Understanding the Desertion of South Carolinian Soldiers During the Final Years of the Confederacy

Abstract

Although the American Civil War is perhaps the most written about event in American history, the issue of desertion has often retained a neglected position in the conflict's dense historiography. Those historians who have studied military absenteeism during the war have tended to emphasize socio-economic factors as motivating men to leave the army and return home. The Register of Confederate Deserters, a list of southern soldiers who crossed into Union lines and took an oath of loyalty in order to try and return home, can provide a different look at these men. By studying the South Carolinian men on the Register, as a case-study, we can see that ideological, as well as socio-economic, motivations occupied the thought process of Civil War deserters. Moreover, the act of desertion was rarely a simple representation of the thoughts of the individual but of the opinions and feelings of his family and community as well. As such, studying Confederate desertion not only helps us understand the issues of loyalty and nationalism during the Civil War, but also the way in which nineteenth-century southerners conceptualized the world around them.