From bloody battles to devastating pandemics, the deadliest days in American history have all left their mark on the United States.
What is the deadliest day in American history? It’s a surprisingly challenging question to answer.
Since 1790, the U.S. population has risen from four million to more than 330 million. During the deadliest day of the Civil War at the Battle of Antietam, the population was about one-tenth the size it is now. So the 3,600 soldiers who were killed then would be the same as losing 36,000 people today.
On top of that, many more people die every day in the United States than those directly affected by catastrophic events like natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and pandemics. In 2020, heart disease alone killed nearly 2,400 per day — about the same number who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet, it’s the magnitude of single, deadly events that makes their legacy so powerful. Indeed, the tragic impact of these deadliest days in American history is still acutely felt, whether in a city’s architecture or in the memories of those who survived. Read on to see nine candidates for the deadliest days in American history.
The Deadliest Day In American History: The 1900 Galveston Hurricane
WikimediaCommonsCơn bão Galveston đã giết chết 12.000 người.
The fact that the 1900 Galveston Hurricane is still the deadliest natural disaster in American history speaks to its terrifying destruction. Regionally known as the 1900 Storm, the Category 4 hurricane tore through the Texan town on Sept. 8 at speeds of 135 miles per hour — and left between 8,000 and 12,000 people dead.
When the storm descended on Galveston, it ripped over 3,600 homes and commercial businesses from their foundations like paper. While the destruction of infrastructure was unlikely to have been averted with prior warnings, the death toll could have been, had it not been for an incompetent U.S. Weather Bureau.
The predecessor to the National Weather Service, the U.S. Weather Bureau was only 10 years old at the time, and tracking hurricanes across the Atlantic was still a primitive science. Nonetheless, “any modestly educated weather forecaster would’ve known” where the storm was headed, says MIT professor of atmospheric science Kerry Emanuel.
WikimediaCommonsKhoảng 3.600 ngôi nhà và cơ sở kinh doanh đã bị phá hủy.
At the time, scientists in Cuba had developed expert knowledge about tracking hurricanes in the storm-prone Caribbean. And they first observed the storm picking up in early September when it made landfall in Puerto Rico. And as it passed over the northern tip of Cuba, they correctly predicted that it would head northwest, straight into the Gulf of Mexico.
But in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Weather Bureau’s director, Willis Moore, had made an appalling decision.
According to Emanuel, Moore “was so jealous of the Cubans that he shut off the flow of data from Cuba to the U.S.” and told American forecasters in the region “that they could not on their own issue a hurricane warning, that they had to go through Washington.”
So when the Weather Bureau sent their forecast that the hurricane would pass over Florida and head to New England, Galveston residents were left entirely unprepared for the disaster.
And although Isaac Cline, the Weather Bureau’s chief observer in Galveston, urged locals to leave town at the last minute, nobody listened. The day the hurricane made landfall, it inundated the streets, which rose to a peak elevation of just eight feet above sea level, with a 15-foot storm surge — and killed Cline’s wife.
“The Galveston hurricane made people realize you can’t play politics with a weather bureau,” says Emanuel. “If you make it political, people will die.”
And with upwards of 12,000 people killed by the hurricane, Sept. 8, 1900, might be the deadliest day in American history.
The Deadliest Battle In American History: Gettysburg
Timothy H. O’Sullivan/Wikimedia CommonsKnown as the “Harvest of Death,” this photo shows Union soldiers scattered across the battlefield.
The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania lasted for three days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863. It left more than 40,000 dead or wounded soldiers scattered across the battlefield. When the deafening gunfire ceased and the smoke settled, it became clear that the Civil War battle had killed 7,000 to 10,000 men.
After decades of tension over slavery between northern and southern states, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede. Fought by the northern Union Army and the southern Confederates, Gettysburg became the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee had hoped to win this battle north of the Mason-Dixon Line to force the north into negotiations. While his army of 28,063 soldiers exceeded Union General George Meade’s by 5,000, he failed and fled south.
Mathew Brady/Wikimedia CommonsThe body of a Confederate sharpshooter is left lying where he was shot.
The battle’s aftermath as detailed by a New Jersey soldier was macabre:
“Some with faces bloated and blackened beyond recognition, lay with glassy eyes staring up at the blazing summer sun; others, with faces downward and clenched hands filled with grass or earth, which told of the agony of the last moments. Here a headless trunk; there a severed limb; in all the grotesque positions… they lay.”
