New and Noteworthy---How Soldiers Die In Battle

The following is a portion of a book review written by Andrew Burtch, Canadian War Museum, published by Michigan War Studies, June 13, 2013.

The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die In Battle, Michael Stephenson, Crown Publishing, 464 pp., 2013, $28.00.

In The Last Full Measure, Michael Stephenson combines a compelling, encyclopedic analysis of the history of warfare with firsthand accounts of battlefield carnage. The finished product is accessible, informative, convincing, and moving. It forgoes any discussion of the geopolitical and strategic elements of warfare to get at what Stephenson defines as the core of military history—killing and dying. Whether inflicted by fire-hardened sharp sticks, swords, axes, arrows, musket balls, high velocity rounds, cruise missiles, or IEDs, violent death links soldiers across the centuries.

Stephenson states his central thesis in a discussion of combat in the Pacific during the Second World War: "The fighting ... reminds us that combat is a bloody gutter-slop: nasty, brutish and short—an abattoir that is only later cleaned up, perfumed, and decorated with the laurel crown of history" (262). He also dismantles the myth of the "Western Way of War," characterized by heroic man-to-man confrontations on the battlefield, by highlighting accounts from the sharp end, where "the last sound from the lips of the stricken is not so much the rousing call 'for the motherland' as the heartbreaking cry for mother" (xii–xiv).

. . . .

The book has no formal conclusion, perhaps because wars and their aftermaths are still ongoing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and any attempt to assess definitively their outcome or meaning would quickly be outdated. But Stephenson misses an opportunity to use his considerable store of evidence to answer a question he raises at the close of his Civil War chapter. If war is such a devastating experience (in General Sherman's words, if "war is hell"), why does it continue to exist? Why is it that a man like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., wounded and thoroughly disillusioned, resigned his commission, yet less than twenty years later, "Like some American samurai, … discovered a fervent belief in the mystical importance of a warrior's unquestioning obedience unto death" (165).

Why, in short, do men so easily forget the atrocities of past wars just in time for the next one? Of course, many historians have fruitfully explored the meaning and memory of death and the heroic ideal after the battle, but we are left to wonder about Stephenson's thoughts on the subject.
This book is a thoughtful, respectful treatment of a difficult subject. Its author deftly balances personal, sometimes extremely graphic accounts of death and mutilation with enlightening historical analyses, steering clear of the purely anecdotal war stories or "pornography of violence" that John Keegan warned against. I recommend The Last Full Measure to both scholars and general readers with any interest in military history.

The full text of the review is found at Michigan War Studies, June 13, 2013

New and Noteworthy---Death and the Civil War During the Sesquicentennial

Without a doubt, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust put the Civil War on the bestseller lists again. Published in 2008, Faust's work illuminated for many a new view of Ken Burns' Civil War 1990 series. Popular culture treats the American Civil War differently than scholars, buffs and reenactors treat the war. For popular culture the market place is a battlefield; products vie for mass attention and sales. Now during the 150th sesquicentennial of 1862, the public will likely take a glance at the Civil War. Ric Burns' Death and the Civil War will premiere on Tuesday September 18th on public broadcasting television. Based upon Faust's bestselling non-fiction work, Death and the Civil War is a sobering reminder that the Civil War was a landscape turned red by 750,000+ deaths in four years.

At 120 minutes, Burns' pace is deliberate and provocative. The opening segment is jarring.  A few moments before his death, a Mississippi soldier begins writing a letter to his father. The man bleeds onto the paper has he haltingly reveals his last thoughts about his life, service, death and afterlife. Within this 12 minute  preface  viewers' hearts may begin to break.  The images that Burns selects include photography from the era; within the images there are ghosts, individuals who moved during the 30 second to a minute and half exposure time. There are subtleties in the images and texts that may move past the causal viewer; such may be the estimate that of the 750,000+ deaths 50% were not identified by name.

