This comes from watching an episode of the western TV program, Wanted Dead or Alive.
A Confederate soldier is imprisoned for desertion. His imprisonment continues after the war ends. Would the Union government continue to hold CSA military prisoners?
I presume they would have for murder or rape, but desertion from the Confederate army?
At the beginning of the war, the Union didn’t really have any sort of universal policy towards confederate deserters, leaving commanders in the field to decide what to do about them. Different commanders obviously had differing opinions about how they should be handled.
About halfway through the war, the Union decided to come out with a formal policy. Confederate deserters were to be given complete amnesty, and could even return home to the South if they so chose. However, this was only to be granted if the deserter first signed a loyalty oath to the Union. No oath, no freedom.
This policy applied to all Confederate deserters. If they were deserters who happened to end up on the Union side of the lines, they would be granted amnesty (assuming they signed the oath) instead of being treated as prisoners of war. If they were in a Confederate prison that was in a town that got captured by the Union, they could be given amnesty and released.
In response, the Confederacy made it illegal for deserters to return home, and the punishment for it was death.
I haven’t read anything about the policy after the war ended, but I would assume that the same amnesty deal was still in effect. I don’t know if they still had to sign a loyalty oath or not though.
The penalty for desertion was death, so I imagine most Confederate deserters were simply executed instead of being left to rot in a prison.
It was a 1960 TV show not know for historical accuracy.
Thanks!
As a side issue, what happened to regular criminals sentenced to prison by Confederate courts? Let’s say I robbed a bank in Georgia in 1863 and was sentenced to ten years in prison by the state court. What would happen to me in 1865? Would the American government recognize the validity of a sentence issued under the Confederate government? Or would they open my cell door and let me go free?
Seems odd. You get captured, you sign the oath, and you go home to re-join the Confederate Army.
If you got captured, you were a prisoner of war, and you could end up at someplace like Camp Douglas where you’d be starved and horribly mistreated.
Amnesty wasn’t for prisoners. It was only for deserters. If you returned to the South, you would likely face execution by the Confederacy. The loyalty oath only protected you from punishment by the Union side.
Basically, the Union was actively doing anything they could to encourage desertion in the Confederate army.
The confederate states and their authorities were treated as being regular states and operating with full legality during the war. That is, if a house was sold, it was sold,
, if a person was jailed for civilian offenses, he was jailed for civilian offenses.
Every feature of the state was still a part of the USA… and constitutional and lawful. The states didnt leave the USA and then return - they never left !
Back to the original question about amnesty for confederates - were they held to account for rebellion ? They had to be treated individually, each individual would apply, make the oath and then be pardoned.
See
That page said that while prisoners might have been able to take up the pardon for an oath deal, many didn’t seem to be given access to the deal . The requests for individual pardon were going to the President in a flood.
So it was done case by case, and when July 1867 Johnson pardoned a further list of people, he had completed almost 14,000 individual pardons.
From July to Dec. 25, 1868 there were 14 reasons that confederates were still on the hook for treason, and there were were about 300 prisoners remaining in those months- whether or not they fell into one of the 14 reasons or not is unclear.
On Dec 25 1868, Johnson ended any deprivation and reversed any reversable penalty related to federal charges of treason and desertion . He reversed any forfeiture of real estate and business ownership for example… Well around 3 years after the war ended,the last 300 were released.
So around 14,000 prisoners were held after the end of the war, reducing thousands , lesser cases first, every few months to mean only 300 of the most dangerous people were still held by July 1868 and 0 by January 1869.
Also See
My understanding is that the official American position was that the southern states never left and were still part of the United States. But the governments in those states were not recognized as lawful governments. Because the American government obviously didn’t want to say that legitimate state governments had voted to secede and fight against the national government. So the legal fiction was that the states were still part of the union but were being held in duress by unlawful governments which had seized power. The American government was therefore trying to rescue its southern states from the illegal governments which were holding them in captivity.
I have an ancestor that did that. Got captured at Vicksburg, signed the oath, joined another CSA unit from his home state. Appears on pay listings but never heard from again. Maybe killed in the chaos of the last part of the war.
Even into modern times, a victorious military doesn’t necessarily want its own soldiers to get the idea that being defeated exempts you from the disciplinary requirements of your own side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_May_1945_German_deserter_execution
Yes, indeed.
Including sometimes encouraging them to head for the western frontier in northern states like the Dakotas, Nebraska, etc., where there was 40 acres of land available to settlers. This was a pretty powerful incentive, as most of the captured confederate soldiers were poor whites with little or no land in their family.