Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was one of the chief architects of the stunning Confederate victory at the battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, on May 2, 1863. Along with overall Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, Jackson devised a daring plan that divided the numerically inferior southern army and then marched Jackson’s men far around the Union army to strike unsuspecting northern troops on their extreme right flank. Northern soldiers were caught almost completely unawares and quickly succumbed to panic and rout, resulting in one of the most striking tactical victories of the war. Jackson, eager to follow up the initial success by mounting an extremely rare nighttime attack, reconnoitered the Union lines by the light of a full moon the evening of the battle. It was his last act as commander.

Though the men of his corps were undoubtedly exhausted after the day’s fighting, there was reason to believe that they would summon the will for a follow-up attack. Jackson’s men had already proved themselves capable of feats of endurance far beyond what most Civil War-era units could accomplish. During their famed 1862 campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Jackson’s men marched over 400 miles during a four-week stretch (including one 57-mile march in 51 hours) and fought six battles that month, repeatedly confounding Union generals’ attempts to defeat them. That the troops in Jackson’s command managed these feats under extremely difficult conditions—many had poor equipment, insufficient rations, and suffered from dysentery and other chronic conditions—renders their achievements even more remarkable, and helps explain why Jackson’s infantry became known as his “foot cavalry.” Their record as some of the most battle-hardened troops in the Army of Northern Virginia may have led their commander to believe they could renew the attack even after a grueling day of battle. (Jackson also may have anticipated a relative advantage over his Union opponents, whose troops were not only exhausted from the day’s hard fighting but also suffering from low morale due to the chaos of their defeat earlier in the day.)

Night attacks like the one Jackson contemplated at Chancellorsville were extremely rare during the Civil War not because of fatigue but because of the difficulty of fighting in the dark. Even under the best of conditions, Civil War battles were chaotic and confusing affairs: absent modern communications technologies, regiments depended on brightly-colored flags and uniforms to distinguish friend from foe. Even in daylight, troops sometimes mistook friendly regiments for enemy units: the thick, heavy smoke produced by Civil War firearms hung close to the ground, obscuring lines, and in the first years of the war many units on both sides employed nonstandard uniforms. Nighttime amplified these problems, making it nearly impossible to determine the position of friendly and enemy units. The increased threat of so-called “friendly fire” casualties represented a powerful disincentive to mount nighttime operations.

Jackson himself became the best-known Civil War victim of friendly fire. While scouting the Union lines at Chancellorsville by moonlight on horseback with his aides, Confederate pickets mistook his party for northern troops and fired several volleys into the group. Jackson himself was struck by musket balls and mortally wounded: surgeons amputated his left arm in an attempt to save his life, but pneumonia set in and the famous general died eight days after the battle.

This question gets at a central truth about service in the Civil War armies: desertion was common on both sides. It became more frequent later in the war (when more of the soldiers were draftees rather than volunteers, and when the brutal realities of Civil War combat had become more clear), and was more common among Confederate soldiers, especially as they received desperate letters from wives and families urging them to return home as Union armies penetrated further south.

While it is impossible to know with certainty how many soldiers deserted over the course of the conflict, Northern generals reckoned during the war that at least one soldier in five was absent from his regiment; at war’s end, the Union Provost Marshal General estimated that nearly a quarter of a million men had been absent from their units sometime during the war. Estimates for Confederate armies range even higher—perhaps as many as one soldier in three deserted during the course of the war. The Army of Northern Virginia alone lost eight percent of its total strength in a single month during the savage campaign of the summer of 1864.

Officially, desertion constituted a capital offense and was punishable by death. But because of the numbers of soldiers involved, it proved practically as well as politically impossible to execute every deserter who was captured. The armies could not afford the numerical loss of such large numbers of troops; more importantly, as Abraham Lincoln himself noted, people would not stand to see Americans shot by the dozens and twenties. Both armies employed other punishments (branding captured soldiers with a “D” on the hip, was common, for example) rather than execute every deserter they recovered. Both armies did execute some captured deserters—often in highly public ceremonies before the entire regiments, intended to deter other would-be fugitives—but such punishments were unusual.

Only 147 Union deserters were executed during the course of the war. Rather than rely entirely on punitive measures, Union authorities attempted to woo deserters back with offers of amnesty for soldiers who returned to their commands before a specific deadline, frequently pairing that reprieve with threats of increased punishment for those who failed to return before the designated date. Lincoln offered general amnesty to some 125,000 Union soldiers then absent from their regiments in March 1863, provided those soldiers returned to their units.

The prevalence of desertion from the ranks of both armies speaks to an interesting reality about those soldiers’ conception of military obligation. Long mistrustful of professional armies and fiercely protective of individual liberties, many Americans of the mid-nineteenth century (North and South) adhered to a conception of military service as a contractual—one that involved obligations from the state as well as from the citizen-soldier.

