What Was Biggest Killer of Union and Confederate Troops During the War? (Poll)

What Was Biggest Killer of Union and Confederate Troops During the War? (Poll)

  • Pneumonia

    Votes: 10 10.6%
  • Diarrhea

    Votes: 64 68.1%
  • Malnutrition

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • Battlefield Wounds

    Votes: 4 4.3%
  • Tuberculosis

    Votes: 1 1.1%
  • None of the Above

    Votes: 9 9.6%
  • Don't Know

    Votes: 5 5.3%

  • Total voters
    94
The impact was that people began to think about the geographic distribution of disease.
I'm pretty sure people were already thinking about that. Checking Google Books shows discussion of the idea that malaria came from swamps easily before 1830; they thought it was "bad air" (mal-aria) but the swamps-to-malaria link had been made.
 
I feel like there's not really a sense in which you can complain about someone correcting factual misstatements, especially when you made it clear that you meant it as factual instead of metaphor or rhetoric. If the information is presented misleadingly, then fine.


Well, the revolution was going on during the war, but it started well before the war began and concluded well after the war ended. It feels like saying the Civil War period witnessed a medical revolution is perhaps a bit overly focused - it's comparable to saying "the Franco-Prussian War period witnessed a medical revolution".

I've no doubt you have a great knowledge of anecdotes, but I feel your main problem is placing them in context. For example:


This is incorrect, and had been since the 1670s or so with Leeuwenhoek.


The problem with the acceptance of germ theory was always the ability to provide specific demonstration.
Quite frankly, the problem is that you begin your posts with put downs & gratuitous insults. The dismissive nature of the Leeuwenhoek reference is typical, how many Cilvil War doctors had ever heard of him or practiced anything based on his findings? Zero, none, nobody, it is an irrelevant factoid.
 
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Quite frankly, the problem is that you begin your posts with put downs & gratuitous insults.
Would you be so kind as to let me know what the best way to address a specific error while highlighting the nature of the error is? If I think someone is incorrect on a point of fact or interpretation, I am hardly going to say that they are correct before addressing it, and "I think this is wrong" can be dressed up in many ways but it's sometimes hard to be sure which is going to come across as unpleasant.
 
I feel like there's not really a sense in which you can complain about someone correcting factual misstatements, especially when you made it clear that you meant it as factual instead of metaphor or rhetoric. If the information is presented misleadingly, then fine.


Well, the revolution was going on during the war, but it started well before the war began and concluded well after the war ended. It feels like saying the Civil War period witnessed a medical revolution is perhaps a bit overly focused - it's comparable to saying "the Franco-Prussian War period witnessed a medical revolution".

I've no doubt you have a great knowledge of anecdotes, but I feel your main problem is placing them in context. For example:


This is incorrect, and had been since the 1670s or so with Leeuwenhoek.


The problem with the acceptance of germ theory was always the ability to provide specific demonstration.

You are quite correct Saphroneth, Pasteur was not the first to propose the germ theory. It wasn’t until the late 1850s that he was able to start validating the theory and throughout the first half of the 1860s. Even then, it took until Koch’s work in the 1880s for support for the longstanding miasma theory to be finally debunked scientifically.
 
You are quite correct Saphroneth, Pasteur was not the first to propose the germ theory. It wasn’t until the late 1850s that he was able to start validating the theory and throughout the first half of the 1860s. Even then, it took until Koch’s work in the 1880s for support for the longstanding miasma theory to be finally debunked scientifically.
This is quite similar to how many scientific understandings change. It's usually not a single discovery which changes everything overnight - what you have instead is an idea, which bubbles away for a while and which people start thinking about and experimenting on. Eventually someone does the right experiment, or gathers the right data, and is able to convincingly state the new idea so that a transformation in general thinking takes place - which is to say, the consensus changes.

It's quite rare that someone comes up with an idea that works but they keep it secret until they gather the data - that's not usually how science works.
 
