Civil War Death Toll: Undercounted?

[CarolJ]

For a long time I have been skeptical about the official tally of 600 thousand casualties, and the assumption that there were few civilian casualties. While there was no policy of targeting civilians, a lot of things can happen to people who are caught in the crossfire-hunger, stray bullets, even a few rogue soldiers. Indeed, the story of most wars seems to be that civilians, usually unarmed and unprotected die more readily than soldiers who at least have someone to hellp them.

The New York Times Article this week postulates an 850,000 casualty number. But I still think this is in reference to military deaths and not civilian ones-civilian ones would be hard to aggregate.

If you believe civilian deaths were low, could you tell me why this war was different in this respect than other wars?

 

[Freddy]

Here is the article.

I know of one Private Benjamin F. Pratt, 3rd of Company H, 35th MA Volunteers, who barely survived Andersonville and three other Rebel Prison Pens only to die in 1866 of illnesses contracted while a prisoner. I doubt that he was counted as dead because the 1884 regimental history says he survived the war but was dead in 1884.

"Although the Surgeon General's Office had at that point documented 304,000 Union deaths, Walker noted that the number was based only on those men who died during their terms of service. About a third of the 285,000 men discharged for disabilities and many of the remaining 2 million men who survived the war, he argued, subsequently died as a result of diseases and wounds contracted while in the Army. "Tens of thousands were discharged to die; tens of thousands died within the first few months after discharge," he wrote. "Tens of thousands more lingered through the first or second year." Together with the losses calculated by the Surgeon General's Office, Walker concluded that "500,000 will surely be a moderate estimate for the direct losses among the Union armies."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...he-dead/?scp=1&sq=civil war casualties&st=cse