During the Civil War, a Union colonel was five times more likely to be court-martialed than a private. Among the court-martialed transgressors presented in this volume are an officer nicknamed 'Stumpy' because he tended to hide behind tree stumps during combat and a man tried for calling his superior a 'miserable reptile'.
Thomas P. Lowry is a retired psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco. He is the author of Curmudgeons, Drunkards, and Outright Fools: Courts-Martial of Civil War Union Colonels, available in a Bison Books edition, and The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.