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The southern or Confederate states in the United States Civil War (1861-65) lost more men than the Union or northern states, a new study has calculated.
Southern states saw an average of 13 per cent of their military-age native born white men die, compared to fewer than five per cent in the northern states.
The researchers’ estimate put the number of casualties in the Civil War, the worst conflict in American history, at 698,000 deaths. This is substantially higher than the conventional historical estimate of 618,000 but lower than the most recent estimate of around 750,000 deaths.
Even more importantly, the scientists did a state wise breakdown of deaths, enumerating casualties for all states settled by European settlers by 1830.
These states’ populations comprised 90 per cent of the US’ native-born white fighting-age males.
These include 13 of the 18 non-enslaved Northern states (the ‘Old North’), 8 of the 11 slave-owning Confederate states (Old South), and the remaining five slave-owning states, including West Virginia, which did not join the Confederacy (Border States).
Louisiana was the worst sufferer in the Confederacy, with 19.15 per cent of the deaths, followed by South Carolina (16.7 per cent), Georgia (16.63 per cent), Alabama (14.7 per cent), North Carolina (14.01 per cent), Virginia (12.32 per cent), Mississippi (12.18 per cent) and Tennessee (6.52 per cent).
In the Old North, Illinois (9.97 per cent), New Hampshire (6.36 per cent), Indiana (6.2 per cent), Maine (5.72 per cent) and Michigan (5.29 per cent), were the five states with the highest casualties.
Among the Border States, West Virginia recorded 8.14 per cent of deaths, followed by Delaware (6.96 per cent), Maryland (4.12 per cent), Kentucky (3.97 per cent) and Missouri (2.29 per cent).
There has been disagreement over the exact number of deaths in the conflict because of incompleteness of the Confederate Army’s surviving records.
“Recently, a full count of individual census returns has become available for 1850-1940, as well as a sample of linked records across multiple censuses that are useful for estimating subnational migration. Using these newly available historical data, published as part of the integrated public use microdata series (IPUMS), we re-estimate the Civil War’s national death toll and introduce a novel census-based method for calculating state-level excess mortality while accounting for cross-border migration,” the paper read.
New Estimates of US Civil War mortality from full-census records was published in the journal PNAS.