Review - "Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War" by Earl Hess

[Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War by Earl J. Hess (University Press of Kansas, 2026). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,202/265. ISBN:978-0-7006-4095-9. $39.99]

With a vast body of firsthand accounts and other primary sources readily available for writers to consider, exploring Civil War battlefield heroics as well as the actions of those who simply performed their expected duties as fighting men can be a fairly straightforward process. On the other hand, investigating those Union and Confederate enlisted men, officers, and units who failed the moral and physical test of combat is much more challenging. Those combat "defaulters" were certainly recognized as a problem and their failures called out in writing by their more stalwart comrades in arms, but their particular brand of dereliction of duty has received far less attention from the publishing world at large. Naturally enough, the defaulters themselves were almost uniformly reluctant to share that aspect of their military lives. Nevertheless, historian Earl Hess has managed to compile enough primary source material to meaningfully address the many questions surrounding those Civil War officers and men of both sides who defaulted on their battlefield responsibilities. Description and analysis of that subject matter is the central aim of Hess's newest book, Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War.

Hess himself has already devoted a good chunk of his writing career to examining the nature of Civil War combat, his greatest single contribution to that body of literature being his 1997 study The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat. In contrast to that book's one-sided perspective, Shattered Courage takes into account both Union and Confederate fighting men. The opening chapter summarizes our current general understanding of this topic, establishing baseline context by recounting the ways in which soldiers of both sides responded to the multitude of mental and physical tests presented by the Civil War battlefield.

A unique aspect of Hess's investigation of this subject matter is his pairing of anecdotal evidence (through an accumulation of brief individual and unit-based case histories) with informative quantitative analysis. Historical evidence of battlefield defaulting is limited, but Hess believes he has compiled more than enough examples from both sides (and across all three major theaters of operation) to provide a sample roughly representative of the variety of ways in which officers, men, and entire units defaulted on their combat responsibilities. Sources that might assist with numbers data related to actual bolting from the battleline are few and far between, but a handful of spot studies from the historical record (the most useful being Confederate general Bushrod Johnson's exceptionally thorough reporting of those men from his Tennessee brigade who fled under fire at Stones River) allow the author to reference at least some groupings of reliable figures. Nevertheless, the degree to which this limited data is representative of the armies at large is worthy of further research.

In the era of tight, linear formations and crowded battlefields, those who suddenly bolted to the rear were the most obvious combat defaulters. However, a more subtle form of defaulting that Hess terms "combat reluctance" was far more common but, until recently, has eluded wider study and understanding. These men were generally able to preserve the appearances of performing the regular duties of the good soldier, but, at the same time, they minimized their exposure to battlefield danger in ways elusive enough to avoid the dreaded accusation of cowardice. On the individual level, this reluctance was expressed in a variety of ways (including behaviors such as faking or exaggerating illness, helping wounded comrades get medical attention, and, most cynically, self-mutilation), but Hess focuses most heavily on straggling, its effects, and how both sides tried (but largely failed) to positively address its widespread deleterious impact on army discipline and efficiency. One of the most interesting subsets of the combat reluctant soldier involved those individuals who seemed to sincerely want to to their duty but were betrayed by their minds and bodies at the moment of crisis. Those men, labeled "constitutional cowards," were in many cases surprisingly viewed with compassion by their more reliable comrades. Recognized by others for at least trying, such men, especially if otherwise well liked, were often kept within the unit but assigned useful non-combat tasks and duties, that being preferable to losing their services entirely through dishonorable discharge. As Hess and others have also pointed out, combat reluctance also extended to entire units and formations. As the war slogged forward from its midpoint onward, veterans of both sides gained through hard-won and repeated experience an almost instinctual understanding of what was and wasn't possible when attacking enemy positions over certain types of terrain and against advanced field fortifications. In those cases, combat reluctance came with a quiet but determined refusal to attack (employing a variety of possible excuses) or a willingness to advance a certain distance toward the enemy line but no more.

In Hess's examination of combat defaulting among individual officers and enlisted men, two common themes emerge. The first is that defaulting could occur at any phase of an individual's length of service. A common perception among readers is that enduring combat became much easier as time went on, with the first experience being by far the most trying. According to Hess's evaluation of the available evidence, this was not the case, with grizzled veterans and green officers and soldiers experiencing combat for the first time being more similar than different when it came to vulnerability to combat failure. The second common theme is that actual punishment, official and unofficial, was, given the gravity of the offense, relatively infrequent. One might presume that officer failure was taken very seriously, and it was, but Hess's examination of 98 examples of documented Union and Confederate officer failures and their personal fates, a good number of which are sampled in the text, reveals that a bolting officer had a better than one-third chance of escaping any career-damaging consequences. In Hess's view, this speaks to a military system heavily weighted toward compassion and desire to offer second chances. One suspects that the mass volunteer nature of Civil War armies and their highly political makeup had something to do with that tendency toward leniency. As was the case with most large bureaucracies, inertia played a major role in determining how accused officer defaulters were treated. Higher-ups often lacked the motivation and time necessary to put the accused through the military justice system, and, as Hess explains, it proved much easier to all involved to just allow, or firmly suggest, shaky officers quietly resign (which occurred in nearly one-fourth of the cases in Hess's sample).

