Whenever someone brings up the civil war when speaking about U.S. casualties and costs, I usually blow them off. The reason I do this is because the civil war killed U.S. citizens on both sides. It was not so much of a war as the quelling of rebels. Unlike other wars, there was 0% chance of us avoiding this war--other wars, like Vietnam or WWI, we could have simply NOT joined (outcomes would have been different, sure, but we didn't HAVE to fight them). The Civil war though, threatened our authority as a nation-state. It was necessary for us to go into the south fight a costly war, the only one fought on U.S. soil destroying U.S. buildings and farms in the north and in the south, and killing U.S. citizens in the north and in the south.
It isn't that this wasn't a real war with real guns and real fighting. It's that it isn't comparable to a national war. People who try to use the statistics of this war to prove a point about international wars are using a logical fallacy. It's about like comparing apples to oranges.
And that is without mentioning the fact that modern warfare brings less casualties due to advances in medicine, more environmental and economic tragedies due to advances in warfare, and other outcomes of learning how to fight better. Times have changed and scholars and journalists need to compensate for that. You can't really compare wars that are distant from one another by over 100 years.
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