The Civil War brought almost unimaginable suffering. The scale of the losses is difficult to grasp. Never before or since have the American people borne such a toll.
The exact number of war-related deaths is unknown. For years, the number 620,000 was cited as settled fact. But that figure was always suspect, based as it was on inconsistent recordkeeping.
A decade ago, historian J. David Hacker at Binghamton University reviewed digitized Census data and determined that the dead had been significantly undercounted. Acknowledging the impossibility of finding an exact figure, Hacker suggested a range of between 650,000 and 850,000 military war deaths. (Civilian war deaths were not included.)
So historians now mostly cite the number of war dead as 750,000, since it is the midpoint of Hacker’s range. To put that number in context, more Americans died during the Civil War than in all other wars combined.
Americans are, tragically, once again experiencing what it is like to lose hundreds of thousands of their compatriots. Covid deaths in America are approaching 600,000, but that number, as shocking as it is, doesn’t have nearly the societal impact as deaths did during the Civil War. That’s because in 1860 the United States was a far less populated place. The country’s population was only about 31 million, less than one-tenth of what it is today.
Union soldier Pvt. Hazen B. Hooker expressed the funereal mood of the times when he wrote to his parents back home in Peacham in 1864: “Death is every where present, on the field of battle, in the camp and at home, but it will not do for soldiers to think of such things, that is to dwell upon them, for if he does he will be miserable all the time.”
Historian J. David Book quoted Hooker’s letter in an article about death during the Civil War that he wrote in 2011 for Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society. Though he didn’t want soldiers to fixate on death, Hooker wrote that he hoped they would think about it enough that they remembered to live upstanding lives.
Hooker was one of more than 34,000 Vermonters to serve during the war, which represented more than 10 percent of the state population. A month after writing that letter, he became one of the more than 5,000 Vermonters to die in the war when he was killed at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia.
Vermont troops suffered a frightfully high fatality rate during the war. A Vermont enlistee had a better than 1 in 7 chance of dying in the conflict. Among Northern states, Vermont’s per-capita fatality rate ranked second only to Michigan’s.
For his article, Book combed the writings of soldiers and relatives back home to understand attitudes about death during the war. The soldiers quoted in Book’s article often seem fatalistic. Resigned to the possibility of imminent death, some imagined what would be the best way to die, or at least what were the worst ways.
Pvt. Wilbur Fisk, who served as a regular correspondent for the Green Mountain Freeman newspaper of Montpelier, saw firsthand the horrors of war. “In some places the men were piled four or five deep, some of them were still alive,” he wrote after the battle of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia. “I turned away from that place, glad to escape such a terrible, sickening sight.” Fisk had often thought that if he had to die in the war, he wanted to die on the battlefield. “(B)ut after looking at such a scene, one cannot help turning away and saying, any death but that.”
Orlando Burton, a corporal from Manchester, felt differently. In a letter to his hometown newspaper, he said his company had already lost five men to disease: “We had rather die by the bullets of the enemy than by disease, but we cannot choose.”
Haunted by their own possibly imminent deaths, soldiers sometimes found they could ignore the deaths of others. Maybe it was a coping method to deal with the misery surrounding them. But this occasional indifference bothered Capt. Chester Leach of Fletcher. When a sergeant he knew drowned while bathing, Leach was dismayed to see that few bothered to note his passing: “(H)ere where hundreds were sitting around within 50 rods & none thought of going to see him, even after his body was taken out. He was buried near the church, no ceremonies excepting a prayer made by some chaplain of the brigade.”
Soldiers particularly feared an anonymous death. As one author explained, “If a soldier could not save his life, he hoped at least to preserve his name.” The government had yet to start issuing soldiers dog tags for easy identification. When a man was killed in battle, his body would often lie, unidentified, where it fell. His best hope of identification was if a comrade had seen him fall or was available to identify his remains while they were still recognizable. But with armies frequently on the move immediately after battle, the people who knew a soldier were often miles away before strangers had a chance to bury the body.
Some soldiers improvised by writing their names on scraps of paper and pinning them to their clothing as a form of identification they hoped would never be needed. Others carved their names on pieces of wood and wore them on strings around their necks. Entrepreneurs began marketing metal pins, some in gold or silver, on which a soldier could have his name engraved.
Despite their best efforts, however, these soldiers still often went unknown, their identification carried away by the blast that took their lives or by ill-equipped Confederates who stripped clothing from the bodies. Fully 40 percent of the Union soldiers who died in the war were listed as unknown, Book notes.
The image of a soldier lying unidentified on some distant battlefield haunted loved ones at home, too. Families sometimes hired agents to travel south to search for remains and return them to Vermont for burial.
Book describes the efforts to locate the body of Cpl. William Church of Swanton after he was killed at Gettysburg. The historian for Church’s unit (Company K, 13th Regiment) wrote, “Among the bodies that I had seen on this gory field, his was the most horribly mangled. On the following day we carefully gathered up his remains, moved them to the brow of a hill where we had dug a shallow grave and lovingly and tenderly placed him in it and at the head we set a mark that the place might be found should occasion require it.”
Church’s family hired a J.S. Foof to recover the body. Foof reached Gettysburg four months after the battle and started searching. He wrote the Church family: “I looked until so dark I could not see to read (the names on markers) and returned to the hotel a little disappointed in not finding it.”
Foof had searched the area around a log barn, where he had been told Church was buried. As he searched, Foof watched teams of men removing unidentified bodies and taking them to the Soldiers National Cemetery being constructed nearby. (Later that month, President Lincoln would deliver his Gettysburg Address at the cemetery.)
At his hotel, Foof encountered Miram Warren, who had written Church’s family where the body was buried. Foof and Warren searched together for hours, but to no avail. Foof pronounced himself “quite discouraged.”
“The board is since gone,” he wrote, “either by the cattle in the field, the cemetery trams driving through or by other persons finding the board down and using it to mark other friends graves.”
What Foof didn’t realize, Book writes, is that Church’s body had already been recovered by a Capt. Blake, apparently of the same unit. Even as Foof searched, Blake might have been transporting Church’s body north. Once Church’s body reached Vermont, the regimental historian wrote, “(it) was buried in the Church street cemetery in Swanton, and a modest headstone now marks his last earthly resting place.”
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Then Again: The Civil War took a heavy toll on soldiers from Vermont - vtdigger.org
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