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Counting had grown in importance in the decades that preceded the war. A population that had been largely innumerate—basic arithmetic was not even required for entrance to Harvard until 1803—began to count and calculate, to teach mathematics in schools, to regard numbers as a tool of mastery over both nature and society. The American Statistical Association, founded in 1839 by five Bostonians, grew within months into a nationwide organization with a constitution, bylaws, and regular publications. Americans had by the middle of the nineteenth century entered into what historian Patricia Cline Cohen has called an “infatuation with numbers.”2

As the very term itself implies, statistics emerged in close alliance with notions of an expanding state, with the assessment of its resources, strength, and responsibilities. Often this quantification focused on censuses, on demography, and on mortality records, the very questions of life and death that took on new salience with the outbreak of war. Americans confronted the conflict and its death tolls predisposed to seek understanding in quantitative terms. In the face of the war’s scale and horror, statistics offered more than just the possibility of comprehension. Their provision of seemingly objective knowledge promised a foundation for control in a reality escaping the bounds of the imaginable. Numbers represented a means of imposing sense and order on what Walt Whitman tellingly depicted as the “countless graves” of the “infinite dead.”3

But it was as difficult to count the dead as to name them—and for the same reasons. Whitman wrote both literally and figuratively in calling them “countless.” Just as Civil War armies lacked procedures for accurate identification of dead and wounded, so too structures for ensuring accurate reports of numbers of casualties after each battle did not exist. Army regulations had required military commanders to submit lists of captured, killed, wounded, and missing with the official description of each engagement. Hundreds of these handwritten lists are crammed into boxes at the National Archives, but they represent a highly problematic record, as E. B. Whitman discovered when he turned to them as part of his effort to identify and reinter thousands of Union dead. At the end of an engagement, commanders usually had more compelling concerns than compiling lists of casualties. If reports were made close in time to a battle, the number of deaths was understated, not just because of incomplete information but because many of the wounded who would soon die still clung to life. However, a lengthy interval between battle and casualty report—and this interval sometimes stretched as long as months—produced other sorts of errors.

Contemporaries readily admitted the shortcomings in official casualty data. William F. Fox, a Union lieutenant colonel who devoted his postwar years to trying to document the numbers of war deaths, found officers’ reports a poor source. “After a hard fought battle,” Fox remembered, “the regimental commander would, perhaps, write a long letter to his wife detailing the operations of his regiment, and some of his men would send to their village paper an account of the fight, but no report would be forwarded officially to head quarters. Many colonels regarded the report as an irksome and unnecessary task.” Mass modern warfare had not brought with it the bureaucratic apparatus appropriate to its unanticipated scale. “What may be called the book-keeping of our volunteer army,” former Union colonel Thomas Higginson wrote, as he tried to compile data on Massachusetts soldiers, “was borrowed from the book-keeping of our little regular army. It had suddenly to be expanded from thousands to millions.” The duty of keeping records, he observed, tended to fall either to a man of military experience “without training in red tape,” or to a “man of red tape without any training…as a soldier. In either case confusion resulted.” History, Higginson concluded, was necessarily “an