Harvard Civil War deaths

Moldbuggist Nick Land, inciting people he dislikes (Southerners) against other people he dislikes (Yankees/Puritans), using as evidence of Yankee perfidy the expressed worldview of an unlikeable ethnocentric Jew (who Nick Land likes); and, for bonus incitement, ascribing Talmudic ethics to Yankees:
Outsideness ?@Outsideness
If any of the eth-nat hardcore on my TL are in the mood to blow a bloodvessel tonight, I recommend this:
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2015/06/22/the-confederate-battle-flag-is-what-makes-america-stupid/ …

Preston S. Brooks ?@Rebel_Bill 2h2 hours ago
@Outsideness Actually it didn't kill nearly enough of those yankee bastards.

Preston S. Brooks ?@Rebel_Bill 2h2 hours ago
@skyagusta @Outsideness Many New Englanders paid for criminals to replace them in the draft.

Outsideness ?@Outsideness 2h2 hours ago
@Rebel_Bill @skyagusta Understandable, since they had important Unitarian-moral research to do.

Outsideness ?@Outsideness
@skyagusta @Rebel_Bill But, as you know, a broken Harvard fingernail hurts God more than an annihilated battalion of midwesterners.

The evidence I'm aware of tends to point in a direction opposite that implied by Nick Land to his followers:
The 20th was called “the Harvard regiment” because so many of its officers were educated at the College. Some had left Harvard as undergraduates, quitting school in April when the first rebel shells rained down on Fort Sumter. By 1865, the regiment’s nickname was “the Bloody 20th.” Of the nearly 3,000 Union regiments that saw action, the Harvard regiment had the fifth-highest number of casualties.

Harvard faculty, undergraduates, and graduates served in other regiments as well, and in every branch of the service. There were 246 dead among the 1,662 with Harvard ties who fought on both sides. In the Union ranks, 176 died. On the Confederate side, where 304 men with Harvard connections enlisted, 70 died, a mortality rate two and a half times higher than the Union side.

Note that the ratio of Confederate to Union deaths for those with Harvard connections is in line with or below the overall 3:1 ratio of Confederate to Union deaths reported here. From the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of 1918:
In 1860 the number of living Harvard graduates was between 4,100 and 4,200. To this number should be added the temporary students or non-degree-holders who were still alive; their number is uncertain, but can be approximated. About a quarter of the living graduates and temporary students, or 1,237, entered the Army and Navy; and of these 131 died in service. The percentage of deaths to men in service was roughly 10.6.
An earlier estimate, from 1865, puts the number of living Harvard graduates around 1860 even lower:
over 500 of Harvard's sons (of a total of 2,400 living Harvard graduates, including the aged, sick, absent and all,) had voluntarily entered the service of the country, enthusiastic admiration was expressed on all sides. When it was added that nearly 100 of the 500 had already fallen in the service -- not to count the wounded and the sick
Note also that many of the Midwesterners who died were of New England Puritan stock.

4 comments:

  1. "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

    - Jesus on Nick Land

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  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain

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  3. Steve,

    Thanks. At a glance, I see plenty of other Civil War Medal of Honor recipients with New England ancestry as well.

    The two Union army brigades with the most combat deaths according to Fox's Regimental Losses were the Iron Brigade and the 1st Vermont Brigade.

    The Iron Brigade was from the Midwest, but the majority of the associated officers listed on the wikipedia page appear to have New England ancestry.

    Here's a list of "every infantry regiment in the Union Armies which lost over 200 men, killed or mortally wounded in action", with many New Englands units represented.

    Incidentally, the father of CSA Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory was a Yankee.

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