The chapters are each about 15 minutes in length: Death, Burying, Naming, Honoring, Believing and Doubting, Accounting, and Remembering. Drew Gilpin Faust is the most frequently interviewed expert during the film; generally her remarks impart important facts but on one occasion it appears that she minimizes the 6,500+ deaths during the Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom campaigns. The individual being interviewed who is most likely to be remembered is Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet. He remarks defines and gently elevates the bleak discussions that, at times, may approach melodrama. The narration by  Oliver Platt and music compositions by Brian Keane are effective in conveying grief and hope. Is there an 'Ashoken Farewell'  on the soundtrack.  Yes, possibly two: A Thousand Thoughts [Tusen Tankar] and Republic of Suffering in acoustic and orchestral versions. Both the film and the soundtrack are immediately available after the Tuesday evening broadcast and they are worth every penny and much more.  Ric Burns' Death And The Civil War is an exceptionally fine work in the field of television broadcasting and presentation of historic artifacts, photographs and sentiments.

News---The Civil War's Body Count: Was It Three Quarters Of A Million?

Recounting the Dead, J. David Hacker, New York Times, September 20, 2011.

Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.

The notion that we’ve drastically undercounted the Civil War dead is not a new idea: in fact, Francis Amasa Walker, superintendent of the 1870 Census, estimated that the number of male deaths was “not less than 850,000.” So how did the lower number come to be the accepted count — and why does it matter that it was wrong?

Efforts to identify, rebury and count the dead began as soon as the war ended. A precise count proved impossible, however: both armies lacked systematic procedures to identify the dead, wounded and missing in action, as well as an official means to notify relatives of a soldier’s death. Men went missing; battle, hospital and prison reports were incomplete and inaccurate; dead men were buried unidentified; and family members were forced to infer the fate of a loved one from his failure to return home after the war.

United States Census Bureau History StaffFrancis Amasa WalkerInstead, postwar counts of the Union dead drew from regimental muster-out rolls and battle reports. An 1866 report compiled under the direction of Provost Marshal General James B. Fry estimated that 279,689 men in the Union forces died in the war. The estimated death toll increased to 360,222 by the late 19th century, partly as a result of widows and orphans bringing forward information when applying for pensions and survivors’ benefits.

But a direct count of the Confederate dead proved impossible. The destruction of the Confederate army and many of its records limited investigators to partial counts. The Fry report documented just 133,821 Confederate deaths from incomplete returns. That number didn’t change much: since Confederate widows and orphans were ineligible for federal benefits, the estimate was never supplemented with information from survivors.

Francis Amasa Walker’s interest in estimating the number of war-related deaths was a result of the 1870 Census returns. The final Census count put the population at 38,558,371, up just 22.6 percent from the count in 1860. All previous 19th-century censuses had documented decennial growth rates between 32.7 percent and 36.4 percent, a near-constant rate of increase that 19th-century Americans had come to expect and celebrate as a measure of the nation’s strength, progress and future prosperity.

The 31-year-old superintendent was understandably defensive. City boosters in Philadelphia and New York had charged the 1870 enumeration with excessive coverage errors, and President Grant had taken the unusual step of ordering a recount of those cities. Although the second counts failed to turn up many additional residents, the Census remained suspect. After all, if past growth patterns had continued, the population should have been 41.5 million. Had the Census somehow missed 3 million people?

Walker acknowledged that the 1870 census was far from perfect, but he refused to concede that it was more deficient in its coverage of the population than preceding censuses. Instead, he reasoned, the war was to blame. The disappointing growth rate, he countered, was the result of the “notorious and palpable effects of the war, which hampered the growth of the black population, checked immigration, limited marriages and births and led to the direct loss of close to a million men.”

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.”

Walker’s estimate of Confederate losses was necessarily rougher. He started with a guess at the number of men participating — about half of the aggregate number participating on the Union side — and his assumption that Confederate soldiers’ longer average terms of service and relative lack of nourishing food, medicine and skilled physicians resulted in a greater risk of death. “Without attempting to deal at all nicely with this subject,” he argued, “it is difficult to see how anyone could, upon reflection, place the losses of the confederate armies at less than 350,000 men.”

Unfortunately, Walker did not pursue the line of inquiry further. After his reappointment as superintendent for the 1880 Census, he had to explain the overly rapid growth of the South’s population between 1870 and 1880 and defend the Census from charges of fraud in the form of over-counting. After a field investigation by the Census geographer Henry Gannett failed to turn up any evidence of fraud, suspicion returned to the 1870 census. Gannett charged that many of the 1870 enumerators were appointed for their Republican political connections, not for their local knowledge or ability to conduct a census. The inevitable result, he concluded, was a large undercount.

