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Title: A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2011

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Abstract: For more than five decades, Civil War History has served as the leading venue for scholarly publications on the Civil War era. Even in light of this impressive run, the editors of Civil War History feel that the following contribution by J. David Hacker of Binghamton University, SUNY, stands among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages. Hacker, a specialist in quantitative methods, has utilized recently released microdata samples from nineteenth-century censuses to examine one of the archetypal “facts” about the Civil War—the oft-cited total of 620,000 plus deaths. Through a comparison of male survival rates between 1860 and 1870 with male survival rates in surrounding censuses, Hacker finds the traditional statistic understates the number of actual Civil War deaths by approximately 20 percent. In his estimation, the most probable number of deaths attributable to the Civil War is 752,000, although the upper bounds of his data set point to as many as 851,000 deaths.

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Authors: Hacker, J.David

Periodical (Full): Civil War History

Issue: 4

Volume: 57

Pages: 307-348

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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