Faded ink. Inconsistencies. Fires. The deadliest conflict in American history, the Civil War, also had some of its worst-kept records, making the true number of casualties seem forever elusive.
For decades, historians have cobbled together clues. But thanks to a newly released set of census records spanning three decades, researchers have landed on a firmer estimate of lives lost: 698,000.
The analysis, published this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also suggested that the Confederate states fared much worse than the Union, with a mortality rate more than twice as high. The granular nature of the census data means that researchers who build upon the work will be able to better understand the long-term impact of the war in the hardest-hit regions.
Caroline Janney, a history professor at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the research, said that she was intrigued by the census-based methodology and excited that the state-by-state data is likely to have other rich information, such as migration patterns among the newly freed population.