Review - "United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration" by R. Gregory Lande

[United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration by R. Gregory Lande (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,219/253. ISBN:978-1-4766-9584-6. $39.95]

R. Gregory Lande's United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration is a descriptive and quantitative survey of cases prosecuted by the judicial arm of the Union military services.

Though the process employed in creating a statistically significant sample is not fully detailed, there is enough explanation in the author's introduction to leave the reader confident that the sample is representational in composition. At 5,000 cases, its size is certainly impressive. Sample breadth includes cases involving regular and volunteer officers and enlisted men of all three major services (Army, Navy, and Marine Corps), medical personnel, black and white servicemen, and individuals from every state. Proportions also strike one as being suitably representative, with largest sample contingents hailing from the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and the majority of army cases involving infantrymen followed in descending order by cavalry, artillery, and engineer defendants.

There are a lot of criticisms leveled against how military justice was handled during the Civil War, but Lande sympathetically reminds us that the American military courts, being tasked with maintaining the delicate balance between keeping the overall discipline and effectiveness of the Union Army from unraveling while also respecting the cherished civil rights of its individualistic volunteer citizen-soldiers, had a very difficult job to perform. After providing a very brief big-picture summary of court-martial law and practices, the book is organized around four major groupings of common offenses. Naturally, those sections begin with the two most prevalent charges, unauthorized absences of various kinds and alcohol-related offenses, the former encompassing "desertion, absence without leave (AWOL), leaving a duty area without permission, overstaying a pass, failure to repair, and straggling" (pg. 28). Military charges associated with the third group of charges—the "violent misconduct" explored in Chapter 4—include "assault, murder, mutinous conduct, rape and other sexual crimes, threats of violence, marauding, manslaughter, maltreatment, pillage, plunder, and torture" (pg. 129). The final chapter is reserved for the "subordinate military crimes," among them theft, forgery, consequential criticisms, malingering, gambling, and medical malfeasance, that were prosecuted by general courts-martial on a less frequent basis.

Each of the above chapters, and their subsections where applicable, start with numbers analysis of each charge's sample prevalence among the three major services. Conviction rates are also highlighted. Case summaries, ranging in length from just a few paragraphs to several pages, form the bulk of each chapter. These collections of examples drawn from the sample group demonstrate to readers the range of offenses within a given category along with insights into prosecutorial practices, defense strategies, types of sentences, post-conviction reviews, and trial misconduct. In places Lande also engages with the published scholarship, pointing out where his findings agree with or clash against the work of earlier researchers. Rather than being placed in footnotes or endnotes, the volume's source notes are embedded within the main text.

By representing all three services in his sample, Lande sheds light upon a number of noteworthy interservice differences among both court processes and prosecuted offenses. For example, in addition to its own officers, the U.S. Navy employed civilian lawyers and U.S. attorneys in their cases while all Army courts-martial were conducted solely by uniformed officers (the suggestion being that the Navy was more progressive in its legal processes). Data on specific offenses also frequently points toward stark differences between the services. In just one example, the large preponderance of unauthorized absence convictions for army officers were for AWOL offenses with desertion a distant second, while the direct opposite was the case for naval officers. Some of the widest interservice disparities defy easy explanation, and, in those cases, one wishes the author had more often attempted to explore possible reasons behind them.

While differences ranging from slight to truly striking abound between the services, there were significant commonalities, one being the shared preponderance of multiple charges attached to most Army, Navy, and Marine Corps court-martial cases. Another was the similarly high conviction rate (guilty verdicts were roughly 84 percent in the Marine Corps, a bit lower than the Army's nearly 88 percent and the Navy's 91 percent). Also, for many offenses, it was often generally the case that sentences increased in severity as the war progressed.

The volume ends rather abruptly, without a summary or conclusion chapter within which the author might have shared his own general thoughts on how effectively United States military courts enforced and maintained armed forces discipline. Given all the labor and thought that Lande has devoted to the subject, it would have been interesting to read his own views in regard to whether the evidence supports longstanding criticisms that Civil War-era court-martial practices and outcomes were too arbitrary in dispensing justice and unnecessarily draconian in their punishments. Even without that, though, the volume still serves as a very useful survey and reference guide to the numbers and practices involved in the Civil War military justice system.