The Effect of the Civil War on Southern Marriage Patterns.

She asked the editor, "[D]o you think that I will be overlooked 'amidst this wreck of matter and crush of men and horses'[?!'" Social historians ofthe Civil War have generally agreed that fears like Hattie's were well grounded in demographic realities. Nearly 620,000 men were killed in the war, a number approximately equal to the deaths in all other American wars from the Revolution to the Korean War combined. The deaths of huge numbers of men, Nancy Cott has argued, rendered "the assumption that every woman would be a wife . . . questionable, perhaps untenable."^ The death rate was especially great in the Confederacy, which lost approximately one in five white men of