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Cowards and Heroes: Group Loyalty in the

U.S Civil War

Dora L. Costa

MIT and NBER

Matthew E. Kahn

Tufts

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Introduction

• The U.S Civil War was horrific• Soldiers knew that:

• Probability of death from disease and battle was high (20%)

• Pay was low and irregular• Punishment mechanisms were

weak• Why didn’t everyone desert?

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What motivates soldiers to be loyal to

this organization?

• Narrow self-interest cannot explain why the desertion rate was only 9%

• Alternative Explanations:• Altruism for your fellow men• Desire for their honor and

esteem• Ideology• Morale

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Empirical Contribution

• Use a unique data set of 31,850 Civil War Union soldiers to model the propensity to be a “coward” and a “hero” as a function of:

• demographics

• community characteristics

• ideology

• morale

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Cowardly and heroic deeds

 

• Non-market interaction

• An important aspect of human behavior that ECONLIT suggests is under-researched

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The Paper Contributes to Three Growing

Literatures

• Group Loyalty

• Levitt and Venkatash 2000,

• Berman 2000,

• Luttmer 2001,

• Poterba 1997,

• Iannaccone 1992

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Production of Social Capital

• Social Capital is the “Glue” that keeps the army united

• Growing research on the micro and macro determinants of producing social capital

• Alesina and La Ferrara 2000,

• Glaeser, Laibson and Sacerdote 2000,

• Costa and Kahn 2001

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Empirical Organizational Design

• What types of organizations “function well”?

• Outcome measures such as turnover levels are higher in more heterogenous divisions based on observables such as age, education, tenure, race and sex (see Pfeffer)

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Demand and Supply of Military Loyalty

• The military faces a tough “agency problem”.

• It produces team output – winning battles

• The military cannot observe its workers’ effort in the smoke of the battlefield.

• The “usual” solutions for agency problems cannot be utilized

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For the Military: Social Capital can substitute for

monetary incentives

• If loyalty could be built within the company this would mitigate the agency problems

• Such loyalty cannot be “purchased” it must be produced “in-house”

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How Does Social Capital help this

Organization Function?• Self-enforcing peer-pressure,

fighting is done in public and your actions are common knowledge among your peers;

• Don’t lose face, self-esteem tied to how your peer group views you

• More social capital => more group loyalty => less shirking => better chance for victory

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Will the Men Supply Loyalty?

• Survival Instincts says “no”

• BUT: If they feel altruism for their fellow men

• If they desire the respect of their company

• If they believe in the cause

• If their side has been winning recently

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Production Function Framework

• Loyalty = f(social capital, individual attributes, morale)

• Social capital = g(individual attributes, community attributes)

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Empirical Design

• Hazard model of competing risks (Weibull), why choose this?

• Our Decision Tree• Focus on coefficients on individual

attributes, company attributes, and ideology to measure “cowardice” and “heroism”

• Desertion measures “cowardice”• Promotion measures “heroism”

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Robert Fogel’s Union Army Sample

• Sample includes 31850 white men who fought for the Union

• 303 infantry companies out of 331 randomly sampled and within these companies a 100% sample

• their wealth representative of northern population

• % all northern men serving ranged from 53 to 81% in 1839-1845 birth cohorts

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Advantages of our Empirical Design

• Stakes are high

• easy for the researcher to measure “shirking” relative to the modern firm

• team members also observe “shirking”

• 303 companies provide “cross-variation”

• Small Companies but not randomly assigned

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Demographic and socio-economic Determinants

Individual Characteristics;

• occupation

• country of birth

• age and height

• total personal property wealth in 1860

• Literacy

• Marital status

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Community Determinants

• company characteristics --

• birthplace fragmentation

• occupation fragmentation

• age heterogeneity of the company

• Do you have a brother in your company?

• Population of city enlisted in

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Ideological Determinants

• Volunteer

• percent of your county of enlistment who voted for Lincoln

• Year mustered

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Morale Determinants

• Momentum variables – share of battles won in the last year

• Share of company who died

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The Geography of Cowardice and Heroism

• Table One

• Each column’s entries sum to 100%

• Wide variation

• Wisconsin and Iowa are special in terms of promotion

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Summary Statistics

• Table Two reports the means of the explanatory variables for;

• The whole sample

• For “Cowards”

• For “Heroes”

• Means differ depending on ultimate category

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We Estimate Separate Hazard Models for Desertion, Arrests,

AWOL, and Promotion

• We organize our findings by major hypothesis

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Individual Attributes

• The Deserters are:

• Older

• Literate

• Wealthier

• Irish and British

• Not German

• Married

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Community Level Variables

• Desertion probabilities are higher in companies where:

• heterogeneity is higher as measured by:

• birth place,

• occupational

• age

• if you are from a large city

• duration dependence parameter in the desertion hazard

• Fragmentation Measures

• Big City Effects

• “Dark Side” of Social Capital? Do more homogenous companies collude to avoid combat and to survive? “Special treatment and favoritism” ---

• Reflection Effects

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Community Continued

• Unlike the desertion results, the community variables do not intuitively predict promotion to officer (i.e heroism)

• Having a brother in your company raises desertion propensity but lowers AWOL propensity

• Evidence of Contagion Effect identified due to functional form

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The “Dark Side” of Social Capital

Hypothesis

• We find no evidence that in more homogenous communities that the men “collude” to straggle in back

• Some evidence of favortism if the officer and the soldier have similar attributes

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Ideology

• Desertion is Lower for:

• Men who enlist early (1861)

• Volunteers

• Men from Pro-Lincoln counties

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Morale

• Desertion falls when the company death rate is lower

• When the Union is winning battles

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Optimal Organizational Design

• Table 8 allows us to show the magnitude of our hazard estimates

• If the army wanted to minimize cowardice, Table 8 shows what we predict it could achieve

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Conclusion

• A self-interested soldier would have deserted, yet a small fraction did. Why didn’t more soldiers desert?

• Social capital and fear of loss of honor substituted for incentive pay

• The same variables that predict participation in the “modern” social capital literature predict participation in this historical setting