This time Walker agreed. Having been successful in pushing through many costly reforms for the 1880 census, one of which was to shift enumeration responsibilities from federal marshals answerable to the Justice Department to a much larger field force selected for their qualifications and answerable to the Census Office, Walker must have felt some measure of justification from Gannett’s report.

But with the census discredited — a crude calculation by the 1890 census office subsequently indicated that the 1870 Census had undercounted the South’s population by 1,260,078 (10 percent of the region’s and 3 percent of the nation’s population) — the opportunity for a more comprehensive examination of the war’s human cost was lost to the political winds. The estimate of 360,222 Union deaths stood.

The count of Confederate dead was, however, heavily debated. William F. Fox, a private citizen and Union army veteran whose 1889 book on regimental losses remains a classic reference work for Civil War historians, relied on battle reports and unofficial estimates to obtain a total of 94,000 Confederate battle deaths. He complained, however, that records were incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths (many men counted as wounded in battlefield reports subsequently died of their wounds). In 1900 Thomas L. Livermore, who, like Fox, was a private citizen and Union army veteran, put the number of Confederate non-combat deaths at 164,000, using the official estimate of Union deaths from disease and accidents and a comparison of Union and Confederate enlistment records.

Livermore’s estimate assumed Union and Confederate troops suffered an equal risk of death from disease, a conservative assumption that Walker had explicitly rejected. Despite acknowledging that his estimate of disease mortality likely undercounted Confederate deaths and his concern that Fox’s estimate of battle deaths could “be accepted only as a minimum,” Livermore combined the two estimates to arrive at a total of 258,000 Confederate deaths, a total that remains unrevised more than a century later.

So why should we now doubt that number? For one thing, Fry, Walker, Fox, Livermore and other early investigators were limited by the quality of the data available. Using new quantitative sources, we can now make a more comprehensive and accurate estimate of war-related deaths. With one exception, microfilm copies of the original manuscript returns have been preserved for all censuses since 1850 (the 1890 Census manuscripts were lost in a fire). Census microdata samples created from these returns at the Minnesota Population Center make it possible to estimate undercounts by age and sex in censuses back to 1850 and to construct a Census-based estimate of male deaths caused by the war.

Census undercounts are estimated using multiple censuses and a demographic method known as back projection. The results confirm that, indeed, the 1870 Census was the most poorly enumerated. It was not nearly as bad as Walker feared and as 1890 census officials charged, however: the net undercount was 6.5 percent in 1870, compared to 6.0 percent in 1850, 5.5 percent in 1860, and 3.6 percent in 1880.

War-related losses are estimated by comparing sex differences in mortality during the 1860s with sex differences in mortality in the 1850s and 1870s. The results indicate that the war was responsible for the deaths of about 750,000 men (using less conservative assumptions, the total may have been as high as 850,000). Although that estimate is 100,000 fewer than the 850,000 deaths suggested by Walker, it is closer to his guess than it is to traditional estimate of 618,222 deaths, which has been cited uncritically for too long. If the Census-based estimate is correct, the traditional estimate is about 20 percent too low.

Although there are limitations to using Census data to estimate of Civil War mortality — civilian deaths are too few to be measured accurately, and deaths cannot be reliably divided into Union or Confederate subtotals — the method provides a more complete assessment of the war’s human cost. In addition to the men who died during their terms of service, the Census-based estimate of male mortality includes men who died between the date of their discharge and the 1870 Census from diseases and wounds contracted during the war, as well as non-enlisted men who died in guerilla warfare and other war-related violence. It excludes, however, men dying from war-related causes who would have died under the normal mortality conditions of the late 19th century. This final group, included in all direct counts of the Civil War dead, represents about 80,000 men.

So what? Above a certain count, do the numbers even matter? Well, yes. The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war. The new estimate suggests that more men died as a result of the Civil War than from all other American wars combined. Approximately 1 in 10 white men of military age in 1860 died from the conflict, a substantial increase from the 1 in 13 implied by the traditional estimate. The death toll is also one of our most important measures of the war’s social and economic costs. A higher death toll, for example, implies that more women were widowed and more children were orphaned as a result of the war than has long been suspected.

