Selective Assignment of Military Positions in the Union Army: Implications for the Impact of the Civil War

Abstract

The Civil War was the bloodiest event in American history. For every 10,000 persons, 182 died during the war. Wartime mortality was especially severe for young men; about 8% of all white males between the ages 13 and 43 died (Vinovskis 1990). Among those who survived the war, many were disabled due to wartime injuries. According to the estimate of Claudia Goldin and Frank Lewis (1975), human losses account for 37% and 28% of the direct costs of the Civil War for the North and the South, respectively.A question of perennial interest to social historians is the degree to which mortality during the war varied across economic classes (Murdock 1964; Hess 1981; Lavine 1981; Riggs 1982; Rorabaugh 1986; Kemp 1990; Geary 1991). Starkly put, the question reduces to this: Was the Civil War a poor man’s fight? In a recent study, Maris Vinovskis (1990) suggested that the answer to the question is yes. Vinovskis found that recruits from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to die or to be wounded than servicemen who had higher-ranking jobs or greater wealth, presumably because they were more susceptible to disease or were sent on more dangerous missions. However, he didn’t provide evidence of how the socioeconomic backgrounds of recruits affected their susceptibility to disease and military missions. Moreover, since his study was based on a relatively small sample composed of recruits who resided in a single town, it is unclear whether the results could be generalized for Union army recruits at large.

Military service and economic mobility: Evidence from the American civil war

“…Military rank or duty is not a good index of military treatment because military positions were not randomly assigned (Lee 1999). However, the results of analyses based on employing these indices (not reported in this paper) are at least suggestive.…”

Leaders: Privilege, Sacrifice, Opportunity and Personnel Economics in the American Civil War

“…Smith (2003) finds disease death rates of 65.4 per 1000 for enlisted men in New York Regiments compared to 23 per thousand for their commissioned officers. Lee (1999) finds that in a sample of Ohio companies four percent of non-commissioned officers died of disease compared to 9 percent of privates.…”

“…After the first major battles, state governors began to commission officers from the ranks of noncommissioned officers who had proved themselves in the field and in battle (Fisher, Jr. 1994: 109). Among Ohio companies, the major predictors of promotion to non-commissioned officer were a non-farm and non-laborer occupation and literacy (Lee 1999). …”

Health, Information, and Migration: Geographic Mobility of Union Army Veterans, 1860–1880

“…Richard Steckel noted that an important basis of the dominant pattern of East-West migrations in nineteenth-century America was the desire of the migrants to relocate to areas where their agricultural knowledge of the climate and soil type would still be applicable. 39 It is likely, therefore, that the veterans who moved vertically (North-South) were exposed to a greater variety of unfamiliar environments than those who traveled the same distance horizontally. Also, the veterans may have collected different kinds of information from their military movements depending on the direction.…”

“…Accordingly, I construct five dummy variables on height (Height 1 to Height 5), each of which represents a quintile of the height distribution for a particular age. 39 Steckel, "Economic Foundation." separate variables on both longitudinal and latitudinal moves in the analysis (denoted "NorthSouth move" and "East-West move" in the tables reporting the results of regression analyses), representing the distance from the county of residence at enlistment and the longitudinally (or horizontally) most distant state the veteran had ever entered while in service.…”