Civil War for the day

HistoryFreak.com has an article about a dozen little-known facts about the War:

The Civil War was the bloodiest war in our country’s history; two-thirds of those who died were killed by disease. Over six hundred thousand men died in the Civil War, more Americans than died in World War One, World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam combined. This amounted to two percent of the population at the time, which would be the equivalent to about six million Americans dying today. Battles weren’t as deadly as disease, however. Diarrhea, typhoid fever, lung inflammation, dysentery, and childhood diseases like chicken pox were the cause of nearly seventy percent of the deaths. And if those numbers aren’t bad enough, new estimates suggest that the death total may have been higher.

Gettysburg wasn’t the only unusually bloody battle. More Americans were killed in two days at the Battle of Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined. The Battle of Antietam (photos) was only one day long, but left twelve thousand Union soldiers killed, missing, or wounded, higher than estimates of Allied casualties on D-Day. With twenty-three thousand casualties overall, it was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. At Cold Harbor in Virginia, seven thousand men fell in just twenty minutes.

Over fifty thousand soldiers died in prison camps from starvation and disease; a quarter of those deaths happened at a single camp. No American prisoner of war camp had ever held more than a hundred men at a time prior to 1861. During the Civil War, each camp held thousands. Although they weren’t intentionally killing prisoners, ignorance of proper sanitation, overcrowding, and a lack of resources led to an outrageous number of soldier deaths. Camp Sumter in Georgia, also known as Andersonville, was the largest of the military prisons and also the deadliest. Nearly forty thousand soldiers were imprisoned there, and thirteen thousand, about one-third of them, died.
An estimated forty percent of Civil War dead were never identified. With advances in weaponry and the sheer number of men killed, many bodies were damaged beyond recognition, or left to rot in piles on the battlefield.

Amputation was the treatment of choice for broken or severely wounded limbs. There were so many wounded men that doctors found it impossible to do time-consuming procedures like removing part of a broken bone or some damaged flesh. More than half of leg amputations at the thigh or knee ended up being fatal. That number shot up to 83 percent if the amputation was done at the hip joint.
Surgery wasn’t sterile. Doctors of the day didn’t understand sterilization and believed infection was caused by contaminated air, so cleaning surgical tools often meant wiping them on a dirty apron. There weren’t any antibiotics either. If a doctor did not cut off a soldier’s limb, there was a good chance he’d lose it to infection or gangrene anyway.

There was no anesthesia on the battlefield. Anesthesia wasn’t available, so patients were given chloroform, ether, or, failing that, a glass of whiskey and a bullet to bite down on.

African-Americans made up less than one percent of the North’s population but were ten percent of the Union Army. Black men weren’t allowed to join the army until 1863. About two hundred thousand black men, more than eighty-five percent of eligible African-Americans in the Northern states, fought. While white soldiers earned $13 a month, black soldiers earned only $10, and then were charged a $3 clothing fee that lowered their monthly pay to $7. The highest paid black soldier made less than the lowest paid white one. After protesting by refusing to accept their wages and gaining support from abolitionist Congressmen, black soldiers finally received equal pay in 1864, paid retroactively to their enlistment date.

About twenty percent of soldiers were under the age of eighteen. The Confederacy had no minimum enlistment age. Even though the Union Army technically required soldiers to be eighteen, many officers looked the other way when it came to underage soldiers. Some younger soldiers signed up as drummers or buglers. Musicians weren’t supposed to fight, but when the battles began, they often dropped their instruments and grabbed a weapon.

Women had to fight secretly in the War. Both sides prohibited women from enlisting, but that didn’t stop them from joining in disguise. Since they were incognito, exact numbers aren’t known, but some estimates say four hundred women served in the war by pretending to be men. Many certainly did it out of a sense of loyalty to their cause, but historians say some women were just in it to make ends meet during desperate times.

The estimated cost of the Civil War was nearly seven billion dollars (almost a hundred and fifty billion in today’s dollars). While the cost in human lives was the most tragic, the Civil War also had a high financial toll. Before the war, the US government spent roughly a million dollars a week. By the end of the war, the Federal government was spending over three million dollars a day. The South, as the primary battlefield of the war, suffered greatly, with ten billion dollars in property damage and two-fifths of its livestock destroyed.

As of 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs is still paying a Civil War pension. The last surviving child of a Union veteran still receives a small monthly payment, a hundred and fifty years after the Civil War ended.

Rico says there's always more to learn, and more wars Rico was glad he missed...