[Letter to the Editor of the New Republic]

Steven Hahn writes, "More people were killed or wounded in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined.... Ours was, in fact, the bloodiest war of the nineteenth-century world" ("Divine Rights," February 6). Hahn should check out the Taiping Rebellion in China in the middle of the nineteenth century. Estimates of casualties in that Chinese conflict range from 20 to 30 million. Our Civil War resulted in fewer than one million deaths. The Taiping Rebellion was probably the second-bloodiest conflict in modern history, exceeded only by World War II.

Roger Schmeeckle
Seattle, Washington