Civil War Casualties (estimated 600,000)

A non‑individual collective invoked as a rhetorical constituency — the estimated six hundred thousand Americans who died in the Civil War. In the series the referent functions less as a named historical actor and more as a moral counterweight: characters summon the casualty figure to insist on national sacrifice and to blunt demands for reparative justice. The invocation operates dialogically (not institutionally), shaping debates between Joshua Lyman and Jeff Breckenridge by converting abstract claims about restitution into competing moral claims about cost, loss, and political feasibility.