Author Entertainment Series – Judkin Browning

Deserter Declarations

Deserter Declarations are firsthand accounts of North Carolinian Confederate deserters and their motivations for deserting. It explores nearly two hundred letters from Confederate deserters to Governor Zebulon B. Vance from 1861 to 1865. It shares the voices of deserters or friends and family petitioning on their behalf. Browning helps us understand who deserters were and lets us tease out some of the factors that motivated soldiers to leave their posts. These letters add vivid specificity to the often-contentious debates over deserters in the Confederacy and shed light on the changing attitudes of deserters over the course of the war. North Carolina is an excellent case study for desertion, as the state had the highest number of deserters. The Old North State also represents a microcosm of the entire South’s geography and demography.

Meet The Author

Judkin Browning is a professor of military history at Appalachian State University and the author or coauthor of five books on the Civil War, including An Environmental History of the Civil War, which he coauthored with Timothy Silver. In addition to being awarded major research grants and winning several teaching and research awards, Browning also maintains the digital humanities website, www.TarheelTroops.org, which provides several databases, letters, and blog posts about North Carolina soldiers during the Civil War. He lives and writes in North Carolina.

Dr. Browning received a BA in History at Florida State University in 1996, an MA in Public History at North Carolina State University in 1999, and a Ph.D. at the University of Georgia in 2006.

He is the administrator of https://www.tarheeltroops.org/, a Digital Humanities website he developed, which provides several databases, letters, and blog posts about North Carolina soldiers during the Civil War, all derived from the various projects on which he is working.

He has written Letters from a North Carolina Unionist, co-edited with Michael Thomas Smith (2001), an edited collection of letters from a Unionist official living in occupied Beaufort, North Carolina; The Southern Mind under Union Rule (2009), an edited diary of a secessionist living under that Union military occupation in Beaufort; and Shifting Loyalties (2011), which examines the effects of Union military occupation on the local whites, African Americans, Union soldiers, and northern benevolent societies that experienced or participated in the occupation of eastern North Carolina. He has also written a history of The Seven Days’ Battles (2012), reassessing that campaign and the reasons for its ultimate outcome. He most recently co-authored (with Tim Silver) An Environmental History of the Civil War (2020), examining the Civil War as a biological event. In the U.S. Civil War class, his lecture on “The Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles” was filmed by C-Span on February 28, 2017.