A Higher Duty: Desertation among Georgia Troops during the Civil War. (Book Reviews).

A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War. By Mark A. Weitz. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, c. 2000. Pp. x, 227. $30.00, ISBN 0-8032-4791-5.)

With this book, Mark Weitz joins those historians who cite desertion as Exhibit Number One in their case against the existence of "nationalism" among southern soldiers. According to Weitz, Confederate soldiers fought to defend their families, not a nation. Weitz's explanation of desertion depends upon a particular understanding of antebellum society. He argues that a hegemonic "planter class" brought Georgia into the war with "little support from non-slaveholders" (p. 12), and the ambivalence of nonslaveholders toward secession, he maintains, is the key to understanding desertion. The privations of the home front combined with those of camp life and the terrors of battle to undermine the allegedly weak attachment of southern soldiers to the Confederacy, causing significant numbers to desert. For Georgia troops, Sherman's march through their home counties triggered the most desertions.

This book includes helpful figures on desertion and a valuable chapter on the Union army's policy concerning desertion. But the author's class analysis, which is central to his argument, is unpersuasive. Weitz fails to explain the many slaveholders/planters who either never supported secession or were as ambivalent about it as Weitz claims nonslaveholders were. Weitz is also on shaky ground with his contention that nonslaveholders tended to oppose secession. He presents very little primary evidence to support this point, and his arguments concerning it--for example, that Whigs opposed secession and nonslaveholders tended to support Whigs (pp. 14-15)--are questionable.

Weitz's claim that the problems faced by wives on the home front led some men to desert has a more substantial evidentiary base but does not account for contrary evidence. He relies on the fact that many women wrote to their husbands pleading with them to come home, placing this front and center as an explanation; yet he dismisses other letters in which wives insisted upon husbands doing their duty in spite of deteriorating conditions at home. Judging from these letters, there were many southern women who preferred continued sacrifices over reunification with the hated Yankees. On balance, wives' letters from home could just as easily explain why most soldiers did not desert.

The author's conclusion in this instance, as in many others, is based on the assumptions he makes rather than the evidence. It appears to this reviewer that most desertions occurred late in the war, only after Confederate soldiers decided that there was little need to continue their misery (and that of their families) if the war clearly was not going to end favorably for their side. Given the paucity of support for the argument Weitz offers, this is at least as good an explanation for increased desertions as is class resentment.