A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops During the Civil War (review)

A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops During the Civil War. By Mark A. Weitz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. x, 226. $30.00.)

Desertion in the Confederate Army has received relatively little attention from scholars. In A Higher Duty, Mark Weitz examines desertion among Georgia's Confederate soldiers based on a register housed in the National Archives. The register, kept from 1863 to 1865 by the Union Army's commissary general of prisoners, contains the names of thousands of Southern soldiers who deserted, took the oath of allegiance to the United States, and were allowed either to go home or to remain in the North for the duration of the Civil War.

The first chapter of A Higher Duty, which describes the antebellum "seeds of desertion," includes several questionable premises. Drawing primarily from secondary sources, Weitz argues that North Georgians were isolated by choice, seldom traveled to court or other community functions, and viewed the railroad and the expanded market economy that it brought as "an intrusion into their way of life" (21). By 1860, North Georgia "remained more isolated and less a part of the state's economy than Appalachian regions in other parts of the South" (19). Unfortunately, the author provides little primary evidence to support these conclusions.

The majority of the 3,368 Georgians listed on the register of deserters were from the upcountry and upper piedmont regions of the state. Because most North Georgia families owned no slaves and relied on the labor of the entire household, the prolonged wartime absence of so many men caused widespread destitution. The advance of Sherman's army into northwest Georgia in the spring and summer of 1864 heightened the fears of Georgia soldiers regarding the safety of their families. Deserters, Weitz argues, left the army because of the "call of a higher duty" from their hard-pressed families and communities.

Weitz claims that class and regional tensions also encouraged North Georgia soldiers to desert. North Georgians, he states, became angry and disillusioned when they came to believe that the Black Belt planter class "stood to benefit most from the war, yet refused to take much of a role in the fighting" (119). Although such perceptions occasionally appear in the personal papers of upcountry and upper piedmont civilians and soldiers, they are too infrequent to support Weitz's sweeping claim. His assertion that the planter class really didn't support the war contradicts his own evidence that units raised from the Black Belt, comprised in large part of planters and their kin, had the lowest desertion rates of any Georgia Confederate organizations.

Weitz attributes the desertion and diminished morale of Georgia soldiers not solely or even primarily due to events on the battlefield, but more as a response to conditions on the homefront. There is certainly a degree of truth in this, but Weitz virtually ignores conditions and morale in the Confederacy's two major field armies. Couldn't the lower desertion rates among Army of Northern Virginia units also be attributable to a high esprit de corps forged by battlefield victories and superior leadership? Couldn't the deserters from Georgia regiments (most of them formed under the imminent threat of state and Confederate conscription in the spring of 1862) that served in the western theater have been influenced by their participation in disasters such as the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns?

One problem in A Higher Duty is its failure to demonstrate that desertions to the enemy seriously affected the Confederate war effort in Georgia. Weitz shows that many of the deserters came from a small number of Army of Tennessee regiments raised primarily in North Georgia. In most of these "high desertions units," as Weitz calls them, deserters to the enemy numbered fewer than one hundred men, around 10 percent at most of the total wartime strength of these organizations. Overall, deserters on the register comprise roughly 3...