Confederate Desertions in North Carolina

Confederate soldier desertion rates skyrocketed as the Civil War came to a close. Particularly, western North Carolina has been identified as an area which was highly prone to desertion, even early in the war; some w-NC counties reported that one in five soldiers deserted at some point during the war, and certain companies comprised of men from these counties expressed desertion rates above 25%. There are many theories as to why this was, and most of them are represented in this article. Desertion did not seem to have a correlation with slave ownership, or soldier age; what seems to have been the factor in deciding whether a county expressed higher desertion rates than others is whether the county in question was strongly pro-Union before the war, or not.

Another strange, perhaps counter intuitive factoid contained in this article is that almost 10% of all “deserters” returned to their companies, even after long stretches of time (sometimes after 5 months of freedom). From this particular area (western North Carolina), up to 20% of all deserters would return to their posts at some point. We had discussed this in class, and the article reinforces what we talked about: farmers and laborers (which the article shows comprised upwards or 70% of all enlisted men from western North Carolina regiments) would leave temporarily, to bring in the harvest, or in certain cases, to hunt game and/or provide needed assistance for struggling families during the harsh winter months. However, after 1863, the Confederacy began “cracking down” on deserters, and the percentage of temporary deserters who returned to active duty dropped by over half.

Finally, the article points to another major factor in desertion rates in this area of North Caroline: Union (and Confederate) Bushwhackers. Men, both young and old, were needed at home in their own communities to defend from roving bands of outlaws and killers who, according to North Carolina's governor Zebulon Vance, had “eaten the region out” of food. After reading “Confederate Outlaw”, I can certainly imagine the tough position these soldiers were in: stay in their unit and perhaps die to a Yankee, only to return to a home which had been totally annihilated by guerrilla killers.

I feel that this article largely reinforced what we had already discussed in class about soldier desertion, while shedding light on this particular region of the Confederacy.  

Source

King-Owen, Scott. "Conditional Confederates: Absenteeism among Western North Carolina Soldiers, 1861-1865." Civil War History 57, no. 4 (2011): 349-379.