A casualty is someone injured, killed, captured, or missing in a military engagement. The Civil War had plenty of all these. The casualty totals in the Civil War can only be treated as estimates. The exact numbers cannot be exactly known.

Dead at Spotsylvania, 1864.

Due to exhaustive research by many credible and earnest Civil War scholars, the casualty numbers presented here can be considered to be as accurate as possible. I have relied on trustworthy sources for the numbers and statistics I share in this post. The exact number of Civil War casualties will forever be a topic for debate.

One fact we can be certain of regarding Civil War casualty counts, the carnage of the Civil War was immense. War and disease provided the Grim Reaper with all he desired.

Let us not neglect to know that the cold numbers and statistics shown in this post are facts that represent real people. People who fought in a vicious war, who bled red blood whether they were clothed in blue or gray. People who lost limbs or were severely disfigured, people who died miserable, slow deaths of disease or injury, people who perished instantaneously in groups during battle, or slowly had life ebb away as they sprawled alone and incapacitated in the aftermath of a major battle or minor skirmish. Many died agonizing and feverish deaths of disease. These numbers are human beings.

Dead Yankee at Petersburg, 1864.

How Many Died in the Civil War? The quick and simple answer is that no one knows for sure exactly how many died in the Civil War, neither for the North or the South. An estimate of the deaths in the Civil War is 623,026. This means that of men of service age, one out of eleven men died during the Civil War years between 1861 and 1865.

Below is a chart showing how the Civil War compares in total deaths to other wars:

A severe facial wound suffered in the Civil War.

How Many Casualties in the Civil War? For both sides in the Civil War, 471,427 can be considered as a minimum number of those wounded. When added to the estimate of 623,026 deaths, the total estimate of Civil War casualties is 1,094,453.

Greatest Union Battle Losses

+ Not including South Mountain and Crampton’s Gap.
++ Includes Chantilly, Rappahannock, Bristoe Station, and Bull Run Bridge.
Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

The Union Armies lost 110,070 killed or mortally wounded, and 275,175 wounded; for a total of 385,245. This does not include the missing in action. Of the 110,070 deaths from battle, 67,058 were killed on the field and the remaining 43,012 died of wounds.
This table shows how this loss was divided among the different arms of the service:

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

The losses in the three main categories of Union troops were:

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

DIED BY DISEASE. NOT INCLUDING DEATHS IN PRISONS.

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

Deaths in the Union Army, from all causes, as officially classified.
DEATHS FROM ALL CAUSES:

NOTE: The deaths from accidents were caused, principally, by the careless use of fire-arms, explosions of ammunition, and railway accidents; in the cavalry service, a large number of accidental deaths resulted from poor horsemanship.

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

DEATHS IN CONFEDERATE ARMIES
James B. Fry, United States Provost Marshal-General, provides a report in 1865-1866 that includes a tabulation of Confederate losses. Fry’s report is compiled from the muster-rolls which are on file in the Bureau of Confederate Archives. This report is incomplete, as Confederate records can be, and often are, spotty. For example, in these records the Alabama rolls are mostly missing. Nonetheless, the numbers are worth noting. From General Fry’s report, the following table was created by William E. Fox in his Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865:

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

Confederate Deaths of Disease:

Source of table: William E. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865

The Angel of the Battlefield A young boy named David falls from the rafters of a barn at North Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1832. He is badly injured from the fall and becomes an invalid. David will spend the next two years recovering and during this time his eleven-year-old sister stays by his bedside helping, and nursing her brother back to health.

Civil War picture shows patients in Ward K of Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.

The sister’s name was Clara, and this was the beginning of Clara Barton’s life of caring for, and helping others. Clara was born on Christmas day in 1821, and like her four older siblings Clara’s schooling was at home. At age fifteen she becomes a schoolteacher, later she starts a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey. Clara Barton would spend her life aiding and serving. During the Civil War, Clara Barton becomes known as "The Angel of the Battlefield."

Barton was working for the United States Patent Office and living in Washington, D.C. when the Civil War began in 1861. The women who worked at the Patent Office before the Civil War were known as "government girls" as they were part of the growing Federal government. These women had jobs that were previously held only by men. When the Civil War began, these "government girls" lost their jobs.

The Baltimore Riot occurs on April 19, 1861 when militia from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are on their way to Washington and are attacked by secessionists in Baltimore. Four militiamen and twelve citizens are killed. Clara Barton starts a relief program for the 6th Massachusetts Regiment when it arrives at Washington.

Barnes&Noble: A Woman of Valor

Barton advertised in the Worcester, Massachusetts, Spy newspaper for donations when she learned that after First Bull Run (also known as First Manassas, fought July, 1861) the injured men did not have adequate medical supplies for their needs. She started an independent organization to distribute the collected supplies. Her efforts were successful and the next year Barton was granted a general pass by United States Surgeon General William A. Hammond to travel along with the army ambulances. William’s pass said Barton’s presence with the ambulances was; "for the purpose of distributing comforts for the sick and wounded, and nursing them." Clara accepted this pass, but she was somewhat reluctant to do so, Clara was afraid she might be confused as one of the women who made it a habit of following the army – but not for the good, and higher purposes like her’s.

After Second Bull Run (also known as Second Manassas, fought August 28-30, 1862) Barton was part of the volunteer nurses United States Secretary Edwin M. Stanton called for to help the troops spread along the defeated Union line of retreat. She gathered and solicited wagonloads of food and needed medical supplies, taking them to the troops on the front lines. Barton would aid the injured and sick and make soup and coffee.

"The men were brought down from the field till they covered acres. By midnight there must have been three thousand helpless men lying in that hay…. All night we made compresses and slings – and bound up and wet wounds, when we could get water, fed what we could, traveled miles in that dark over to those poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some one’s candle fall into the hay and consume them all."
– Clara Barton writing of her experiences tending to the injured men after Second Bull Run. Barton had helped spread bales of hay onto the ground for the men to lay on.

It is during the Antietam Campaign (September, 1862, also known as Sharpsburg) when Clara Barton is almost killed. While attending to an injured soldier, a bullet passes through a sleeve of her dress. The bullet completely misses Clara, but strikes and kills the injured soldier. She also digs a bullet out the cheek of another soldier using only her pocketknife. A few days after Antietam, Barton has typhoid fever.

Clara Barton was working in field hospitals of General Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James, in June, 1864. Also in 1864, Barton was part of a petition (along with notable others such as; Horace Greeley, P. T. Barnum, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) for the establishment of veteran’s homes. By 1933, fifteen such homes were built.

In February 1865, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Clara Barton to attend to correspondence to help reunite missing soldiers with their families. In July of the same year, she was at the infamous Andersonville prison in Georgia to manage the identification of unmarked graves. From hospital and burial records, Clara was able to create a list of missing prisoners.

In 1877, Clara Barton organized the American National Committee, three years later it became the American Red Cross and she served as its first president. Barton published a book in 1882, History of the Red Cross. Barton retired from the Red Cross to her home at Glen Echo, outside of Washington, D.C. in 1904. She died on April 12, 1912. "If I were to speak of war, it would not be to show you the glories of conquering armies but the mischief and misery they strew in their tracks; and how, while they marched on with tread of iron and plumes proudly tossing in the breeze, some one must follow closely in their steps, crouching to the earth, toiling in the rain and darkness, shelterless themselves, with no thought of pride or glory, fame or praise, or reward; hearts breaking with pity, faces bathed in tears and hands in blood. This is the side which history never shows." – Clara Barton

Barnes&Noble: Clara Barton