sary general daily use, and also a similar average of wages, for each year, from, say, 1858 to 1868, and compare these averages year by year. Taking the average wages and average prices of 1860 as 100 per cent., it will appear that wages had been gradually advancing from 80 to 100 during the whole preceding twenty years, an advance that continued in accelerated movement during the war period. And in so far the change was profitable. But at the same time prices of necessaries, which had been disturbed only by local fluctuations prior to 1861, suddenly jumped to two and three times their former standard. The result was that, while a man got more money for his day's labor, it was worth far less to him in the purchase of the goods he needed. In 1865 his wages were nearly a half more than in 1860, but prices of goods had gone up to two and a third times the former level. Under these conditions a day's labor would buy in that year only two-thirds as much as before the war. Men thought they were getting big returns for their work, but the enormous cost of the necessaries of life made these hard to obtain. Those who during the recent hard times have had their wages cut down a third from the standard of 1892 know what this must have meant to the struggling families of the home guard thirty years before.
There are other evidences of the sacrifices of those days. Many farms went untilled or yielded their fruits to the toil of the women, because the men were at the front. Figures show that, even with all the efforts of those at home, the crops of the war years were less in the North by a third than were those of the years before or immediately after that period. And in the South, as the struggle neared its close, the conditions were tenfold worse. Foreign commerce from Southern ports was practically destroyed. In the North it fell to half its former volume. Business failures in the first years of the rebellion were multiplied three fold. Railroad building dropped to but a fourth of its previous standard.
Destroyed wealth can be replaced by later toil, but there were losses of the war which no after efforts could make good. Men were condemned to hobble through life on crutches; shattered health carried thousands to early graves. Starved in the enemies' prisons and wasted with disease in the hospitals and on the field, soldiers went home to die. There were, besides the thousands slain in battle, the tens of thousands more who suffered intolerable anguish from wounds. Killed, wounded, missing, were the heart-rending records of every battle.
The first battle of Bull Run cost the North 3,000 soldiers, and the South 2,000. At Shiloh 13,000 Federals and 11,000 Confederates fell. On the "seven days' retreat," the two armies left behind them 33,000 men. Antietam weakened the Northern army by 12,000, and the Southern by 26,000. At Gettysburg, 23,000 Federals and 32,000 Confederates were mowed down. In the siege of Vicksburg the Southerners lost 31,000 men. The three days in the Wilderness cost the North 38,000. Sherman in his glorious March to the Sea left 37,000 soldiers between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Corinth has a record for both armies of 16,000, Fredericksburg 17,000, Chancellorsville 28,000, Chickamauga 33,000, Spotsylvania 35,000, and Stone's Run 37,000 men. And so the horrors might be multiplied.
Official records show that in the armies of the North 44,000 were killed in action during the war, 49,000 died of wounds, 186,000 died of disease, and 25,000 died from causes unknown, making a total of 304,000 deaths of Northern soldiers. But these numbers do not include those who died at their homes from wounds and disease. It is not too high an estimate to place the deaths in the North from the war at 350,000. And for every Northerner that fell it is believed that a Southerner died also—700,000 lives destroyed in one short war. That struggle multiplied three fold the death rate of ordinary times, and took, not the children, the aged, the sick, and the weak, but the very flower of the nation's manhood. Could every slain soldier have had appropriate burial, the hearses alone would have formed a funeral cortège from ocean to ocean. Cut off every adult man in the broad State of Ohio, and the victims of such a catastrophe would be no more numerous.
Bitter as was the cost of the conflict to the men at the front, scarcely less heavy did misfortune weigh upon those left at home. For the dead there were widows and orphans. For the wounded and sick there were those waiting at home in anxious hope and fear. The newspaper was perused in dread of disaster; the sight of the telegram changed fear of calamity to certainty. Nobly did the women of the North and South sustain the men at the front, but at sacrifices which no figures can measure.
