Statistics from the Civil War

Interesting statistics from the Civil War, startling even, at least to me.  Stephen Ambrose, in his book To America, Personal Reflections of a Historian, provides the following statistics:  "...for the Confederacy 94,000 battle deaths, 164,000 killed by disease, and 194,000 wounded; for the Union, 110,000 battle deaths, another 225,000 deaths by disease, and 275,000 wounded."   I had just assumed that the South bore the brunt of casualties from the war.  Just in my family of ancestors, there was a great-great grandfather who died during the war, Jesse Potts (disease, Richmond VA), another was wounded at the Battle of Corinth (George Emerson Robinson), and W. T. Bishop, my great-great-great grandfather, spent two years as a prisoner of war in various Union prison camps as one of the Immortal 600.   I figure that most everyone in the South can claim ancestors who were Confederate casualties of the War Between the States; it just never really occurred to me that likewise, my Northern counterparts could claim a similar number of ancestors with casualties from the War, if not more.   In the South, we've probably overdone the memorializing of the war dead while in the North, there has been too little recognition of the soldiers who fought to keep our country united.  

I'm enjoying Ambrose's book, which was published the same year he died, 2002.  You may remember that he wrote Band of Brothers, and is largely responsible for the D-Day Museum (now World War II Museum) being located in New Orleans.