Estimates of numbers engaged in Civil War battles vary, and statistics on killed, wounded, captured, and missing are incomplete. Participants attempted to fill gaps as they wrote their official reports, and historians have tried to refine the data. The reports of casualties at Ball's Bluff shown in the Official Records are certainly inaccurate. They do not show numbers of dead whose bodies were not immediately located, nor do they show the number of wounded who later died, or the missing who returned to duty or who were later determined to be captured. Although Confederate casualty figures appear to be fairly accurate, the Union figures are not. The day after the battle a Union burial party reported interring forty-seven bodies, leaving about twenty-five unburied. In the days following the battle another twenty bodies were reported washed up on the banks of the Potomac between Ball's Bluff and Washington. Counting those soldiers listed as missing and never accounted for, the number of Union dead might be as high as two hundred.

CONFEDERATE CASUALTIES AT BALL'S BLUFF

53