Discussion Post 7: Marshall
Read the TWO articles then Write a 250-300 word post response to this prompt:
Marshall implicitly argues that nineteenth century Americans did not perceive the military death toll of the U.S. Civil War as a catastrophe. On what grounds does he make this assertion? Are you convinced of his argument? Why or why not? (Alternatively, you may create your own prompt related to the readings and respond to it. If you choose this option, provide your prompt at the top.)
Add one question about something that confused you in the readings, or one they left unanswered that you’re curious about, or one you’d like to hear others’ opinions on.
The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War
Nicholas Marshall
J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Volume 4, Number
1, Spring 2016, pp. 214-221 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided at 27 Aug 2019 00:11 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz
https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2016.0009
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/616917
https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2016.0009
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/616917
214 Civil War Sufferings
J19
17. Ibid., April 10, 18, 21, 25, 29, 30, 1862.
18. Charles Minor Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army; or, Memoirs of Life in and out of
the Army in Virginia during the War Between the States, ed. Susan Leigh Blackford and Charles
Minor Blackford III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 96; Pvt. Jacob Blackington to
Sister, 19th Mas sa chu setts Infantry, June 24, 1862, Lyman and Jacob Blackington Collection, US
Army Military Institute at Carlisle, PA; William H. Morgan, Personal Reminiscences of the War
1861–5: In Camp—on Bivouac—on the March—on Picket—on the Skirmish Line—on the
Battlefi eld— and in Prison (Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell, 1911), 100.
19. See, for instance, Michael C. C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); and Brian M. Jordan, Marching Home: Union
Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York: Liveright, 2015).
The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War
Nicholas Marshall
Marist College
In 2008, I was struck by two in ter est ing and high-
profi le publications. Both Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering:
Death and the Civil War and Mark S. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heav-
enly Country: The Civil War and Amer i ca’s Culture of Death spoke
directly to the issue of death and dying in the Civil War.1 Though similar
in some of their descriptions of antebellum culture and war time car-
nage, the books seemed to me to offer enough contrasting perspectives
that I imagined a major historical and historiographical argument
would ensue. I was wrong, and my own modest entry into the discus-
sion of the meaning of Civil War deaths more recently helped me under-
stand why.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize and fi nalist for the Pulitzer, Faust’s
This Republic of Suffering has become a standard in the fi eld. It places
death at the very center of the Civil War experience, in the pro cess de-
veloping keen insights into how the government, the larger society, com-
munities, and individuals coped with the dying. While acknowledging
that nineteenth- century Americans were more familiar with death than
we are today, Faust bases her argument on the claim that the “Civil War
represented a dramatic shift in both incidence and experience,” produc-
ing “carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination
of technological profi ciency and inhumanity characteristic of a later
time” (Republic of Suffering, xii). Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly
Country received more qualifi ed and less extensive praise but neverthe-
less found an appreciative audience. His goal is to show how circum-
stances before the war in some sense trained Americans to understand
J19
Nicholas Marshall · The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War 215
and cope with the exceptional level of loss that they were to experience
in the 1860s. Schantz argues that the “fundamental confrontation with
death” was “one of the most pervasive concerns of the antebellum era”;
that “nineteenth- century Amer i ca was a death- embracing culture”; and
that death was “the major story” for nineteenth- century Americans. By
1860 Americans had a clear cultural matrix that allowed them to pro-
cess and, as Schantz further claims, even “facilitate” the vio lence of the
Civil War (Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 2–4). Thus, while viewing
the volume of death in the war as unpre ce dented, he sees the culture of
death as continuous and supportive.
Having spent years working on the private papers of antebellum
Americans (and fi nding within them a world very much like that de-
scribed by Schantz), I immediately identifi ed with his larger purpose.
And I especially appreciated his desire to understand the Civil War in
the context of a hoary, yet still useful, historiographic argumentative
mode— that is, “change versus continuity.” As I saw it, both Schantz’s and
my evidence suggested an unbroken line of both experience with death
and means of coping with it, whereas Faust argued for fundamental dis-
ruptions in scale and meaning. Yet reviews that treated Awaiting the
Heavenly Country and This Republic of Suffering together made much
more of their harmonizing ele ments than any implicit or explicit contra-
dictions. One noted that “ these books are not in competition with each
other: Each complements the other, and together they powerfully employ
deathways to describe the conclusion of the early American republic and
the opening of modern Amer i ca.”2 Note here the direct support of the
“change” perspective rather than “continuity.” James McPherson in the
New York Review of Books, in his usual perspicacious way, praised both
works, while discussing some of the distinctions, including the question
of whether a “culture of death” continued into the war years. But he also
maintained that Schantz’s book offers “insights that complement those
of Faust.” According to McPherson, one of the most impor tant points of
intersection was the two authors’ understanding of the dramatic new
scope of death during the Civil War: the generation of the Civil War, he
averred, was “totally unprepared for mortality on this scale.”3 Clearly,
the tendency was to fold Schantz’s points into Faust’s interpretation and
always keep the focus on the number of dead.
As I pro cessed the two books and thought about my own work I
increasingly became bothered by the statistics used in all accounts of
the war, including my own introduction to the topic in my classes. Sta-
tistics were one of the two ways that I (and seemingly every one else)
216 Civil War Sufferings
J19
encapsulated the horrors of the war; the other was to use an eyewitness
account of a battlefi eld, such as Ulysses S. Grant’s harrowing descrip-
tion of Shiloh: “I saw an open fi eld, in our possession on the second day,
over which the Confederates had made repeated charges the day before,
so covered with dead that it would have been pos si ble to walk across
the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot
touching the ground.”4 Coupled with such a battlefi eld description came
the mind- numbing numbers: approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the
war, roughly equal to all the deaths in all other American wars combined.
As a percentage of the population, this fi gure approached 2 percent,
which if applied to today’s population would equal approximately six to
seven million dead. Such a vast sum was hard to comprehend and served
the purpose of making the point that the sacrifi ce of the Civil War gen-
eration was enormous.
However, as I continued to read the diaries and letters of antebel-
lum Americans that were saturated with sickness, suffering, and death,
I began to won der about how the death rates they faced would compare
with those experienced in the Civil War. The more I looked into this topic,
the more I came to believe that the story of the Civil War as usually told
did not represent the experience of those who lived through it. Mortality
statistics from the fi rst half of the nineteenth century are not complete,
but those that we do have confi rm the picture I found in my sources:
Americans died at rates and in patterns that were profoundly dif fer ent
from those experienced in twenty- fi rst- century Amer i ca. Compared to
today, they frequently died at birth ( mothers and children), in youth, and
in the prime of life. Given these circumstances, it seemed logical that,
rather than trying to draw analogies by calculating what a similar death
rate would look like in our own time, the deaths in the Civil War should
be put into their con temporary context. In essence, I began to ask, for
those living at the time, was 620,000 (or the newer estimate of 750,000)
a big number?
What resulted from asking this question was an essay draft that es-
sentially answered “no.” The death rates before the war and the truly
overwhelming anecdotal evidence from diaries and letters made it clear
that the additional deaths in the Civil War could be seen as part of a regu-
lar pattern of high and highly variable loss. However, early commenters
on my essay had two issues with my account. First, claims about uni-
versal high death rates seemed to suggest that life was cheap at the time,
a point that was directly contradicted by Faust’s and Schantz’s books
(and any number of other sources). And, second, the essay failed to rec-
J19
Nicholas Marshall · The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War 217
ognize that, often in history, as in our own times, the size of the num-
bers regarding death are not the key issue; rather, the big question is not
how many died but what meaning we associate with the deaths. After
all, one could cite any number of instances when relatively few deaths
had enormous consequences and signifi cance. In response to these con-
cerns, I worked to make sense of the larger picture, using both quantita-
tive and qualitative sources. The point about a presumed unfeeling
populace hardened to death was easily put aside by showing how ante-
bellum and Civil War– era Americans expressed deep and heartfelt loss
when their loved ones died. The point about the insignifi cance of num-
bers in and of themselves was a bit trickier, for it was not an entirely fair
critique. Because so many historians refl exively cited death statistics
alone to make a case for the signifi cance of the war, I had to do the same
thing in order to combat the argument. So, yes, on one level, I had to
speak about relative numbers by themselves, but at the same time, I was
careful to discuss the perceptions of those who lived during the period
and the meanings they ascribed to the deaths. At no time did I claim or
believe that deaths were insignifi cant on either the personal or national
level. I simply argued that there was much continuity throughout the
period, and that the antebellum experience of death in terms of both scale
and meaning looked very similar to the war time experience. In the end,
I think the evidence supports my original point and serves to undercut
rote citation of misleading numbers that have been used to support
claims for a dramatic shift in the demographic facts of life or the cul-
ture of death. Yet the response to what I thought was a reasonable and
relatively uncontroversial attempt at perspective was overwhelmingly
negative, including two outright rejections from journal editors.
Not yet suspecting any larger issue, I reworked my piece to include
David Hacker’s recent article on death totals and the just- published book
by Frances Clarke (War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifi ce in the Civil
War North) that skillfully analyzed the way ordinary Americans pro-
cessed the war.5 In the meantime, I saw that Drew Faust’s book had
been made into a fi lm that was shown on PBS’s American Experience.6
The introduction to the fi lm included this statement: “With the coming
of the Civil War— the fi rst modern war, the fi rst mass war of the modern
age— death would enter the experience of the American people, and
the body politic of the American nation, as it never had before, on a scale
and in a manner no one had ever imagined pos si ble, and under circum-
stances for which the nation would prove completely unprepared.” Now
suspecting that I was up against something much bigger than I had
218 Civil War Sufferings
J19
originally thought, I nevertheless soldiered on, sending the essay to a
third journal (Journal of the Civil War Era), and received an enthusi-
astic response. The essay was eventually published after receiving
positive reviews from all three referees,7 yet I continued to won der
about the diametrically opposed reactions of the editors of the three
journals. This issue came up again soon thereafter when I presented the
essay as a paper at a conference. In the comment period, I was immedi-
ately confronted with questions like “Are you saying that those were
meaningless deaths?” Only a small minority appreciated the paper for
providing a new perspective.
