Over 500 Steuben County men died in the Civil War… an 1878 history lists 498 of them, but has missing or incomplete figures for Howard, Wayland, and Prattsburgh.
*Disease was the biggest killer of that war, so the 99 dead of illness is no surprise. There were also 176 unspecified deaths, which were probably overwhelmingly due to illness.
*Seven deaths came from accident, two from suicide. Forty-nine Steuben County fellows died in Confederate captivity. There were 165 deaths from battle causes.
*I tried to narrow this down – were there particular battles or campaigns where the deaths ran into large numbers? Civil War units were formed mostly geographically, so a town or a county could suffer catastrophic losses all at once.
*Omitting illness and unspecified, the Confederate prison system was the biggest killer. The second-biggest was a SINGLE camp, at Andersonville in Georgia (24). The commandant at Andersonville was hanged after the Civil War’s only war crimes trial.
*Next came the Battle of Antietam, with 18 dead… no surprise. Even with the rest of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II… even with bombs and tanks and rockets and poison gas… Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in American military history.
*There were 16 deaths in the Wilderness, 16 at Dallas/New Hope Church, 11 at Gettysburg, 7 at Second Bull Run, six each at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and four each at Resaca and Sabine Crossroads. Most of these were big death-toll battles in general, but they all were multi-day affairs – making the 18 dead during sunlit hours of a September 17, 1862 at Antietam all the more horrifying.
*When looked at by campaigns, Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign just edges out Andersonville (25 deaths to 24). Twenty men died in the Overland Campaign, ten in the Siege of Petersburg, and eight in the Peninsula Campaign.
*Taking a birds-eye look at Steuben towns in the Civil War, Bath sent the most men (455), but Corning had the most deaths (44, to Bath’s 43). Troupsburg sent an unbelieveable 222 men to the Civil War, and 62 of them died… making the highest death rate (28%) of any municipality in Steuben County. We’ll look at Troupsburg’s calvary in more detail at a later date.