Civil War, The
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
The, in American history, a conflict between the northern and the southern sections of the Union. So far as open hostilities are concerned, the war may be said to have begun with the bombardment of Fort Sumter April 12, 1861, and to have closed with the surrender of the Army of West Virginia at Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865. The eleven states of the South forming the Confederacy had a total population of 8,900,000 of whom 3,500,000 were colored slaves. The Northern, Federal, or Union area had a population of 22,100,000. The Confederacy had about 1,400,000 white men between eighteen and sixty years of age. The Union had 5,000,000 men of military age. The Confederacy enlisted and drafted 1,230,000 different men. An equivalent of 1,080,000 men were under arms for three years. The Union enlisted and drafted 2,500,000 men, and maintained a total service equivalent to 1,560,000 men for three years. The war was confined almost entirely to the territory of the Confederacy. Slavery was abolished. The doctrine of state sovereignty was overthrown. The North increased in wealth and military strength from year to year. The Union troops laid plantations waste, ran off the stock, and devastated the most fertile valleys of the Confederacy. The South was reduced to dire poverty. On the Union side 360,000 soldiers died on the field of battle or of disease. The Confederacy lost 258,000. It would not be far out of the way to say that the war cost 1,000,000 lives. The Union paid out $3,660,000,000, and the Confederacy spent about $1,500,000,000, gold values. All in all the conflict, counting the destruction of private property, inflicted a loss of $10,000,000,000, a sum equivalent to one-tenth of our present national wealth. See Nullification; Brown ; Taney ; Slavery; Secession ; Antietam ; Gettysburg ; Richmond ; Arlington; Grant ; Lee ; Jackson ; Sheridan ; Sherman ; Confederate States; Lincoln ; Davis ; Beauregard ; Charleston; Bull Run ; Fremont ; Douglas ; Butler ; Vicksburg; Emancipation ; Contraband ; Sumter ; Torpedo ; Monitor; Farragut ; Alabama Claims; Carpetbaggers ; West Virginia ; Libby; Ku-Klux-Klan ; Greenbacks ; Debt
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 figures — 360,000 Union and 258,000 Confederate dead — are close to the long-standard total of about 620,000, but demographer J. David Hacker's 2011 study of census records pushed the likely toll to roughly 750,000, and most historians now cite that higher range. What has changed far more is interpretation. Aiton's flat sentences that "slavery was abolished" and "the doctrine of state sovereignty was overthrown" sit oddly beside an entry that never says slavery caused the war; the reconciliationist mood of the 1913 Gettysburg reunion held for decades, while historians since the 1960s have placed slavery and emancipation at the centre of the conflict and treated the "Lost Cause" as itself a subject of study. Living memory has also closed: Albert Woolson, the last undisputed Union veteran, died in 1956, and Irene Triplett, the last person drawing a Civil War pension, died in 2020. One small slip stands out — the army Lee surrendered at Appomattox was the Army of Northern Virginia, not "of West Virginia".
Written for this edition, 2026.