March 10, 1863 President Lincoln issues an order of amnesty for men absent without leave from the Union Army. They must report by April 1st or they will be considered deserters. Some estimates show nearly 100,000 Union Soldiers were AWOL at this point.
The article I read said very few did. In fact in the State of NY alone there were 56,000 AWOL when he made this offer of amnesty. I believe almost 30,000 from CONN. Entire Regiments were reported as all being AWOL
American Civil War (Wikipedia) (THEY STILL HAVE MY CHANGES POSTED)
Desertion was a major factor for the Confederacy in the last two years of the war. According to Weitz (2000), Confederate soldiers fought to defend their families, not a nation. He argues that a hegemonic "planter class" brought Georgia into the war with "little support from non-slaveholders" (p. 12), and the ambivalence of non-slaveholders toward secession, he maintains, was the key to understanding desertion. The privations of the home front and camp life, combined with the terror of battle, undermined the weak attachment of southern soldiers to the Confederacy. For Georgia troops, Sherman 's march through their home counties triggered the most desertions.
One example of desertion in the Civil War was Confederate soldier Arthur Muntz, who was killed by his fellow soldiers after deserting at The First Battle of Bull Run. In many cases, in the early years of the war, the Confederate Home Guard dealt with deserters. For a time, the Confederate government offered a bounty to be paid for the capture and return of deserters. However as the war progressively got worse for the south, often Home Guard units would deal with desertion as they saw fit, whether that be by execution or imprisonment.
In Arkansas, many units deserted completely when rumors spread that local Indians had raided towns and scalped citizens, with the soldiers feeling their place was at home rather than fighting in the war. There were also instances across the southern states where whole units deserted together, banding together and living in the mountains, at times fighting against Union Army regulars if forced to do so, but also raiding civilian farms to obtain food or supplies. [3] The fictional story of a wounded Confederate deserter is told in the novel Cold Mountain, who at the end of the Civil War walks for months to return home to the love of his life after receiving her letters pleading him to come home. Many Confederate units had signed on, initially, for a one year service, and felt completely justified in walking away when they'd reached their breaking point. By the war's end, it was estimated that the Confederacy had lost 103,400 soldiers to desertion. [4]
The Union Army also faced large scale desertions. Confederate forces lost fewer to desertion than did the northern forces. This has been partly attributed to the southern soldiers fighting a defensive war, on their own ground, rather than an offensive war of invasion, which gave the southern soldiers a sense that they were defending their homeland which is always an advantage in any war. In addition up until late 1863 the South had many victories in fact more than the North, and many northern soldiers felt the war was a lost cause. For example New York alone suffered 44,913 desertions by the war's end, with Pennsylvania having 24,050 and Ohio having 18,354, not to mention the desertions faced by the other northern states. [5]
Just a matter of time...but lets be really fair here. Here is a letter that caused one Confederate to desert: Not just a few Southern soldiers found themselves in the situation of an Alabamian who deserted the army when his wife wrote him: "We haven't got nothing in the house to eat but a little bit of meal. . . . I don't want you to stop fighting them Yankees . .but try and get off and come home and fix us all up some and then you can go back."
In view of the conditions which prevailed in the war department and in the Union army, it is not surprising that desertion was a common fault. Even so the actual extent of it, as shown in the official reports, comes as a distinct shock. Though the determination of the fully number is a bit complicated, the total would seem to have been well over 200,000. From New York there were 44,913 deserters according to the records; from Pennsylvania, 24,050; from Ohio, 18,354. The daily hardships of war, deficiency in arms, forced marches (which sometimes made straggling a necessity for less vigorous men), thirst, suffocating heat, disease, delay in pay,~ solicitude for family, impatience at the monotony and futility of inactive service, and (though this was not the leading cause) panic on the eve of battle - these were some of the conditioning factors that produced desertion. Many men absented themselves merely through unfamiliarity with military discipline or through the feeling that they should be "restrained by no other legal requirements than those of the civil law governing a free people"; and such was the general attitude that desertion was often regarded "more as a refusal . . - to ratify a contract than as the commission of a grave crime." The sense of war weariness, the lack of confidence in commanders, and the discouragement of defeat tended to lower the morale of the Union army and to increase desertion. General Hooker estimated in 1863 that 85,000 officers and men had deserted from the Army of the Potomac, while it was stated in December of 1862 that no less than 180,000 of the soldiers listed on the Union muster rolls were absent, with or without leave. Abuse of sick leave or of the furlough privilege was one of the chief means of desertion. Other methods were: slipping to the rear during a battle, inviting capture by the enemy (a method by which honorable service could be claimed), straggling, taking French leave when on picket duty, pretending to be engaged in repairing a telegraph line, et cetera. Some of the deserters went over to the enemy not as captives but as soldiers; others lived in a wild state on the frontier; some turned outlaw or went to Canada; some boldly appeared at home; in some cases deserter gangs, as in western Pennsylvania, formed bandit groups. To suppress desertion the extreme penalty of death was at times applied, especially after 1863; but this meant no more than the selection of a few men as public examples out of many thousands equally guilty. The commoner method was to make public appeals to deserters, promising pardon in case of voluntary return with dire threats to those who failed to return. That desertion did not prevent a man posing after the war as an honorable soldier is evident by a study of pension records. The laws required honorable discharge as a requisite for a pension; but in the case of those charged with desertion Congress passed numerous private and special acts "correcting" the military record.
