europe and in USA.
The South was thrashed and trashed more severely than the North ever admitted. What's new?
Remember, the victors write the history books.
Damn Redleggers (artillerymen).
And for the record yes, I have a history degree (for which I wrote a major paper on the historiography of the Civil War) and have even worked in a Civil War museum, so I know what I'm talking about.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
This is quite clear in the recent case of Iraq.
The numbers on Iraq vary hugely depending on what you're counting. At some point the estimates varied with a factor 30. The spectrum covers
- documented kills by american military.
- documented violent deaths
- statistical estimate of violent deaths
- statistical overall excess death (including increased child mortality, epidemics etc).
The first item is the one you want to use if you want to minimize blame , and you can push it a bit by keeping as few records as possible and contesting the remaining records - but the blame can actually be extended to cover the very last item. The Lancet made estimates of overall excess deaths , see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties
Did this analysis have any way to determine that everyone missing from the census had actually died, as opposed to leaving the country or avoiding the census to dodge the draft? At least in modern day civil wars it isn't uncommon for there to be a sizable refugee population that decides a country is too unstable/unsafe to stay in.
there was a not insignificant number of free blacks that fought for the South.
Citation desperately needed. Blacks fought for the South but "free blacks" was a completely different identifier in the South at the time.
Knowing how many died tells you a lot but when a society is so affected by war that you don't actually know how many died, that also tells you a lot.
Bob.
For more than a century, it has been accepted that about 620,000 Americans died in the the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history
But I really think that statement should be qualified with "bloodiest, most devastating conflict involving only Americans." The Indian genocide, World War II, Vietnam War and possibly even the Iraq Wars were deadlier. Non-American causalties should also be counted in body counts.
Football Odds
Just the other week: Richmond woman finds Civil War-era cannonball in her garden (and I have no idea as to why this was posted in the crime section)
And from a few years ago Virginia Man Killed In Civil War Cannonball Blast
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'Northern aggression'. Read all about the spitefull greed of New Englanders in your local Jesusland high school history book.
The United States has done far less harm in its history than Germany, Russia or even China, and possibly less than Western Europe taken as a whole, but let's not pretend that American history has no external effects, or that the rise of the USA was anything other than an invasion.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well, you are entitled to your opinion. But as the analysis did its best to allow for immigration and emigration, and did comparisons with other periods, your argument needs a bit more beef than "dislike". In my own field of interest, naval history, things like manning levels, pay rates, construction, weights of shot, water capacity, access to navigational equipment and the like turn out to be far better predictors of outcomes than the "Great Man" ideas of historians of the past. The outcome of the Battle of Britain was almost entirely determined by engineering factors - radar, and the fact that the British fighters were developed a little later than the German ones and so benefited from better engineering. The massacres in Rwanda and El Salvador can be better understood by analysing population density, land use and economic power than by speculation over tribal or political conflict. Proper statistical analysis of history - not numeric analysis, whatever that is - is not only illuminating in itself but could eventually give models with predictive power.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Did statistical analysis really raise the death count? I don't think statistical analysis is to blame for those people dying. I think they were already dead by the time somebody decided to apply statistical analysis.
Slavery was the primary state's rights issue. What is often lost on opponents of the Confederacy is that the issue of state's rights ultimately exposes very large questions of how different sides see the nature of the United States. Opponents of the Confederacy ultimately do not accept the proposition that the United States was founded as a federation of states, but rather treat the states like provinces that are ultimately under higher accountability to one another than what is laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
This is dangerous stuff if you are a strong supporter of democracy and self-determination. There are very few issues that could be so bright lined for being "simply in the wrong" as slavery on basis of race. Now we have pro-choicers and pro-lifers who ardently agree that it must be all or nothing. The fact is that we've now reached a point where key decisions cannot be decided at the state level and dissidents forced to simply deal with it. For example, Rick Santorum and NARAL both agree that California and Alabama should have no say in the matter. This is why we are being ripped apart culturally. The simple fact is that aside from shared language, the various regions of the United States really are not "one nation, under God, indivisible" yada yada yada anymore than Great Britain is "one nation" because the Welsh, Scots, English and Northern Irish share the same native language among the vast majority of their populations.