I should have expected something similar when a short form of the
essay appeared in the New York Times Disunion Blog.8 The reaction
from the readers was generally outraged. One respondent simply said,
“So the Civil War wasn’t that bad. What a relief! Kudos to young histori-
ans seeking distinction by rehashing statistics.” Another chimed in with
“Me thinks Professor Marshall protests too much— engaging in sophistry
that demeans the real, terrible costs of the Civil War.” I took solace in
the few readers who told some of these folks that they had not under-
stood my point about context, but the responses reveal a power ful in-
ability to separate an attempt to comprehend death in a larger sense from
a perceived attack on the importance of the war or the sacrifi ce of the
soldiers involved.
I began to think that it might be diffi cult for some to comprehend
that Civil War– era Americans could have suffered emotionally at the
deaths of loved ones and at the same time recognized the dying as, in
some sense, an ordinary part of life. That the massive loss of life in the
antebellum period (and the cultural responses) represented an uncivil
demographic war that accustomed (note that I do not use “inured”
here— there is an impor tant distinction) nineteenth- century Americans
to loss. As I wrote in my essay: “The antebellum evidence shows that
within a sentimentalized culture death was indeed an impor tant and pro-
foundly disturbing event. Deaths in the war were also viewed in this
way, and the trauma associated with them was real, heartfelt, and an
added burden. The demographic picture that spans the war years, how-
ever, makes clear that it is unconvincing to claim signifi cance or mean-
ing based on the perception that the magnitude of death in the war
necessarily forced Americans to re- assess the implications of the car-
nage” (“ Great Exaggeration,” 12).
In the end, I think something is going on in the fi eld and in popu lar
culture that bears notice. The suffering in the war and the larger signifi –
J19
Nicholas Marshall · The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War 219
cance of the era have become intertwined to the point that the Civil War
has achieved some kind of exalted status, and many believe that it should
not be challenged. We had hints of the prob lem when Mark Neely pub-
lished his book on the relative destructiveness of the war in 2007 (The
Civil War and the Limits of Destruction) and was taken to task by a
number of reviewers, including James McPherson in the New York Re-
view of Books.9 By comparing the vio lence of the Civil War to the Mexican
War, the Indian Wars, and other mid- nineteenth- century confl icts, Neely
made a strong argument for the relative restraint practiced during the
fi ghting between Union and Confederacy. Criticisms of the book too of-
ten took the form of pointing out specifi c instances of brutality in the
Civil War rather than recognizing that Neely was arguing about the big
picture. Since Neely’s book appeared, I would argue that the trend he
criticized, of sensationalizing the war and putting it in “some unfathom-
ably violent category by itself” (Limits of Destruction, 213) has contin-
ued unabated and has been amplifi ed by Faust’s book and the subsequent
documentary based on her work. As Andrew Delbanco noted in a recent
review, there has been a “surge of books that belong to what might be
called the school of gore— exemplifi ed most recently by Mark M. Smith’s
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil
War— books that almost seem to savor the range of ways in which living
bodies were converted into corpses by fi re or disease, in mud or in bed,
quickly enough to block awareness of death’s arrival, or slowly enough to
taunt the dying with false promises of reprieve.”10 The cele bration sur-
rounding the publication of David Hacker’s carefully wrought demo-
graphic article suggests that the fascination with numbers (and their use
by themselves to clinch an argument) also shows no sign of dying out. In
fact, James McPherson used the occasion to continue his attack on Neely,
noting in Civil War History that “such a fi gure calls into question Mark
Neely’s assertion that the Civil War was ‘remarkable for its traditional
restraint.’ The Civil War did indeed result in more American soldier
deaths than all the other wars this country has fought combined.”11 At the
same time, the editors of Civil War History said that Hacker’s recalcula-
tion of the number who died in the war “stands among the most conse-
quential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages”; shortly thereafter,
Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times, stated that the article “further
elevates the signifi cance of the Civil War and makes a dramatic statement
about how the war is a central moment in American history.”12
More evidence that the trends are continuing may be found in a re-
cent issue of Civil War History. In it, David Hacker offers a review of
220 Civil War Sufferings
J19
my essay, in part taking issue with my efforts to avoid comparisons to
the pres ent, and concludes by calling the Civil War “the greatest demo-
graphic shock in our nation’s history.”13 It might make for an in ter est ing
conversation to debate whether the Civil War was truly the greatest de-
mographic shock: perhaps the blow to Native Americans was greater;
perhaps the 600,000 who died in a few months from fl u in 1918–1919 was
greater, but this misses the main point: how did Americans at the time
understand their circumstances?
Hacker’s review, however, raises the question of why historians
and those interested in history are so sensitive about the war’s place in
history. Why does any suggestion that some part of it was something
other than catastrophic or overwhelming incite such quick and seemingly
visceral response? In dif fer ent contexts, Drew Faust and Mark Neely have
put their fi n gers on part of the issue. Years ago, in explaining the boom
in Civil War studies, Faust commented on the attractions of the war for
those looking back: “The Civil War offers an authenticity and intensity
of experience that can rivet both researcher and reader; the war serves
as a moment of truth, a moment when individuals—be they soldiers or
civilians— have to defi ne their deeply held priorities and act on them.
War is a crucible that produces unsurpassed revelations about the es-
sence of historical actors and their worlds.”14 I would add that the middle
of the nineteenth century offers a perfect blend of a dif fer ent world and
a recognizable one, a bit of mystery and romance folded into characters
and actions that we are still able to identify with. Though foreign,
they are not so foreign as to be unknowable, and we have excellent
documentation of their thoughts and feelings. Mark Neely, on the other
hand, spoke to why historians tend to emphasize the war’s brutality:
“unequaled bloodiness has become a way for those of us who write on
the war to impress our readers with the importance of our subject”
and “bloodiness has abetted the idea of the importance of courage and
dedication to public causes in the individual Civil War soldier. It is
impor tant, also, for demonstrating objectivity; it has the further ad-
vantage of not making invidious distinctions between the Union and
Confederate causes” (Limits of Destruction, 210, 211).
My experience supports Neely’s analy sis but also extends it. By chal-
lenging the statistical case for the importance and destructiveness
of the war, I now realize, I have been stepping on a hallowed piece of evi-
dence that is connected to a hallowed interpretation. On the one hand,
the attempt to rethink how death may have been understood in the past
has run into two of twenty- fi rst- century American culture’s primary, re-
J19
Nicholas Marshall · The Sacrosanct Statistics of the Civil War 221
lated associations with death. The fi rst is that death before old age is
deeply, fundamentally tragic. The second is that death while in military
ser vice should be viewed as noble sacrifi ce no matter the context. Given
these two power ful interpretive perspectives, it is hard to imagine that
Civil War– era Americans could have seen death in the war as closer to
ordinary and understandable. On the other hand, these numbers, in
shorthand form, seem to represent the monumental importance of the
only all- American war. They have a purity, simplicity, and cogency that
is very, very diffi cult to give up: great sacrifi ce, suffering, and courage
all wrapped up in a shining bundle. It may be time, however, to look else-
where to encapsulate the elemental transformations— the major dis-
continuities with the past— that reveal the signifi cance of the war. One
possibility would be to focus on fi gures related to the death of slavery
rather than the death of soldiers: At the beginning of 1861, there were
about four million American slaves. By the end of 1865, there were none.
Notes
1. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New
York: Knopf, 2008); Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and Amer-
i ca’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Subsequent references to
both are made parenthetically in the text.
2. Journal of Social History 43 (Spring 2010): 742.
3. James M. McPherson, “Dark Victories,” New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008.
4. Ulysses Simpson Grant, Personal Memoirs, ed. Caleb Carr (New York: Modern Library,
1999), 97.
5. J. David Hacker, “A Census- Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57
(December 2011): 307–48; Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifi ce in the Civil
War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
6. “Death and the Civil War,” American Experience, PBS, September 18, 2012.
7. Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War,” Journal of the
Civil War Era 4 (March 2014): 3–25. Subsequent references are made parenthetically in the text.
8. Nicholas Marshall, “The Civil War Death Toll, Reconsidered,” New York Times Disunion
Blog, April 15, 2014.
9. Mark E. Neely Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007); subsequent references are made parenthetically in the text. James M.
McPherson, “Was It More Restrained than You Think?” New York Review of Books, February 14,
2008.
10. Andrew Delbanco, “The Civil War Convulsion,” New York Review of Books, March 19,
2015.
11. Civil War History 57 (December 2011): 310, 307.
12. New York Times, April 2, 2012.
13. J. David Hacker, “Has the Demographic Impact of Civil War Deaths Been Exaggerated?,”
Civil War History 60 (December 2014): 458.
14. Drew Gilpin Faust, “ ‘We Should Grow Too Fond of It’: Why We Love the Civil War,” Civil
War History 50 (December 2004): 377.
