Free Resources Until April 30th!

The Alexander Street Press is providing FREE access to their online Civil War Collections until April 30th.

You can access the following Collections:

• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• The American Civil War Research Database
• Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines
• American Song

Try this, click The American Civil War Research Database then Click on: Analysis at the top of the page then click on Confederate and Union Losses Chart. You can view graphs of various statistics related to the Civil War, research specific regiments and get statistics (oh my) on soldiers.

For example, the following graph shows a comparison of Union and Confederate Losses of those who died or were killed in battle.


Why do you think there was a large increase in the number of Union soldiers killed in the early months of 1864?

So many statistics....So little time

According to John Busey's "These Honored Dead: The Union Casualties at Gettysburg", the following is a list of the number of soldiers killed during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Army Of the Potomac :

New York	978
Pennsylvania	745
Massachusetts	200
Michigan	200
US Regulars	182
Ohio	139
Maine	119
Wisconsin	105
Indiana	96
New Jersey	80
New Hampshire	67
Vermont	58
Minnesota	50
Connecticut	45
Maryland	29
Delaware	21
Rhode Island	14
West Virginia	11
Illinois	9
Total	3,148

Army of Northern Virginia:

North Carolina	1452
Virginia	1012
Georgia	774
Mississippi	393
South Carolina	295
Alabama	254
Louisiana	141
Texas	111
Florida	80
Maryland	65
Tennessee	55
Arkansas	41
Total	4,673

Total number killed: 7,821

Based on these figures, you can easily have your students working on some math concepts. Have your students answer questions such as:

• What is the average number of soldiers killed for both the North and the South?
• What percentage of the total number of soldiers killed were from Ohio?
• What percentage of those killed were from the South?
• How many more soldiers were killed from North Carolina versus Pennsylvania?

Or, how about some critical thinking skills...

• Why do you think New York and North Carolina had the highest number of soldiers killed?
• During what day of the battle do you think Minnesota lost the greatest number of soldiers and why?
  

Until next time. From just north of Gettysburg...

Civil War Casualties

In order to better understand the impact that the Civil War had on the United States, it is important for students to review data of how many soldiers were killed, died from disease, died as a prisoner of war, and died in accidents. Information such as this was collected during it is currently available online. The data can be obtained from Dyer's Compendium (Union) Summary of Losses by State as listed on the website at http://www.civil-war.net/ Once students have obtained the required data, they will then be able to manipulate the data in order to determine totals and averages for states and/or categories.

The following could be some objectives for this lesson.

1. Students will analyze data from Dyer's Compendium (Union) Summary of Losses by State.
2. Students will manipulate a spreadsheet in order to better understand the data provided.
3. Students will focus on the following issues: participation in the war by state, casualties of the war by state, averages for the various statistics.

So, the teacher could take the data from the website and replicate this table into spreadsheet. Then the students would take the spreadsheet provided by the teacher perform the following:

1. Enter formulas into the Total Deaths column to total the number of casualties for each state.
2. Enter formulas into the Totals section at the bottom of the spreadsheet to calculate the totals for each category.
3. Enter formulas into the Totals section at the bottom of the spreadsheet to calculate the averages for each category.
4. Review the data and answer questions about the data such as which state had the highest number of Total Deaths.
5. Additional questions for students to answer:

• What is the total number of people who died of disease during the Civil War?
• What was the cause of the most losses in Illinois during the War of the Rebellion?
• How many more died as prisoners of war in Pennsylvania than in Massachusetts?

The following table shows the losses that are specific to Pennsylvania