The American Civil War is the country's deadliest conflict with an estimated 620,000 fatalities. In 1860, the population of the United States was roughly 31,443,321 which means 2% of the population died. These deaths are only a portion of those who make up the number of casualties. A casualty is a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, capture, or through being missing in action. During the Civil War it was usually the officers responsibility for recording casualties and their soldiers would be marked as a casualty if they could not perform their duties. A soldier could be marked as a causualty multiple times throughout the war. The majority of these casualties were due to non-combat related disease, as medicine during the Civil War was primitive.

The map below visualizes the 10 Civil War battles with the highest casualties and what side each state was on: Union = dark grey, Confederates = red, and Boarder States = light grey. Click on the symbols to quickly see the facts of each battle. Click on the symbol in the upper left corner to open the side bar in order to change the map settings and for a description of the battle that is clicked on in the map. source: American Battlefield Trust, Civil War Casualties, accessed 22 August 2020. www.battlefileds.org

The treemap below was created to give a sense of where those who fought in the war originated. It displays the home states of soldiers who joined the civil war. Those states are further divided into Union, Confederate, and Border states. Border states represent states who never officially seceded from the Union. This visual was created using the National Park Service Search For Soldiers Database which will allow you to search for family members by name. Those states with over 100,000 soldiers are displayed.

While the data for African American troops was not tracked by state, the National Park Service lists over 200,000 total names. It is estimated that by the end of the war over 10% of Union troops were African American. These soldiers were part of the United States Colored Troops(USCT), a watershed in American history, and one of the first major strides toward equal civil rights. -- Visit Battlefields.org to learn more