The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War
Nicholas Marshall
The Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 4, Number 1, March 2014,
pp. 3-27 (Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press
DOI: 10.1353/cwe.2014.0010
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Sydney Library (18 Feb 2014 15:40 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwe/summary/v004/4.1.marshall.html
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3
n ic holas marshall
The Great Exaggeration Death and the Civil War
What did the Civil War death tolls mean to those who lived through the
war? We are now told that wartime deaths were unprecedented, over-
whelming, and constituted one of the fundamental experiences for the
wartime generation. But is this really true? In recent years, statistical
descriptions have been used by historians—including such renowned
scholars as James McPherson, Eric Foner, and Drew Gilpin Faust but also
celebrated fi lmmakers Ken and Rik Burns, among many—to drive home a
characterization of the war based on the scale of death. They may be found
across the range of media regarding the war, in fi lms, museums, popu-
lar histories, scholarly treatises, and lectures. One such statistic is that the
number of soldiers’ deaths in the Civil War was greater than the total num-
ber suff ered in all other American wars combined. A second point makes
use of the fi rst fi gure: if one calculates the proportion of the total popu-
lation that died while in military service during the war and applies this
percentage to present-day population fi gures, the equivalent number of
deaths for Americans in the twenty-fi rst century would reach above 7 mil-
lion. This is a staggering fi gure that suggests that the Civil War generation
made almost inconceivable sacrifi ces.1
We are shocked at these numbers, however, because we interpret them
from a modern point of view. The present essay argues that while factually
correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the war’s impact. At its essence,
the use of these statistics is designed to provide perspective, a laudatory
goal. It is supposed to allow those of us looking back on the war to get a
clear sense of the emotional texture of the time. The great problem in this
instance, however, is that it violates one of the central codes of historical
analysis—that of avoiding presentism. Instead of putting us in the minds of
those who experienced the Civil War, it conjures up signifi cance by facilely
equating wildly disparate eras. In addition, implicit in the use of the overall
casualty fi gure is the notion that size matters—that is, that in certain cir-
cumstances, the volume of death itself is enough to make an argument for
4 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
the signifi cance of an event, or to make a case that a social equilibrium has
been disturbed. However, to be convincing, this mode of argument has to
establish that the scale has indeed changed dramatically for those experi-
encing it; historians should not simply extrapolate meaning from the pres-
ent back into the past. To question the “size matters” argument, one must
at least temporarily accept the notion that comparative statistics of death
are meaningful, but only in the context of appropriate comparisons. In the
bigger picture, however, it is not enough simply to speak about numbers.
To understand how deaths aff ect a culture, it is essential to examine the
meaning ascribed to them beyond the statistics. In one way, this is obvi-
ous: compared with the tens of thousands of traffi c deaths per year in the
United States, for example, the relatively small number of people killed
on September 11, 2001, had an enormous impact, infl uencing the nation’s
psyche, and, ultimately, domestic and international politics and culture. To
be convincing when making a point about death, therefore, we must fi nd
evidence for the transformative power of the meaning of military mortal-
ity, and place any statistics in their contemporary context, before making
claims about signifi cance.2
In the case of the Civil War, historians have not adequately taken into
account the context of death and dying. Solid scholarly work exists on the
central importance of death in antebellum America and the ordinary expe-
rience of death during the war, but Civil War historians have tended to
sidestep this in order to claim the war years as exceptional. They have also
underplayed the signifi cance of the demographic realities Americans faced
before, during, and after the war. These reveal a society constantly coping
with large-scale mortality.
If we start to take more seriously the antebellum circumstances, we can
reexamine the statistical realities of Civil War deaths and put them into
a more reasonable perspective. First, what was the demographic reality
before the war for those Americans who would later experience the carnage
associated with shells and bullets? In other words, how would they have
viewed the statistics of death that we fi nd so monumental? A much higher
percentage of the population died each year than does today, though the
numbers varied dramatically by region and period. Figures available from
Massachusetts, which began collecting statistics in the 1840s, point to a
nineteenth-century death rate that hovered between 1.7 and 2.3 percent.
In New York City, however, estimates are higher, mostly between 2 and 3
percent but with spikes close to 5 percent. In Chicago, from 1847 to 1864,
the rate radically changed from year to year, with lows around 2 percent
and highs above 6 percent. The modern rate is a relatively constant num-
ber, now below 0.8 percent. Thus, in the nineteenth century the average
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 5
person regularly saw two to three times (and sometimes upwards of six to
seven times) as many people die per year than we do today. The drop in
mortality in the last 130 years or so can be attributed to, fi rst, public health
measures such as clean water delivery systems and more eff ective sewage
removal, and second, twentieth-century advances in medicine based on
understandings of germ theory and the development of treatments such
as antibiotics. For Civil War–era Americans, however, there was a constant
presence of infectious and endemic diseases that no longer trouble us sig-
nifi cantly in the United States: tuberculosis, typhoid, typhus, dysentery,
malaria, even cholera. Thus, we must recognize that people of the period
in question were much more familiar with death and dying, and that they
recognized that life was fragile.3
The second important demographic point about the antebellum expe-
rience with death is that the high numbers were distributed much more
evenly among the population. That is, the chances of dying young were
much greater then than today. The simplest statistical measure of this
phenomenon is life expectancy (measured in years), which was only in the
upper thirties or lower forties in the antebellum years. Today the fi gure is
up to the high seventies. While this tells us that, on average, people died
much younger, it also includes high infant mortality rates that might be
interpreted to skew the numbers, and the grossness of the number perhaps
serves to minimize some important elements of the demographic picture.
One way to see more clearly the eff ects across a lifetime is to use life tables,
which state the probability of reaching certain ages for the cohort born in
a specifi c year. For twenty-fi rst-century Americans, these fi gures show that
close to 99 percent of those born today will live to age twenty, 95 percent
to age forty-fi ve, and 83 percent to age sixty-fi ve. We can see this phenom-
enon another way when we examine the actual age at death. In the United
States in 2001, for example, 85 percent of the dead were at least fi fty-fi ve
years old, and 75 percent were sixty-fi ve and over. In terms of daily experi-
ence, this means that we understand death to happen when people are old,
when we often can say, “they lived a full life.” It has also led to the cultural
phenomenon of great tragedy associated with early death, articulated most
often by statements such as “one should never have to witness the death of
one’s own child.”4
For antebellum Americans, however, the life tables reveal an entirely
diff erent picture. In 1850 Americans had only a 77 percent chance of mak-
ing it to age one, 69 percent chance to age nine, 62 percent chance to age
twenty-four, and only 47 percent chance to age forty-nine. This meant that
a person would likely be cut down before reaching even the most conserva-
tive defi nition of “aged.” Almost a third would die as preadolescent children,
6 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
and another one-fi fth would die in the prime of life. David Hacker’s recent
careful statistical accounting of the Civil War–era dead confi rms this point.
He shows that for those living in the decade spanning 1850–60, the chance
of survival was extremely variable and often low. For example, males
between twenty and twenty-four could expect to lose 18 percent of their
cohort during the decade, while for females it was even worse (about 21
percent). Overall, these fi gures demonstrate that Civil War–era Americans
regularly lost family members at all ages and that they understood that the
hand of death could reach out for them at any moment.5
Evidence for the extraordinary importance of affl iction in the lives of
antebellum Americans may be found in nearly any historical source from
the period. Newspapers almost always included both poems about the
death of loved ones and advertisements for nostrums claiming to cure a
variety of ailments. Health became an important focus of advice manuals,
and fi ction frequently used death and sickness as plot devices. In many
cases, private correspondence concerned matters of health to the exclu-
sion of most other topics. It is in diaries that regularly recorded signifi cant
events, however, that the full import of suff ering best reveals itself.
An examination of these personal writings of ordinary Americans in the
North highlights the affl ictions faced in the years leading up to the Civil
War. It demonstrates just how pervasive and powerful the problem was
for the great majority of the population. The diseases and accidents of the
period killed so frequently that families, neighbors, and friends lived in
constant fear that those close to them could be taken away at any moment.6
The diaries also suggest that the sentimentality of the period had a com-
plex relationship with the harsh reality of separation from loved ones. The
style of emotional response that became a standard mode within the liter-
ary culture of the mid-nineteenth century, and that has been mocked as
mawkish, in fact was often apparent in diaries not meant to be read by any-
one other than the diarist. This suggests that while reactions to separation
from loved ones could be expressed in ways determined by the dominant
culture, it does not necessarily mean that the emotions somehow lacked
authenticity. In other words, the frequent separations of the period before
the war caused heartfelt suff ering. Furthermore, it makes it clear that high
death rates do not necessarily result in desensitization to loss.7
The persistent presence of affl iction, even for those in the prime of life,
may be seen in the diary of a young woman named Cornelia Smith, writ-
ten from 1835 to 1843. The diary was unusual in its length and commit-
ment to full entries. Most diaries covered shorter periods, included large
gaps, or used briefer descriptive passages yet nearly all of them discussed
experiences with affl iction. This diary thus may be viewed as a fuller
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 7
representation of common life paths. Cornelia lived in Trumansburg, a
town on the western side of Cayuga Lake, about fi fteen miles from Ithaca,
New York, and spent most of her days helping in her parents’ household.
She also earned money as a schoolteacher in nearby district schools and
thus boarded with the parents of her students for many school terms.
