Describe the human costs of the Civil War, including casualty figures, prisoner-of-war conditions, civilian hardship, and women's expanded wartime roles.
The Civil War remains the deadliest war in American history: historians now estimate around 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died, more American deaths than in World War I and World War II combined, and disease killed even more soldiers than combat did, spreading easily through crowded, unsanitary army camps. Prisoner-of-war camps on both sides were often brutal: at Andersonville, a Confederate camp in Georgia, roughly 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners held there died from disease, starvation, and exposure, and Union camps such as Elmira, New York had harsh conditions of their own.
Civilians suffered too, especially in the South, where Union blockades and the destruction of farms and railroads caused severe shortages and inflation. In the North, resentment over the draft -- and the fact that wealthier men could pay a fee or hire a substitute to avoid it -- boiled over into the deadly New York City Draft Riots of July 1863, which tragically included violent attacks on Black New Yorkers. Meanwhile, women on both sides took on expanded roles: Clara Barton, later founder of the American Red Cross, treated wounded soldiers so close to the fighting she was nicknamed the "Angel of the Battlefield," while Dorothea Dix served as the Union's Superintendent of Army Nurses, and thousands of other women ran farms and businesses, worked in factories, and in a smaller number of documented cases, disguised themselves as men to serve as soldiers or worked as spies.
Mastery looks like: They can state accurate casualty figures and describe at least three specific human costs of the war: disease, prisoner-of-war conditions, civilian hardship, and women's expanded roles.
Common stumbles: Treating the war's human cost only as a single large casualty number, without recognizing disease, imprisonment, and the home front as significant, distinct costs of their own.