Statistics and Size
Incomplete and destroyed records make an accurate count of the number of individuals who served in the Confederate Army impossible. All but extremely improbable estimates of this number range between 600,000 and 1,500,000 men. The better estimates of the actual number of individual Confederates soldiers seem to be between 750,000 and 1,000,000 men. The exact number is unknown. Since these figures include estimates of the total number of individual soldiers who served in each army at any time during the war, they do not represent the size of the armies at any given date. Confederate casualty figures are as incomplete and unreliable as the figures on the number of Confederate soldiers. The best estimates of the number of deaths of Confederate soldiers appear to be about 94,000 killed or mortally wounded in battle, 164,000 deaths from disease and between 26,000 and 31,000 deaths in Union prison camps. One estimate of Confederate wounded, which is considered incomplete, is 194,026. At the end of the war 174,223 men of the Confederate forces surrendered to the Union Army.
Read more about this topic: Confederate States Army
Famous quotes containing the words statistics and/or size:
“July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation’s public school system entitled “Savage Inequalities,” Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)