This thread is really getting interesting. It does raise a few questions about when a war is actually over, and when do we stop listing soldiers as casualties of that war. While there is no way of really knowing what happened to all of the individuals on their way home, I would suggest a few thoughts.

Thousands obviously did not die walking home after the war- that would have been noticed. But how about hundreds? What it were only dozens? What is the number we have to reach before someone comments with some alarm on their collective, non-battle-related deaths? The individual deaths at the time would not have been noticed or even recognized as part of some pattern of disaster, even if the deaths were recorded. But who would record those deaths? The Confederate Army was no longer keeping records, and those soldiers were now out of the hands of the Union Army.  How many soldiers simply died along the way and were buried where they fell? They would just be listed as missing and presumed dead by their loved ones. 

There was no Confederacy left to organize the soldiers' homeward march. There was also little or no infrastructure left intact in the South to assist these soldiers in their travels. While the Union Army looked after its own men, it did provide shipping for the Confederate prisoners- like those at Point Lookout- to return to Virginia. Ships were also made available in ports like Norfolk to carry soldiers, from outside Virginia, around Florida to Mobile and to other southern ports. It has been noted many times that Union soldiers at Appomattox provided food and clothing to many of the needy Confederate soldiers, out of respect for their former foes.  After the Confederates left the area, however, they were on their own.

The road home was hardly "a walk in the park." The war was not over after Appomattox,  especially for those heading for Alabama and Tennessee. The presence of Joseph Johnston's army in central North Carolina kept that part of the war going- an area where Confederate soldiers would have to pass through to reach home in beyond the mountains. Soldiers' letters from the 1st Tennessee Regiment and from the 9th Alabama Cavalry told of their being attacked by Union pickets as they made their way back home, and having to run through these lines just as they had done during the war. The Union troops were shooting to kill, and some men were killed. Even without being shot at and pursued, many men had not eaten in days and were weak and sick. While some people were hospitable to the soldiers passing by their homes, many of them had little or nothing to give. These soldiers were not staying for long in any town or farm- there was an urgency to get home.

As far as deaths along the road are concerned, think about how many men died along the road during war-time marches, for example, to Antietam and to Gettysburg. If those men could die during a 150-plus mile march, out of an army of 40-70,000 men, why wouldn't the same proportion have died during a 500-mile march home? General John Gibbon reported to General Ulysses S. Grant that they had paroled between 25- 35,000 men at Appomattox- about half the total on those marches. The Union soldiers' descriptions of the Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Sayler's Creek and at Appomattox indicate that many of them were not only ragged and weary-looking, but were undernourished and weak. The men who were released from prisons like Fort Delaware and Point Lookout were in even worse shape. Some of those men had to be carried from the prison to the ships for the trip to Virginia.  How many of those died before they reached home, or even after they reached home? Not all Confederate soldiers, however, were in such desperate conditions. Union reports also told of Confederate soldiers and units who were as healthy and well-fed and clothed as they were.

When it comes to not hearing about the deaths of large numbers of soldiers returning home, keep in mind that even large losses of life could be virtually ignored. The loss of the "Sultan," a ship carrying recently-released Union prisoners in 1865 (which blew up killing 1,600 out of 1,900) made very few of the newspapers of the time. After a war where tens of thousands had recently died, people just didn't want to hear more bad news. The war was largely over for the North- it was all about getting back to normal, and they wanted to close the book on the war and move on. 

Even today we are still revising (upwards) the casualty totals of all our wars. Do we include people who died in hospitals where they spent the majority of the war? Do we count the veteran who died, not only on the way home from the war, but the one who died five years after the war due to war-related injuries and illnesses?

Men did die and were killed on their way home. How many did, we may never know. To say it didn't happen because we never heard about it, does not mean that it didn't happen.

Another good book on the subject of the homeward march after the war (for both sides) is: "Homeward Bound," by William B. Holberton. Also, "The Final Bivouac," by Chris Calkins- a lot of first hand accounts of what happened to both Confederate and Union troops (and the area around Appomattox) after the surrender.  

John


On Oct 11, 2012, at 9:18 PM, Craig Kilby <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> You took the words right out of my mouth.
> 
> On Oct 11, 2012, at 5:30 PM, Lowe, Richard wrote:
> 
>> One other thing: on the possibility that large numbers of returning Confederate soldiers died on their journeys home -- the fact that no one (or at least no one I've heard about) mentioned these deaths in a letter, a diary, a newspaper article, a U.S. Army document is revealing. If large numbers of soldiers had really died on the road home, someone would have surely said something about it. What a perfect opportunity to slam the Federals -- but, apparently, no one did write about it.
> 
> 
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