Originally aired on February 27, 1998 - In part 183 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson explores the impact of desertion on both armies during the Civil War.
#183 – Desertion
Wintertime always brought an increase in desertion among Confederate soldiers. Relative proximity made it easy to walk away from Army camp and return home to loved ones. That was but one factor that made desertion so prevalent in the Civil War.
The first wave of enlistees were convinced that the disagreement between North and South would be settled with one battle. When the war continued and showed no inclination of ending war-weariness replaced enthusiasm. Others who abandoned the Army were ignorant of fundamental issues behind the war. Many recoiled at the sight on death, wounds, sickness and wickedness.
Government mismanagement also played a major part in encouraging desertion. Confederate bureaucracy plus breakdowns in transportation caused hunger and lack of clothing to become mainstays of every army. Galloping inflation made a soldier’s $13.00 monthly pay useless, when he was paid at all.
The advent in 1862 of conscription seemed to take away a man’s basic liberties and when the Southern government followed that law with a series of exemption measures seemingly designed to protect the “haves” and the expense of the “have-nots” a national outcry arose that this was “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight”.
Such class frictions persisted throughout the Civil War. A disgruntled dirt farmer’s wife wrote the Confederate Secretary of War a straightforward letter. “Her husband,” she said, “is not able to do your government much good and he might do his children some good and there is no use in keeping a man there to kill him and leave widows and poor little orphan children to suffer while the rich has aplenty to work for them.” As to those forced into the Army by conscription an estimated 75% ultimately deserted.
Yet another factor in the high incidents of desertion was camp life. For forty-nine of every fifty days a soldier was in a camp atmosphere that offered little sanctuary. Sickness was rampant. Even when the soldiers were reasonably well loneliness and homesickness diluted morale and sapped whatever good intentions a man might have.
Probably the greatest cause of Confederate desertion were heart-rending pleas from the home-folk. In December, 1864, a wife wrote her solider husband, “We haven’t got nothing in the house to eat but a little bit of meal. Try to get off and come home and fix us all up some and then you can go back. If you put off a’comin’ t’won’t be no use to come for we’ll all be out there in the garden in the graveyard with your ma and pa.”
Desertion followed an actual and chronological pattern in the Civil War. It increased steadily as the war continued. Unlawful absences reached epidemic proportions by the autumn of 1864. Half of the Confederate soldiers on regimental lists were absent. Most of them were deserters.
A discouraged Robert E. Lee reported that, “hundreds of men were deserting nightly to the Union lines”. In a one month period Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia lost 8% of its strength from absences without leave. The crime became so prevalent that hunting deserters was a wide-spread and usually unsuccessful enterprise. If extant statistics are believable, a deserter had a three to one change of making good his escape from the army.
A large percentage of those who fled were good men who could stand some things, but could not stand everything. Much is still made of Confederate patriotism, as it should be. Yet only thirty-five years after the war, North Carolina’s leading military historian thought desertion, “so great that it overcame all bounds and together with the breakdown in the finances of the Confederacy was the major cause of Southern defeat”.