The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

By the middle of the war more than five thousand soldiers were deserting every month—some merely dropping behind during the interminable route marches, others fleeing in the face of gunfire. In May 1864—the month when General Grant began his southern progress, and the month of the Wilderness—no fewer than 5,371 Federal soldiers cut and ran. More than 170 left the field every day—they were both draftees and volunteers, and either heartsick or homesick, depressed, bored, disillusioned, unpaid, or just plain scared. William Minor had not merely stumbled from the calm of Connecticut into a scene of carnage and horror: He had also come across a demonstration of man at his least impressive—fearful, depleted in spirit, and cowardly. Army regulations of the time may have been rather flexible when it came to prescribing penalties for drinking—a common punishment was to make the man stand on a box for several days, with a billet of wood on his shoulder—but they were unambiguous when it came to desertion. Anyone caught and convicted of “the one sin which may not be pardoned in this world or the next” would be shot. That, at least, was what was said on paper: “Desertion is a crime punishable by death.” But to shoot one of your own soldiers, whatever his crime, had a practical disbenefit—it diminished your own numbers, weakened your own forces. This piece of grimly realistic arithmetic persuaded most Civil War commanders, on both sides, to devise alternative punishments for those who r...