And you also have to remember one thing about the Fugitive Slave Act. In all matters of property, if someone feels the jurisdiction with your property you have a right to reclaim it. For example, if someone drives your car to Canada, the Canadian government is obligated (morally, if not by treaty) to facilitate its return to the rightful owner. The problem here was that few people on both sides recognized that the differences were so great with regard to slavery that it was likely not possible that the union could have been preserved except by force. One side felt slaves were property, another did not even recognize slavery. It was about as viable to be held together by peace as a political union of Athens and Sparta.
Excuse me for wondering, but why do we care? This war ended almost 150 years ago, and all the players are long gone. As the saying goes, this is only of historical interest, and only to a very limited number of people, even then. Perhaps we should rethink the number of casualties in the Revolutionary War?
While everybody is talking about the minor squabble in the USA, during the same time there was the Taiping Rebellion in China. A mere 20 million dead followed by another 10million who died in the Dungan revolt that started during the same time.
Now.
Maybe "slavery" was on the way out, but racial injustice certainly wasn't.
This is a part of the 14th amendment: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws". Without the civil war the states could march in and take whatever they wanted from lesser-privileged classes, and it was all legally legitimate.
Hundreds of thousands died in the Civil War, but far more future lives would have been ruined without the conflict!
I think it was Jay Gould (and if not I apologise to his shade) who observed that the usual distinction between "hard" and "soft" science is completely backward. Physics advanced faster than chemistry, and chemistry faster than biology, because in fact it is physics that is "not-hard", and especially the social sciences and economics that are very hard indeed. We had a model of dynamics that was "good enough" by 1700AD, but the causes of infectious diseases wouldn't be understood for roughly another 150 years. (We've just seen what happens when a load of bankers think physicists are capable of writing financial models).
However, as the originators of CERN would probably agree, because something is difficult is not a reason not to try it.
In my own experience, most of the people who object to statistical modeling do so because the results confound cherished beliefs. For instance, the arts graduates who run the British Home Office despise statistics because so many studies have shown that their approaches to crime don't work, and don't want to know about medical and psychological studies of the effects of various drugs because the results do not suit the agenda of the Daily Mail and the drinks companies. During WW2, the High Command of the RAF had a statistical wing that was demonstrating that (a) carpet bombing was a failure and (b) air crews did not become safer with experience. So what did they do? Ignored them, of course. But that is all the more reason why they should be done, and done as rigorously as possible.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
During the American wars with Britain, the Royal Navy had a well publicised policy of freeing captured slaves on American ships, thus encouraging them to mutiny on one hand, and making them very determined not to allow their new ships to fall into American hands on the other.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Looking a white men only gives military casualties. But both the Confederates (Forrest, Stuart) and the Union (Grant, Sherman) conducted operations destroying supplies, livestock and buildings.
While done early with the justification "to deprive enemy forces of required supplies", later actions were done to demoralize civilian populations (Atlanta). It is _impossible_ that civilian casualties were not thereby caused from starvation, (leading to disease) and exposure.
I regard the US Civil War as one of the most heinous in all history -- AFAICS, it is the first time since the Crusades that civilians were deliberately harmed as a matter of strategy and official policy. Civilians always get harmed in wars, but prior to this (and lipservice to this day) such harm was officially regretted.
As the other commenter said, this is so simplistic.
Some psychopath writes a book or some racist writes a newspaper article inciting people to kill. Let's say there's no right to freedom of the press.
What? The First amendment. Well, there's a 10th amendment guaranteeing states rights, but that's now invalid because of a group of states were being immoral (even though let's forget that slavery was pretty prevalent throughout human history so we have the advantage of looking back at progress). So using your logic, I hereby declare there is no freedom of speech and of the press.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
That was in a 15 year period. Now we need to know how many people in China would typically have died from the same causes in that period. This is exactly where proper data collection and analysis is needed - to what extent was the destruction caused by the wars responsible for the civilian deaths? Were there other factors (weather patterns, for instance) involved? Was China more fragile than the United States, so that a war in which fewer died directly had a much bigger knock on effect? What similarities and differences were there with the Cultural Revolution, with a similar death rate?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Lets take Vietnam. I think we can assume the figures for US soldiers are reasonably accurate, but the figures for Vietnamese killed are probably straight plain fiction.
WW2 will be similar but on a much larger scale. The Nazis kept fairly exact records but destroyed a lot of them towards the end to hide their culpability.
Now back to the Civil War.
The following states were admitted to the Union after 1870 and it's census.
1870's - Colorado
1889's - the Dakotas, Montana, Washington
1890's - Idaho, Wyoming, Utah
1900's - Oklahoma
1910's - New Mexico, Arizona.
