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  • Has the Demographic Impact of Civil War Deaths Been Exaggerated?
  • J. David Hacker (bio)

In a recent article, Nicholas Marshall contends that the impact of death in the Civil War has been greatly exaggerated; the war’s death toll does not stand out as especially high or shocking in the context of the high death rates characteristic of the nineteenth century. Comparisons to modern populations—such as observations that the war resulted in more deaths than all other American wars combined or that the proportionate death toll today would exceed 7 million—are inappropriate, he argues, because the risk of death today is much lower.1

These are important claims. Marshall is correct in observing that nineteenth-century Americans were more intimately associated with death than we are today and that more people died from causes unrelated to the war than from causes associated with it, even during the war years. He is correct in observing that the overall death toll should not be used as measure of the war’s “bloodiness,” since more than two-thirds of the total was due to non-battle–related causes, primarily infectious disease. And although the overwhelming emphasis he gives to evaluating war mortality in its contemporary context discourages comparison across time and space, he is correct in arguing that context is critically [End Page 453] important in evaluating the size and importance of the war’s death toll. The scale of death, he argues, must change dramatically for those experiencing it before it can be said to have had a substantive impact. But what constitutes a reliable scale and what level of change qualifies as dramatic change? In the course of the article, Marshall focuses on the crude death rate and relative differences, not absolute differences, in the risk of death. In this short note, I make a few critical comments regarding his choice of measures and his focus on relative differences, both of which work to minimize the impact of Civil War deaths. I also note his selective use of numbers and comparisons across disparate groups. Although I discuss briefly the relationship between the risk of the death and its perception, my comment is limited primarily to Marshall’s treatment of war’s demographic impact, not its cultural impact.

Consider first Marshall’s comparison of short-term fluctuations in the crude death rate in nineteenth-century Chicago, New York City, and Massachusetts with the increase in the rate in the nation as a whole during the war. At some point in the century, all of these locations experienced surges in mortality approximately equal to the percentage increase in the national death rate between 1861 and 1865, suggesting to Marshall that Americans were accustomed to mortality shocks of this magnitude. But while the contemporary context is the same, the comparison is flawed. The epidemics that caused short-term increases in nineteenth-century mortality spread less easily in sparsely populated areas, often missing the smaller cities and rural countryside where the vast majority of Americans lived. When they did strike rural areas, they rarely hit with the severity they did in cities such as New York or in Massachusetts, the nation’s most urbanized state. This pattern is quite evident in the war itself, when recruits from rural areas, who lacked exposure and acquired immunities to acute infectious diseases, suffered more than twice the rate of disease mortality of recruits from urban areas.2 Even in the largest cities, mortality rates approaching or exceeding the overall death rate during the war were rare and short-term. The national surge in death rates during the war was unprecedented in scale and duration. That epidemics sometimes occurred, moreover, does not mean that nineteenth-century [End Page 454] Americans were accustomed to sudden spikes in mortality rates or perceived war mortality as business as usual. Historians of medicine have noted that epidemics, which killed far fewer Americans than endemic diseases, engendered dramatic behavioral responses. The cholera pandemics of 1832, 1849, and 1866, for example, although killing only one individual for every twenty taken by malaria and tuberculosis, were a major catalyst in the development and growth of the public health movement.3

More important, Marshall’s...

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