By the end of the third day, Confederate casualties had approached 60 percent, with 3,903 men killed. While 18,735 of them lay wounded, 5,425 had either been captured or gone missing. When General Lee withdrew on the rainy afternoon of July 4, the Union tallied its own losses to fewer, albeit similarly harrowing results.
With 3,155 soldiers killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 captured or missing, the Union victory certainly didn’t feel like one. Soldiers on both sides had never engaged in strife of this scale before, with many traumatized or disfigured for the rest of their lives.
Most grueling of all, the Civil War would rage on for two more years. When General Lee capitulated in April 1865, it finally ended — but only after 750,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians had died in the conflict.
The 1941 Attack On Pearl Harbor
Army Signal Corps/U.S. National Archives/Wikimedia CommonsU.S. Navy sailors rescue a survivor alongside the sunken USS West Virginia battleship.
World War II had ravaged Europe for two years before the United States entered the conflict. It was only after the Axis power of Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan.
While the attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking, it should hardly have been a surprise.
Both nations had been inching toward conflict for years. Before the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. imposed a litany of sanctions on Japan, hoping to curb its aggression toward China. In response, Japan ramped up hostilities and began planning for one of the deadliest days in American history.
Near the center of the Pacific Ocean, Pearl Harbor lay 2,000 miles from the American mainland and 4,000 miles from Japan. U.S. military leaders were wholly unconvinced Japan would attack such a distant target, and Pearl Harbor was left unprotected — with most of the Pacific Fleet and hundreds of airplanes in the open.
U.S. NavyAmerican sailors watching as the USS Shaw explodes.
Japanese bombs and bullets befell Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, Japan dropped a 1,760-pound bomb on the USS Arizona’s forward deck — where hundreds of thousands of pounds of ammo were stored. This triggered a giant explosion that sank the 33,000-ton vessel and killed 1,177 sailors in an instant.
A coordinated torpedo attack sank the USS Oklahoma with 400 sailors trapped inside. Intent on destroying the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet to continue expansions in the South Pacific at ease, Japan had managed to cripple every single battleship and over 300 airplanes at Pearl Harbor in less than two hours.
Unbeknownst to Japan, however, aircraft carriers had become far more critical to the U.S. than battleships — and none of America’s carriers were moored at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. Nonetheless, it was one of the deadliest days in U.S. history as 2,403 sailors, soldiers, and civilians were killed, and 1,000 were wounded.
The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906
Wikimedia CommonsIn less than a minute, the earthquake nearly destroyed the city.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 arrived without warning or time for people to prepare. Most were still asleep when the 7.9-magnitude tremor shifted the grounds beneath them at 5:12 a.m. on April 18. With a tectonic slip along 270 miles of the San Andreas Fault, the shaking was felt from Los Angeles to Oregon.
While other towns near the fault line, such as San Jose, Salinas, and Santa Rosa, endured destruction, none suffered the apocalyptic devastation seen in San Francisco. There, fires started almost as soon as the earthquake itself was over.
The natural disaster hit San Francisco shortly after dawn with a noise described “like the roar of 10,000 lions.” Cable cars across the city stopped in their tracks as critical infrastructure was destroyed. City Hall crumbled into the street while the iconic glass roof of the Palace Hotel shattered into the courtyard below.
Wikimedia CommonsThe fire in the Mission District during the Great San Francisco Earthquake.
The following inferno spread from south of the Market District to Chinatown, Telegraph Hill, and North Beach. More than 500 blocks comprising four square miles in the middle of town were razed to the ground, with the relentless blaze continuing until fortuitous rainfall extinguished it four days later.
While the initial death toll was estimated at 700, later analyses concluded that more than 3,000 people had been killed. Up to 400,000 residents were left destitute and relegated to tent cities in Golden Gate Park, as scavenging opportunists waded through the rubble of homes to steal valuable items from fellow townsfolk.
More than 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed in the earthquake and conflagration, with a total property value loss of $350 million. Photographs taken by the U.S. Army captured the pop-up soup kitchens and discouraged faces of survivors before federal relief shipments of food and clothes and tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid arrived.
Fortunately, most of San Francisco was rebuilt to be earthquake- and fire-resistant, with the whole world arriving to marvel at the results during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Yet the 1906 San Francisco disaster remains the deadliest day in American history caused by an earthquake.
The Deadliest Day In The Civil War: Antietam
Wikimedia CommonsThe Battle of Antietam yielded 23,000 casualties with 3,650 killed in action.
The Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862, marked a Civil War sea change. Until then, most battles had put Confederates on the defensive as the Union Army marched south. Fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, it was the first battle of the war fought on Union soil. At the time, it would become the deadliest day in American history.
With a triumph in the Second Battle of Bull Run behind him, Confederate General Robert E. Lee confidently marched his men into Maryland on Sept. 3. Both he and Confederate President Jefferson Davis believed another victory in the north would spur France and Britain to side with the South, who supplied the European nations with invaluable cotton.
Lee also believed that an invasion of a Union state would see Lincoln lose congressional support and yield domestic support for the Confederacy. However, when Union soldiers Private Barton Mitchell and Sergeant John Blood discovered a document detailing his troop movements on Sept. 13, the armies converged at Antietam Creek.
Formerly known as “Sunken Road,” this embankment was christened “Bloody Lane” after 5,000 corpses filled it within three hours of the battle.
Union General George McClellan’s Army confronted Lee’s men at dawn. The Confederates were not only sickly and exhausted from battle but outnumbered by two to one. A mere eight hours after the bloody battle began on a 30-acre cornfield along the creek, there were more than 15,000 casualties on both sides.
Around 2,600 Confederates had fortified themselves in a farm lane known as “Sunken Road.” Close range slaughter began when Union Major General William H. French arrived with 5,500 men — and turned that embankment into an alley of death christened “Bloody Lane” consisting of 5,000 corpses within three hours.
Twelve hours after the first shot was fired, the battlefield was drenched in gore. Each side claimed their dead or wounded. In total, 3,650 men died, with another 16,000 wounded or missing. The slaughter was so devastating that McClellan allowed Lee to retreat the next day without defeating his army once and for all.
Despite preventing the Confederacy from claiming a victory on northern soil, McClellan was removed from his post on Nov. 5 — as President Lincoln was furious that the general hadn’t eradicated the southern threat for good. The Civil War would rage for three more years.
The Deadliest Attack In American History: 9/11
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty ImagesNearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.
It took less than two hours for Sept. 11, 2001, to become one of the deadliest days in American history. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 tore into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. To many on the ground, it appeared at first like a tragic accident.
In reality, five Al Qaeda terrorists had hijacked the Los Angeles-bound plane and flew it to lower Manhattan. With the world watching, United Airlines Flight 175 followed at 9:03 a.m., crashing into the South Tower. Thirty-four minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
The unimaginable happened at 9:59 a.m. as the South Tower collapsed into its own footprint. Meanwhile, over Pennsylvania, passengers on United Flight 93 were attempting to regain control of the plane from hijackers when it crashed in a field near Shanksville at 10:03 a.m.
Then, at 10:28 a.m., the North Tower of the World Trade Center fell.
Wikimedia CommonsThe two 110-story Twin Towers collapsed into their own footprint.
In a matter of 102 minutes, the two most iconic towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, the Pentagon was attacked, and passengers on flight 93 had stopped their plane from reaching its target, widely believed to have been the U.S. Capitol building. In total, 2,977 people were killed in the September 11th attacks.
One of the deadliest days in American history — and the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the Sept. 11 attacks would yield hundreds of thousands of more deaths due to the respiratory illnesses suffered by first responders and the resultant wars in the Middle East.
And to this day, more than 40 percent of those who died in America on 9/11 remain officially unidentified.
Deadliest Days In U.S. History: The 1918 Flu Pandemic
Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty ImagesSt. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps workers on duty.
As World War I raged across Europe, the United States was embroiled in a battle of its own at home. It was no army of invaders nor a domestic threat that the country was facing, but an invisible killer with a mortality rate the world hadn’t suffered since the Black Plague.
While the war in Europe accounted for 20 million deaths from 1914 to 1918, the Spanish Flu claimed at least 50 million lives across the globe. The H1N1 influenza strain affected one-fourth of the world population as it swept from tropical islands in the Pacific to the isolated towns in the Arctic.
Although experts remain uncertain how or where the deadly virus first emerged, it has since become clear that World War I furthered its spread and bolstered its mortality rate. And the worst of it hit the U.S. in October 1918, bringing the country to a standstill.
That month, the virus killed 195,000 Americans — an average of more than 6,000 people per day. According to experts, any one of October’s 31 days that year is more than likely the deadliest day in American history.
Wikimedia CommonsSoldiers with the Spanish flu lie in beds at Kansas’ Camp Funston.