In the fall of 1835, Cornelia witnessed a friend die of scarlet fever, saw
her mother severely injured in a wagon accident, discovered that her sister-
in-law was very sick with consumption, and endured days of extreme pain
from a toothache. Early in 1836, she went to live with her brother John and
helped tend to Anna, his dying wife. At one point, Cornelia encouraged
herself to let the “sickness” of her “sister” “be a warning to . . . prepare for
Death.” Another brother brought his family to visit, and all the children
had contracted whooping cough. As Anna continued to fade, Cornelia also
suff ered through some illness. On February 12 she was unable to sit up all
day, due to a pain in her side. Five days later, Anna seemed to be on the
verge of death. Cornelia commented that it was “hard to see own friends
sick and dying and know that one must soon bid them a fi nal adieu but
why wish them to stay in this world of trouble, and trials.” Furthermore,
she wrote, if her own grace was true, then she would “soon meet them in a
better world where there will be no partings.”8
The late winter and spring included more trials. Anna managed to hold
on to life into late February. Cornelia kept watch over her throughout the
fi nal weeks of sickness, often commenting in her diary on Anna’s condi-
tion. One evening she noted that Anna looked “frightful,” “restless and
uneasy.” The ordeal meant very little sleep for Cornelia, and she began to
feel “worn out.” On February 20, Anna fi nally died “in great distress,” and
Cornelia struggled to accept that all the suff ering and pain of separation
were part of God’s plan. “Blessed be the name of the Lord—O that this
may be the language of my heart,” she wrote after Anna’s funeral. Several
months later, Cornelia went off to teach school, just after two neighbors,
Charlotte Dunham and Henry Lewis, died. “Death is every day calling
some one and why am I spared?” she wrote. On the Fourth of July, she
remembered that one year before she had been in the company of one who
was now dead, and wondered if by the same time next year she would be
numbered among the dead as well.9
August brought Cornelia more bad news. Her brother Henry wrote a
letter informing the family that his wife had died. He was sending his two
small children to live at the old homestead. For her part, Cornelia hoped
the death would lead Henry to a closer relationship with God. One of
Henry’s children died on the trip to the grandparents’ home, and, after
dropping the other off , Henry left for Michigan. That fall and winter,
8 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
Cornelia continued to note the deaths of acquaintances and nearly always
remarked on the need for preparation and the fact that she had again been
spared.10
The next two years brought little relief. Cornelia’s brother John remar-
ried early in 1837, but his new wife, Delia, soon fell sick. After visiting the
house, Cornelia wrote, “it makes me feel very solemn to go there so soon
and see another sister sick and languishing.” During the summer, she
recorded another series of deaths, including a nearby boating accident that
took several lives. In November, on a Saturday, Cornelia wrote, “another
week has winged its rapid fl ight away and I am still numbered with the
living.” In February, a close friend died, and Cornelia helped prepare the
corpse. “Time after time I am admonished by death be ye also ready,”
she wrote that evening. Just two months later, brother John’s wife Delia
died suddenly after giving birth. The day of the funeral, Cornelia received
“unexpected and solemn news” in a letter that informed the family of the
death of “Caroline H.” “We see the old, the middle age, and the young called
away by death,” Cornelia wrote.11
Cornelia contracted scarlet fever early in 1841 but made a recovery. In
late January, disease struck again John’s house. John and six of his chil-
dren became ill, and two children soon died. Cornelia described the scene
in her diary, “While some were in one room taking care of the sick others
were in another paying their last respects to the dead. Oh such scenes, it
seemed that I could not endure them, the Lord only can support.” At the
funeral for young Phebe, Cornelia was overwhelmed: it was “too much for
me to bear up under,” she wrote, “and I had to be carried and laid on the
bed. I was completely overcome.” She then began to suff er from illness and
returned to her parents’ home. John and his children, wanting to distance
themselves from the home in which so many had already died, moved into
the old family home as well. A few weeks later, however, another of John’s
children, Charles, died in much agony. “The Lord has taken him to himself
where pain and sickness will trouble him no more,” said Cornelia, “and I
would be reconciled and say the will of God be done.”12
During the rest of this year, Cornelia made several entries in her diary
that linked her experience with affl iction to her understanding of religion.
In April, after reading her deceased niece’s journal, Cornelia found it hard
to believe that she would never enjoy the young girl’s company again on
earth. She took comfort though in the knowledge that, in her words, “if I
am ever so happy as to join the redeemed in heaven there I hope to meet
her and all my christian friends never more to be separated. O blessed
thought.” A few months later, when she herself was “affl icted with sickness
and pain,” Cornelia tried to put it in perspective. She asked, “from whence
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 9
cometh affl iction?”—and answered, “Are they not sent by a kind parent
who does it for our good?” She concluded, “then let me profi t by them, may
they serve to make me more humble, more prayerful, more watchful and
to live more prepared for death.”13
Here, Cornelia has clearly stated the religious reasoning that informed
the lives of many as they carried on through days burdened by affl iction.
The suff ering had a divine purpose; it was instruction in how to live, com-
mitted to God and prepared to die. The vision of heaven served to amelio-
rate the suff ering, showing that pain was only temporary and that God had
provided an eternal rest for those who paid attention to instructions. Thus,
if one could be assured of saving grace, a bright future lay ahead, despite
the present burdens of worldly existence. Furthermore, almost invariably,
heaven was described as a place “where parting is no more”: the end of
physical pain would be accompanied by a greater benefi t, the end of physi-
cal separation from loved ones.
Diaries like Cornelia Smith’s thus help us to understand both how per-
vasive affl iction was and its importance in shaping the way antebellum
Americans viewed their position in the religious world. Still, the intense
frequency of death and separation in Cornelia’s diary becomes monoto-
nous and thus seems like an unusual example. Could one argue that her
case was not representative? Looking at the broad spectrum of diaries
in the period demonstrates why we should think otherwise. In many in-
stances, the frequency of sickness and death was so great that diarists
resorted to close record-keeping of the events, thus providing a quantita-
tive demonstration of demographic conditions in the countryside. Some
diarists kept lists of the deaths in their neighborhood or simply noted the
names of the dead in their journals on the day they heard the news or
attended the funeral. That many people recorded this information off ers
a clue to its signifi cance, and some elementary tallies make plain that a
health crisis had indeed hit the countryside. In addition, these relatively
impassive measures of affl iction were not mediated through the language
of sentimentality that was increasingly part of the culture. In other words,
the problem of separation was a pressing corporeal issue for nearly all
Americans, and they understood it partially through a depressing set of
statistics of their own making.
As with Cornelia Smith’s, the deaths reported in diaries covered a
great span of ages. In New York’s Steuben County, the Rice family kept an
account book to track their expenditures, debts, and credits. At the back
of the book, someone added another list, “Deaths in the Neighborhood.”
According to the list, eighteen neighbors died in 1845. The 1853 account-
ing also included the ages of the nineteen deceased, ranging from one to
1 0 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
ninety-two, with the average age at death being just over thirty-fi ve. Ten
of the nineteen died between the ages of sixteen and twenty-seven. To the
east of Steuben, in Madison County, David Darrow noted the deaths of
twenty-six acquaintances in the sixteen months between October 1851 and
March 1853.14
Thayer Gauss’s brief diary reinforces the impression that death came
often and early. In the six weeks following January 12, 1847, Gauss recorded
six deaths in the neighborhood, including Dr. Hall, a well-respected phy-
sician cut down in the “prime of life” before age forty. At least three of
the fi ve other dead listed here, like Hall, had not yet reached forty years
of age. In the next few days, Gauss reported on the sicknesses within his
own family, his own severe headache, and the illness that laid up his wife
and daughter for two weeks. “But when so many are dangerously ill and
death is in our midst,” he wrote, “and so many are falling on my right hand
and on my left I have great reason to be thankful that my health and the
health of my family is as good as it is.” Gauss seemed to be taking pleasure
in small victories.15
When considering the eff ects of the Civil War, it is vitally important to
recognize the vast volume of death faced by antebellum Americans, but one
must also understand the cultural web of death that enveloped Americans
by the mid-nineteenth century. Here, a look at Mark Schantz’s book,
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of
Death, is extremely illuminating. Here is the fi rst line: “Living under the
shadow of postmodernity, where all historical ‘facts’ are dimly perceived,
at least one reality appears horribly luminous: that 620,000 men lost their
lives in the American Civil War.” Like many historians, Schantz accepts
that the war produced what he calls a “stunning level of carnage,” yet his
goal is to show how circumstances before the war, in some sense, trained
Americans to understand and cope with the exceptional level of loss they
were to experience in the 1860s.16
In the main, Schantz does this through a comprehensive analysis of
antebellum culture. He fi nds that death was at the center of antebellum
life. Whether examining art, fi ction, poetry, sermons, personal writings, or
any other cultural form, Schantz argues that the “fundamental confronta-
tion with death” was “one of the most pervasive concerns of the antebellum
era”; that “nineteenth-century America was a death-embracing culture”;
that death was “the major story” for nineteenth-century Americans; and
that “the very pervasiveness of death in antebellum America trained up
an entire generation to see it not as something to be avoided, but as the
inevitable destiny of humanity.” Schantz notes that everyone in the period
recognized how frequently death visited American homes, though he does
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 1 1
so using mainly qualitative rather than quantitative evidence. In the end,
however, his purpose is to show that, whatever the specifi c demographic
circumstances, by 1860 Americans had a clear cultural matrix that allowed
them to process the violence of the Civil War, that it “made it easier to kill
and to be killed”:
They understood that death awaited all who were born and prized the
ability to face death with a spirit of calm resignation. They believed that
a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the
grave. They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished
forever by posterity. They grasped that death itself might be seen as
artistically fascinating and even beautiful. They saw how notions of
full citizenship were predicated on the willingness of men to lay down
their lives. And they produced works of art that captured the moment
of death in highly idealistic ways. Americans thus approached the Civil
War carrying a cluster of assumptions about death that, I will suggest,
facilitated its unprecedented destructiveness.
