| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark A. Weitz. A Higher Duty: Desertion among Georgia Troops during the Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2000. Pp. x, 227. $30.00.

Scholars of the Civil War era have approached that conflict in myriad ways. Some of the best recent work has dealt with the motivations of the soldiers wearing blue and gray. But not since the late 1920s and early 1930s has anyone addressed why men who eagerly went to war in 1861 made the decision to leave the army without permission. Mark A. Weitz addresses this gap in the literature in his thoughtful monograph. 1

The revisionist nature of Weitz's study is evident from the outset. As Weitz observes, previous studies of desertion by Ella Lonn and Bessie Martin relied on the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1880) for their evidence. Both historians broke down desertion rates into specific periods or waves. Weitz challenges their "periodization" and their reliance on the Official Records. He utilizes the Register of Confederate Deserters and surveys individual Georgia counties in his quest to understand the role desertion played in Confederate defeat. For Weitz, the issue is "whether desertion acted as a primary cause of Confederate defeat or as a symptom that the Confederacy had already lost its spirit" (p. 6). 2

Weitz begins his book with an analysis of Georgia's economic geography. According to him, economic, geographic, and cultural variations within the state shaped the way Georgians reacted to the war. For the yeomen in the upper Piedmont and the upcountry, local and family ties loomed larger than any affinity for the state of the Confederacy at large. Conversely, residents of the plantation belt, with their active participation in the market economy, maintained a broader perspective (pp. 16, 24, 32). . . .

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