Cities were utterly devastated, with public places such as churches, schools, bars, and theaters shuttered. San Francisco residents who refused to wear masks were fined or sent to jail, while New York City Health Commissioner Royal Copeland kept public venues open. Most impacted of all was the city of Philadelphia.
Public Health Director Wilmer Krusen decided not to cancel a parade that promoted the sale of government war bonds. Around 200,000 people attended the gathering, leading the city’s hospitals to be inundated three days later. That October, more than 11,000 Philadelphians died — with the deadliest day killing 759 people.
To the relief of citizens across the U.S., the Spanish Flu seemed to vanish as unexpectedly as it had arrived. While cases skyrocketed once more after citizens celebrated the armistice of World War 1 on Nov. 11, the flu abated in 1920 — after 675,000 Americans in total had died.
The AIDS Epidemic Of The 1980s
Bettmann/Getty ImagesWashington, D.C., doctor Richard DiGioia hugging his patient, Tom Kane.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) arrived without warning nor explanation in 1981. Doctors in New York City and California were suddenly finding inexplicably enlarged lymph nodes, rare types of pneumonia, and odd cancers among gay men, intravenous drug users, and recipients of blood transfusions.
The world didn’t know it yet, but an invisible killer had arrived to ravage cities across the country. The condition was only given a name by the CDC in 1982: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
Experts believed it had crossed over to humans from chimpanzees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as early as 1920. It spread silently for decades before a strong type of pneumonia and rare cancer known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma emerged among gay Americans in 1981 — when 121 of the 270 known victims died.
Los Angeles Public LibraryThousands of people gather for a candlelight vigil in honor of AIDS victims in Los Angeles, California, on May 30, 1987.
It became rapidly clear that about half of those infected with HIV in the United States would die of an AIDS-related condition within two years of infection. The deadly condition began stigmatizing the already marginalized — gay men, people addicted to drugs, and the unhoused.
At the height of its spread in 1995, AIDS killed 50,000 per year. Those figures boiled down to 4,500 people dying every of the condition every single month, or around 150 people per day. Researchers were desperate to identify the virus itself.
Fortunately, the federal government began screening the U.S. blood supply and licensed an HIV antibody test by 1985 — the same year that the American Foundation for AIDS Research was founded. While early remedies were lacking, antiretroviral therapies that saw infections plummet emerged by the late 1990s.
Despite sex education and HIV prevention measures being funded and promoted ever since, up to 15,000 AIDS-related deaths still occur each year. In total, 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS since 1981.
The Deadliest Days In The COVID-19 Pandemic
Official U.S. Navy Page/FlickrHospital ship USNS Comfort departing New York City after treating patients there in April 2020.
When doctors diagnosed the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States in January 2020, many believed the novel coronavirus would be contained and have little to no impact on our lives. Instead, its subsequent spread impacted the entire country and led to some of the deadliest days in American history — in rapid succession.
And soon, 2020 slowly revealed itself as one of the most devastating years in recent memory. Millions of people quarantined in their homes in fear for their lives, uncertain of what was to come. Then, in the last few weeks before Christmas, COVID-19 deaths skyrocketed across the country.
The daunting figures showed that the first four days in December marked four of the deadliest days in American history.
On Dec. 1, 2020, there were 2,597 coronavirus deaths. On Dec. 2, there were 2,804. Dec. 3 was the highest to date with 2,879 deaths. On Dec. 4, there were 2,607 coronavirus-related deaths — all higher death tolls than the attack on Pearl Harbor or any single day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Wikimedia CommonsA CT scan of a patient with COVID-19 and the lesions (bright areas) in their the lungs.
But it was only going to get worse. On Jan. 12, 2021, the deadliest day of the pandemic, 4,400 deaths were reported — more than from any other single event in American history aside from the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1900 Galveston Hurricane.
Then came February, when an estimated 3,300 people were dying of COVID-19 across the country every single day. For weeks on end that month, the fatalities exceeded the death toll of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York daily.
Yet just like in the aftermath of every other deadly event in American history, people have mourned and adapted.
Following the Galveston Hurricane, the city literally raised itself by several feet in one of America’s most daring feats of engineering. The San Francisco Earthquake led to drastic improvements in shock-absorbent buildings. The AIDS crisis spurred medical advancements in immunotherapy treatment.
Today, masks have become commonplace, vaccine research has led to promising breakthroughs beyond COVID-19, and outdoor dining appears here to stay in some of America’s densest cities. As with all of the deadliest days in American history, those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will leave their impact for generations to come.