Previous work by other historians support Schantz’s fi ndings about the
pervasiveness of death in the antebellum culture, but his application of
them in this form to the problem of Civil War deaths is new, exciting, and
represents a direct challenge to the standard thesis that the dying in the
Civil War was understood as a wholly new phenomenon. Americans were
not facing appalling new levels of loss without a cultural leg to stand on.
Instead, they folded the experience into a well-developed, shared perspec-
tive. This would suggest that if historians fi nd a culture intimately linked to
death during the Civil War, then they should consider viewing it as a con-
tinuation of older forms rather than something entirely novel. In addition,
of signifi cant importance here is that heroic deaths for a great cause could
be recognized as more purposeful than, say, dying at home from typhoid.17
Given the grim reality for antebellum Americans and the continu-
ation of such circumstances into the war, let us now examine the com-
monly cited fi gures that purport to show the bloodiness of the Civil War.
At the top of the list is the seemingly huge total representing casualties
of war. David Hacker has recently reexamined the question of how many
actually perished in the war, and he estimates that the overall numbers
are even greater than previously believed. For the purposes of the pres-
ent comparison, I will use both the old fi gure, 620,000, and Hacker’s new
estimate, 750,000. Whichever is used, the number dwarfs the losses in
all other American confl icts, yet we must view this from the nineteenth-
century perspective to understand its importance in its own time. If one
divides the number by four to get a crude average of the number of deaths
1 2 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
in the military during each year of the confl ict, we fi nd that from 155,000
to187,500 deaths accrued per annum. This fi gure, however, has little mean-
ing unless we know how many people regularly died in this era. Working
from the available statistics on death rates, we may estimate the total num-
ber of deaths in 1860. A 2 percent death rate would have meant about
629,000 deaths, while a 3 percent rate would have resulted in 943,000
deaths. If we take the higher estimated death total for the war and use
the lowest prewar estimated death rate, the additional deaths would rep-
resent a 29.8 percent increase in total deaths, a substantial amount, no
doubt, but not overwhelming (and if using the 3 percent death rate for
1860 and the lower fi gure of 155,000 additional deaths, the percentage
increase would be just sixteen). If we look at estimated death rates for the
period that include antebellum, bellum, and postbellum periods, we notice
that these Civil War variations had contemporary parallels. In Historical
Statistics of the United States, estimated death rates for Massachusetts are
supplied for every year after 1855. In this broader context, death in the Civil
War is more a variation on a theme than a fundamental change in key or
tenor. The fi gures show that the death rate varied dramatically year to year.
The largest single change in the nineteenth century (including the Civil
War years) occurred between 1871 and 1872, a 22 percent increase. If one
uses the fi gures for Chicago between 1847 and 1864, however, the great-
est change in the death rate between single years was an astounding 296
percent. Nothing close to this level of variation occurs today, and the Civil
War additions (the yearly increase of between sixteen and thirty) would
not appear obviously anomalous to those living through the period.18
David Hacker’s work confi rms this point. For some of the cohorts that
he estimated, the survival rates before the war, from 1850 to 1860, were
either eerily similar to or, amazingly, even worse than those during the
Civil War. For example, Hacker’s tables identify male survival rates for the
age cohort twenty to twenty-four as 82 percent for the decade 1850–60,
72 percent for the war decade, and 89 percent for 1870–80. For females
in these same three decades at the same ages, the survival rates are 79,
76, and 82 percent. What does this tell us about the chances of dying? For
both men and women, whether in the war or not, the probability of dying
ranged from approximately 1 in 5 to 1 in 4. Furthermore, the fi gures for
other cohorts show that women in the twenty to twenty-four age range
during the war years had a lower survival rate than all other male cohorts
who fought in the war!
Thus, the demographic picture of life in the mid-nineteenth century
based on quantitative sources confi rms the experiences revealed in diary
sources. Together, these show that Civil War–era Americans, such as
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 1 3
Cornelia Smith, would not have seen the scope of the dying associated with
the war as a new, nearly unthinkable slaughter. Before, during, and after
the war, the world as they knew it included suff ering and death in similar
large measures. The losses in the war were not large enough to be viewed
as unprecedented because they fi t within the broader nineteenth-century
pattern of mortality. This is not to say that deaths in the war were not emo-
tionally wrenching or that they did not raise any number of new issues for
Americans. The antebellum evidence shows that within a sentimentalized
culture death was indeed an important and profoundly disturbing event.
Deaths in the war were also viewed in this way, and the trauma associated
with them was real, heartfelt, and an added burden. The demographic pic-
ture that spans the war years, however, makes clear that it is unconvincing
to claim signifi cance or meaning based on the perception that the magni-
tude of war deaths necessarily forced Americans to reassess the implica-
tions of the carnage.
If the overall death rates did not represent a wholly new experience for
Americans of the time, can something similar be said about the analogies
historians make to twenty-fi rst-century society? Specifi cally, we should be
careful when noting that if we calculate the percentage of Americans that
died in the Civil War (above 2 percent), and apply it to our current popu-
lation, our equivalent experience today would be the loss of from 6 to 7.2
million. While factually correct, this is misleading, because it ignores con-
text. Death rates today are about eight-tenths of a percent (that is, approxi-
mately eight of every thousand Americans die each year). For a population
of 300 million, this means that about 2.4 million die every twelve months.
The 6 to 7.2 million fi gure, therefore, shocks us in part because of our own
very diff erent experience with death. If we divide it into four years as in the
Civil War, it becomes 1.5 to 1.8 million per annum. This would represent
an increase in the death rate experienced today of about 75 percent, a level
far beyond that of the Civil War era and demonstrating clearly that the
comparison is fl awed. Furthermore, as we know, nearly all who die today
are relatively old. These 1.5 to 1.8 million extra deaths, as we envision them
when this analogy is used, would occur in fi ghting-age men and women.
Again, the tragic element feels enormous. In a nation that usually sees only
about 36,000 deaths in this age group every year, the scope of loss would
indeed be monumental: forty-one to fi fty times as many young men and
women would die in each of four years, a rate several orders of magnitude
above what Civil War–era Americans experienced. Thus, the simple statis-
tic, while informative on one level, serves to obfuscate the historical experi-
ence. Put another way, the modern analogy does not help situate us in the
minds of those who lived through the Civil War.19
1 4 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
At this point, it is vitally important to add to discussion of the casualty
fi gures that approximately two-thirds of the deaths of soldiers in the war
came from disease rather than the battlefi eld. Looking back from today,
these numbers are diffi cult to fathom, and the image they conjure is of
horrendously unsanitary conditions in military camps. These deaths seem
as much a product of war as those that resulted from wounds: soldiers in
camp were there to fi ght the war, and they died because the conditions
were necessary to conduct fi eld operations with a massive army. But this is
also a present-minded understanding of the circumstances; it ignores the
epic antebellum confrontation with disease.
The records and experience of the U.S. Sanitary Commission shed light
on the way Americans understood the circumstances facing soldiers in the
camps. Leaders of the commission recognized the problems and possibili-
ties of forging a healthy army. The key moment in enlightened understand-
ing of these issues came with the British involvement in the Crimean War,
and Florence Nightingale’s eff ective work in reducing the incidence of dis-
ease. High levels of mortality, sometimes reaching 60 percent, convinced
the British to engage in ameliorative actions, including “fresh air, suitable
food and clothing, cleanliness of person and quarters, and well-regulated
habits.” By these means, death rates were reduced, it was claimed, to close
to 1 percent. For the Americans, the army’s experience in the Mexican War
off ered a similarly debilitating picture. The commission claimed that 15
percent of volunteers and 8 percent of regular troops died from disease
alone in that confl ict. In peacetime, at home, the rate was just under 3 per-
cent (not out of line with estimates for the general population).20
The commission’s stated goal was to both prevent disease and provide
relief and aid for those sick and wounded. It sought to advise the army
on how to create the most sanitary of camps and also to make available
to surgeons the most up-to-date information on treatments. In addition,
it created hospitals and delivered necessary supplies, such as fresh veg-
etables, clothes, and bandages, to the troops. The army, however, includ-
ing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, frequently resented and resisted the
commission’s eff orts, indicating on some level that disease was considered
part of the process of prosecuting a war. The resistance, however, was not
a universal phenomenon, according to the commission, as they reprinted
glowing testimonials from offi cers in the fi eld. While it is diffi cult to estab-
lish the eff ectiveness of the commission’s work (and of the thousands of vol-
unteers who gave money, supplies, and service), there is no doubt that lives
were saved and recoveries aided by their eff orts. In published materials, the
commission claimed to have helped to reduce the death rate by disease to
less than one-third that experienced in the Mexican War. It recognized the
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 1 5
scope of the losses involved in the Civil War while emphasizing the com-
mitment to continue the fi ght, noting that “every town and neighborhood
in the land has borne a share in this sacrifi ce, and the voice of mourning for
the fallen brave and loved ones has mingled with new vows of devotion to
the national cause in every community of the North.” Perspective, however,
was maintained by stating that “this has occurred in an army whose death-
rate from disease has been less than was ever before known in the annals
of great campaigns.” Thus, those who were best-informed on the issue, due
to their understanding of the contemporary circumstances, considered the
volume of death by disease in the Civil War to be a great victory rather than
a shocking level of loss.21
The Sanitary Commission was aware of some of the hazards posed by
unsanitary conditions in the camps, but many soldiers and civilians did
not view the camps as disease entities of an entirely diff erent stripe from
their own communities. They had very little knowledge of what caused
sickness; in fact, given the high death rates at home for people of all ages
(including those of military age)—and the role of contagious and endemic
diseases in these deaths—dying of disease in a camp must have seemed
distressingly normal. Instead of attributing these losses to the war, as we
now do, Americans of the nineteenth century in the midst of war would
most likely have counted them as the cost of living.
