No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count. The war also killed a significant number of civilians battles raged across farm and field, encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, guerrillas ensnared women and children in violence and reprisals, draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, and shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. These military statistics, however, tell only a part of the story. Twice as many Civil War soldiers died from disease as from battle wounds, the result in considerable measure of poor sanitation in an era that created mass armies that did not yet understand the transmission of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus, and dysentery. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. A similar rate, about two percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. The number of soldiers who died between 18, generally estimated at 620,000, is approximately equal to the total of American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined. In the middle of the 19th century, the United States entered into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the 20th century.
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