Over the next few days Southerners collected and killed all the wounded black prisoners they could find. The Saltville massacre was the most blatant battlefield atrocity of the war. Right now I am A.B.D. at TCU working under Dr. Grady McWhiney on the Confederate Guerrilla Champ Ferguson. I am working on Confederate desertion during the Civil War. Although desertion literally destroyed Confederate armies no historian has given an adequate explanation of the crime.
Most works are descriptive or quantitative.
I want to look at desertion as a symptom of the weakness of the South's slave society and not purely as a response to military or political events. Nonslaveholders fought for individual freedom which the army and Confederate government denied. They could draw a correlation between slavery and their own condition. Soldiers deserting can be seen as analogous to slaves running away from the plantation. It will use first hand accounts to describe the conditions of the trenches.