Casualties of War

by
Thomas R. Fasulo

Recently a TV news reporter announced that the deaths at the World Trade Center and Pentagon probably total about 6,000 people. She then stated that never in our country's history have more Americans died in one day, not even in the Civil War. As any Civil War reenactor or living historian knows (or should), the bloodiest day in American History occurred on another September day near a small Maryland town. The battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg) occurred on September 17, 1862, resulting in 4,710 dead, 18,440 wounded and another 3,043 missing [statistics are from the Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War, 1991, 850 pp]. Those counting the casualties at Antietam usually only total the number of dead and wounded [23,150], but who knows how many of the missing at Antietam were also killed? Was the reporter right or wrong about the deaths at the World Trade Center exceeding those at Antietam? Frankly, I am not interested in arguing the point as that is not why I am writing this. Still, statistics can be impressive if used properly. In my living history presentations I often ask spectators if they have seen the movie "Saving Private Ryan" with its brutal depiction of war. I then point out that more Americans were killed or wounded by 7:30 am at Antietam [in the cornfield] than were killed all day on June 6, 1944, and the battle of Antietam was just getting started. It allows spectators to understand just how terrible American Civil War battles were.

The United States now has a population of about 270 million. During the Civil War there were 31.5 million people in the United States. This means our country's population is now about 9 times what it was doing the Civil War. Mary Chestnut, a southern woman whose diary is now famous, once wrote [about three years into the war] that before the Civil War she did not know a family that had someone in the army, but that now she did not know of any family that had not lost someone to the war. Our population is now far greater and yet our county is still tightly linked. I have two cousins who work in the World Trade Center complex - both survived, one by a lucky chance. At the University of Florida, I work closely with a graduate student who still has two friends among the missing. All of us, those who have lost friends and family and those who haven't, are deeply affected by this tragedy. Yet consider what Americans who lived in the Civil War must have felt when the casualty lists from Antietam (23,150), Gettysburg (more than 50,000), Chickamauga (28,399) and other battles were published. Worse than the battles were the lists of those who died from disease - two of every three of the 622,000 who died in the Civil War. The despair in the cities, towns and hamlets during those four bloody years must have been overpowering at times.

Also consider that the men in most military units were from the same area, companies being formed of men from the same town or county. What happened in those communities when units like the 1st Texas and the 16th Connecticut took horrendous casualties in the cornfield at Antietam, or at Gettysburg when units like the 26th North Carolina had three men left when it reached the stone wall, or the 1st Minnesota, a small regiment of 280 men attacked an entire Confederate brigade, to buy five minutes for General Hancock with their lives? What this meant was that entire towns or counties lost all their young men. I'm reminded of the folk song from the 1960s that went, "Where have all the young men gone? Gone to graveyards every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?" What must have it been like in America after the war, with a large part of an entire generation missing? Yet, despite the hardships, those Americans who survived still struggled to build a great nation.

Many of us who reenact say we do so in awe of and to honor the Americans of the 1860s who struggled under such great personal hardships, in battle and on the home front. But now is our time to really honor them. If they could continue to live in such terrible times, when they shuddered in anticipation of the next day's newspapers and its casualty lists, how can we shrink from our own fear of the loss of a loved one or economic hardship? Do statistics really matter? Which is worse, 6,000 dead in one day, or 622,000 dead in four years? Perhaps John Dunne answered this when he wrote in his Devotions #17, "...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Those of us who chose to live our lives in the past for one or two weekends a month, can best honor those whom we try to impersonate by facing the future with courage and resolve and not turning aside from our goal. They did it once, we must do it now.

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