A War Lost and Found

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Allen C. Guelzo
Sept.-Oct. 2011

Although Robert E. Lee made the end of the Civil War a practical certainty when he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, it was not actually until August 20, 1866, that President Andrew Johnson officially declared that the American Civil War was “at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”1 In one of the few moments of tact Johnson ever exhibited during his miserable presidency, he refrained from chortling over who had won and gloating over who had lost. But Johnson also missed a golden opportunity to identify what the war had accomplished, or failed to accomplish. He would never have that chance again, and his omission initiated a vast uncertainty over who the war’s winners and losers actually were. Over the years, the war would become hostage to contorted definitions of victory and defeat, resulting in a generous ransom of sentimental treacle that converted the war into a national entertainment within an American exceptionalist narrative in which all had somehow won. The biggest loser of the Civil War thus became our understanding of the Civil War itself. One hundred and fifty years on, the question of who lost the Civil War is still very much worth asking.

n the simplest sense, the most obvious losers of the Civil War were the dead. Between 1866 and 1885, the Federal War Department issued three successive enumerations of Union army wartime deaths, ultimately arriving at a figure of 360,222. Precise as this sounds, it was actually only an approximation. There were no death or grave registration units in the Civil War armies; in some instances, officers were encouraged to undercount their casualties in order to soften the blow to civilian morale back home.2 The number of Union wounded, which could mean anything from minor punctures to double amputation and blindness, was pegged at another 275,000. Add the 7,000 or so Union Navy dead and wounded, and the butcher’s bill for the preservation of the Union amounted to at least 640,000 dead and wounded. In practical terms, six out of every 100 men of military age in the North died during the war, and one out of every six who actually served perished: One out of every 65 soldiers was killed, one out of every 56 died of their wounds, one of every 13 or 14 died of disease, and one out of every ten was wounded. Every one of these statistics, in turn, generated ripples throughout American society for decades thereafter. By 1903, there were 970,322 Civil War pensioners (both veterans and families of veterans) at a total cost of almost $139 million, which in those days amounted to 22.5 percent of all Federal expenditures. In these terms, the Civil War was first and foremost a fiscal and demographic catastrophe.3

These losses, however, paled beside the toll that the war exacted from the Confederacy. Estimates of Confederate battle-related deaths range from 74,500 to 94,000, while between 110,000 and 164,000 Confederate soldiers died of various diseases. But the Confederacy had a far smaller pool of military manpower to draw upon, and it was restricted until the very end of the war to whites. All told, ten out of every one hundred Southern soldiers were killed (a literal decimation); adding to that figure the deaths from disease, this means that one out of every four Confederate soldiers never came back. It is almost impossible to estimate how many Southern civilians may have died war-related deaths.4


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But this was not what Lincoln, Douglass and the veterans believed. In 1886, the survivors of Battery B of the 1st New Jersey Artillery gathered together at Gettysburg with the survivors of the III Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Together, they strolled over the battlefield and visited the graves of New Jersey’s dead in the National Cemetery that Lincoln had dedicated 23 years before. One elderly man in the group, who had lost his son at Gettysburg, listened as the old battery mates stood by the boy’s grave and “praised his boy’s pleasant ways, genial, kindly disposition, and brave deeds.” The man was unconsoled. “My boy, my boy, O God, why did you take my boy? He was all I had”, he sobbed. It was the wife of an ex-artilleryman who at last took the old man by the arm and turned him toward the flag on the cemetery flagstaff: “Your boy died for that flag, and while this nation endures his deeds will never be forgotten. When you and I are dead, patriots, standing where we are now, will remember his name and fame.”24 It was a beautiful and quintessentially Victorian moment of nationalistic melodrama, but it underscores a point often missed in the terrible toll of the Civil War’s losses, which is that democracy—the classical liberal democracy of Locke and Montesquieu, of Hamilton and Madison, of Mill and Tocqueville—survived.

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