Georgia suffered highest Civil War death toll of any state, new research finds

Pvt. Lucien Weakley’s weathered headstone stands beneath a towering magnolia tree that is surrounded by the graves of thousands of other Confederate soldiers in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. Cracked and then repaired, the marker says the Tennessee native died in Atlanta in 1863, a month after he was mortally wounded in the bloody Battle of Chickamauga.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army two years later in Virginia. In the 160 years since, researchers have repeatedly sought to quantify the Civil War’s staggering death toll. That task has proven challenging partly because of poor recordkeeping and the loss of documents to fires that consumed much of Richmond, Virginia — the capital of the Confederacy — during the war.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

For more than a century, historians have cited a rough estimate of 618,000 deaths from the war, though that has long been viewed as a serious undercount. In 2011, a demographic historian used a 1% sample of census records to compare wartime and peacetime death totals. He estimated the death toll was 750,000.

Newer research armed with more data provides the fullest picture yet of not just the overall death toll but its disproportionate impact on the South, including Georgia.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, the latest analysis is based on recently released census returns from the 19th century, as well as census records linked across multiple years. Those linked records helped researchers track people moving between states.

The New York University researchers who completed the study estimate the overall death toll at 698,000, reaffirming the Civil War as the deadliest armed conflict in American history.

Southern states, according to the study, saw 13.1% of their U.S.-born, military-age, white males like Weakley die in the war, compared to 4.9% in Northern states.

The researchers also discovered that more such white males from Georgia died or were killed because of the war than in any other Confederate state. That number reflects troops and civilians who died from a variety of causes, including gunfire and diseases.

Of the approximately 210,000 counted in Georgia during the 1860 census, an estimated 35,000, or 16.6%, died because of the war. While that is the largest toll in absolute terms, Georgia ranks third in percentage terms behind Louisiana and South Carolina.

About 4 million Black enslaved people in Southern states were freed after Union troops defeated the Confederate Army. Nearly 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought for the Northern states, according to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

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The Civil War continues to echo in political debates today.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has drawn praise and condemnation for restoring the names of Fort Benning in Georgia and Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Those name changes, according to the Pentagon, honor American soldiers who fought bravely in World War I and II, not the Confederate generals for whom the military installations were originally named. Critics are accusing the Trump administration of using sleight of hand to stoke division.

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Stephen Berry, a Civil War historian at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the latest research, was struck by the scope of the trauma illuminated by the study. That trauma, Berry said, could have caused both long-standing grief and grievance.

“It means that everyone virtually in Georgia lost a family member — fathers, brothers, uncles — or knew someone who did,” said Berry, who wrote “Count the Dead: Coroners, Quants, and the Birth of Death as We Know It.”

“And that grief, those lost wages and those economic, social, cultural and psychological impacts on the state have to be absolutely enormous.”

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

More research on the horizon

Jeffrey Jensen, who teaches political science at New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, said he and the three co-authors of the newest analysis received a boost from a data organization at the University of Minnesota called IPUMS.

IPUMS provided them with access to records linked across multiple censuses that aided their “migration-adjusted census comparison method.” That method helped them account for people who migrated within the United States between the 1860s and 1870s.

The scholars have ambitious plans for more research using some of the same records. One of them, for example, compares the Civil War’s impact on people who owned slaves and those who did not. They are also interested in the correlation between the trauma caused by the war and the memorialization of the Confederacy in the South.

“It has really changed the way people can study American history,” Jensen said.

The same census records could conceivably help researchers estimate Civil War death tolls at the county level, said John Robert Warren, director of the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, which includes IPUMS.

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J. David Hacker, the historian who calculated the Civil War death toll estimate in 2011, is using the records to study infant mortality from 1850 to 1940. He and a colleague hope to publish their findings this year.

“What we are finding is a fairly major bump in the child mortality during the 1860s,” said Hacker, who teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

‘An irreplaceable living legacy’

The Historic Oakland Foundation, a nonprofit that helps Atlanta preserve Oakland Cemetery, routinely leads tours of the 48-acre property.

Among the highlights is a visit to the prominent magnolia tree shading Weakley’s headstone. Decades after the war ended, according to the foundation, Weakley’s brother honored him by planting the tree next to his grave. The foundation’s website calls the tree “an irreplaceable living legacy.”

The Atlanta History Center recently located records through ancestry.com that illuminates Weakley’s life. Born in 1839, he was baptized the same year at a Presbyterian church southeast of Nashville in Smyrna, Tennessee. After he turned 21 in 1861, Weakley enlisted in the 20th Tennessee Infantry Regiment, serving with Company E, according to the National Park Service.

Starting with 880 men, the regiment saw action in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee. Within three months, its strength fell to 505. In September of 1863, when it fought in the Battle of Chickamauga in North Georgia, it lost nearly half its remaining men.

Chickamauga resulted in about 34,000 casualties, making it one of the war’s bloodiest battles, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Weakley was seriously wounded in the knee during the fighting and was hospitalized in Atlanta, military records show. He left behind his wife, Adaline Bradley, who outlived him by 45 years.

Weakley’s marker is surrounded by headstones for Confederate soldiers from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. In all, about 6,900 are buried at the cemetery, including 3,000 in unmarked graves. The cemetery is also the final resting place of 16 Union service members.

Reading the names on those headstones helps visitors understand the scope of the Civil War’s deadly toll, said Richard Harker, the Historic Oakland Foundation’s CEO.

“When you read about it in books or you watch a Ken Burns documentary, it can be very abstract. The numbers are so vast,” Harker said. “It impacted real people.”