William F. Fox, Lt. Col. U. S. V., Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861-1865: A Treatise on the extent and nature of the mortuary losses in the Union regiments, with full and exhaustive statistics compiled from the official records on file in the state military bureaus and at Washington

[537] that the State would thus become once more “the dark and bloody battle ground” of history; Maryland remained steadfast, and her fields resounded with the tread of armies and the roar of battle; and, in West Virginia, loyal regiments were formed of refugees who had left their homes, their fields, and barns in the hands of a ruthless enemy. It meant something to be loyal on the Border.

And, yet, these States responded promptly to the calls of the National Government for troops, one of them surpassing all others in its lavish supply of men and money, while the others filled their quotas and did it without a bounty or a draft. The slave-holding States of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri, not only remained true to the old flag, but furnished 301,062 men for the loyal support of an Administration that received scarcely a vote within all their borders.

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Casualties in the Navy.

The number of men in the naval service during the war was 132,554, of whom 7,600 were already in the service at the outbreak of hostilities. There were 1,804 killed and mortally wounded in battle. This includes 342 who were scalded to death, while in action, by escaping steam from boilers which had been pierced by the enemy's shot; also, 308 men drowned in action. The latter were men who went down with their ships,--their flag flying, and their guns firing defiantly from port-holes level with the waves. In addition to the 1,804 who lost their lives in battle, there were 2,226 wounded who survived their injuries.

The deaths in the navy from disease and accidents numbered 3,000. This includes 71 deaths from accidents; 265 from accidental drowning; 37 scalded; and 95 deaths in Confederate prisons. Unlike the army, the mortality from disease was, apparently, not in excess of the normal death rate of civil life.

Subjoined will be found a tabulation of the principal naval losses in action during the war. If some of the casualties appear trivial, let it be remembered that on most of the vessels named the crews were small; and that the loss of life, in proportion to the number engaged, was as serious as at Trafalgar or the Nile.

The losses in many cases include men who were scalded to death, and men who were drowned; but losses from such causes belong properly with the casualties, as much so as wounds from shot or shell. They were among the dire probabilities in every action,--deadly and terrible dangers which had to be confronted as well as the guns of the enemy. The changes in the methods of naval warfare, first introduced in the American War, brought a class of casualties hitherto unknown in naval combats. Our sailors fought in previous wars without the terrible danger from exploding boilers and escaping steam; and when their slowly-sinking wooden ships went down in action, there were opportunities for escape far different from any offered on an iron-clad sent rushing to the bottom by the explosion of a modern torpedo. In the action at St. Charles, the gunboat Mound City lost 150 men, killed or wounded, out of a crew of 175, but 3 officers and 22 men escaping uninjured; 82 were killed by gunshot wounds, or scalded¹ to death, and 43 others were drowned, or shot while struggling in the water. When the iron-clad Tecumseh led the column of monitors across the torpedo line at Mobile,² it moved as a forlorn hope which would not have been necessary in the naval combats of previous wars. In all that grand drama of heroism incidental to the Civil War, the Navy played no secondary part.