Our last post sketched some of our key findings concerning the role of social networks and their effects on desertion and surviving POW camps during the U.S Civil War. In our new Princeton University Press book, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, we also use our unique longitudinal data to explore how the war affected the later life experience for Union Army soldiers. In this post, we discuss how deserters who survived the war lived their lives after the war. We also discuss our findings concerning black troops.
Deserters: Shame and Ostracism
During the U.S Civil War, home towns knew which of their sons had fought honorably and who had deserted. Spitzer and Avatar both commented that the need to maintain their reputations would keep men from deserting. And, as Spitzer predicted, we found that men from large cities were more likely to desert, all else equal. Spitzer then asked what happened to the deserters. After the war, would the cowards be welcomed back to their hometowns? Or would they feel shame and experience ostracism that would push them to move away?
If deserters left home, it was not because of written laws, but because of community mores. Once the war was over, deserters who had not been pardoned during one of the wartime presidential amnesties were dishonorably discharged with forfeiture of pay. They could return home without fear of arrest, but were deemed by the Federal government to have relinquished their citizenship or right to become a citizen of the United States and therefore their voting rights. Later court interpretations weakened federal law even further by specifying that the requirement could not be desertion alone but had to be a conviction of desertion. Furthermore, because states regulated voting rights, this federal disenfranchisement was widely viewed as ineffectual except in the territories and in the states that passed laws disenfranchising deserters (Lonn 1928: 202-207; United States War Department. 1880-1901. Series III, Vol. 5, 1900: 110).
By 1880 only Vermont still disenfranchised deserters. In Kansas, an 1866 amendment to the state constitution revoked voting rights from those dishonorably discharged as well as from felons and people who had aided in the rebellion, but an 1874 amendment struck dishonorable discharge as one of the listed offenses that led to a revocation of voting rights.
In thinking about the role of social sanction as a means to discourage desertion, we have been highly influenced by Robert Ellickson