All of these were Territories before they schieved statehood (Oklahoma included 'Indian Territory'). Did the Census include Territories? Can we assume that more men that women would have been prepared to take that step? To simply head out west?
The 1870 Census is known to have missed a large number of people, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. The authors tried to take that into account by using the number of women as a baseline but there still has to be a lot of guesswork involved.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Try the Thirty Years' War.
One of my own hypothesis is that drug use and dependency stems heavily from the Civil War. Between people being hurt in the Civil War and the psychological trauma inflicted as a result of it, many people turned towards drugs as a way to relieve pain and stress.
Wait for it, he will.
2 things, lets head off the 'Not about Slavery' crowd at the pass.
1: Lincoln, and the North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union. But lets not forget the South fired the first shot and seized Federal property. The war to preserve the Union turned into a war against Slavery out of necessity. You can see Lincoln evolve, to the point that when he thought he would lose the 1864 election, he had a meeting with Frederick Douglass to try and urge him to get as many slaves out of the South via the Underground Railway before the elections.
Lincoln was assasinated by John Wilkes Booth, who spoke the following words a few days before assasinating Lincoln.
"I had never seen Mr. Lincoln up close and I knew he was a tall man, however nothing could have prepared me for the sight of him. A long shadow did he have. And his arms, when at his sides, touched near his knees. Very professionally he said that there would never be any suffrage based on differences in the way people look. Upon this, Booth turned to the two of us and said, “That means nigger citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through!”
Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction collapsed, and for the next 100 years, African Americans in the South were subjected to the same deprivations of Slavery just without the term. Up until the 1964 CRA (things weren't rosy in the North, but they were a hell of a lot better than the South for African Americans, read "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson
For the Civil War years, read "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson, read "Grant's Memoirs" or watch the 27 part lecture (1 hour each) by Yale Historian David Blight.
2: For those claiming the Civil War wasn't about Slavery, get real. It was very much about slavery for the South. They were fighting for States Rights, the right to keep slaves. The South knew they had to expand Slavery to survive, the North wanted to contain slavery. The South knew it was all about slavery at the time, a fact they proclaimed in speeches and also clearly documented in the Articles of Secession (I've included relevant passages below).
'Declaration of Causes of Seceding States' http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
--------
Georgia
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.
Mississippi
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
South Carolina
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery,
Texas
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government *a
is about to take place. The U.S. government will most likely slaughter millions to achieve its goal of total control over the population. It doesn't matter if they have an R or a D in their title, the ruling class will stop at nothing for absolute power.
of black people after the Civil War is easily explained by this as well. The South did everything in its power to recreate slavery and disenfranchise what little newfound economic and political power blacks had, piece by piece, over the years and decades after the Civil War in the form of Jim Crow laws, so I call bullshit. Debt slavery, poll taxes, "reading" tests for voting, miscegenation laws, prohibitions against being in town after dark, segregation in every sphere of public life--you really want to claim that change was coming? "If only we hadn't angered the South, I'm sure they would have changed." Like the South was an abusive alcoholic.
Don't give me the common man argument either. It's not like the King of the South was forcing this down white people's throats unwillingly. Those laws, city, county, and state were not only written by slaveholders or their ancestors, and they were eventually enforced by people who never owned slaves, so even if they didn't own slaves, they made damn sure that black people were treated as such. There is a deep complicity there, whether people are willing to acknowledge it or not.
I didn't exactly see market forces coming in to crush those laws, and, had it not been for the intervention of the federal government, it would have taken longer. The argument that people would have accepted it better had they been given their own sweet time (how much longer? They had over 100 years!) to accept it does nothing to erase the pain borne by those forced to endure it.
Democracy should not be two wolves and sheep voting on what's for dinner. I'm late to the discussion, so maybe nobody will read this. I lived for quite a while in the South, and goddamn am I tired of hearing this shit.
Had the leaders in 30yW been able to capture territory with less destruction, they would have. The US Civil War AFAICS is the first time the thugs had more than a wink-and-a-nod "boys will be boys" tolerence, but strategic, systematic, official orders to burn.
What about the effect the decrease in [male] population from the Civil War may have caused on the ability to perform the 1870 census? Fewer people in the work-force may have impacted the number of employees performing the census, which may have resulted in reduced ability to count "everyone" (any error almost certainly would show a reduction in the population).
âoeThe wall between art and engineering exists only in our minds.â -- Theo Jansen