For some Civil War volunteers, their service in the army was predicated on specific treatment from their officers and the government. When they believed that the government had not held up its end of the bargain (by failing to provide essential supplies, for example, or by furnishing incompetent leaders) they assumed that the contract had been voided—and their absence, by extension, did not constitute desertion.

Here are three possibilities about what you were told, none of which match precisely what you have described.

One possibility relates to the actions of Lincoln just after he assumed the presidency in 1861. By late March and early April, several southern states had seceded, but a few closer to the North—Virginia, in particular—had not. Virginia had called a Constitutional Convention to decide its course, but those in favor of remaining in the Union were in control of the convention, and this apparently accorded with public sentiment in Virginia. Nevertheless, the convention did not adjourn, so the outcome was still undecided.

During those weeks, the political and military situation was extremely volatile. The Federal army's forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay and at Fort Pickens outside Pensacola needed to be relieved or reinforced, especially in the face demands from South Carolina and Florida. These two states called for the evacuation of federal soldiers at the forts, an action that would have been widely seen as a de facto recognition of the legality of their secession.

In testimony after the war at a congressional hearing, John Minor Botts and John Baldwin, both pre-war Virginia politicians and delegates to the Virginia convention in Richmond, gave contradictory testimony about Lincoln’s actions. Botts claimed that Lincoln had asked to confer with Baldwin, and that during their talk, Lincoln asked Baldwin to relay to the convention a pledge that, if it would adjourn without voting for secession, he would evacuate the federal forces from Forts Sumter and Pickens. Botts met with Lincoln several days later, he testified, and Lincoln had told him about the offer. This had alarmed Botts, who heard nothing of the offer from Baldwin. Botts claimed that Baldwin, on his own initiative, said nothing about the offer because it could have prevented Virginia’s secession. Baldwin, however, strongly denied that Lincoln had made any offer during their conversation.

Nevertheless, by the time Lincoln met with Botts, he had already dispatched orders to send forces by sea to relieve Forts Sumter and Pickens, an action that South Carolina and Florida resisted by force. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter from Charleston and its fall, sentiment in Virginia and at the convention shifted dramatically, and Virginia seceded.

In the hearing, Botts—who was a Unionist before and throughout the war—said that Lincoln’s offer elevated the president’s reputation as a statesman who was genuinely seeking peace and the preservation of the Union. The Radical Republicans who presided over the hearing, however, were troubled by the idea that Lincoln had made such an offer, because, from their point of view, it would suggest that he had been willing to “offer a bribe to Treason.”

Historian Nelson Lankford points out that Lincoln may have been pursuing more than one course during the first weeks of his presidency, before hostilities erupted. He was criticized in the press for indecision, but in fact he had been working to resolve conflicting advice within his cabinet. His secretary of state, William Seward, in particular, advocated resolving the issue through negotiation, rather than by force.

Another possibility relates to the presidential election of 1864, when the Democrats nominated General George B. McClellan. The party's platform called for an end to prosecuting the war and a truce with the Confederacy, which would have ended the war by allowing the secession of southern states. McClellan himself did not agree with this and advocated continuing the war. Because the war had not been going well for the North, the Democrats might have won the election, but Union victories close to election day bolstered the Republicans, and Lincoln was re-elected.

The Democrats' "peace plank" had declared the war a failure and promised to end hostilities. Its author was Clement Laird Vallandigham (a photo of him is at the top of the page), an Ohio politician who was arrested, tried, and convicted by a military tribunal the previous year for "disloyal" statements. Instead of serving time in jail, he was exiled south by Lincoln. From there he traveled to Canada and accepted the Ohio democratic nomination for governor in absentia. During his campaign, which he ran from a hotel room in Canada, he pledged, if elected, to withdraw Ohio from the Union unless Lincoln ceased hostilities with the Confederacy.

Vallandigham lost the election in a landslide, but continued to be influential in the Democratic Party. If McClellan had won the 1864 presidential election, many Democrats were determined that Vallandigham should serve as secretary of war.

A third possibility relates to the closing days of the war. Radical Republicans in congress as well as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton became concerned that Lincoln would allow the confederate states back into the Union without punishing them or forcing them to outlaw slavery.

Their fears seemed well-founded when they learned that Lincoln, during a trip to Richmond after its fall, early in April 1865, consulted with at least one Virginia politician and had informally encouraged him to help reconvene the Virginia legislature, declare the state's loyalty to the Union, and order Virginia's soldiers to lay down their arms. In return, said Lincoln, the legislature would be recognized as the de facto government of the state and it could begin to restore order. Republicans viewed Lincoln's offer as an attempt to usurp the power of Congress and as a "bribe of unconditional forgiveness." The point soon became moot, however, by Lee's surrender of his army at Appomatox. The Virginia Legislature did not reconvene.