The Civil War was hard on my wife’s family

Seven men who went off to fight did not come home.

Martin Johnston lived in Parker County in early 1862 when he enlisted in the 10th Texas Infantry at age 41. After training in Gonzalez, Texas, the 10th Texas walked to Shreveport, La., boarded a paddle wheeler, went down the Red River, up the Mississippi River and the Arkansas River, disembarking at Little Rock. In September of that year, Pvt. Johnston died from pneumonia.

Levi Raley was 19 when he enlisted in the 26th Arkansas Infantry on 3 May 1862. Pvt. Raley died on 13 September 1862 from a respiratory infection. He is buried in the Camp Nelson Confederate Cemetery in Austin, Ark.

Two other Raleys from the Monticello, Ark., area enlisted in the 26th Arkansas on 3 May 1862. Less than a month later, one was dead at a training camp in Tennessee, from an outbreak of mumps. The other died in 1863 while serving at an island fort in the Mississippi region. I had the names at one time, but an older computer lost them.

More than 1,500 Confederate soldiers died from disease in Arkansas in mid-1862.

My wife's great-grandmother Sarah Elizabeth McLain Johnston, from west of Fort Worth, had three older brothers who “went off to fight in the War Between the States…and never returned.”

Until a year or so ago, historians said about 620,000 soldiers died during the war. That number now is reckoned at nearer 1 million.

Historian J. David Hacker:

“If you go with that total for a minute—620,000—the number of men dying in the Civil War is more than in all other American wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War combined. And consider that the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, about one-tenth the size it is today. If the war were fought today, the number of deaths would total 6.2 million.”

But if Hacker’s research is correct, the modern figure would be between 7.5 million and 10 million.

https://www.history.com/news/civil-war-deadlier-than-previously-thought