In other words, the war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.

Sources: Drew Gilpin Faust, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”; Joshua B. Howard, North Carolina Civil War Death Study; Francis Amasa Walker, Report of the Superintendent of Census to the Secretary of the Interior, Dec. 26, 1871; Henry Gannett, “The Alleged Census Frauds in the South”; Francis Amasa Walker, Documents Relating to the Taking of the Census of South Carolina, Oct. 5, 1880; Robert P. Porter, Henry Gannett and William C. Hunt, “Progress of the Nation, 1790 to 1890″; William F. Fox, “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865″; Thomas L. Livermore, “Number and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861-65″; Steven Ruggles et al., “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series.”

J. David Hacker is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University, SUNY.

Text Source New York Times September 20, 2011

Image Source: Civil War Librarian

CWL----The Last Letter Home: On Campaign, On The Battlefield, In The Hospital, In Prison

Proud To Say I Am A Union Soldier: The Last Letters Home From Federal Soldiers Written During the Civil War, 1861-1965, Franklin R. Crawford, Heritage Books, 238pp., , 20+ photographs, notes, bibliography, index, $29.95.

Crawford has done good service to Federals who died during the war. Similar in many ways to a portion of Greg Coco's work focusing on Gettysburg, Crawford organizes and edits the letters home of 31 Federal soldiers. He is a careful researcher who offers between 15 and 40 notes for each of the individuals. Crawford's comments are not overwrought with Victorian pathos but are clear and concise summaries of the soldiers journeys, camplife and encounters on the battlefield.

Private Pliny F. White, Company E. 14th Vermont encounters drills, picket duty, drills, weapon care, drills after he enlists in early September 1862. With other Vermont regiments that enlisted during the early fall of 1862, the 14th travel to Washington D.C. to man the forts. White frets that his term of service will expire and no combat will be seen. Fortunately Confederate raider Mosby strays to close to Washington DC and two Vermont brigades are ordered out of the forts. Marching from northern Virginia, through Maryland, the Vermonters arrive in Gettysburg on July 2. He writes on July 2 to his sister, "The chances are that today we shall go into battle." Pliny must wait 24 hours for that to happen. Wounded severely in the arm, Pliny is sent on July 5 to the Seminary Hospital. His last letter is July 31. One other letter follows. Francis Bell writes to White's family that Pliny died at 10pm on August 5 due to fever and diahrea (sic).

Ernst Damkoehler,a veteran of the Prussian army and private in Company I, 26th Wisconsin, has commissary duties which bores him but does allow him to sell his free time as a horse groom. Safe during the 1862 and 1863 campaigns of the Army of the Potomac due to his rear eschelon duties. The Eleventh Corps in which Ernst serves is transferred to Chattanooga and participates in the breakout. Stripping the commissary to the barest essentials, Sherman orders commissary soldiers to be transferred to the front in the Atlanta campaign. His last letter home is April 17 1864. He is wounded and captured at Resaca, sent to Andersonville Prison. He dies in June 1864 from complications of the wound and diarrhea. Twelve graves in Anderson hold men of the 26th Wisconsin.

Crawford sets forth soldiers' remarks with a simplicity and directness that is sobering. Each soldier's story takes about 20 minutes to read. The impact of reading the soldiers' description of the ordinariness of their camps, their marches, their cooking, their drills helps the reader to understand these were ordinary men. Loving and missing terribly their families contrasts with the aloneness of being one dying soldier in the Seminary Hospital that held over 700 or being one of the fifty a day who died at Andersonville.

Readers who are reenactors or those who wish to recall to memory the lives of Civil War soldiers will enjoy this book. Also, those editing family letters would do well to look to this book as a model of a difficult task well done.

Just Released---From The Hearth, Through The Battlefield, To The Grave

Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death, Mark S. Schantz, Cornell University Press, 256 pp., $24.95.

