Tarnished eagles

by Thomas P. Lowry

"In the Union army during the Civil War, a 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. These, and dozens of other remarkable facts, have emerged in this first large-scale investigation of officer misbehavior in the War Between the States? The stories of? curmudgeons, drunkards, and outright fools, along with a statistical exploration of 22,000 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"--Jacket.