Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (review)

Civil War historians have long celebrated the richness and multitude of their sources. Other scholars seem to have noticed. Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn, both economists at UCLA, use one of the richest collections of Civil War material—Robert Fogel's forty-one-thousand-record Union Army sample—to investigate the elements of social cohesion and the costs and benefits of diversity. The authors' inquiry was motivated by recent research that suggests that "people are less likely to be 'good citizens' when they live in more diverse places" (xviii). Living, as we do, in an increasingly diverse society, this conclusion should worry us and motivate us to identify the origins and solutions to such problems. The authors conclude that such attitudes are trans-historical, arguing that during the Civil War "loyalty to comrades extended only to men like themselves—in ethnicity, social status, and age" (6).

While that assessment makes logical sense and is supported by evidence from their database, the authors' methodology weakens their conclusions. To assess the relationship between cohesion and military effectiveness, the authors focus on desertion and retention in service. But the relationship between these values was not always linear. One of the most celebrated units in the whole war—Virginia's famed Stonewall Brigade—had a 33 percent desertion rate, enormously high for either side. Effectiveness must include some evaluation of how well a unit performed in battle and on the march.

Further, as several studies have shown, the status of deserters on both sides remained fluid throughout the war. Costa and Kahn claim the ability to make precise statements about what factors account for desertion. While it is true that data exist—we can, in some cases, identify the age, occupation, wealth, and hometown of deserters—it is not clear that this material actually explains desertion. Focused studies of the process reveal that a complex set of motivations was at work and that reducing the act of desertion to a single cause oversimplifies an inherently multicausal process.

Another instance of the difficulty of applying a solely quantitative lens appears in their discussion of the effect of ideology on desertion. The attributes they used to assess a soldier's ideological position are his year of enlistment, volunteer status, and home county's support for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 (95). Ideology undoubtedly played a role in soldiers' behavior during the war, and Costa and Kahn deserve credit for incorporating such a slippery subject into their matrix, but these variables tell us very little about the ideological predisposition of individual soldiers. Perhaps early volunteers enlisted in 1861 not out of fervent patriotism but because they wanted to join with a relative. Soldiers from pro-Lincoln counties could always have belonged to the Democratic minority.

Nonetheless, Costa and Kahn earn praise for offering a quantitative assessment of Civil War soldiers, an approach that continues to bear fruit despite all that we know about the subject. Costa and Kahn offer important conclusions: men who entered prisoner-of-war camps with friends and comrades were more likely to survive; older, wealthier, more literate soldiers were less likely to desert; and high mortality rates and Union military losses were likely to increase the desertion rate. The upside of diversity is revealed in Costa and Kahn's findings regarding black soldiers in the Union army. Most of the enslaved men who fought in the U.S. Colored Troops entered the army illiterate, and while all such men likely benefited from the educational efforts of charitable groups, gains in literacy were particularly high when slaves and free blacks were mixed in their units (208). Their cogent narrative supplies enough historical context to help non-specialists understand these findings. For the broad community of social scientists and engaged citizens interested in the issue of social cohesion, Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the continuing utility of historical data to assess contemporary problems and reveals that while problems of inspiring loyalty within diverse...