More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (review)

One of the long-neglected themes of Civil War military history is the frequency and significance of desertion from the armies of both sides. Americans might have volunteered enthusiastically, but they abandoned their obligations just as readily. Mark A. Weitz has attempted a reappraisal of this subject from the Confederate side. He believes the official total of Confederate deserters, 103,400, is an underestimate but that nonetheless it reveals the scale of the problem. Weitz seeks to determine the patterns and influence of desertion, and is less self-consciously intent on establishing its causes as the small band of earlier writers. Inevitably though, he offers numerous insights on the origins of the disaffection of Southern soldiers, as well as the sources of Confederate defeat. It is testimony to the fascination of historians with the latter, and the perennial attraction of the Confederate army, that this volume is confined to the South. This is a pioneering study (and one hopes that a successor on Union desertion will follow it at some point), one that can draw out the comparisons with the Northern military experience.

Weitz begins by considering the South as a place rather than a nation. He also suggests that American soldiers tended to fight near their homes. Consequently, defence of the home became far more significant than defending the nation they ostensibly enlisted to defend. Weitz contends that desertion—a gradual rather than a dramatic and sudden process—began as soon as Civil War armies formed and resulted from a variety of causes. Its central features, however, were determined by the failure of the Confederate government to protect the safety of the homes and families of Southern soldiers not just from Union invasion but from the depredations of other Southern soldiers (138–40). Men in the field thought they had been betrayed by the wealthy, who had promised to take care of their families and had failed to live up to their obligations. Widespread desertion led to the erosion of slavery by weakening the Confederate capacity to resist the Union onslaught, resulting in virtual anarchy. Weitz likens the process of disintegration, as in northern Alabama, to a "civilian insurrection" (210).

He considers desertion a disease that slowly infected all Southern society. He does not argue that the scale of desertion is central reason for Confederate defeat, but he makes a cogent case that "working in concert with the Confederacy's many other problems," the phenomenon "crippled the Confederate war effort" just as much as the number of battle casualties (294).

Weitz establishes firmly that deserters were not just cowards and shirkers. Widespread anarchy prevailed in so many parts of the South because the bands of deserters were superior fighters to the troops (often ill-trained militia) sent against them. Certainly the great spaces of North America facilitated the escape of deserters and made returning them to the ranks difficult. He offers one of the best discussions of deserter sanctuaries, for instance, in Georgia and Alabama, and their ravaging as guerrillas, sometimes in alliance with Unionists. He certainly widens and deepens our knowledge of the fissures that cut across the South as a result of the war.

Deserters had withdrawn their consent to participate in the war, and many of them rejected the Confederate cause. The measures taken by the military and civil authorities were often ineffective. They combined inconsistency, bluster, and little firm action. Weitz argues that the leniency of Southern leaders proved self-defeating. Their tolerance of straggling set the tone for a system that condoned the decisions soldiers made as to whether they would accept the rigors of military discipline. Whatever their intentions, Weitz concludes, soldiers were frequently absent when they were most badly needed, as during the Seven Days' Battles and at Antietam. The series of amnesty proclamations after 1864 were ineffective. In any case, by then desertion had become so widespread that any recourse to capital punishment became impossible. "There were simply too...