Which state sent the most?

pamc153PA

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This should be a no brainer for me, but it's not, which says a lot about me--

Which state sent the most soldiers to fight in the CW, both North, and South? How many? And comparatively speaking, did these states also have the most men killed and wounded?

One of my history teacher friends asked me, and I drew a blank!

Thanks!

Pam
 
For the South:
North Carolina it is: 19,673 died in battle - 20,602 by disease
and for the North:
New York it is: 46,534 died from battle & disease, I didn't have the broken down answer
Ohio is next with: 35,475
then Illinois with: 34,834
then Pennsylvania with: 33,183
 
Highest percentage is Iowa or Wisconsin depending on how the troops are broken down. Iowa sent a lot of troops west to fight the Native American and these are often excluded which gives the ribbon to Wisconsin.
 
"Highest percentage...". [johan steele/#5]



Johan - thanks for bringing that up. It's easy to get lost in the numbers and forget that the percentage actually gives you (in this instance and IMHO) a better sense of what each state sent. Percentage allows you to see how many troops were sent in relation to the individual states' populations...which changes things around a bit.

A sort of boring side-note on statistics...it's sort of amusing because you'll run (inevitably) into regimental histories that will claim the highest losses and then you'll subsequently discover that they're counting a particularly tragic encounter with some break-out of disease that hit that particular unit hard. It becomes apparent after a while that these statistics are stated in very specific ways (sometimes). They either mean total losses (which include death by disease - the biggest killer in the Civil War) or they mean actual combat losses...or they mean the highest losses of people who have red hair and are left-handed....(well, okay, maybe not the last one...but I keep expecting to run into that statistic one day). :wink:

The statistics from the Mexican War are actually the weirdest. The actual combat losses are something like an amazingly low 2%...but the 'sick dead' are a whopping 14% (exceeding the total for the American Civil War's 12%) - cholera and yellow-fever outbreaks south of the border were particularly devastating.







CC
 
The statistics from the Mexican War are actually the weirdest. The actual combat losses are something like an amazingly low 2%...but the 'sick dead' are a whopping 14% (exceeding the total for the American Civil War's 12%) - cholera and yellow-fever outbreaks south of the border were particularly devastating
.A particularly revealing look at "the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sanitation and the lack of immunity had to have been published in the medical journals by the time of the Civil War. Gather farm boys and mix them with city boys and disease is going to sweep through encampments. Small pox had a prventative way back during the Revolutionary War. And measles and chicken pox and mumps could and did kill.

Sanitation of regular army camps had been practiced by regular army troops well before 1860. Livestock and sinks downstream, if you please. But apparently this wasn't often observed in the volunteer armies.

Which simply points to the fact that no one knew how to conduct a war of the magnitude that resulted. A Keystone Kops situation.

What started as a war for southern rights to maintain slavery became a war to eliminate it. Go figure.

Just a thought.

Ole
 
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