"Americans came to fight the Civil War in the midst of a wider cultural world that sent them messages about death that made it easier to kill and to be killed. They understood that death awaited all who were born and prized the ability to face death with a spirit of calm resignation. They believed that a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave. They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity. They grasped that death itself might be seen as artistically fascinating and even beautiful."--from Awaiting the Heavenly Country

How much loss can a nation bear? An America in which 620,000 men die at each other's hands in a war at home is almost inconceivable to us now, yet in 1861 American mothers proudly watched their sons, husbands, and fathers go off to war, knowing they would likely be killed. Today, the death of a soldier in Iraq can become headline news; during the Civil War, sometimes families did not learn of their loved ones' deaths until long after the fact.

Did antebellum Americans hold their lives so lightly, or was death so familiar to them that it did not bear avoiding? In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark S. Schantz argues that American attitudes and ideas about death helped facilitate the war's tremendous carnage. Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent, Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.

Schantz addresses topics such as the pervasiveness of death in antebellum America; theological discourse and debate on the nature of heaven and the afterlife; the rural cemetery movement and the inheritance of the Greek revival; death as a major topic in American poetry; African American notions of death, slavery, and citizenship; and a treatment of the art of death--including memorial lithographs, postmortem photography and Rembrandt Peale's major exhibition painting The Court of Death.

Awaiting The Heavenly Country is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the Civil War and the ways in which antebellum Americans comprehended death and the unimaginable bloodshed on the horizon.

Blurbs:
"The premise of this very interesting and very satisfying book is that an antebellum American culture of death contributed mightily, even decisively, to the destructive nature of the Civil War. Mark S. Schantz's excellent research melds with his deep knowledge of the war in making persuasive links between antebellum culture and Civil War behaviors--North and South, male and female, black and white, home front and battlefield."--David Waldstreicher, Temple University

"Awaiting the Heavenly Country is an eloquent and insightful analysis of the culture of death and dying in antebellum America. Mark S. Schantz argues that the carnage of the Civil War may perhaps best be explained by a culture that embraced several anesthetizing notions about death: the idea that death was ennobling, that it ushered the deceased into a materially and emotionally rich heavenly existence, that the body itself could be purified and restored in the act of death. Schantz is a generous and sympathetic guide to the mind-numbing bloodletting of the Civil War who manages to explain the inexplicable."--Susan Juster, University of Michigan

Source of Text: publisher

CWL: Coming on the immediate heels of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering which was released in January, Schantz's work may get a boost from Republic of Suffering's very high sales or the book could be in the shadow of Faust's heavily reviewed work. CWL plans to read both in June and offer readers a comparative review before the July 4th. Related reading CWL hopes to catch up on in June includes Mark Noll's The Civil War As A Theological Crisis.

CWL----Forthcoming in 2008, My Copy Is On Order

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust, Knopf Inc., 368 pp.

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.

Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields—from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.
Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

Were he alive today, This Republic of Suffering would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the “real war will never get in the books. No other generation of Americans has encountered death on the scale of the Civil War generation. This Republic of Suffering is the first study of how people in both North and South coped with this uniquely devastating experience. How did they mourn the dead, honor their sacrifice, commemorate their memory, and help their families? Drew Gilpin Faust’s powerful and moving answers to these questions provide an important new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War.” —James M. McPherson, author of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

“During the Civil War, death reached into the world of the living in ways unknown to Americans before or since. Drew Gilpin Faust follows the carnage in all its aspects, on and off the battlefield. Timely, poignant, and profound, This Republic of Suffering does the real work of history, taking us beyond the statistics until we see the faces of the fallen and understand what it was to live amid such loss and pain.” —Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Drew Gilpin Faust has used her analytical and descriptive gifts to explore how men and women of the Civil War generation came to terms with the conflict’s staggering human toll. Everyone who reads this book will come away with a far better understanding of why the war profoundly affected those who lived through it.” —Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War

“Drew Gilpin Faust’s brilliant new book, This Republic of Suffering, builds profoundly. In the end, one can only conclude, as she does, that the meaning of the Civil War, for its contemporaries, was tied up with/lay in death itself. Powerful, moving.” —Stephanie McCurry, author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Pulture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country

“Whitman was wrong; the real war did get into the books. This is a wise, informed, troubling book. This Republic of Suffering demolishes sentimentalism for the Civil War in a masterpiece of research, realism, and originality.”
—David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Source of Text: Publisher