| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

More Damning than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army. By Mark A. Weitz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xxii, 346 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8032-4797-4.)
Analyzing and assessing the causes of Confederate defeat has become a cottage industry over the last twenty years. Building on his pathbreaking work on Georgia, Mark A. Weitz endeavored to place desertion and its associated evils among the causes of the South's demise. He painted a complex portrait of the Confederacy and showed how several elements related to desertion combined to create a situation that was, as he paraphrased the Roman historian Vegetius, "more damning than slaughter."	1
Weitz noted that save for Ella Lonn's 1928 classic, Desertion during the Civil War, scholars have shied away from examining the problem of desertion. The real value of Lonn's monograph is its identification of important primary sources. Weitz capitalized on those sources to pose the central question of this study: How badly did desertion hurt the Confederacy? (p. viii). The evidence convinced Weitz "that desertion undermined the army's fighting effectiveness [and] ... its effect spread from the army into other parts of the struggle" (p. xvii). Desertion was a cancer that, over time, consumed the Confederacy.	. . .

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