Pvt. Lucien Weakley’s weathered headstone stands beneath a towering magnolia tree that is surrounded by the graves of thousands of other Confederate soldiers in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. Cracked and then repaired, the marker says the Tennessee native died in Atlanta in 1863, a month after he was mortally wounded in the bloody Battle of Chickamauga.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army two years later in Virginia. In the 160 years since, researchers have repeatedly sought to quantify the Civil War’s staggering death toll. That task has proven challenging partly because of poor recordkeeping and the loss of documents to fires that consumed much of Richmond, Virginia — the capital of the Confederacy — during the war.
For more than a century, historians have cited a rough estimate of 618,000 deaths from the war, though that has long been viewed as a serious undercount. In 2011, a demographic historian used a 1% sample of census records to compare wartime and peacetime death totals. He estimated the death toll was 750,000.
Newer research armed with more data provides the fullest picture yet of not just the overall death toll but its disproportionate impact on the South, including Georgia…