During the Civil War, a Union colonel was five times more likely to be court-martialed than a private. Worse, courts-martial of all ranks increased by 400 percent in the winter months. Among the court-martialed transgressors presented in this volume are an officer nicknamed Stumpy because he tended to hide behind tree stumps during combat and a man tried for calling his superior a miserable reptile.
The gallery of offenders also includes a Vermont colonel who became a chloroform addict and a New York colonel who rode his horse into a barroom, ordered a brandy for himself and one for his horse, then fired his pistol through the ceiling. The stories of fifty misdeeds, along with a statistical exploration of twenty-two thousand other courts-martial, provide a pioneering study of the little-known world of Civil War misbehavior and clarify the often-bewildering dynamics between volunteer soldiers and their professional superiors. Thomas P. Lowry is a retired associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.He is the author of several books, including The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War and The Civil War Bawdy Houses of Washington D. C.