Civil War court martials

Since I began researching a Civil War court martial late last year, I have come to realize that this seems to be a record set which is little-known.  Many of the Union Civil War court martials are held by the National Archives (NARA).  Before requesting one, you need to email NARA and have a staff member check to make sure that they hold the file in question.  Because the court martial files vary so much more in size than the average record set, if they do turn out to hold the file you want, you then need to use the file number reference they send to request a price quote for the specific file you seek.  Once they send back a price, you then mail in a check to an address they provide, and wait.  I think it took about four months for the file I had requested to come.  Michael of Casefile Clues  requested what was filed as a court martial case around the same time I did, but his turned out to be a mis-filed non-court-martial court case.  So it might be worth checking to see if there is a file for the person you are researching, even if you don’t know whether they were court-martialed.

The file I received was about 22 pages long.  It contained information on more people than just the one I was researching.  There was a section that had been compiled and published, containing abstracts of all the people who’d been court martialed at the location my ancestor had, around the same time period; it included my ancestor’s case.  I have read before that a large number of Union court martials during the Civil War were for desertion, and reading this record really brought that home; a very large percentage of the court martials in this section were for desertion.  Some people that were believed to be deserters were really captured as prisoners of war and only later discovered by the Union to be POWs, so if you have a Union soldier who was a POW, it might be worth checking to see if they were court-martialed before being discovered to be one.  The second section of the file was a handwritten record of the court session, seemingly contemporary with the trial.  Again, it didn’t just contain my ancestor’s case, but also the others who were tried in the same session as he was.

I found out in my ancestor’s compiled military service file that he had been court martialed, which is how I knew to request the file in the first place.  There was a small record stuck in the file noting that he had been tried and found guilty.  When I received the court martial file, I discovered that there were more charges than what had been in the record in his service file.  I don’t know what the process is today, but at the time of the Civil War it appears that people were charged with a general charge and then with one or more “specific” charges under the umbrella of that general charge.  My ancestor had been charged with insubordination, with three specific incidences being cited under the general charge.  The specific charges seem to have generally correlated to specific incidents that backed up the general charge.  Many of the people in the file were only charged with one specific charge under the general charge, so it seems that (at least at this time and place) my ancestor was somewhat unusual in having multiple specific charges.  One of his specific charges was encouraging/supporting someone else’s insubordination, which had not been mentioned in the service file; luckily for me, the other person was tried the same day as my ancestor, so his case was also in the file I received.

My ancestor was found guilty on both the general charge and all three specific charges, but was only sentenced to nine days in the guard house.  Someone reviewed all the court martial sentences, which I only know because they were infuriated by this sentence, which they saw as far too lenient, and wrote a letter about their anger, which was also included in the court martial file.  They demanded that the sentence be vacated, so my ancestor was, according to the file, immediately returned to duty.  I would have expected him to be re-sentenced or even retried, but there is no further mention of any sentencing or other trial in either his service file or his court martial file.  A friend who is a Civil War records expert reviewed the file and suggested that because by the time his sentence was vacated, it was late 1862 and the Union was at that point desperate for troops, perhaps they decided it wasn’t worth the cost and hassle of retrying and re-sentencing someone who was willing (minus the insubordination!) and able to serve the Union.

My ancestor went on to re-enlist as soon as he was discharged from his first tour, and continued on in the Union side until war’s end in 1865.  He proceeded to receive a disability pension, and – completely unsurprisingly – does not mention having been court-martialed anywhere in his large pension application.  He was already one of the last veterans from Chemung County, New York when he attended a statewide Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) reunion in 1932, and members from a variety of veterans’ groups and military lineage societies held a 94th birthday party for him in 1935.  He died at age 96 in 1938, outliving all his siblings, both his wives, and all but one of his children.

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