Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.

The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln

November 19, 1863

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania


Allan Pinkerton of the secret service, President Lincoln, and Major General John McClernand, 1862


155,000 Soldiers Engaged At Gettysburg
7,058 Soldiers Were Killed
33,264 Soldiers Were Mortally Wounded
10,790 Soldiers Missing In Action
Total Losses At Gettysburg - 51,112


After the end of the Civil War, scholars began to compile facts and figures as a way to help grasp the scope and cost of the bloody four year struggle. Exact numbers have been impossible to ascertain in many instances, but over the years historians have come to agree on general estimates:
  • More than 2,000,000 soldiers and sailors fought for the North during the Civil War, while fewer than 750,000 men fought for the South.

  • Union deaths during the war totaled more than 360,000 men, fewer than a third of which were combat related. Most of the dead succumbed to diseases, of which diarrhea was the most deadly, accounting for more than 44,500 deaths.

  • Figures for the almost 200,000 Northern black soldiers are even more startling. More than 29,000 died of disease, while only 2,751 succumbed to combat related causes.

  • Confederate deaths have been calculated as somewhat fewer than 260,000 men, with 164,000 estimated to have been caused by disease.

  • Of the South's 425 generals, 82 percent survived the war; 92 percent of the North's 583 generals survived.

  • More than 30,000 Union soldiers died while incarcerated in Confederate prisons.

  • More than 26,000 Southerners died in Union prisons.

  • Only 4,084 of the 132,554 Union sailors died during the war. Only 1,084 died in combat, with the rest killed by disease or accident. The combat deaths include 342 scalded to death when their ships' boilers were struck by enemy fire and 308 sailors who drowned. Five thousand soldiers in the Union armies drowned during the war.



There were more than 10,000 battles, engagements, skirmishes, and other military events. In descending order, the number in each state were recorded as follows:

Virginia 2,154Kentucky 453
Tennessee 1,462Alabama 336
Missouri 1,162N.Carolina 313
Arkansas 771S.Carolina 239
W.Virginia 632Maryland 203
Louisiana 566Florida 168
Georgia 549

[Source: Atlas Editions; Civil War Cards]





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