Would you be so kind as to let me know what the best way to address a specific error while highlighting the nature of the error is? If I think someone is incorrect on a point of fact or interpretation, I am hardly going to say that they are correct before addressing it, and "I think this is wrong" can be dressed up in many ways but it's sometimes hard to be sure which is going to come across as unpleasant.
It is simple. Never use insulting or dismissive language, period. If I encounter that kind of language, that is as far as I read & I am not alone in that. If you have a point to make, leave off the snark if you want anyone to read the post.

You obviously google a subject with the deliberate intent of finding a nit picking detail & make out like it discredits an entire post. The intent of that is obvious. I can google things, too. Any posting involves editing & condensing material, this is a very cryptic format. If you posted the factoids that you glean from your searches as additional background material, that would add to the the conversation. Instead, your habitual 'this my factoid means you are a liar' act is extremely tedious, stifles discussion & discourages people who are not knowledgable from participating in the threads.

Since you asked, I have no idea if it is your intention, nuance is lost in online discussions, but your posts often read like bully boy taunts. An example of that is a thread where you posted a reply & several follow ups on what was obviously a typo or word changed by spell check. Whatever your intent might be, the effect is that of a taunt, not an honest attempt to correct an error.

You obviously enjoy researching online, so do I. The images & maps that are an earmark of my posts come from the same sense of curiosity. We both run across posts that are made by people who obviously don't have the background necessary to understand what is being discussed. This is particularly true of anything that is tainted by Lost Cause disinformation. What I do is quote original sources & give links to the complete texts & books that the poster can read on their own. I offer them the chance to educate themselves, you really can't do more than that.

I read a bunch of your posts & found a large number of what an editor I worked with called 'echo barks.' Dogs echo bark back & forth. Recycling a term that was in a response is echo barking & it amounts to school yard taunting that does not encourage civilized discussion. Personally, I consider echo barking as a flag that indicates a poor grasp of the topic under discussion. That is because the first thing that an ignorant person does is attack the author personally because they don't know enough to add to the discussion on a factual level.

Finally, all of us have to be humble, be teachable. I don't contribute to these forums just to show off how big my library, online filing system & personal knowledge. I already know all that stuff, or did know it at one time & enjoy revisiting it. For example, I really enjoyed reading the comments of the former boiler men in the recent thread about where gunboats got water to feed their boilers. They brought in subjects that I knew nothing about. On the other hand, any post that begins with an insult or a put down is one I ignore. It is another thing that dogs taught me, ignore behavior you don't want encourage. Attention of any kind, positive or negative, has the same result, more of the same.

You asked me an honest question, I have taken the time to give you an honest answer. In my world, that is a high compliment. An honest critique from a knowledgable person is worth its weight in gold. It has often been my experience that the kind of honest exchange that I am accustomed to doesn't travel well, so be it. Do with it what you will.
 
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It is simple. Never use insulting or dismissive language, period.

I'll do my best; however, I wish to caution that pointing something out as wrong is not in and of itself insulting or dismissive.

You obviously google a subject with the deliberate intent of finding a nit picking detail & make out like it discredits an entire post. The intent of that is obvious. I can google things, too. Any posting involves editing & condensing material, this is a very cryptic format. If you posted the factoids that you glean from your searches as additional background material, that would add to the the conversation. Instead, this my factoid means you are a liar act is extremely tedious, stifles discussion & discourages people who are not knowledgable from participating in the threads.

Since you asked, I have no idea if it is your intention, nuance is lost in online discussions, but your posts often read like bully boy taunts. An example of that is a thread where you posted a reply & several follow ups on what was obviously a typo or word changed by spell check. Whatever your intent might be, the effect is that of a taunt, not an honest attempt to correct an error.

That's not actually the case, at least in terms of "google a subject" etc. What I do is that when I see something which strikes me as being likely to be incorrect from knowledge I already have (in synthesis) what I do is to check to see whether my original impression is actually upheld or not.

For example, the reason why I brought up the Leeuwenhoek example - for one - is that your statement that
"Microscopic organisms living in the environment were yet to be discovered."
did not seem correct to me, as I remembered the discovery of microscopic organisms to have dated from some time beforehand. I then went to check the actual discovery of microscopic organisms, and the first person to discover them was Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s.
This does not mean he was the only person. What it means is that the discovery had been made centuries beforehand, and by the 1860s was in the nature of (at least among the relevant academic communities) common knowledge.


