A Deadlier Fight

The New York Times recently published an interesting article about the Civil War death toll. The article not only discusses research concerning new mortality numbers, but also mentions the processes researchers went through in order to calculate the original death toll; immigrants and their relation to Civil War demographics; and the impact of disease on the North and South.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=new%20estimate%20raises%20civil%20war%20dead&st=cse&scp=1

According to new estimates from demographic historian J. David Hacker, the Civil War death toll is now thought to hover around 750,000, a number 20% higher than the original estimate of 618,222. Dr. Hacker's research has recently been published in Civil War History, a historical journal that recognizes the significance of the new information. Dr. Hacker's research not only aims at a more accurate representation of the Civil War death toll, but it presents the Civil War as an even deadlier conflict than it was originally thought to be.

What surprised me about this article was the fact that the old numbers have not been questioned too critically, if at all, since their origination in the late nineteenth-century. After reading about Dr. Hacker's methods of inquiry into demographic data, I was a bit surprised that this process hadn't been attempted before.