If you pick up some statistical abstract of the Civil War, you may find that the 97th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry officially reported 151 deserters. That's a firm figure. One-hundred-fifty one. It feeds into the larger stream of firm figures from which generalizations are made.

This happens to be a regiment I studied extensively, at a level deeper than the official records. I got to know its soldiers as individuals. I cross-referenced their lives, from the 1860 census to the pension records to the obituaries in the local newspapers. It's not so much to my credit: They made it easy for me. They were local boys from stable families that had been on the same farms for generations. Being mostly Quakers, or raised among them, the regiment's officers had a reflexive tendency to be meticulous records-keepers.

Hanging around with them taught me that once you start to consider soldiers as individuals, not as a lump sum, the stiff pictures gets less sharp, and more human.

How would you count the five men in the 97th Pa. who deserted, were recaptured, and were returned to the ranks after punishment and served out their enlistments? They are not listed among the deserters. Neither are two men in Company D who were officially reported "absent sick at muster out," but were noted by their captain as deserters, "carrying away arms, accoutrements, etc."

But Pvt. John O'Brine, a substitute in Company F of the 97th, is counted as one. He went missing in action at Drury's Bluff, Va., on May 14, 1864, and was marked a deserter and dropped from the company muster roll. But according to his commanding officer, he turned up as a prisoner of war in Wilmington, N.C., on Feb. 22, 1865.

How would you count Harrison Taylor, who mustered in with the regimental band, but never left camp with it, and was marked upon the rolls of the 97th as a deserter. Yet he re-entered the service for three years in January 1864 as drummer in the 186th Pa., and was discharged with that regiment on Aug. 15, 1865.

Or the two soldiers from Company H who were arrested in October 1861 by order of the governor as deserters from Company G of the 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, which had been raised in the same region as Company H of the 97th. Apparently they filled out enlistment papers for one company, saw their friends going off in another, and so joined that one instead. Should they count as two deserters? Or as four volunteers?

Ella Lonn concluded that the motives for desertion were similar on both sides of the Civil War. I tend to think she's right about that. The 97th Pa., the regiment I worked on, saw duty on the South Atlantic coast in 1862 and 1863, then got thrown into the meat grinder at Cold Harbor and Petersburg during the war's last year. That means it served most of the war hundreds of miles from home, with hostile territory in between, unlike the Confederate regiments that often served in their back yards.

If you graph them out, the Ninety-Seventh's 151 desertions cluster into three "spikes." The first is in September and October 1861, within a month or two of enlistment, and it can probably been attributed to filtering out those who never should have been soldiers in the first place. This process affected Northern as well as Southern regiments.

The third spike came at the very end of the war. That is, in the case of the 97th, between Appomattox and the end of August 1865 when the regiment mustered out. The men would have been looking ahead to post-war life, trying to re-start their lives. Confederate armies, too, bled away men in the last months of their war, when it was possible to see the end approaching. As Bill Mauldin pointed out in World War II, a soldier's worst nightmare was getting killed on the last day of a war.

The middle spike is in the spring of 1864, when the "veteran furloughs" were granted to those who had re-enlisted for another year. The chance to visit home had been dangled as a re-enlistment inducement to war-weary men who had not seen family in years. Many took the bait, signed up for another year, went home, and decided to stay there. Any number of motives could have driven that decision, but one of them probably wasn't the risk of wife and children starving. The homes the 97th's re-enlistees visited in 1864 were a lot better off than those of Southern soldiers in the same months.

All of this seems to suggest, to me, a pattern of desertion based on personal and immediate reasons, rather than one principally motivated by a lack of commitment to the cause or by larger political considerations.

A few cases of desertion in which there are more thorough records reinforce this notion. Pvt. George W. Miles, a 22-year-old farm hand in Company D, was one of the men who signed up for another year and came back from veteran furlough. But then he deserted near Raleigh, N.C., on Aug. 3, 1865. just weeks before his regiment was to go home. Why? Capt. Mendenhall, his commanding officer, noted on his muster roll that Miles had, "Served faithfully with company three years; was in all engagements; was arrested for some act contrary to military discipline, and jumped from cars on the way to Raleigh, N.C., Aug. 3, 1865; not recaptured."

Again, an immediate and personal decision, rather than a political one. This is also bolstered by the fact that desertion tended to be highest from the regiments with a reputation of being poorly led. I also studied, in detail, a local company in the Philadelphia Brigade. This four-regiment unit was made of the same stuff -- working-class Irish and native-born soldiers, recruited in Philadelphia and the smaller industrial cities in its vicinity.

The four regiments in the Philadelphia Brigade served together until the very late stages of the war, fought the same battles, slept on the same campsites. Yet their desertion rate ranged from only 10 percent in the 106th Pa., to 19 percent in the 71st Pa. (California Regiment). Not coincidentally, the 106th had a reputation from the opening weeks of the brigade's term in service as the best-led, and the 71st as the worst-led, regiments in the brigade.

[Gottfried, "Stopping Pickett" is a good study of the Philadelphia Brigade that I wish had been in print when I did my work on it].

"My" part of that outfit was Company K of the 71st, one hundred or so Irish immigrants or sons of immigrants from the Schuylkill River iron mill town of Phoenixville. In Company K, there were 27 desertions, a rate of 25 percent. There was no meticulous records-keeping, as there had been in the 97th, so I turned to the county relief records, on which an astounding one-third of Company K was represented. Unlike the majority of the 97th Pa., these soldiers had families at risk.

The families on relief got one dollar per week for a wife or other adult dependent, sixty-five cents for each child under 12. Rates fluctuated, but generally grew smaller as the war went on, as more and more men with families were in the ranks while the county cash contribution did not keep pace. A family's relief also was slashed if a child was put out to live, or died, and wives could be dropped for "improper conduct."

As early as March 1862, the Phoenixville relief directors reported to the county that many under their charge were "extremely needy, not having BREAD to eat unless given by the hand of charity." All of which gives some context to the 25 percent desertion rate, and to men like Pvt. Patrick McKenna, 39, an iron mill worker with a wife and two children on relief who deserted, came to Phoenixville, took his family and went to New York.

Lonn's book on desertion [p.13] reproduces a letter to a Confederate soldier from his wife, (signed "Your Mary") which was introduced as evidence at the man's trial for desertion. She got the letter from A.B. Moore's "History of North Carolina." Here it is:

"My dear Edward: -- I have always been proud of you, and since your connection with the Confederate army, I have been prouder of you than ever before. I would not have you do anything wrong for the world, but before God, Edward, unless you come home, we must die. Last night, I was aroused by little Eddie's crying. I called and said, 'What is the matter, Eddie?' and he said, 'O mamma! I am so hungry.' And Lucy, Edward, your darling Lucy; she never complains, but she is growing thinner and thinner every day. And before God, Edward, unless you come home, we must die."

Lonn notes that "The court was melted to tears, but as was their plain duty, sentenced the prisoner to death for desertion. However, Lee, reviewing the case, pardoned the prisoner."