Barron Mills - June 25, 2008

June 27, 2008 12:55 pm

— Is it true that the rate of desertions during the Civil War was higher among North Carolina troops than troops from other states of the confederacy?
Many of us have heard all of our lives that was the case.
However, that may not be true.
Let’s examine the facts as researched by Troy Kickler, director of the North Carolina History Project (www.northcarolinahistory.org).
Dr. Kickler said that he had always heard and read that Unionism was prevalent in North Carolina and that Tar Heel troops – especially those from the mountain and several Piedmont counties – left their posts at alarmingly high rates.
He adds that these claims of desertion have been greatly exaggerated in many instances.
Recently, Dr. Kickler took a closer look at the facts. He found that in late 1860 and early 1861 North Carolinians were divided over the necessity and practicality of secession and most Tar Heels wanted to stay in the Union.
It was not until President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for troops on April 15, 1861, to crush what he described as a Southern rebellion that Tar Heels became enraged.
When Gov. John Ellis quickly replied “You will get no troops from North Carolina!” there was a large shift in sentiment.
On May 20, 1861, the 86th anniversary of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, secession convention delegates voted to join the Confederacy.
Western North Carolina, Dr. Kickler said, has long been considered a “bastion of Unionism.”
This contention has been refuted by a new study by Terrell T. Green who has written a book entitled Mountain Myth: Unionism in North Carolina, published in 2006.
Green undertook the boring task of counting the number of men from Western North Carolina who became Union solders and those who joined with the Confederates.
This took him five years! He counted 27,282 Confederate soldiers from the mountains – more than a third of the mountain population – and 1,836 Union soldiers who came from the mountain counties.
In fact, North Carolina provided more troops for the Confederacy than any other states of the Confederacy!
However, there also was a high rate of desertions among the Tar Heel troops.
This was a matter of grave concern for the Confederacy. Scholars have determined that 428 officers and 23,964 non-coms deserted.
These figures are somewhat larger than those determined by Historian Richard Reid.
His findings are published in the North Carolina Historical Review of July 1981.
Reid surveyed 2,732 officers and found that only 42, or 1.5 percent, deserted and that six of these returned and 14 left after December 1864.
Reid randomly selected 4,395 enlisted men (selecting every seventh soldier on the roster) and found that the number of deserters had been overestimated: 10.9 percent for artillerymen, 11.8 percent for cavalrymen, 12.3 percent for infantrymen.
One-fifth of the desertions occurred from January to March 1865.
Reid also estimates that of those who deserted about 100 were officers and 14, 000 were men in the ranks.
Many of the deserters returned to action.
It also has been determined that when soldiers went AWOL, the dates reveal the absences were highest among those companies whose home counties were under or threatened by Union occupation.
In his memoirs written in 1866, General Jubal Early sympathizes with such men: “Some palliation was to be found for the conduct of many of those who did desert, in the fact that they did so to go to the aid of their families, who they knew were suffering from the necessaries for life.”

Barron Mills came to Asheboro in March 1955 when he bought The Randolph Guide and became its editor and publisher. He sold the paper in 1991 but still lives in Asheboro.