Teaching the Civil War with Technology

Thanks to the Wig-Wags Blog for posting this interesting article on The Civil War’s Last Veterans, Wives and Stats to bring us even MORE statistics to ponder. Yippee!!

According to the post, the following table comes from Fact Sheet: America’s Wars by the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs:

Civil War (1861-1865)
Total U.S. Servicemembers (Union)…………..2,213,363
Battle Deaths (Union)………………………………140,414
Other Deaths (In Theater) (Union)………………..224,097
Non-mortal Woundings (Union)…………………..281,881
Total Servicemembers (Conf.) ………..1,050,000
Battle Deaths (Confederate) ………………74,524
Other Deaths (In Theater) (Confed.) (note 3, 4)……59,297
Non-mortal Woundings (Confed.) ……………..Unknown

Discussion questions for your class:

1. What percentage of Total U.S. Servicemembers were killed in battle?
2. What percentage of Total Confederate Servicemembers were killed in battle?
3. According to the website, the Confederate figures are incomplete. Why do you think they are incomplete?

Now let’s add in some additional figures from the same website:

America’s Wars Total
U.S. Military Service During War…………….41,891,368
Battle Deaths………………………………………….651,022
Other Deaths (In Theater)………………………….308,797
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater)………….230,279
Non-mortal Woundings…………………………..1,431,290
Living War Veterans…………………………….17,484,000
Living Veterans (War & Peacetime)…………23,532,000

Based on this table ask your students:

1. What percentage of soldiers fought during the Civil War when compared to all America’s Wars?
2. What percentage of Union Battle Deaths make up the total for all America’s Wars?
3. How would having more accurate Confederate data impact these figures?

Don’t you just love math.

Until next time….

Posted under Lesson Ideas

According to John Busey’s “These Honored Dead: The Union Casualties at Gettysburg”, the following is a list of the number of soldiers killed during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Army Of the Potomac :

New York	978
Pennsylvania	745
Massachusetts	200
Michigan	200
US Regulars	182
Ohio	139
Maine	119
Wisconsin	105
Indiana	96
New Jersey	80
New Hampshire	67
Vermont	58
Minnesota	50
Connecticut	45
Maryland	29
Delaware	21
Rhode Island	14
West Virginia	11
Illinois	9
Total	3,148

Army of Northern Virginia:

North Carolina	1452
Virginia	1012
Georgia	774
Mississippi	393
South Carolina	295
Alabama	254
Louisiana	141
Texas	111
Florida	80
Maryland	65
Tennessee	55
Arkansas	41
Total	4,673

Total number killed: 7,821

Based on these figures, you can easily have your students working on some math concepts. Have your students answer questions such as:

• What is the average number of soldiers killed for both the North and the South?
• What percentage of the total number of soldiers killed were from Ohio?
• What percentage of those killed were from the South?
• How many more soldiers were killed from North Carolina versus Pennsylvania?

Or, how about some critical thinking skills…

• Why do you think New York and North Carolina had the highest number of soldiers killed?
• During what day of the battle do you think Minnesota lost the greatest number of soldiers and why?

Until next time. From just north of Gettysburg…

Posted under Lesson Ideas, Primary Sources

Well, I’m not a statistician by any means and I even struggled with the stats for my dissertation. But for some reason, I have quite a few blog posts on statistics. So, why not one more:

The following tables are the number of Union and Confederate soldiers who were killed, wounded or captured during the Gettysburg Campaign. These figures are adapted from Fox’s Regimental Losses on the Civil War Home website.

The following shows the total Killed and Wounded for both Union and Confederates:

UNION
July 1 Killed — 950

July 1 Wounded — 4,550

July 1 Total – 5500

July 2 Killed — 1500

July 2 Wounded — 7,250

July 2 Total – 8,750

July 3 Killed — 705

July 3 Wounded — 2,745

July 3 Total – 3,450

Total Killed — 3,155
Total Wounded –14,529
Total Killed and Wounded– 17,684

CONFEDERATE
July 1 Killed — 900

July 1 Wounded — 4,350

July 1 Total – 5,250

July 2 Killed — 1,175

July 2 Wounded — 5,325

July 2 Total – 6500

July 3 Killed — 1,425

July 3 Wounded — 5,575

July 3 Total – 7000

Total Killed — 3,500
Total Wounded –15,250
Total Killed and Wounded– 18,750

By Location on the Battlefield:

Wheat-Field: Union Losses 4,133 Confederate Losses 2,822

Emmittsburg Road: Union Losses 2,645 Confederate Losses 1,978

Peach Orchard: Union Losses 1,285 Confederate Losses 1,047

Round Top: Union Losses 575 Confederate Losses 826

Total: Union Losses 8,638 Confederate Losses 6,673

So, lets start asking some questions:

• What percentage were killed on the first day of the Battle?
• What percentage of the Union losses occurred in the Peach Orchard?
• Why were Union causalities lower on July 3rd?
• What percentage of Confederates were wounded on July 2nd?

And the questions could go on and on…

Until next…enjoy the statistics !

Posted under Lesson Ideas, Miscellaneous

In order to better understand the impact that the Civil War had on the United States, it is important for students to review data of how many soldiers were killed, died from disease, died as a prisoner of war, and died in accidents. Information such as this was collected during it is currently available online. The data can be obtained from Dyer’s Compendium (Union) Summary of Losses by State as listed on the website at http://www.civil-war.net/ Once students have obtained the required data, they will then be able to manipulate the data in order to determine totals and averages for states and/or categories.

The following could be some objectives for this lesson.

1. Students will analyze data from Dyer’s Compendium (Union) Summary of Losses by State.
2. Students will manipulate a spreadsheet in order to better understand the data provided.
3. Students will focus on the following issues: participation in the war by state, casualties of the war by state, averages for the various statistics.

So, the teacher could take the data from the website and replicate this table into spreadsheet. Then the students would take the spreadsheet provided by the teacher perform the following:

1. Enter formulas into the Total Deaths column to total the number of casualties for each state.
2. Enter formulas into the Totals section at the bottom of the spreadsheet to calculate the totals for each category.
3. Enter formulas into the Totals section at the bottom of the spreadsheet to calculate the averages for each category.
4. Review the data and answer questions about the data such as which state had the highest number of Total Deaths.
5. Additional questions for students to answer:

• What is the total number of people who died of disease during the Civil War?
• What was the cause of the most losses in Illinois during the War of the Rebellion?
• How many more died as prisoners of war in Pennsylvania than in Massachusetts?

The following table shows the losses that are specific to Pennsylvania

Posted under Lesson Ideas, Primary Sources