From renowned Civil War historian Earl J. Hess comes a study of Union and Confederate soldiers as never seen before. Shattered Courage examines the experience of the men who refused to fight on the day of battle. When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of presidential office on March 4, 1865, he urged the country to care for those "who shall have borne the battle"-a reference to the Union soldiers who successfully met the challenges of combat. But while honoring and helping the good soldier, Americans have forgotten those men who tried but failed to meet the test of battle in the Civil War. Shattered Courage tells the stories of those previously obscure soldiers and explores the other side of combat courage. In this unique and groundbreaking volume, based on decades of research, Earl J. Hess provides the first comprehensive account of soldiers who refused to fight in the midst of combat. Hess charts the limits on combat morale, which affected veterans as well as green troops, officers in addition to enlisted men, and Union along with Confederate armies. Hess is the first historian to identify combat defaulters from personal accounts and official reports and to then examine their service records to discover what happened to them in the military system. He is also the first to compile statistics on defaulters and to reveal that their comrades sometimes reacted with anger, but more often accepted their failure as an unavoidable aspect of engaging in battle. Hess also discovered that the army tried unsuccessfully to stop combat defaulting but managed to contain its effects by efforts to encourage battle spirit. Far from heroes but not deserters, most of these men returned to duty and continued trying to deal with the experience of battle as lived during the Civil War.
One of the nation's premier historians of the American Civil War, Earl J. Hess is professor emeritus of history at Lincoln Memorial University. He is the author of 31 books on the Civil War, including July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat, and The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth, all published with Kansas.
List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Battle and Its Challenges 2. Combat Reluctance 3. Combat Failure-Officers 4. Combat Failure-Enlisted Men 5. Combat Failure-Units 6. Punishment 7. Encouragement 8. Other Wars Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
"Earl J. Hess has done it again. In shedding light on an understudied aspect of the Civil War soldiering experience, Hess reminds us that the volunteers who marched in the conflict were first and always human. Their fears, anxieties, and horrors wrought from battle derived from the most inhuman of experiences."-Andrew F. Lang, author of In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America "Although many scholars have discussed Civil War soldiers who failed the test of combat, Earl Hess provides the first comprehensive treatment of the topic. He draws on a vast familiarity with the sources and deftly uses case studies to illuminate a critical dimension of military service. This book is essential for anyone interested in men who broke under fire or pursued stratagems to avoid battle."-Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the Great American Crisis "In this richly researched study of shirking, skulking, straggling and bolting, Earl J. Hess offers us unparalleled insight into the Civil War soldiers-officers and enlisted men alike-who were not brave heroes. This is a nuanced and compassionate exploration of the complexities of courage and of human motivation. A very important and memorable book."-Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War "Although commemorated in marble, sandstone, granite, bronze, and iron on battlefields and courthouse greens, Civil War soldiers were in fact flesh-and-blood human beings whose sense of patriotism, honor, and duty was not always sufficient to enable them to meet the test of combat. In a deeply researched, skillfully crafted, and impressively wide-ranging study of men and units who let fear get the better of them on the battlefields of the Civil War, as well as how authorities on both sides addressed the problem of combat reluctance, Earl J. Hess makes yet another fascinating and truly revelatory contribution to scholarship. A first-rate study by a first-rate scholar, Shattered Courage is a work that merits the attention of anyone seeking to better understand the men and armies that fought the American Civil War."-Ethan S. Rafuse, author of From the Mountains to the Bay, The War in Virginia, January-May 1862 and editor of Corps Commanders in Blue: Union Major Generals in the Civil War "With this highly original book, one of our best and most prolific historians coaxes a stubbornly elusive cohort of Civil War soldiers-shirkers, stragglers, and men who bolted in the face of battle-from the historiographical shadows. Bringing to bear his peerless knowledge of the war's military campaigns as well as an inventive reading of sources, Earl J. Hess delivers a revealing examination of the enlisted men, officers, and even units who fled the fighting. Clear-eyed but refreshingly free of censure, this is the cultural history of war at its finest."-Brian Matthew Jordan, author Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War
