GAINESVILLE- At the third and final lecture on the 'Civil War at 150' at the University of North Georgia's Gainesville Campus, Dr. David Hacker, who changed the death count of the American Civil War, said we'll never know exactly how many men died during the nation's bloodiest war, but his research led him to find that the traditional count of 618,200 was too low. Hacker, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, concluded UNG's three part series on the war with his lecture, 'The Human Cost of the American Civil War' in the Cleveland Ballroom in the Martha T. Nesbitt Building.
Hacker told his audience that the traditional count was based largely on incomplete data and guess work. It did not include the soldiers who died at home from wounds and disease following the war. Pension records elevated the death toll, and the number of men who died from disease in the South after the war was underestimated, according to Hacker. Military records were also incomplete and disorganized. Hacker concluded that 750,000 men died - 131,800 more than originally estimated. Hacker based his figure on census records.
"I went to an alternative that does not suffer from this incompleteness and under-counting ," Hacker said. "It's the best we have but its not perfectly accurate. What we can be confident of is that the traditional estimate is way too low, but we'll never know exactly how many men died in this war."
Hacker said he came to that conclusion by working with census data with a different approach - by examining the missing, not the dead.
"I developed a method of using how many men were missing from the 1870 census," Hacker said. " Most people would want to count actual deaths, but I'm using records of the living to see who was missing. There is no comparable data that come close to recording the lives of people from the past. Nothing else comes close. It is the only source where you can find most everybody."
Hacker said his newly-calculated death toll further shows that the Civil War was the worst conflict America ever experienced, pointing to the mortality numbers.
"We had about 31 million people in 1860, we have 310 million today, about 10 times as any people," Hacker said. "Can you imagine a war today in which 7.5-million men would be killed? It gives you some sense of the level of death in this conflict."
Dr. Dee Gillespie, UNG assistant professor of history, organized the series which also included how the war impacted Georgia and a reflection on the war by UNG historians. She said Hacker's lecture was not originally planned on the 150th anniversary of Confederate General Robert Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Virginia.
"When we were putting the series together we wanted to hold the lectures on the second Thursday of the month and when we got to April, we realized the second Thursday was April 9th," she said. "It makes the point that the war is not over when it's over, that the impact of the war, particularly on families and communities, resonates and continues after the war is over."