If what you had said was instead that "Microscopic organisms living in the environment were not thought by most doctors to be the cause of disease", then that would be correct, and accurately reflect the state of understanding at the time.




I'm not actually able to remember the example you mean about "a reply and several follow ups on what was obviously a typo or word changed by spell check". Would you be able to point me at it so that I can refresh my memory, and understand what I did wrong?
(If it's the case that it was nitpicking I will of course apologize.)


You obviously enjoy researching online, so do I. The images & maps that are an earmark of my posts come from the same sense of curiosity. We both run across posts that are made by people who obviously don't have the background necessary to understand what is being discussed. This is particularly true of anything that is tainted by Lost Cause disinformation. What I do is quote original sources & give links to the complete texts & books that the poster can read on their own. I offer them the chance to educate themselves, you really can't do more than that.

I feel like pointing out here that - at least in my memory of our various recent conversations - what you do not do is to quote sources when challenged, on topics which are in contention. This, I feel, is a problem.
If you feel that I have made an incorrect statement, I would be glad to explain the sources for my understanding of the topic - either direct primary sources, or secondary sources, or where I have made my own inference based on sources. The key point here however is that I am willing to do so; by contrast, on several occasions I have asked you to cite your source for specific claims and you have been unwilling to provide it.


To use an example from this thread, I have not contested any of the points you've made about the Red Rover. That is not a point in contention; I am willing to take your word on it, because it is not something that strikes me as discordant with my understanding of the Civil War and of the 19th Century.


(I appreciate that this is getting off the topic of this thread, which I regret, and I would be glad to bring up a specific example on another more relevant thread where I have asked you for sources and you have been unwilling to provide them. Would you be interested in this?)
 
It is simple. Never use insulting or dismissive language, period.

You obviously google a subject with the deliberate intent of finding a nit picking detail & make out like it discredits an entire post. The intent of that is obvious. I can google things, too. Any posting involves editing & condensing material, this is a very cryptic format. If you posted the factoids that you glean from your searches as additional background material, that would add to the the conversation. Instead, this my factoid means you are a liar act is extremely tedious, stifles discussion & discourages people who are not knowledgable from participating in the threads.

Since you asked, I have no idea if it is your intention, nuance is lost in online discussions, but your posts often read like bully boy taunts. An example of that is a thread where you posted a reply & several follow ups on what was obviously a typo or word changed by spell check. Whatever your intent might be, the effect is that of a taunt, not an honest attempt to correct an error.

You obviously enjoy researching online, so do I. The images & maps that are an earmark of my posts come from the same sense of curiosity. We both run across posts that are made by people who obviously don't have the background necessary to understand what is being discussed. This is particularly true of anything that is tainted by Lost Cause disinformation. What I do is quote original sources & give links to the complete texts & books that the poster can read on their own. I offer them the chance to educate themselves, you really can't do more than that.

I read a bunch of your posts & found a large number of what an editor I worked with called 'echo barks.' Dogs echo bark back & forth. Using the term that was a part of the response to a post is echo barking & it amounts to school yard taunts that does not encourage civilized discussion. Personally, I consider echo barking as a flag that indicates a poor grasp of the topic under discussion. That is because the first thing that an ignorant person does is attack the author personally because they don't know enough to add to the discussion on a factual level.

Finally, all of us have to be humble, be teachable. I don't contribute to these forums just to show off how big my library, online filing system & personal knowledge. I already know all that stuff, or did know it at one time & enjoy revisiting it. For example, I really enjoyed reading the comments of the former boiler men in the recent thread about where gunboats got water to feed their boilers. They brought in subjects that I knew nothing about. On the other hand, any post that begins with an insult or a put down is one I ignore. It is another thing that dogs taught me, ignore behavior you don't want encourage. Attention of any kind, positive or negative, has the same result, more of the same.

