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What are we to make of Neely's claims? And how can all the historians who have come to regard the Civil War as "brutal," "cruel," "ruthless," and "merciless" have been so mistaken? Neely is at his most challenging when he suggests how casualty figures can be misleading, especially in comparative perspective. After all, the 620,000 who died during the Civil War (that is the widely accepted figure) were, theoretically, soldiers of two countries, not one. The Union dead totaled only 360,000; the Confederate dead only 260,000. In neither case did they equal the 407,000 American soldiers who died during World War II. What is more, the death toll during the Crimean War in 1853-1856 has been placed at 640,000, most of it coming during a two-year period, surpassing the deaths in the Union and Confederacy combined over a period of four years. Drew Faust might say that 620,000 dead in America during the 1860s would be equivalent to 5,500,000 dead in America today; and Neely might respond that Faust's reasoning typifies the sensationalizing disposition among historians.
Let us grant for a moment that historians have been disposed to "sensationalize" Civil War casualties (though I am not sure what is to be gained by this, since the readership for histories of this war has always been robust), and that we ought to interrogate our assumptions about the war's destructiveness. Where does this leave us? The Civil War witnessed a remarkable and unprecedented mobilization of resources on each side. Between half and three-quarters of all men of military age served at some point during the conflict. (There was a higher proportion in the Confederacy than in the Union, but impressive in either case.) The federal government's authority and capacity expanded dramatically, and a Confederate state was created from scratch, with remarkable results. Thousands of slaves were impressed to work on Confederate fortifications and in Confederate war industries. Both the Union and the Confederacy enacted military conscription, printed currency, imposed taxes, and centralized power. And the Union embraced the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as its war goal. The Civil War, in other words, assumed many of the features of "total war," even if it was, in effect, a set of domestic rebellions or insurrections.