When it comes to the enlisted men of both sides, Hess's research roughly estimates that during any given engagement around 10% of a regiment's rank and file defaulted in a noticeable manner. As was the case with officers, disdain directed toward these men from their comrades was in many cases tempered by compassion rooted in shared experience and the accompanying desire to give bolters and shirkers the benefit of the doubt and the chance to redeem themselves during the next battle. This combat failure among individuals was very often clear cut in nature. However, as Hess keenly observes, unit-level defaulting, while just as visible as when it occurred in driblets, tended to be considered a more opaque matter. When entire units failed, it was commonly recognized that mitigating circumstances beyond their control were involved. Even so, the manner in which units exited the battlefield directly influenced perception, although units who fled in wild disorder could still be forgiven if they quickly rallied and returned to the fight. A benefit of group failure was that individual combat failure was frequently shielded from special attention.

Given that combat defaulting seriously impaired army discipline and effectiveness, one might expect that attempts to curb it involved widespread, swift, and severe punishment. Hess's research shows that the opposite was the case, with wide-ranging reluctance to impose the heaviest punishments, execution (which was not applicable to officers, who were instead cashiered from the service) being especially rare. Hess finds that the strongest advocates for capital punishment were those at the highest levels of command (divisional commanders and above), with mercy and prosecutorial laxity most prevalent at the lowest command levels (those most closely involved in carrying out such punishment). Civil War officers, public officials, and enlisted men alike seemed to recognize that combat failure could not be cured through harsh punishment. Instead, it was determined by these men that "(c)ombat failure was a fact of military life that had to be accepted and dealt with in reasonable rather than extraordinary ways" (pg. 154). Open to interpretation is how effectively each side managed that balance.

While punishments for combat failure might have been sporadic and generally limited in severity, efforts aimed toward improving combat performance through positive means of raising fighting spirit were legion by comparison. In Hess's own words, both armies relied more on the carrot than the stick. In addition to encouragement through pre-battle motivational speeches and post-battle congratulatory orders, armies issued individual and unit badges, medals, and honors. Both well-known rewards such as the Kearny Medal and obscure ones are reviewed in the text, the latter including those that never made it into actual practice (one being General Rosecrans's idea, ultimately disapproved, for rewarding his bravest men in the Army of the Cumberland by gathering them into honor battalions supplied with the best arms the government could procure). Stitching battle honors on flags was a practice that both sides eventually adopted, and promotions for bravery were also dangled in front of soldiers to inspire them. In comparing the two sides, Hess finds distinct differences in the Union and Confederate approaches to fostering combat spirit, the former being more active, broad, and varied in its rewards programs and the latter more hesitant and disorganized in both creating and following through with national awards. Some of that difference might be attributed to priorities and resource limitations (for example, the Confederate Roll of Honor medals were never struck), but Hess's limited sample also suggests that the Confederate soldier might have been, on average, more skeptical of individual award honors and, given past experience, distrustful of the government to follow through on its promises. In the end, Hess believes that Union superiority in employing means of shaping morale and fighting spirit through rewards of all types actually had a material effect on their achieving victory, Confederate inattention to such matters having the opposite effect. Given its nebulous nature, the magnitude of that impact is debatable. Regardless, though, it certainly does appear that both sides generally preferred to primarily address fighting morale through encouraging good battlefield behavior, not by threatening them with dire punishment for failure.

International context has been a significant part of Hess's most recent scholarship. The final chapter of Shattered Courage draws clear parallels between combat defaulting in Civil War soldiers and the experiences of those who fought in other wars. Most distinctive among differences are the ways in which historians of different eras classify these men (often through continuously updated diagnostic systems) and study how soldiers respond to both the timeless aspects and the fresh challenges of the contemporary battlefield. One interesting observation is that during the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its evolution into far more dispersed small-unit tactical arrangements and dramatically decreased percentage of troops on the firing line in any given unit, defaulting became less visible. Hess ends the discussion with the intriguing suggestion that the Civil War, with its high literacy rates among soldiers and no system of censoring their prolific writings, might very well represent American military history's most insightful documentary laboratory for examining the phenomenon of combat defaulting. This fine study of that important yet neglected topic, with its unique focus and first of its kind qualitative and quantitative analysis, advances a strong argument in support of that possibility.