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44 2 Loss and Reconstruction The Impact of the Civil War on Veteran Families and Their Postwar Rebuilding No estimates in dollars and cents can cover the entire cost of one of those sanguinary struggles in which the nations so often become involved. Such estimates fail to cover the value to commerce and to human happiness, of the productive labor, in agriculture, or in the various legitimate arts of peace, of those engaged in the war. . . . And what computation can measure the misery . . . what a sum total of pain and sorrow is endured on the part of the wounded, all of which defy computation by the unfeeling scale of mere dollars and cents. And when we add to this, the many tens of thousands of hale, athletic men who are killed in battle, or who die as a consequence of the war . . . then it is that we are made to feel that one war does more mischief than any extent of material destruction of which it is possible to conceive. —“The Cost of War,” Religious Herald, July 24, 1862 In memoIrs written in the early twentieth century, veterans William Dame and Robert Withers wrote about their experiences during and after the Civil War. Dame’s account portrayed the immediate postwar years in a heroic light: “Just after the war, in the far harder trials and soul agony of the Reconstruction days, [veterans showed] wonderful patience, and courage which . . . rebuilt their shattered fortunes and pulled their country triumphantly up out of indescribable disaster.”Withers was a bit more practical: “the question of food for my large family was now the dominant one.”With the war’s end, Pittsylvania’s soldiers gladly returned home to their families. Not all those who left for war survived to come home, however, and most of those who did return came back as changed men.They returned home to women and children loss and reconstruction 45 also changed by the war, and those who did not return left behind widows and devastated families.The Civil War left a demographic hole and a physical,emotional , and economic legacy that significantly affected veteran families in ways that made their attempts at postwar rebuilding difficult.1 In a landmark 1989 article on the social history of the Civil War, maris Vinovskis made a number of estimates about the conflict’s demographic impact. Vinovskis’s statistics provide a rough frame of reference for the demographic impact of the war on Pittsylvania’s soldiers and their families.A higher percentage of white men aged thirteen to forty-three (“military age”) in the area served in front-line Confederate forces (79 percent) than did military-age white men in the South as a whole (61 percent). The region’s soldiers seem to have suffered war deaths at similar rates to the South as a whole. Twenty percent of white men of military age from the county died in the war (versus 18 percent for the South), and over 25 percent of Pittsylvania’s front-line soldiers died in service (the same as the Confederate military as a whole).2 Although Vinovskis did not demonstrate the percentages of Confederate soldiers wounded, captured, or struck with disease for the South as a whole, those percentages can be produced for the Pittsylvania-Danville area using the databases created for this study. In addition to the 831 soldiers from the area who died, another nearly 1,600 soldiers suffered from wounds, disease, or Union capture and imprisonment over the course of the war but survived. (many of these men endured more than one of these wartime experiences.) Over 38 percent of the county’s white men of military age and 48 percent of its soldiers suffered from at least one of these measurable, non-fatal, but potentially life-altering wartime experiences.Perhaps the fullest broad measure of the impact of the Civil War on the white men of Pittsylvania County and Danville combines these statistics: over 2,400 of the region’s soldiers (nearly 59 percent of the white men of military age and a staggering 74 percent of the soldiers) experienced something during the war that either killed them, damaged them, or put them in a hospital or prison.3 The deaths, the wounds, the diseases, the time in federal prisons, and even military service itself represented a key aspect of the direct human cost of the Civil War for the Confederate veteran families of Pittsylvania and Danville.The rest of this project assesses the...

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