Having served three years in the Army changed many things about me. I was introduced to many new experiences that I hope never to repeat and I learned a lot about myself both good and bad. While I wasn’t involved in any massive world wars I got a taste of its reality by my visits to Korea and Vietnam. This post isn’t meant to be about me but about war itself. Todays post contains a few odd and strange facts from the most destructive war this country has ever faced, The American Civil War, which pitted brother against brother and families against families. The most widely cited figure is 618,222 total deaths, with 360,222 Union deaths and 258,000 Confederate deaths. The war’s toll was so severe that if the same percentage of the U.S. population had died today, it would be equivalent to 6 million deaths. Enjoy . . .

• Of the future members of the United States Supreme Court who were of fighting age during the civil war, seven were in uniform. Four fought for the Union: Oliver Wendell Holmes, John M. Harlan, William B. Woods, and Stanley Matthews. Three fought for the Confederacy: Edward D. White, Horace H. Lurton, and Lucius Q.C. Lamar.

• Union privates were paid only $16.00, but the gold value of their pay was more than seven times greater than that of the Confederates.

• Slaves in Virginia could be hired for $30.00 a month in 1863 – yet the pay for an Army private was $11.00 a month. Confederates pay finally increased to $18.00 a month the next year.

• Of the 546 nuns known to have served as battlefield nurses, 289 were from Ireland, 40 from Germany, and 12 from France.

• Firing on both sides was so inaccurate that soldiers estimated it took a man’s weight in lead to kill a single enemy in battle. A Federal expert said that each Confederate who was shot required 240 pounds of powder and 900 pounds of lead.

• A young Confederate officer, Captain S. Isadore Guillet, was fatally shot on the same horse on which three of his brothers had been previously killed. With his final wish he willed the horse to his nephew as he died.

• Years before the war Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses, lived and worked in the home of Owen Brown, whose small son, played noisily about the frontier homestead,. That boy grew up to be John Brown, the Abolitionist martyr who lit the fuse of the war.

• The Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forrest, classed by some historians as the war’s most able cavalry commander, had twenty-nine horses shot from under him in the course of the war. He survived to be the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

WAR IS TRULY HELL

(And as I also learned – Peacetime is a motherf**ker)