Counting the Dead from the Civil War

J. David Hacker has an interesting column in the Times on using demographic methods to estimate the number of men killed in the Civil War. The number has been disputed since the war ended, since the numbers listed in the official records obviously missed many casualties:

Even as Civil War history has gone through several cycles of revision, one thing has remained fixed: the number of dead. Since about 1900, historians and the general public have assumed that 618,222 men died on both sides. That number is probably a significant undercount, however. New estimates, based on Census data, indicate that the death toll was approximately 750,000, and may have been as high as 850,000.

The new estimates rely on creating a profile of the population, based on age and sex, and then showing how many men were "missing" in 1870. If the new estimates are right, about 1 in 10 American men died as a result of the war.