Confederate Casulty Figures.

[kevikens]

During and after my most recent trip to Gettysburg I read a number of pamphlets and one book on the battle. This prompted me to think about and reflect on the matter of casualties, particularly those of the Confederate forces. Union battlefield casualties, the fatal ones, seem pretty accurate in that the figures appear to be more than approximations whereas I frequently see Confederate losses, from almost all battles, as approximations with considerable variations between authors on the same battle. Gettysburg seems to have been such a battle where some authors cite figures than have more Union than Confederates dying on that field. What I found most interesting was the figure of the Confederate dead disinterred and brought back South after the war for reburial as greater than some of the battlefield written accounts. Obviously there are some discrepancies here. Should the number of the returned dead be considered the most accurate or is that figure suspect for some reason? I wonder if this is because Confederates did not keep accurate records of their dead during the war or they did, but the records were destroyed at the end of the fighting. So, what I am wondering is are there any other reasons that might account for the variations from battle to battle and perhaps some more recent studies or discoveries that can more accurately document what the number of Confederate fatalities were that were incurred during the war.

 

[TomP]

The Confederates created casualty reports after each engagement/battle and most of the ones I have looked at are astonishingly accurate. It is obvious some commanding officers did not wait for the casualty reports to be completed before making their own reports with estimated casualties. Fold3 has a great number of Confederate casualty reports available. Here at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center we have copied the casualty lists for the Battle of Corinth and made them available in our research library. They are very accurate though incomplete; Mansfield Lovell did not turn in a detailed casualty report for his division. As for the other two divisions, a visitor can look up individual names and regiments.
Tom