More on the Confederate Gestapo
My fellow blogger and good friend Geitner Simmons passed my post about the brutalities of the Confederate Home Guard (featured in the movie Cold Mountain) to an expert friend of his, Fred Ray. Fred kindly emailed me additional information. Fred is presently writing a book about Confederate sharpshooters. Says he:

Charles Frazier [author of Cold mountain - DS ] didn't really do a lot of historical research, although almost all the incidents in the book actually happened. He lifted most of them from Bill Trotter's Bushwhackers, and if you want to know about what happened, this is the book to read.

There really was a home guard captain named Teague [the heavy of the story] , who was not a nice guy, and the home guard really did make a fiddler play a tune (Bonaparte's retreat) just before they shot him, and some soldiers really did leave a baby out in the wind until its mother told them what they wanted to know. It was that kind of war in the mountains -- savage and merciless. Probably the worst single incident happened just north of here in 1864 when some Confederates (regular troops, not home guards) massacred some deserters and draft dodgers at Shelton Laurel.

Of course, the Confederate home guards (who were not paramilitaries, but a legally constituted entity) did a lot of bad things, but they were no better nor worse than the pro-Unionists. By 1863 the Federals controlled East Tennessee and the Confederates Western North Carolina, so there was a lot of cross-border raiding by partisans like Champ Ferguson (Confederate) and Col. George Kirk (Union). Both men were utterly ruthless -- a good friend of mine's ex-husband relates a story of who one of his ancestors was murdered in his fields by one of Kirk's men.

The home guard varied wildly in effectiveness (they were, after all, old men & boys). In other theaters, like Virginia, they were quite effective. In fact, if you ignore Teague's brutality for a moment, he is highly effective and always seems to be one step ahead of the deserters. They weren't all like that -- in some areas the guard was utterly ineffective, and in other gangs of deserters and draft dodgers terrorized both the home guard and the populace. The real problem with the home guard was that there was no chain of command -- they were out on their own in very isolated circumstances in a brutal environment, with no supervision. Then of course you had the odd regular army raid, as when Gen. George Stoneman looted Asheville in 1865.

In the mid-1860s WNC was filled with gangs of armed men, some of whom were little better than bandits and murderers and owed only a nominal allegiance to either side. Others (like Teague in the movie) used their authority to settle old scores. Bill Trotter was able to trace Civil War-related revenge killings all the way to the 1920s (the Hatfield-McCoy feud started during the CW over a home guard incident).

In short, neither side had a monopoly on brutality -- both were equally guilty. A sad chapter in our history.

The source for this information could not be more authoritative - the rosters of the N.C. 25th Regiment, of which Pvt. Inman had been a member. ...

Here's another revelation. The departure from the Raleigh hospital was not the first time that the historical Inman deserted. The regimental roster notes that he first did so about two years earlier, on Sept. 5, 1862 - a most significant date. That was when General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia started marching toward Antietam. ...

After a two-and-a-half month hiatus, Inman returned to duty, again on a significant date, Nov. 19, 1862, as his regiment, under Gen. Matt Ransom's brigade and Gen. James Longstreet's First Army Corps, positioned themselves above Fredericksburg. What led Inman to rejoin just in time for one of the two horrific battles portrayed in "Cold Mountain" is a matter of speculation.