Booknotes: Shattered Courage

New Arrival:

• Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War by Earl J. Hess (UP of Kansas, 2026).

A number of studies have examined the Civil War combat experience and its ground-level aspects of both bravery and cowardice. The most recent scholarship has widened the approach to encompass cultural and societal themes of masculinity and the ways in which battlefield cowardice was interpreted by those on the firing line as well as those on the home front. Nonetheless, there is still room for further exploration, and Earl Hess describes the approach taken by his new book Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War as being "quite different from that of previous historians" (pg. 5).

From the description: Hess's study "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."

Hess's fresh examination of the topic applies quantitative measures absent from previous studies, and the author also "contributes to the institutional study of Civil War armies" by not only examining official sanctions levied against individuals but the wider means through which both armies attempted to sustain fighting morale via proactive encouragement. More from the description: Hess is "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."

As outlined in the introduction, the first chapter "details the nature of combat during the Civil War," and the second "looks at the topic of combat reluctance, the hesitation of men and units to expose themselves to the dangers of battle without being branded as cowards." The term Hess applies to those who refused to fight is "defaulters," and chapters are devoted to "combat defaulting among officers, enlisted men, and entire units" respectively. The next two chapters after those look at how Union and Confederate armies came to "manage combat morale," with the first centered on punishment and the second modes of raising "battle spirit." International military history context is a significant part of Hess's more recent body of work, and the final chapter of this book "discusses some ways in which combat defaulting in the Civil War compared with its occurrence in other wars" (pg. 7).