Let us now work from an assumption that deaths from disease were
not viewed as war casualties. Instead of 620,000 to 750,000 casualties,
we are left with 207,000 to 250,000. If we divide this estimate by the four
years of war, we have 51,750 to 62,500 battlefi eld deaths per year. Is this
a “harvest of death,” as Drew Gilpin Faust has emphasized? In one sense,
of course, it is (and no one should minimize the sacrifi ce and suff ering
in each case), but as an indicator of how enormous the losses of the Civil
War were, it falls short. Recall that in 1860, using the most conservative
estimate, approximately 629,000 Americans died, out of a population of
about 31 million. The additional battlefi eld deaths due to the war would
represent an increase of 8 to 10 percent, a fi gure that would not be out of
line with normal variations before and after the war. Furthermore, because
so many people died young in this era, the casualties would be interpreted
very diff erently than today. The same sense of loss twenty-fi rst-century
Americans associate with the relatively rare death of a young person was
not felt regarding Civil War–related deaths. Given this situation, let us also
reexamine the standard statistical analogy to the present regarding 6 to
7.2 million deaths, removing from consideration those who died from dis-
ease (after all, when we imagine soldiers dying today—which this analogy
purposely encourages—we do not envision a twenty-year-old perishing on
1 6 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
the ground, under a dirty blanket, from dysentery). In addition, instead of
using raw percentages that do not account for contemporary death rates,
let us employ as our measure of comparison variation from the norm of the
time. Should a new Civil War break out, in this case, instead of contemplat-
ing 6 to 7.2 million deaths today, we would notice an uptick to approxi-
mately 2.6 million deaths per year, from the normal 2.4 million (the 8 to
10 percent increase). While this calculation understates the scope of loss
in some way, it more clearly represents how Americans today would feel
the eff ects of increased dying that Civil War–era Americans encountered.22
State-level examples may help drive home this point. Ohio’s popula-
tion was over 2 million in 1860; that year, about 43,749 deaths occurred
in the state. Over the course of the war, approximately 11,588 men from
Ohio were killed in battle. In percentage terms per year, this would
mean an additional rise in the death rate of less than 7 percent. In 1860,
Massachusetts had a population of 1,231,057. That same year, approxi-
mately 23,021 people died in the state. The year before, when the death
rate was a bit lower, about 20,888 deaths occurred. The change in one year
represents a growth of about 10 percent (the death rate rose by 0.14 per-
cent). Changes of this magnitude were frequent, most likely due to varying
rates of contracting infectious diseases. Over the course of the war, a grand
total of 6115 residents of the state perished from battle wounds, represent-
ing approximately 1,529 deaths per year. Like Ohio, in percentage terms,
this would mean an increase of less than 7 percent per year over the prewar
standard in Massachusetts.23
The experience with epidemic sickness and death in other historical
moments should also remind us that Americans have been much more
blasé about death from sickness than they are today. Two examples should
suffi ce: smallpox during the American Revolution and infl uenza in 1918–
19. As Elizabeth Fenn has shown, between 1775 and 1782 the colonies and
new nation suff ered through a wide-ranging smallpox epidemic. While
the numbers are sketchy at best, many more Americans died from small-
pox than from wounds on the battlefi eld. Yet very few contemporaries, or
historians, saw fi t to anoint the killing disease as especially signifi cant or
worthy of analysis. The same is true of the global fl u epidemic at the end
of the World War I. As many as 100 million worldwide, and 600,000 in
the United States (roughly fi ve times the number of American casualties
in World War I and approximately equal to the total number of deaths
in the Civil War), perished over the course of just a few months in this
remarkably deadly episode. In addition, this was an unusual strain of
infl uenza that killed mainly the healthiest cohort of the population (those
in their twenties and thirties) through a violent immune response. If any
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 1 7
event should have triggered reevaluation of the nation’s approach to death
(based solely on changes in incidence and scale, as Civil War historians
often do), this would be it. Yet, one historian’s book on the subject is titled
America’s Forgotten Pandemic, and he spends a signifi cant portion of the
book trying to explain why the epidemic seemed to disappear from public
consciousness so soon after it waned. The answer, in part, must be that
Americans into the twentieth century viewed disease—and the death that
came with it—as a constant, as something that had to be dealt with as part
of everyday existence.24
Beyond a reevaluation of the statistics, diary evidence during the war
suggests that the antebellum circumstances regarding death continued in
similar patterns. Americans recognized that war-related deaths touched
many households, but, as in years past, they also noted the frequent deaths
due to sickness and accident that occurred. Nancy Emerson of Virginia,
like a great many nineteenth-century diarists, tried to sum up the year’s
events in late December. For 1862, she spoke of the deaths of three locals
in the war, Col. William Baylor and brothers James and John Gabert, all
killed at “the second battle of Manassas.” She then lists other deaths in the
neighborhood: L. Kerr of typhoid fever, and “little” Emily Baylor and David
B. (age twelve) of diphtheria. In the end, the three soldiers were among
the “fi fteen new graves” added to the community’s “graveyard this year.”
Celestia Lee was seventeen in 1863 and living on a farm in Iowa when
she started her account of important events. Her diary is noteworthy for
depicting a home life and social world (fi lled with discussions of “beaus”)
that was, to be sure, aff ected by the war, but not fundamentally changed.
Her experience with war-related death is relatively slight. In the main,
as those who recorded such things before the war, she notes the frequent
deaths in the neighborhood from diseases such as scarlet fever, consump-
tion, and “membrane croup.” These hit the young especially, including her
seven-year-old niece, Mary. A passage from May 1865 indicates the com-
mon mixing of considerations of death with more mundane aff airs: “Ma
has gone to O. W. Barkers Columbus died this morning with scarlet fever
his little sister was buried last week Monday & Mrs. Barker is real sick. O
Savior we thank thee for the health thou hast blest us with & may suffi cient
grace be given to those you have stricken. I got my hat it looks real nice.” A
few months later she summed up the local experience with the war: “Most
of the soldiers that went from around here are home now I think there
were over 30 from the Tp [township] went & only one killed J. Pierce
& two sickened & died & Colvill quite a number were wounded & some
severely but all at home now it seems so odd & they act so independent
too but guess we can match them.” Lee’s fi nal comment here refers to the
1 8 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
behavior of the young men who were now back in the local community and
the young women who mixed with them, demonstrating her continuing
interest in evaluating social relationships. Note too that Lee separated the
battlefi eld deaths from those soldiers who “sickened & died” in the war.25
In his study of diaries and letters in wartime Philadelphia, J. Matthew
Gallman fi nds a similar pattern. He describes distinct continuity of expe-
rience and cultural forms across the antebellum and Civil War periods,
including coping mechanisms for the separation from loved ones fi ght-
ing and dying in the war. While the loss was considerable for Americans,
Gallman notes that “they did have traditions to cling to to help them cope.
Departures at young adulthood were a familiar aspect of young men’s
experiences. The westward migration of the previous several decades had
accustomed many to long separations.” Death was also common in their
households, Gallman observes, but it usually occurred close to home. He
sees the effi cient mail system that linked Philadelphia to the troops as
one way family members and friends managed the separation. He sums
up: “The letters and diaries examined here suggest that Philadelphians
adjusted to these separations without fully recasting antebellum rela-
tionships.” Frances Clarke’s recent, penetrating book confi rms this per-
spective. In War Stories: Suff ering and Sacrifi ce in the Civil War North,
Clarke argues against the claims by historians—based mainly on the study
of unrepresentative major authors such as Ambrose Bierce—that the war
caused dramatic cultural change through the experience with death. “In
contrast,” she states, “those who study mainstream thought—refl ected in
the writings of common soldiers, lesser-known authors, and the mass of
ordinary civilians—suggest that no such abrupt cultural shift was evident
by war’s end.”26
Diaries and letters from the period, and Gallman’s book, also reveal
the frequency of drownings and accidental deaths from industrial acci-
dents and transportation mishaps. Horses bolted, axes missed their tar-
gets, boats capsized, and engines exploded, creating mayhem on a scale
unknown to modern-day Americans. In Philadelphia alone during the war
years, 1,753 people died in violent accidents, about one-half of the number
of Philadelphians who died on the battlefi eld during this time. Again, these
fi gures show that the contemporary environment created a familiarity with
early deaths both accidental and health-related.27
The Lincoln family experience confi rms this perspective. By the time
Abraham was assassinated in 1865, the nuclear family had already suff ered
two traumatic blows, the deaths of sons Willie and, much earlier, Eddie.
In eff ect, the family’s story represents a microcosm of the ratio of casual-
ties of war: two deaths at the hands of disease, and one from the barrel of
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 1 9
a gun. Confederate general James Longstreet’s experience during the war
reveals a similar sequence of events. He survived four long years of war,
though wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, but three of his
children (ages one, four, and six) were carried off together in an 1862 scar-
let fever epidemic, almost simultaneous with the death of Willie Lincoln.
These family stories can be used to remind us that the vast majority of
military deaths in the Civil War, those caused by disease, would not have
been interpreted as unusual or even, perhaps, as a casualty of war. The
chances of dying this way were very high before the war, and they remained
so during the war for all Americans. This is not to say that Americans were
so inured to death that they did not suff er when it occurred, as is obvious
from Cornelia Smith’s diary and the Lincolns’ responses to their children’s
deaths. Civil War–era Americans had developed close, emotional connec-
tions to loved ones, and the frequency of death did not serve to make peo-
ple callous. Instead, it intensifi ed the experience and produced a culture
that sought to fi nd understanding and solace.