You asked me an honest question, I have taken the time to give you an honest answer. In my world, that is a high compliment. An honest critique from a knowledgable person is worth its weight in gold. It has often been my experience that the kind of honest exchange that I am accustomed to doesn't travel well, so be it. Do with it what you will.
As one who is not as knowledgeable, I appreciate the information and patience the people of this site provide. It is by far the best site I have found to learn about The Civil War. I grew up influenced with legacy of the cruelty of Sherman’s March. Stories of a family member being shot to death on his back porch in Anson County. Unfortunately, as a child I didn’t commit the name to memory. Sherman was described as someone a little lower than the Devil.
I recently read “We Ride A Whirlwind “ by Eric Whittenburg. I have been presented with information that fleshes out Sherman and Joe Johnston. The country owes a great deal of gratitude to both of those men for their courage to begin the mending of the nations wounds. One can see the process of mending the wounds in reading about Wade Hampton. Hampton reveals the full scope of this process. Anti Succession to raising a Legion of troops. The absolute rage of having his home and his fortune disappear. Later he became a Governor of South Carolina and had several freed slaves in his administration. He nominated Hugh Kilpatrick on the US Senate floor for a position as Ambassador. I believe he would have pulled Kilpatrick’s head off at Bennett’s Place.
I believe we all can learn from studying these great men. We can model our behaviors from their maturity and courage , not only from their war experience but more importantly, their behavior in mending the nations wounds!
 
I'll do my best; however, I wish to caution that pointing something out as wrong is not in and of itself insulting or dismissive.



That's not actually the case, at least in terms of "google a subject" etc. What I do is that when I see something which strikes me as being likely to be incorrect from knowledge I already have (in synthesis) what I do is to check to see whether my original impression is actually upheld or not.

For example, the reason why I brought up the Leeuwenhoek example - for one - is that your statement that
"Microscopic organisms living in the environment were yet to be discovered."
did not seem correct to me, as I remembered the discovery of microscopic organisms to have dated from some time beforehand. I then went to check the actual discovery of microscopic organisms, and the first person to discover them was Leeuwenhoek in the 1670s.
This does not mean he was the only person. What it means is that the discovery had been made centuries beforehand, and by the 1860s was in the nature of (at least among the relevant academic communities) common knowledge.


If what you had said was instead that "Microscopic organisms living in the environment were not thought by most doctors to be the cause of disease", then that would be correct, and accurately reflect the state of understanding at the time.




I'm not actually able to remember the example you mean about "a reply and several follow ups on what was obviously a typo or word changed by spell check". Would you be able to point me at it so that I can refresh my memory, and understand what I did wrong?
(If it's the case that it was nitpicking I will of course apologize.)




I feel like pointing out here that - at least in my memory of our various recent conversations - what you do not do is to quote sources when challenged, on topics which are in contention. This, I feel, is a problem.
If you feel that I have made an incorrect statement, I would be glad to explain the sources for my understanding of the topic - either direct primary sources, or secondary sources, or where I have made my own inference based on sources. The key point here however is that I am willing to do so; by contrast, on several occasions I have asked you to cite your source for specific claims and you have been unwilling to provide it.


To use an example from this thread, I have not contested any of the points you've made about the Red Rover. That is not a point in contention; I am willing to take your word on it, because it is not something that strikes me as discordant with my understanding of the Civil War and of the 19th Century.


(I appreciate that this is getting off the topic of this thread, which I regret, and I would be glad to bring up a specific example on another more relevant thread where I have asked you for sources and you have been unwilling to provide them. Would you be interested in this?)
There is nothing insulting about contributing material to a thread. That is not the issue, your posts habitually have a snarky preamble. You know that is true & you would do yourself a favor if you cut it out.
I don't play the "show me your sources game." My experience is that is what know-nothings do instead of reading up on a subject themselves. If somebody has questions, they can google it themselves & tell me what they think. When I have responded to queries such as that, not a single solitary time has the questioner responded with a post based on the material in the citation. Maybe you would, but I have been doing this kind of thing too long to waste my time responding to that one.
On the same line of thinking, just doing what is called an 'Old Testament search' of the O.R. to find a random remark that contradicts a statement in a post is bogus. (Don't mean you, but have seen that one all too often. You know, you can find a verse that says just about anything in the Old Testament.)

Why would you even consider nit picking my Red Rover posting? What would possibly be the point of that? If you have insights on the Rover & its very curious history, please post them.
 
