J. David Hacker rethinks Civil War death toll

A Binghamton University associate professor of history intends, through his demographic research, to rewrite a central statistic in the canon of American history.

J. David Hacker, in a scholarly article to be published in December in the journal Civil War History, asserts that the total number of deaths during the Civil War may have been significantly higher than previously documented.

Historians have used the same data — since 1900 — that claimed a total of 618,222 Americans deaths. Hacker's research indicates that the actual death toll was between 650,000 and 850,000 Americans, with 750,000 as the central figure.

The data Hacker compiled came from public-use microdata samples citing United States censuses....