A short time back I did a essay on desertion in the Confederate States. WOW what an impact when posted on some of those neo sites. Course in their opinion there were no such desertions and all confederates were heros. They even got upset when they found General Lees notes on the issue and his HATE for the cowards. So how about the other shoe dropping? Officially, desertion constituted a capital offense and was punishable by death. But because of the numbers of soldiers involved, it proved practically as well as politically impossible to execute every deserter who was captured. The armies could not afford the numerical loss of such large numbers of troops; more importantly, as Abraham Lincoln himself noted, people would not stand to see Americans shot by the dozens and twenties. Both armies employed other punishments (branding captured soldiers with a “D” on the hip, was common, for example) rather than execute every deserter they recovered. Both armies did execute some captured deserters—often in highly public ceremonies before the entire regiments, intended to deter other would-be fugitives—but such punishments were unusual. Only 147 Union deserters were executed during the course of the war. Rather than rely entirely on punitive measures, Union authorities attempted to woo deserters back with offers of amnesty for soldiers who returned to their commands before a specific deadline, frequently pairing that reprieve with threats of increased punishment for those who failed to return before the designated date. Lincoln offered general amnesty to some 125,000 Union soldiers then absent from their regiments in March 1863, provided those soldiers returned to their units. digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=histsp
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:30:47 +0000
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