We may thus recognize the ordinary, if still emotionally charged, expe-
rience of Abraham Lincoln as he faced losses in his family, but what of
his concerns regarding the steadily mounting losses in the army? His
public and private statements reveal that he could be very sympathetic,
even sentimental, when it came to individual circumstances, but he also
recognized the need to fi ght the war and that losses would necessarily
come with the battle. In a letter to the parents of Col. Elmer Ellsworth,
he assured them that “in the untimely loss of your noble son, our affl ic-
tion here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness
to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely
been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall.” He then briefl y pointed out the fi ne
elements of Ellsworth’s character before closing with: “May God give you
that consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in
a common affl iction.” However, when addressing the larger issues of death
and sacrifi ce, Lincoln could be sympathetic yet not overly concerned by
the situation. In his Annual Message to Congress in 1864, for example, he
noted “that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch
of national resources—that of living men. While it is melancholy to refl ect
that the war has fi lled so many graves, and carried mourning to so many
hearts, it is some relief to know that, compared with the surviving, the
fallen have been so few.” He then pointed out how the increasing number
of voters (all men, of course) in the last election meant that the population
continued to grow in the face of the death toll of the war. “It is not material
to inquire how the increase has been produced, or to show that it would
have been greater but for the war, which is probably true,” he said. In this
2 0 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
clear-eyed (some might say cold-hearted) tone, he emphasized that “the
important fact remains demonstrated, that we have more men now than
we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of
exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the
contest indefi nitely.”28
Lincoln’s attitude toward death and his family’s private experience with
it align closely with the larger society’s. Personal writings from both before
and during the war demonstrate the signifi cance of death and separation
from loved ones. Americans recognized the fragility of life and struggled
to cope with the accompanying sorrow. The war added to the problem and
created new concerns specifi c to the dying in the war, but the great mass of
Americans, Lincoln among them, never discussed the volume of casualties
as somehow intrinsically signifi cant.
And, in fact, there is very little evidence in the public record to show that
death during the war was considered occurring on a monumental or desta-
bilizing scale, beyond that of the antebellum period. A search through the
pages of periodicals generally supportive of the Republican Party during
the war—Harper’s Weekly, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune—
for example, turns up sentimental pieces about loss and recognition of the
carnage involved in particular circumstances, but it also reveals matter-
of-fact accounts of the number of dead in specifi c battles and a fi rm com-
mitment to the importance of the cause. The overall levels of death do not
receive attention as an identifi able problem per se, suggesting that this was
indeed not the central experience of the war. Reporting on a funeral, for
example, the Times mixed sorrow with patriotism, noting, “Two more of
our best and bravest have fallen—two more heads lie low in the dust—two
more names have been added to the long list of those ‘noble ones’ who
have given their life, their all, for country.” At Christmas in 1864, Harper’s
Weekly tried to identify the thoughts of the nation at the end of a bloody, yet
encouraging year: “War is sorrowful, but there is one thing infi nitely more
horrible than the worst horrors of war, and that is the feeling that nothing
is worth fi ghting for, and the blindness which can not see that war is often
the safest, surest, shortest, and least bloody way of peace.” Comments like
these demonstrate an interpretation of death that was fi rmly grounded in
its historical moment, and that linked each death to a larger eff ort.29
If the volume of deaths indeed held such signifi cance on its own for
those living through the war, then it seems surprising that those opposing
the war did not fi nd much traction and did not make consistent use of the
scale of death as an issue. In the North, the Copperhead movement never
put forward the desire to end the dying as its reason for existence. Instead,
northern opposition to the war repeatedly spoke to concerns about civil
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 2 1
liberties and an overreaching government. It is true that the high point for
the movement occurred in the summer of 1864 when the war eff ort stalled
and casualties mounted, but as soon as Sherman’s army turned the tide,
the antiwar crusade crumbled. What this says is that huge losses by them-
selves did not cause a reaction. Rather, the army’s inability to justify the
losses through military advances allowed feelings of resistance to build.
Another way to see this is to note that the Battle of Gettysburg produced a
horrifi c number of casualties but because it was a victory for the North very
little opposition was generated.30
Recognizing that soldiers and noncombatants viewed the dying in
context, however, does not preclude new experiences of death during the
war for those that lived through it. In other words, while the volume of
death was not unprecedented, the circumstances of the Civil War were.
The meaning, texture, and signifi cance of battlefi eld deaths were indeed
processed in the moment. For example, how did family members of dead
soldiers cope with the virtual annihilation of many bodies, the lack of
corporeal presences to mourn, and the fear that corpses could be abused
or neglected? Drew Gilpin Faust has examined these topics with great
insight, and very little about the antebellum demographic or cultural envi-
ronment could have prepared Americans for some of these problems (note,
however, that diaries show that when family members moved west, those
remaining behind often worried about the possibility of never seeing loved
ones again and, should they die in far off regions, not having access to the
corpse or burial site for mourning). The care for wounded soldiers and
the experience of hospitals would also have presented novel situations.
While all this must be acknowledged, the connection of the war deaths to a
greater cause imbued them with a meaning that should not be overlooked
and that may be seen as an improvement over the struggle to make sense of
the vast numbers of dead during the antebellum period. In some way, the
signifi cance ascribed to deaths while in the service of protecting the Union
or Confederacy obviated the antebellum need for struggling to under-
stand God’s will when those in the prime of life were cut down. Recall, for
example, Cornelia Smith’s attempt to understand why her young nephew
died in great agony from a common disease. For family members of sol-
diers, however, the interpretation was easily found. As Minnesotan Patrick
Taylor noted in a letter to his parents upon the death of his brother (the
two fought side by side at Gettysburg), “Isaac has not fallen in vain. What
though one of your six soldiers has fallen on the altar of our country. ‘Tis
a glorious death; better die free than live slaves.’” Edward Everett, in his
speech at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg
in 1863 (in a cultural context very diff erent from the alienation associated
2 2 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
with later wars), reinforced this point by claiming it was “sweet and becom-
ing to die for one’s country” and that if ever gratitude was owed to any it
was “to those whose last resting place we this day commend to the bless-
ing of Heaven and of men.” Hence, dying for the cause was seen as both
patriotic and a guarantee of a passage to heaven. Death in the war could
be viewed as a better death than the model “good death” before the war.
It satisfi ed the cultural demands of the period in ways antebellum deaths
might not have.31
Furthermore, Frances Clarke has shown through a survey of ordi-
nary Americans’ private papers that for the common person the suff er-
ing experienced in the war fi t well into idealized, pre–Civil War modes of
understanding. Reactions by those who were wounded in the war were
“profoundly conservative,” providing “solace, identity, and inspiration”:
the diaries and letters of sick and wounded soldiers make clear that
large numbers expressed their suff ering in terms popularized by domi-
nant stories, representing themselves as undaunted patriots and trying
to remain genial or uncomplaining no matter their misfortune. Unlike
their counterparts in later wars, Union soldiers experienced their affl ic-
tions in a culture that valued ideal suff ering as edifying, uplifting, and
benefi cial to both oneself and society. . . . By imagining well-borne suf-
fering as evidence of the justice of their cause, patriotic writers limited
the disillusionment that might have resulted from rising death tolls,
allowing ordinary white soldiers to embrace heroic status both as war-
riors and as worthy suff erers.
In addition, Clarke demonstrates that for those who lost a loved one in the
war, comfort was not diffi cult to summon: “They could take solace in an
extensive literature written by female nurses and civilian volunteers which
was fi lled with examples of Union soldiers dying good deaths—a litera-
ture suggesting that all who died or suff ered for the Union had necessarily
been saved.”32
The evidence from the period thus makes clear that historians need to
reevaluate the way we have come to understand the carnage of the Civil
War. Before the war began, the constant presence of lethal diseases and
accidents meant Americans were used to physical suff ering and frequent
separation from loved ones on a massive scale, at least relative to today.
Furthermore, in an increasingly sentimental culture, these Americans
had developed social and psychological means of coping with these losses,
though they still felt them with tremendous emotional force. In the main,
then, the war added to an existing demographic problem rather than cre-
ating an entirely new one, and the culture was at least partially successful
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 2 3
in folding the experience of war into an eff ective process of coping with
suff ering and dying.
In sum, the arguments for the signifi cance of death that are in current
ascendance are not fully convincing. If, on the one hand, the case for the
importance of death in the Civil War is based simply on the volume of
death, then it loses its cogency when put into the demographic context of
the antebellum period and the relatively moderate reaction to the dying
on the part of those who lived through the war. If, on the other hand, the
case is made using the seemingly omnipresent discussion of death during
the war, then the evidence breaks down when it is shown that antebellum
Americans had many of the same concerns. In addition, regarding anxiety
about the meaning ascribed to Civil War deaths, it must be kept in mind
that the commitment to the idea of death in the war as ennobling and spir-
itually sanctifying served to soften feelings of loss. Finally, it should be rec-
ognized that discussions of the problem of death in the postwar period do
not reveal much about how people faced the issue during the war. Instead,
they speak more to concerns of the contemporary society. In the end, we
must keep in mind that combat deaths were experienced within the context
of the droning, unvarying dying that washed over Americans throughout
this period. Given this milieu, the nearly ubiquitous use by historians of a
set of factually correct, yet misleading, statistics needs rethinking. To make
a case for the bloodiness of the war in this manner says more about how we
interpret these fi gures today—and the uses we make of them—than about
the way Americans actually experienced the wrenching confl ict.
notes
1. The importance given to the volume of death may be seen in popular forums
such as the introduction to Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, introductory pan-
els at the new museum at the Gettysburg National Military Park, and the recent PBS
documentary Death and the Civil War. Within a wide-ranging analysis of death, Drew
Gilpin Faust’s prizewinning This Republic of Suff ering: Death and the American Civil
War (New York: Knopf, 2008) makes similar claims. J. David Hacker’s “A Census-Based
Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57 (December 2011): 307–48, while
itself a careful quantitative analysis, precipitated new levels of signifi cance attributed
to the total fi gures for Civil War dead. The editors of Civil War History claimed that
Hacker’s article “stands among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this
journal’s pages,” (307) and Eric Foner said the essay “further elevates the signifi cance of
the Civil War and makes a dramatic statement about how the war is a central moment
in American history” (quoted in Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death
Toll,” New York Times, April 2, 2012). An alternative perspective may be found in Mark
E. Neely Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007). In an introduction to Hacker’s article, James McPherson uses
2 4 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
the larger overall casualty fi gure, by itself, to challenge Neely: “Such a fi gure calls into
question Mark Neely’s assertion that the Civil War was ‘remarkable for its traditional
restraint.’ The Civil War did indeed result in more American soldier deaths than all the
other wars this country has fought combined” (310).
