Desertion During the Civil War

Despite this book’s age—almost a century in print—it still stands as a seminal work on an important topic: desertion and its devastating effects on both armies. Lonn was born in 1879 in Indiana, and earned her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the few female historians at the time to do so. She was not immune to the racism of her day nor the cloying ideology of the Lost Cause, yet she told her readers she wanted to understand “the ugly and sordid sides of war.” Her book offers readers a wealth of information and insight to better… show more.

Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War (1928) addressed a controversial element of the conflict and, more than ninety years after it was published, still stands as the only general treatment of the subject. Lonn described both the Union and Confederate sides of the story, examining the causes and scale of desertion, the behavior of men after they left their units, and efforts by both national governments to control the problem. She judged desertion a contributing factor in bringing Confederate defeat and found it especially crucial in 1864-1865. In states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, she concluded, the… show more.