Casualties for a particular battle are expressed as Died + Wounded + Missing.
I assume that they were determined when each unit reported that info up the ranks shortly after each engagement.
The question I have is whether the stats changed days and months later as the wounded died or as the missing were found to have died or been captured?
It seems that those figures would have been more difficult to monitor especially when there are more important things to be doing (ie getting ready for the next battle).
Units checked their men and submitted the names of the dead, wounded, and missing higher up the chain of command. Errors occurred, but it’s a reasonably good system. As for time, that was rarely a problem. Most Civil War Battles were brutal affairs and both sides were exhausted afterwards. The loser slunk off a ways with the wounded he could get and the winner stayed, and both licked their wounds about equally.
Was there any way to determine the number of civilians killed apart from the obvious? About how dangerous were Civil War battles to civilians? (I vaguely recall hearing about people picnicking on hills overlooking ongoing battles. Did that happen?)
That definitely did happen. Don’t know if anybody got dead doing it, but in the beginning of the war people absolutely did picnic. (Not so much later on; particularly when we ran out of stuff to picnic with down here.)
Famously there were picnickers at the first battle of Manassas, and when the battle went against the Union they contributed to much of the chaos during the retreat.
Lest one think this to be an American phenomenon, during the battle between the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama, French excursion boats went out with the Alabama specifically to watch the battle.
AIUI, such seemingly foolhardy spectator outings became much less common as the reality of war became more familiar.
Casualty reports went up the chain of command just as smiling bandit said. By the end of each day, generals on each side would have a pretty good idea of how many men were available for duty, on sick call, dead, AWOL, etc.
I don’t know of any picknicking-civilian stories other than First Bull Run. Civilian casualties from direct gunfire in battles in the East were rare; only one civilian, a young woman baking bread for wounded Union soldiers in her home, was killed in the entire three-day Battle of Gettysburg, for instance. Overall civilian deaths due to displacement, exposure, starvation, disease, etc. weren’t systematically recorded, IIRC. Civilian deaths were significantly higher in areas where guerilla warfare was raging, esp. Missouri, Kansas, etc.
Many records were lost in the burning of Richmond in 1865. To this day, Confederate casualty figures are somewhat conjectural.
Great example! The French railroads even scheduled special trains to take hordes of tourists to Cherbourg. Betting on the battle was widespread. A lot of money changed hands when the local favorite Alabama lost to Winslow’s gallant bluejackets of the Kearsarge.
Another battle watched by civilian spectators was the naval Battle of Memphis. Civilians gathered on the bluffs overlooking the river. The coal-fired gunboats, using black-powder cannons, quickly filled the river basin with dense smoke, but the spectators could still clearly distinguish the ornate twin smokestacks of the Confederate rams from their Union foes. As one set of these smokestacks after another disappeared (probably knocked over by ramming collisions moreso than sunk outright), the partisan crowd groaned.
Why, because every thing you say to her she makes a thinking face about and then scribbles down? It’s hard to figure out who the “real Mary Chesnut” was, because she was so obviously writing for posterity, not for, you know, journaling.
Thanks all. I assumed that was the procedure but have to believe that those involved eventually got info that would have allowed them to revise their figures.
My main question was whether they used that info to revise their figures once they had been submitted.
In the American army from the time it was a colonial militia up until fairly recently, in the 1980s, the whole thing was based on the Morning Report – a form filled in each day by each company/battery/troop and independent small unit, signed by the unit commander and sent up the chain of command. The report showed the number of unit members present and ready for duty, the number absent and the nature of the absence, e.g., in hospital, absent without leave, on detached duty, with the name of the absent member. When absent for 30 consecutive days the soldier was dropped from the unit rolls. The system was sufficiently accurate that the mere proof of the Morning Report entry was enough to establish a prima facie case for AWOL.
The Morning Report went up the chain of command and was used to compile a consolidated personnel report at each successive headquarters.
In the Union Army a consolidated report was put together on the last day of the month. Because of this we can know with certainty only the strength of units at Gettysburg on the day before the battle started, that is on June 30, 1863, when the last consolidated report was assembled. The next consolidated report was for July 31, 1863, and it is by comparing those numbers the official numbers are calculated. Of course, when things quieted down reports for the three or four days of fighting could be put together from the company Morning Reports but there was a fair chance that a company that was engaged on all three days like units in the First and Eleventh Corps did not even do daily reports and instead submitted a summary report to cover the days that no report was submitted. Even in other units unless the companies took special pains it is hard to figure out what losses were suffered on each of the three days of the battle.
Another difficulty is that if a soldier was injured and went to hospital (such as it was) the unit lost track of him. Several historians have noted that once a man went to hospital he seldom came back to his unit. If a soldier died in hospital his death appeared on the hospital,s Morning Report, not his units.
If a soldier did not show up for the roll call after an engagement and it was not positively known that he had been killed or wounded and sent to hospital he was listed as missing.
A similar system was used in the Confederate service except that no one who could stay in the ranks and carry a musket was listed as wounded. Johnnie Reb had to be too badly hurt to stand in the battle line to count as wounded. Billy Yank could suffer wounds that did not incapacitated him and still show up on the Morning Report as present for duty-wounded.
It’s hard to figure out who the “real Mary Chesnut” was, because she was so obviously writing for posterity, not for, you know, journaling.