2. We could make any number of similar comparisons and extrapolations: between
1860 and 1870 approximately 1 million women in the prime of life (between the ages
of fi fteen and forty) died. This is, of course, many more than all the soldiers lost in all
wars combined, and equates to more than 10 million deaths today.
3. Death Rates for Massachusetts may be found in Historical Statistics of the United
States, Millennial Edition On Line, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), Table Ab1048–58, “Death Rate for Massachusetts, by Sex and
Selected Causes, 1855–1970.” For the New York City fi gures, see fi gure 1 in Michael R.
Haines, “Estimated Life Table for the United States, 1850–1910,” Historical Methods
31 (Fall 1998): 149–70. The Chicago fi gures are found in “ANNO DOMINI 1864: THE
CITY OF CHICAGO,” Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1865. See Michael R. Haines and
Richard Hall Steckel, A Population History of North America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 328–38, for an excellent overview of the mortality studies.
They point out that work on the stature of Americans and some incisive mortality stud-
ies suggest there was an increase in mortality between 1830 and 1860. On medical
practice, see Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America: 1660-1860
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960); Martin S. Pernik, A Calculus of Suff er-
ing: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985); Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers,
eds., Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public
Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
4. Center for Disease Control, “United States Life Tables, 2001,” National Vital
Statistics Reports 52, no. 14 (February 18, 2004): 3; Center for Disease Control,
“Leading Causes of Death,” National Vital Statistics Report 50, no. 15 (September 16,
2002): 20.
5. Haines, “Estimated Life Table for the United States,” appendix A; Hacker, “Count-
ing the Civil War Dead,” 313.
6. This section of the article is based on a wide-ranging survey of personal writings
from across New York State. Historical work from other areas supports the claims made
here. Lewis Saum’s excellent and comprehensive study, Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War
America, based on several thousand sets of diaries and letters, confi rms the posited
concern with sickness, death, and separation. For most Americans, according to Saum,
“a sense of tentativeness colored all,” and expressions of the inscrutableness of God’s
intentions appeared over and over again in these materials. “Such sentiments were not
limited to emotional occasions; they were nearly omnipresent.” Most important was the
need to be ready for death. “That theme was so fundamental and prevalent among the
common men that had they stumbled upon the isolated expression ‘manifest destiny,’
they might well have pictured death and the grave.” Thomas Dublin came to similar
conclusions after reading a mass of letters written by women who worked in factories
in New England between 1830 and 1860. He found three main themes that “suggest
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 2 5
aspects of nineteenth-century life that working women shared with all women, and
that permeated the lives of men as well.” First, the women expressed “repeated concerns
regarding sickness and death, reminding readers today how immediate and pressing
these problems were in their daily lives.” Second, the writers exhibited signifi cant reli-
giosity, which provided important solace, “particularly in times of sickness.” The third
theme was the “importance of family and kinship bonds for women, even in the face
of repeated migrations that often caused family separation.” Conevery Valencius made
a similar point upon reading a trove of letters from Arkansas and Missouri: “Worry
about sickness, disease, and accident was part of the fabric of life for all manner of
correspondents.” Valencius’s, Dublin’s, and Saum’s studies show that the themes found
in New Yorkers’ writings were not specifi c to their home region. Lewis O. Saum, The
Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980), 12, 13,
18; Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830–1860 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1981), 3–5; Conevery Barton Valencius, The Health of the
Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York:
Basic Books, 2002), 5. See also Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country:
The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2008) for a comprehensive description of the importance of death in the larger culture
in the antebellum years.
7. Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (New York:
Pageant, 1959), off ers a traditional critique of the genre. Reinterpretations of these
texts may be found in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York:
Knopf, 1977); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nina Baym, Wom-
an’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870, 2nd ed.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Let-
ters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993); Joyce W. Warren, ed., The (Other) American Traditions:
Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1993); Nancy Schnog, “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide,
Wide World,” Genders 4 (Spring 1989): 11–25; Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sen-
timent: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992); Alice Fahs, “The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil
War Literature,” Civil War History 46 (June 2000): 107–31; Lori Merish, Sentimental
Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Litera-
ture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental
Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Lyde Cullen Sizer, The Political Work of
Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000); Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and
the American Market, 1780–1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003).
8. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, February 17, 1836, Rare Book and Manuscript
Department, Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (KLCU).
9. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, February 19, 21, May 18, 27, 1836.
2 6 j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e 4 , i s s u e 1
10. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, August 1, 1836.
11. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, June 8, November 17, 1837, February 18, April 17,
1838.
12. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, January 24, February 18, 1841.
13. Diary of Cornelia H. Smith, April 25, July 29, 1841.
14. Rice Family Account Book, Pratt Family Papers, KLCU; Diary of David M.
Darrow, 1851–53, Madison County Historical Society, Oneida, N.Y.
15. Diary of Thayer Gauss, January 12, February 24, 1847, KLCU.
16. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, 1.
17. Ibid., 2–3, 4, 8. Schantz’s book in many ways summarizes a vast volume of work
on death in the period: David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in
Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977);
Charles O. Jackson, ed., Passing: The Vision of Death in America (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1977); Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, A Time to Mourn:
Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums
at Stony Brook, 1980); Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver
(New York: Knopf, 1981); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes
toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Robert V. Wells,
“Taming the ‘King of Terrors’: Ritual and Death in Schenectady, New York, 1844–1860,”
Journal of Social History 27 (Summer 1994): 717–35; Robert V. Wells, Facing the
“King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). A similar pattern emerged in middle-class
England, as shown in James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Detroit:
Partridge, 1972); Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996). For an excellent survey of the historiography, see Frances M.
Clarke, War Stories: Suff ering and Sacrifi ce in the Civil War North (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011).
18. Historical Statistics of the United States, table Ab1048–58.
19. Modern death rates may be found in “Deaths: Final Data for 2006,” Center for
Disease Control, National Vital Statistics Report, 57, no. 14 (April 2009): 1–136.
20. “The Sanitary Commission,” North American Review 98, no. 203 (April 1864):
373.
21. U.S. Sanitary Commission, The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army:
A Succinct Narrative of Its Works and Purposes (New York: Published for the Benefi t
of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1864), 256. See also Maxwell W. Quentin, Lincoln’s
Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New
York: Longmans, Green, 1956). Figures taken from Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium
of the War of the Rebellion, 1908, Civil War Home Page, http://www.civil-war.net/
searchstates.asp?searchstates=Total, indicate a death rate from disease among Union
troops of 7.2 percent.
22. Faust, Republic of Suff ering, xiii.
23. U.S. Census, 1850, 1860; Historical Statistics of the United States, Table
Ab1048–58; State-level casualties taken from Dyer, A Compendium, http://www.civil
t h e g r e at e x a g g e r at i o n 2 7
-war.net/searchstates.asp?searchstates=Ohio, http://www.civil-war.net/searchstates.
asp?searchstates=Massachusetts.
24. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2002); John M. Barry, The Great Infl uenza: The Story of the
Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin, 2005); Alfred W. Crosby, America’s
Forgotten Pandemic: The Infl uenza of 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
25. Diary of Nancy Emerson, December 29, 1862, available online at University of
Virginia Library, Valley of the Shadow: Valley Personal Papers, http://valley.lib.virginia.
edu/papers/EmeDiar; Civil War Diary of Celestia Lee Barker, 1863–1904, Iowa State
University Library, Digital Collections, Civil War Diaries, http://cdm16001.contentdm.
oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15031coll14/id/1320/rec/1.
26. J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia dur-
ing the Civil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 83; Clarke,
War Stories, 4.
27. Gallman, Mastering Wartime, 55.
28. Abraham Lincoln to Ephraim D. and Phoebe Ellsworth, May 25, 1861, in The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 4, New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University
Press, 1953, 386–87; “Annual Message to Congress,” December 6, 1864, in The Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University
Press, 1953), 152.
29. “Death of Two Soldiers,” New York Times, November 23, 1864; “Saturday,
December 31, 1864. Christmas,” Harper’s Weekly, December 31, 1864.
30. Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the
North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
31. Patrick Taylor quoted in Richard Moe, The Last Full Measure: The Life and Death
of the First Minnesota Volunteers (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001),
277; Edward Everett, “Gettysburg Address,” Nov. 19, 1863, Voices of Democracy: The
U.S. Oratory Project, http://www.voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/warpeace/ee1863txt.
xml. On this point, see also Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier
Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
32. Clarke, War Stories, 27, 53–54, 62.