Alva Review-Courier -

Every year when April rolls around, it is time to start thinking of pleasant things like the start of a new baseball season and the optimistic weather of springtime with new growth signaling that winter has been left behind.

For U.S. historians, however, April is also a time to remember and reflect upon the most divisive and terrible event in America’s past – the so-called Civil War. That conflict began on April 12, 1861, and formally ended on April 9, 1865.

And while new flowers, green grass and budding trees, along with outdoor activities like baseball, may bring smiles to many faces, there is little about the Civil War that should make anyone happy. It was a violent, destructive and miserable time in the United States.

The U.S. Census Bureau counted roughly 31 million people residing in the country in 1860. Census figures, of course, are never accurate, but we rely on them as the best information that we have.

Another type of statistics that are never accurate are casualties of war. The number of soldiers killed and wounded are always guesstimates because no one has time to stop and count. Keeping accurate records is impossible.

The Civil War was typical in that both armies often left the scenes of battle in a hurry, leaving those who had died to be buried by people who lived nearby. Wounded soldiers who could walk often simply left battlefields and might be later counted as deserters or as missing.

For years, history books recorded that the number of soldiers who died in the war was approximately 620,000 – a staggering number that was the equivalent of two percent of the country’s official population according to the 1860 census.

But what of people who were wounded during the war and died of those wounds after the fighting ended? Recently, historians re-analyzed the war’s casualty figures and determined that the number of people who died as a result of serving in the Civil War was not 620,000 but approximately 750,000. It was even bloodier than previously thought!