The few remaining survivors of the struggle, Northern as well as Southern, will be repelled by the very subject of this book; probably the average reader will question the worth-whileness of an exhaustive study of that which seems to record a nation’s shame….Much is to be said in extenuation of the ugly phase of desertion, apparently inseparable from war, but to look it squarely in the face, rather than to cover it up or to ignore it, is to see more of the truth about war and should be another step in the direction of peace. Ella Lonn, 1928

In 1928, when the majority of those who had served in the civil war were dead, and very few lived who had clear memories of the war, a small book appeared, almost out of nowhere, that explored one of the few statistics about the civil war that was not part of the country’s collective history. The book was called “desertion during the civil war,” and the author, ella lonn, dared expose the plague of desertion during the conflict, a subject that had escaped historians and academia alike for over 50 years.

No one wants to acknowledge that his or her ancestors may have [ad#adsense]deserted their duty as a soldier, and knowing this, Lonn forged on ahead with her research, research that was done, for the most part, in the official war records of the Civil War. What Lonn discovered were records that while incomplete and often inaccurate, also proved that desertion was a problem for both the Federal and Confederate Armies.

Desertion during the civil war was long thought of as a uniquely southern problem. this misconception can be directly traced to the reputation of the confederate home guard. The home guard, an organization legitimized by the confederate government, existed ostensibly to protect southern citizens from harm during the war; however, the home guard’s duty to capture and return deserters from the confederate army is much better known.

That the Home Guard exercised their right to round up deserters is not in question; the extent to which they did so is less clear. While the popular notion prevails that the Home Guard rounded up Confederate deserters by the herd to return to active duty, the reality is less dramatic. For one thing, Home Guards were not in place in all eleven Southern states until 1863, giving many soldiers two years leeway. Furthermore, by late 1864-early 1865, the Union Army occupied many Southern states, which effectively ended the reign of the Home Guard, and therefore the returning of deserters to the fold.

Although the home guard’s role in quelling desertion in the south is perhaps overstated, the fact that desertion was a factor in the confederate defeat is not. as the war dragged on, many of those who’d once supported the lost cause found that their opinions had changed. More importantly, as conditions for southern civilians began to decline rapidly in the last year of the war, many men felt their duties at home to be more essential than those in the army, and deserted to return to their families. As more and more men left the army for home, the already outnumbered confederate shrank considerably, and found itself unable to fend off its enemy.

Frankly, Confederate desertion was not only understandable, but inevitable. The theatre of war largely Southern, and the danger to civilians was not lost on the Confederate soldiers. Nor was the fact that their families were suffering the same privations that they were as the Confederacy became increasingly unable to provide goods for its soldiers and citizens. That as many men stayed to the end of the war as did is more remarkable, in fact.

Desertion by northern soldiers, however, was more troubling to lonn, as it has been to many other historians. Union soldiers did not leave their families in the same precarious circumstances as confederate soldiers did. Nor did they continually find themselves without rations of food and clothing. yet, it has been estimated, according to official records of the war, that more union soldiers deserted than did confederate soldiers.

Undoubtedly many Union soldiers deserted for the same reason that their Confederate counterparts did – a longing for home and disgust for war in general. However, there were some aspects of desertion of Union soldiers that had little or nothing in common with those attributed to Confederate desertion. Perhaps the best known aspect of Union desertion was that of hired soldiers. Hired soldiers, commonplace in the North, taking the place of drafted men who did not want to serve, were among the most likely to desert. A great number of the soldiers that served in the Northern forces were hired; however, hired soldiers were largely unheard of in the South.

Lonn was disturbed by the phenomenon of desertion in the union army, writing:

it may perhaps be said that though Confederate desertion was bad, appallingly so, it was offset by the desertion in the Union ranks. Taking for granted in the present state of our historical information the outcome, the fact that the South must have inevitably had to yield to superior resources and wealth, the Northern desertion is the factor the more to be deplored, as it lengthened the war, by distracting energies and men to struggle with this problem in the persons of the provost marshals and soldiers who might otherwise have been in the field…

Lonn and her groundbreaking study of desertion are largely forgotten today, except by historians. However, her study gave new insight into a deciding factor of the civil war that is usually dismissed – desertion.