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Scarring and Mortality Selection Among Civil War POWs: A Long-Term Mortality, Morbidity, and Socioeconomic Follow-Up

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Demography

Abstract

Debilitating events could leave either more frail or more robust survivors, depending on the extent of scarring and mortality selection. The majority of empirical analyses find more frail survivors. I find heterogeneous effects. Among severely stressed former Union Army prisoners of war (POWs), the effect that dominates 35 years after the end of the Civil War depends on age at imprisonment. Among survivors to 1900, those younger than 30 at imprisonment faced higher old-age mortality and morbidity and worse socioeconomic outcomes than non-POW and other POW controls, whereas those older than 30 at imprisonment faced a lower older-age death risk than the controls.

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Notes

  1. See U.S. War Department (1880–1901, Series II, Vol. VIII:615, 781). In a longitudinal random sample, roughly 38 % of the 554 men held at Andersonville died there. In the National Park Service’s cross-sectional database, 40 % of the listed men died at Andersonville (see Costa and Kahn 2007).

  2. Estimated from a random sample of Union Army soldiers.

  3. Estimated from the figures in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (2004) and from http://www.phil.muni.cz/~vndrzl/amstudies/civilwar_stats.htm.

  4. Testimony from the trial of Captain Wirtz, reprinted in Ransom (1963).

  5. The data are available at http://www.cpe.uchicago.edu and were collected by a team of researchers led by Robert Fogel. The sample of 35,570 represents roughly 1.3 % of all whites mustered into the Union Army and 8 % of all regiments that composed the Union Army. Ninety-one percent of the sample consists of volunteers, with the remainder evenly divided between draftees and substitutes. The data are based on a 100 % sample of all enlisted men in 331 randomly chosen companies. The sample is limited to 303 companies because complete data are not yet available on all 331companies.

  6. Linkage to the 1860 census reveals that the sample is representative of the northern population of military age in terms of 1860 real estate and personal property wealth and in terms of literacy rates.

  7. Because of the system of prisoner exchange (and the hope that it would be revived), the South had an incentive to record information on men who were captured.

  8. A searchable version of the database is available online as part of the Soldiers and Sailors system (http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss).

  9. See Costa and Kahn (2007a) for details on the 1880 sample; see Lee (2005) for details on the 1870 sample.

  10. Because information on cause of death comes from the pension records, men—from the researcher’s point of view—are not at risk to die until they are on the pension rolls. By 1900, an estimated 85 % of all Union Army veterans were on the pension rolls. Those not eligible for pensions included deserters (roughly 14 % of war survivors had ever deserted) and men who had served less than 90 days. Men who entered the rolls after 1900 were probably healthier. The percentage of veterans alive in 1900 who entered the rolls later was 8 % for non-POWs, 8 % for Fogel sample POWs, and 5 % for the Andersonville sample. My comparisons of POWs with non-POWs in 1900 may therefore understate health and subsequent mortality differences.

  11. Shell shock, combat fatigue, and post-traumatic stress (all names for the same phenomenon in different wars) were not recognized as disorders either during or after the Civil War (see Hyams et al. 1996 for a history of PTSD). The records therefore provide little information on psychiatric disorders.

  12. WWII POWs held by the Japanese experienced higher mortality rates for at least eight years after the war, whereas those held by the Germans did not. Excess mortality was due to tuberculosis and to trauma, including suicide, with the highest mortality rates among the youngest men (Cohn and Cooper 1954; Keehn 1980; Nefzger 1970).

  13. Additional socioeconomic variables were investigated, including whether the veteran was a private (privates faced higher mortality rates in POW camps than nonprivates), but none of these were statistically significant, and none affected the other coefficients.

  14. Even with no controls for type of POW, a mention of scurvy was not a statistically significant predictor of death.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Matthew Kahn, Louis Nguyen, Irwin Rosenberg, Nevin Scrimshaw, Avron Spiro, the participants of the UCLA Economic History Proseminar, and four anonymous referees for comments. I gratefully acknowledge the support of NIH grants R01 AG19637 and P01 AG10120 and data provided by a subgrant from P30 AG017265.

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  1. UCLA Department of Economics, 9272 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1477, USA

    Dora L. Costa

  2. NBER, 9272 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1477, USA

    Dora L. Costa

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Correspondence to Dora L. Costa.

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Costa, D.L. Scarring and Mortality Selection Among Civil War POWs: A Long-Term Mortality, Morbidity, and Socioeconomic Follow-Up. Demography 49, 1185–1206 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0125-9

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