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I don't play the "show me your sources game." My experience is that is what know-nothings do instead of reading up on a subject themselves. If somebody has questions, they can google it themselves & tell me what they think. When I have responded to queries such as that, not a single solitary time has the questioner responded with a post based on the material in the citation. Maybe you would, but I have been doing this kind of thing too long to waste my time responding to that one.
Then surely - if, when challenged, you refuse to post your sources - you must realize that in that situation what you are not doing is to "quote original sources & give links to the complete texts & books that the poster can read on their own."

When someone has provided information and it makes sense with what I already understand, I have no reason to try and clarify the situation by checking sources. When someone has provided information and it does not make sense with what I already understand, that is when I will generally post counterarguments (and check sources to ensure that my posts are as well sourced as possible).
If there is a situation where someone - such as yourself - has posted information that conflicts with my understanding of the sources, I will then ask that person to source their own statements, so that I can check the source. It may be that the source alters my understanding; if however you refuse to source your statement, what we then have is that (from my point of view) I have on the one hand my existing understanding, derived from relevant research and sources, while on the other hand I have your explicitly unsourced claim to which I can give little credence.

This only happens however when someone has provided information that does not fit with my existing understanding. When someone has provided information that fits with my existing understanding, or does not conflict with it, I have no reason to do so.

Why would you even consider nit picking my Red Rover posting? If you have insights on the Rover & its very curious history, please post them.
That's sort of my point. There is nothing about your post about the Red Rover which conflicts with the information I already know, both general (Civil War period) and specific (about the ship specifically, I know very little).
It is when something is posted that conflicts with what I know that I seek to find further details.



To digress for a moment on a topic brought up in another thread, a week or so ago you claimed:

As the British generals & admirals made clear at the time, no force that the British could have landed & supplied on the American coast would have had any chance of beating the Union army & navy. Had a British force of a few thousand managed to land at Charleston in 1864, for example, it would have confronted Sherman's veterans fully reequipped & spoiling for a fight.

This claim is one for which you have provided no source, and it is so general (there is no name given and there were a lot of British generals and admirals with a large corpus of work, much of it not digitized; this could be from Admiral Milne or General James Hope Grant or any of a hundred other names; there is no specific language which would allow for it to be searched for) that it is effectively impossible for me to find the source by myself - the best I can do is guess, and the closest guess I have is that you may have misunderstood the current rank of Garnet Wolseley (who was not yet a general and would not become one until the 1870s).
So I cannot ascribe much weight to it.

In the rest of the paragraph you also mention the British troops in question as being "parade ground soldiers who had never fired a shot in anger", which leads me to the impression that your reading on the topic of the British Army in the 1850s and 1860s is somewhat lacking as I can only interpret it to mean that you had not realized how the Crimean War in particular would affect the characterization of British troops as "never fired a shot in anger". This leads me to further lack confidence in the claim.


As against that I have my own knowledge and understanding of the capabilities of the US and Royal Navies at the time, plus the British Army and the expeditionary force it was capable of landing and supplying in the Crimean War.
My knowledge of the size of the battle line of the Royal Navy, and the capabilities of British and Union armoured vessels, suggest that the Royal Navy possessed significant to overwhelming military force; my knowledge of the force the British landed at Eupatoria (of ca. 30,000) and of the number of troops available in Britain (to whit, more than enough to provide a force of such a size) suggest that a British landing force would be significantly larger than your analysis has credited them with.


In the absence of a citation for your source, and with significant knowledge of my own from previous discussions and reading which contradict the argument in your post, I thus disagree with it (and outline why in my reply). I ask for a source because there are three possibilities:

1) The claim is garbled or does not result from actual contemporary sourcing.
In which case, no harm done, mistakes were made and you can apologize. It's fine to be mistaken so long as you're willing to admit it.
2) The original quote was made in a specific context, which means there is a problem with the interpretation.
Again, no harm done if the error in interpretation was honestly made. I've seen people alter quotes, which is simply not on, but a problem in interpretation is a learning experience.
3) The original quote is correctly sourced, general enough to apply, and categorical.
In which case I would be tremendously surprised! But I'd have to admit that, yes, that would be what contemporary British generals/admirals did seem to mean, and I could then attempt to discern why.




