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A American Civil War

Cost

About 620,000-850,000 dead, scholarly range -- the deadliest US war.

Educational history. Casualty figures are documented ranges. This is not operational advice, a ranking of nations, or a how-to for weapons or coups.

About 620,000-850,000 dead is the honest band. Disease, camp, and prison (Andersonville) outran many battles.

Enslaved people's flight -- self-emancipation -- was a demographic event as well as a moral one.

Bands

Military dead

The 620-750 thousand band dominates; disease first.

Prisoners

Andersonville and Elmira as names of neglect and policy.

Freed people in motion

Hundreds of thousands self-emancipated toward Union lines.

Southern wealth shock

Slave property erased; land mostly not redistributed.

Pensions

A large late-century federal budget line -- the war as a welfare state ancestor.

Regions

Eastern theatre

The photographed war of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Western theatre

The decisive river war from Donelson to Vicksburg and Atlanta.

Trans-Mississippi

A Confederate leftover that outlasted Lee by weeks.

Border states

Slave states in the Union -- the political tightrope.

Northern cities

Draft riots (New York 1863) as a home-front war.

Postwar South

Reconstruction, terror, and Jim Crow -- the same map, a new regime.

Key numbers

Deaths (range)about 620-850 thousand
Emancipation1 Jan 1863
Appomattox9 Apr 1865
13th AmendmentDec 1865

Makers

Springfield / Enfield

Mass rifle-muskets as the ordinary killer.

US Military Railroad

Haupt and the construction corps -- logistics as a branch.

Tredegar Iron Works

The Confederate industrial jewel in Richmond.

Northern textile/armoury

The Union's factory depth.

Photographers

Brady's galleries as a new public institution.

Freedmen's schools

A postwar "maker" of citizenship that violence later starved.

Southern capital in human beings was destroyed as property and reborn as contested citizenship.

Widows, amputees, and pension politics shaped Gilded Age government.

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