American Civil War.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume I, Issue 72, 26 November 1887, Page 3

American Civil War.

IuvEsTiGATidNS recently made in the War Department at Washington show that the late American Civil War was relatively the most sanguinary on record. Though the Federal and Confederate returns are not altogether exact, the War Office is able to give a Clnse- approximate estimate of the killed, wounded, and missing in the Federal forces. According to the statistics, 297,825 Union soldiers lie buried in the various national cemeteries. Including losses of which no account can be taken, the war cost the north 820,000 lives, or more than one in nine of all those who entered the service. The two opposing armies met in over 2000 skirmishes and battles. In 148 of these conflicts the loss of life on the Federal side was upwards of 500 men, and in a least ten battles more than 10,000 men were reported lost on each side. The combined josses of Federate and Confederate forces in killed, wounded, and missing in the following engagements were :—Shiloh, 24,000 ; Antietam, 38,000; Stone River, 87,000 ; Chancellorsville, 28,000; Gettysburg, 54,000 ; Chickamauga, 33,000; Me Clellan’s Peninsula Campaign, 50,000; Grant’s Peninsula Campaign, 180,000 ; and Sherman’s Campaign 125,000. Waterloo was one of the most desperate and bloody fields chronicled in European history, yet Wellington’s casualties were less than 12 per cent., while during the American war the loss at Murfreesbrough, Atlanta, Chichamanga, Gettysburg, and other places, frequently reached, and sometimes exceeded, 40 per cent., and the average of killed and wounded on one side or the other was 30 per cent. If the figures of the Confederate losses could be accurately ascertained, the total deaths in the late war would probably surpass 500,000. It is not a little curious that the losses and captured men of the Federal*—- who were victorious in the struggle—almost equalled the whole of the Confederate forces.