My apologies for using an example from another thread; I wanted to use the best possible example.
 
Now, to skip slightly sideways back onto topic, here's how I'd go about determining the comprehensive ratio of causes of death for Union troops.

- Collate the records of the deaths in hospitals from the SG reports.
- Check the casualty reports for major battles to determine how they handle KIA, MWIA and WIA. I would expect for example to see whether the number of Union soldiers admitted to hospital for gunshot wounds etc. corresponded roughly to the WIA only or the WIA+MWIA, or the WIA plus some fraction of the KIA, during a campaign. This would allow me to determine what fraction of the KIA died of battle wounds without even seeing a hospital in the first place.
- Go through all the major battles and campaigns to tally up "non hospital KIA"
- Ascribe troops accordingly into the various categories of "battle deaths", "non-infectious-disease deaths" and "infectious disease deaths".


The reason for this is to avoid undercounting or double counting. If I simply ignored all KIA I would (as I hope I have comprehensively shown) be undercounting battle deaths, but if I counted all KIA in addition to the SG reports there is a serious risk I would be double-counting those who were wounded in battle and then died in hospital shortly afterwards (so these soldiers would count as battle deaths twice).

This would of necessity be incomplete where it comes to MIA (deserters and prisoners), plus those absent with leave when they died.
 
Example:

In the Atlantic Region in May and June 1864 there were about 3,450 deaths from gunshot wounds in the hospitals (1,042 in May and 2,400 in June), and in July a further 1,327 such deaths (of white troops), totalling 4,900 of the 7,100 hospital deaths of the same period. These I think need to be counted as part of the death count from the Overland Campaign, and they're quite significant as the total official KIA from the Overland is only about 7,600.

There are a total of 25,000 in hospital from gunshot wounds in May, and 15,000 in June. The Overland campaign saw:

Wilderness 2,250 Killed 12,000 Wounded
Spotsylvania 2,700 Killed 13,400 Wounded
North Anna 600 Killed 2,700 Wounded
Cold Harbor 1,850 Killed 9,100 Wounded

This suggests that many wounded didn't even reach the hospital, and of course that many died before hitting the hospital. It also suggests I'd need to find a regiment with one wounded officer in an action, who died of wounds in hospital, and see if they're listed as WIA or KIA on the records - officer because it's easier to find details on them.
 
The paragraph below may be of interest to the poll and the OP. It appears to use data collated in the immediate aftermath of the war and is taken from:

Infectious Diseases during the Civil War: The Triumph of the "Third Army" Jeffrey S. Sartin in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Apr., 1993), pp. 580-584.

“The scorecard on major illness during the Civil War is numbing in its enormity. Among Union soldiers, pneumonia (including influenza and bronchitis) accounted for 1,765,000 episodes of illness and 45,000 deaths; typhoid for 149,000 episodes and 35,000 deaths; diarrhea/dysentery for 360,000 episodes and 21,000 deaths; and malaria for 1,316,000 episodes and 10,000 deaths [1]. Similar data for Southern casualties are lacking because of the destruction of records by the invading troops, but incidence and death rates were probably similar.”

[1] Prepared under the direction of Surgeon General, Barnes JK. Medical and surgical history of the war of the rebellion (1861-1865). Vol 1, part 1. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870-1888:636-41.
 
“The scorecard on major illness during the Civil War is numbing in its enormity. Among Union soldiers, pneumonia (including influenza and bronchitis) accounted for 1,765,000 episodes of illness and 45,000 deaths; typhoid for 149,000 episodes and 35,000 deaths; diarrhea/dysentery for 360,000 episodes and 21,000 deaths; and malaria for 1,316,000 episodes and 10,000 deaths [1]. Similar data for Southern casualties are lacking because of the destruction of records by the invading troops, but incidence and death rates were probably similar.”
Interesting, as the typhoid fatality numbers are higher than the totals of the long SG report which breaks them down by army and month, but the diarrhea numbers are lower. I wonder what's caused that.
 
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