Was the American Civil War the largest war in terms of manpower between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. And is the Wikipedia numbers of 2,100,000 for the Federals and 1,000,000 for the Rebs the strengths of their armies at the end of the war or the total number of men who served?
It’s bigger than any notable wars I can think of, including:
Crimean War
Franco-Prussian War
Russo-Japanese War
I’m not sure where 2.1m Union and 1m Confederate would come from. Total enlistment numbers for both sides are different than that, there were 2.7m Union enlistments during the period and Confederate enlistments were somewhere from .6m to 1.4m throughout the period.
The number of “persons served” will be lower than the enlistments, because many people enlisted multiple times (some people had multiple concurrent enlistments to collect multiple pay checks–seriously) and some people enlisted but never served.
When talking about strength of a military force over a war if you’re talking about the whole campaign strength numbers would typically mean “this is the total number of soldiers this side had over the course of the war” and without more detailed figures you would have to realize that the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
You also have to realize during all wars there is a difference between number of soldiers and number of soldiers present and ready to fight.
In 1863 Union roll calls returned almost 700,000 men “present”, and 920,000 men total. Around the same time the Confederates had around 280,000 men present and around 450,000 men total.
It would actually appear the Taiping Rebellion probably has the ACW beat in terms of manpower.
The numbers I can get for the nearest I can think of, the Franco-Prussian War, are 1.2 million total conscripts of Prussian and Allies versus 400k French regulars.
Not sure how many of them actually served but even on those totals it looks smaller than the American Civil War.
Though it depends on what you think about “manpower”. They didn’t, AFAIK, field anything like the numbers of soldiers. But the relative poverty and destruction caused by the war created millions of civilian casualties. So it depends on if you’re talking about direct or indirect, and what you mean in terms of “scale.” Contemporary warfare relied on even more industrial workers, and vast swaths of the United States north and south wound up supporting the war effort in ways which didn’t happen in China.
how do we measure the “fielding” aspect? Both the Taipings and Manchus had hundreds of thousands of people under arms deployed in the region. While they did not concentrate them all into a single combined arms operation, neither did the sides of American Civil War. AFAIK Civil War engagements usually involved a few tens of thousands of people, i.e. nothing on the scale of WW1 offensives.
Another major Chinese war ignored in this thread so far is Sino-Japanese war of 1894. Wikipedia says that China (or maybe specifically the areas ruled by Li Hongzhang clique?) fielded 600K soldiers at the time, which presumably is lower key than either Civil War or Franco-Prussian one.
ETA: I think that measuring the size of Taiping military may be especially hard because they used militia forces incorporating peasants. Kind of like Western practice of mass mobilization and very much unlike the traditional Chinese practice of professional military.
This is essentially correct, the Civil War had many more small battles than traditional large battles. The ACW had over 8,000 distinct instances of military hostilities, most involving very small forces (sometimes under 500 on each side.)
Of those 8,000 some “incidents” the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission found 384 battles that they included in their classification scheme (although depending on how starved localities are for publicity many small towns may have preserved battlefields for battles not amongst the 384.)
Of those 384 battles only about 16 were major, traditional pitched battles in which many tens of thousands were involved on each side:
Battle Total Forces
Stones River 76,400
Seven Pines 80,000
Nashville 85,000
Missionary Ridge 100,369
Shiloh 111,511
2nd Bull Run 112,000
Antietam 113,500
Chickamauga 125,000
Atlanta 151,000
Spotsylvania Court House 152,000
The Wilderness 162,920
Gettysburg 165,620
Cold Harbor 167,000
Fredericksburg 186,500
Chancellorsville 194,760
Seven Days Battles 196,100
The delineation of some “battles” on that and similar lists is rather arbitrary. Are engagements between different units of the same larger army commands–a few days and many miles apart–counted as separate battles or components of the same bigger one? Then by the time we get to the First World War, the term “battle” is being applied to whole regions and months of clashes of variable intensity.
Right, and some Civil War engagements are almost indistinguishable (aside from technology) from World War I situations. The Siege of Petersburg went on for nine months and instead of a siege it was more like nine months of trench warfare in which the Union gradually pressured the Confederates into a point where they would have to defend against a classic siege because all of their supply had been cut off–and at that point Lee withdrew towards Appomattox.