My answers to questions on Quora

Did the United states civil war armies, both the North and the South, really execute deserters when they caught them?

Desertion was certainly the most frequent offense for which capital punishment was possible in both armies. The picture above shows what sometimes happened to a deserter — he sat on a coffin, faced a firing squad, and was shot. (From “Hard Tack and Coffee: Soldier’s Life in the Civil War,” by John D. Billings, originally published 1888.)

However, the death penalty was rarely imposed. According to the renowned historian Bell Irvin Wiley:

In the Union’s Army of the Potomac, between July 1 and November 30, 1863, “592 men were tried for desertion, 291 were found guilty, 80 received capital sentences, and 21 were eventually shot.” In the same period, 2,000 deserters were returned to their regiments. (“The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union,” Louisiana University Press, 1998.)

On the Confederate side, mostly Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the last six month of the war, 245 men were convicted of desertion, and 70 were sentenced to be executed; 31 of these sentences were set aside in a general amnesty of February 1865. (“The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy,” Louisiana State University Press, 1991.)

The reason President Davis of the Confederacy issued a general amnesty in early 1865 was that the army was falling apart, with tens of thousands of men missing from the ranks. This was a problem throughout the war for the Confederacy, with men taking “French leave” to go home to see their wives and check on things before eventually returning to duty — and sometimes not.

In both armies, penalties for desertion were usually pretty light in the early days of the war — monetary fines, confinement for a few days or weeks, or extra duty, scaling up to flogging or branding (and sometimes both) and harsher physical punishment as the war dragged on. When a man was actually sentenced to the shot or hanged, regimental or brigade commanders made a big deal out of it, turning out the units to watch the execution and march by the dead man to let soldiers see what could happen to a deserter.

War is hell.