American War DeadA State-By-State Memorial · Six Wars · The Civil War to the Global War on Terror

The definition

Every state-war cell on this map counts US military deaths under the DCAS all-conflict-attributable, all-services definition: combat deaths, deaths of wounds, deaths from disease, non-hostile deaths, accident deaths — across Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Space Force where applicable. This is the same definition the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) applies to its Principal Wars 1775–1991 table.

The all-cause definition counts every American who died because of the war — including the roughly 32,000 American soldiers who died in stateside training camps during the 1918 influenza pandemic before they ever shipped overseas. Gold Star combat-only sources quietly omit them. This map does not.

The Civil War is Union-only

This map shows Union (United States) casualties from the American Civil War. Confederate-state cells render as no-data on the Civil War view. This is a deliberate editorial choice, made at the project's Charter and held throughout: the United States is the country whose war dead this memorial counts. Where Confederate states had Union enlistees (Tennessee notably contributed about 30 Union regiments), those individuals are not state-attributed at v1.

Provenance tiers

Every cell carries a tier and a data-status. The tier describes how the count was sourced:

• LIVE — primary-source verified per-state count from a federal aggregator (Vietnam NARA DCAS; Korea DOD DCAS; GWOT DOD DCAS OCO).
• DERIVED — calculated by scaling a credible per-state share to the all-services national total (WWI from HonorStates Gold Star × DCAS 116,516; WWII from Army CMH × DCAS 405,399 — see asymmetry note below).
• SYNTH — best-available reconstruction from secondary sources where primary per-state data does not exist at canonical standard. Civil War cells use this tier; each carries ≥1 substantive secondary source. 9 of 25 captured Civil War cells (NY, OH, PA, MD, DE, DC, MO, NV, WV) are additionally cross-validated against Fox 1889 Chapter XIII canonical aggregates; the remaining 16 cells' Fox cross-validation is queued for post-publish enhancement, transparent on the page rather than papered over.

WWI vs. WWII — different scaling assumptions

WWI's DERIVED scaling is defensible because the inputs (Gold Star numerator and DCAS denominator) both vary with state soldier-population — draft quotas and pandemic exposure both tracked the same driver. WWII's DERIVED scaling has a known systematic bias: the Army-only baseline under-counts coastal states (California, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Hawaii) that contributed disproportionately to the Navy and Marine Corps via port-of-record enlistment. Every WWII cell carries a proportionality_bias flag naming this. A future build with NARA RG 80 (Navy) and RG 127 (Marines) primary-source data can resolve the bias per state.

Six wars, not eleven

An earlier plan for this map covered eleven American wars — every major conflict from the Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Five of them are not on this map: the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Persian Gulf War. They were left out of this version because verifiable per-state casualty figures for them do not exist in a form this map can stand behind.

For the three oldest wars, the per-state records were never centrally compiled: Continental Army medical records did not survive intact, state militia rolls are fragmentary, and the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars — both overwhelmingly disease-driven — were never aggregated by state. For the Persian Gulf War, per-state figures exist inside the Defense Casualty Analysis System, but only behind a paginated interface this project could not extract reliably. Showing five maps that were blank or estimated would have served the reader less honestly than showing six that are sourced cell by cell.

The national death tolls for the five wars left off the map are recorded here so they are not lost from the account:

• Revolutionary War — 4,435 battle deaths (DCAS). Disease deaths, estimated at 8,000–18,000, were never centrally counted.
• War of 1812 — 2,260 battle deaths (DCAS). Disease deaths uncounted.
• Mexican-American War — 13,283 US military deaths (DCAS), most of them from disease.
• Spanish-American War — 2,446 US military deaths (DCAS), roughly 90 percent from disease.
• Persian Gulf War — 382 US military deaths (DCAS): 147 killed in action, 235 non-hostile.

A later version may add these wars if defensible per-state sourcing becomes available.

What the map does not have

• Alaska and Hawaii were not states until 1959. Korean War figures for those jurisdictions reflect pre-statehood enlistment-of-record counts.
• Territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands) are not rendered in this v1 50-states-plus-DC choropleth. Their dead are no less American.

Numeric conventions

All derived calculations use half-even (banker's) rounding — Python round() semantics. A reader reproducing any DERIVED cell from raw × scale_factor using a standard round() will get the same number this map shows.

Per-capita

The per-capita toggle expresses deaths per 100,000 of state population in the decennial census year nearest the conflict period: 1860 for the Civil War, 1910 for WWI, 1940 for WWII, 1950 for Korea, 1970 for Vietnam, 2010 for GWOT. West Virginia has no 1860 population — it became a state in 1863 — so its Civil War cell appears in the absolute view only.

What you can do with this data

Click any state to see its per-war count and source. Click a war button to switch the active metric. The "Per capita" button at the right end of the toggle bar swaps every state from absolute counts to deaths per 100,000. Every cell carries enough provenance information to be reproducible from public sources.