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It is a truism of American history that the Civil War stands as the American phenomenon, an event of transcendent significance. If the current list of books, movies, and roundtables is any indication, that won't change anytime soon. At some profound level the Civil War is American history.
Tracking a phenomenon is one thing, explaining it is another. "Phenomenon" by definition also implies a cultural process that goes beyond extraordinary "events" or "facts" (though these are foundational to it) to ongoing and ever-shifting perceptions, apprehensions, and collective memory. In this sense, the phenomenon of the Civil War may or may not correspond to the actual "realities" of the war itself; it is something constructed from events and is selective in its memory. Inevitably, phenomena are presentist and self-nurturing. To capture them, the historian needs to move beyond the facts of the past to the legacies they leave and to the ways they have been remembered in subsequent history.
But first the facts. We begin, as most snapshots of the Civil War do, with the numbers. Phenomena do not come out of nothing; they are not national fantasies with no basis in fact. Numbers count, and the Civil War brings some impressive statistics that were sufficiently horrendous to have involved virtually every living American, North and South.
While Civil War enlistments and casualties cannot be known exactly, there are several reliable approximations. In compiling his indispensable chronology of the Civil War, E. B. Long estimates that total enlistments in the Federal forces numbered 2,778,304, including about 189,000 African Americans, in a population of 18,810,123. Confederate forces numbered 1,400,000 in a white population of 6,500,000. In addition, there were slightly less than 4 million slaves. Of these soldiers, 623,026 died and 471,427 were wounded for a total casualty count of 1,094,453. In breaking the numbers down by each "nation," Federal army deaths totaled 360,222, of which 110,100 were killed in battle and 224,580 of disease in camp. Confederate deaths totaled 94,000 killed in battle and 164,000 from disease for a total of 258,000 dead.
The vast majority of these battlefield deaths (perhaps 90 percent) were caused by small-arms fire, and a sizeable proportion of the victims were still in their teens and early twenties. The youngest we know of was thirteen. In Civil War battles approximately 15 percent of the wounded subsequently died of their wounds, while many of the survivors lost limbs and later suffered profound bouts of post-traumatic stress syndrome. These combined casualty totals, in a total population of only 30 million, almost equal losses from all other American wars together. If translated into an equal proportion of the current U.S. population, the casualty rate would total 10 million American soldiers and countless civilians. Without exaggeration one can say that in terms of death the Civil War was America's most appalling act of human destruction.
Another index of the Civil War badly in need of further study is civilian casualties. American historians and demographers have not worked very hard to track the short-term and long-term casualty rates of war among innocent (mostly Confederate) civilians. Historian James McPherson estimates that a minimum of 50,000 civilians died of war-related causes, while the numbers dying more gradually from disease, malnutrition, and suicide have not yet been estimated. Assuming that 30 percent of military fatalities were married, we are left with a figure of 108,000 women widowed by the war itself.1
For the moral critic this absence of sustained investigation is especially troubling because treatment of non-combatants is one determinant of the justness or unjustness of war. Just war theorists from Augustine and Aquinas to Michael Walzer and James Turner agree that one cardinal principal of just war is the protection of innocents.2 This means that they may not be deliberately targeted, and that soldiers in the field take greater risks for themselves if it means lesser risks for civilians. The prospects of "collateral damage," though sometimes inadvertent, are darkly troubling. That is why the protection of innocents must have the highest priority. Otherwise the just defender is reduced to the same evil status as the unjust aggressor, that is, the status of murderer. We shall return to this problem later.
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