In the middle of the 19th century, the United States entered into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the 20th century.  The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, generally estimated at 620,000, is approximately equal to the total of American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined.  The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about two percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities.  As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital.  Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.  Twice as many Civil War soldiers died from disease as from battle wounds, the result in considerable measure of poor sanitation in an era that created mass armies that did not yet understand the transmission of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus, and dysentery.

These military statistics, however, tell only a part of the story.  The war also killed a significant number of civilians; battles raged across farm and field, encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, guerrillas ensnared women and children in violence and reprisals, draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, and shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation.  No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count.  The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were 50,000 civilian deaths during the war, and has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.  The American Civil War produced carnage that was often thought to be reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.

Bringing in the wounded, May 12, 1864 Collection of the New York Historical Society, nhnycw/ad ad43006

The impact and meaning of the war’s death toll went beyond the sheer numbers who died.  Death’s significance for the Civil War generation changed dramatically from its previous prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.  Death was familiar to mid-19th-century Americans, but by the beginning of the 1860s, the rate of death in the United States had begun to decline, although dramatic improvements in longevity would not appear until late in the century.  The patterns to which they were accustomed, however, were in many ways different from those introduced by the war.  Although mid-19th-century Americans endured a high rate of infant mortality, they expected that most individuals who had reached young adulthood would survive into middle age.  Yet, the Civil War took young, healthy men's lives rapidly, often instantly, and destroyed them with disease, injury, or both.  This marked a sharp and alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die.  Both Civil War soldiers and civilians distinguished between what many referred to as “ordinary death,” as it had occurred in prewar years, from the manner and frequency of death in Civil War battlefields, hospitals, and camps, and from the war’s interruptions of civilian lives.

The scale and duration of the conflict, the size of its battles and the number of casualties were also unanticipated and unprecedented.  Both the Union and the Confederacy reaped what many described as a “harvest of death.”  By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, “Nearly every household mourns some loved one lost.”  Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually. Death’s threat, proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared experience of the war’s duration.  Americans were unprepared for the impact of these deaths; what to do with the bodies th