Judkin Browning, Site Administrator

I am a Professor of Military History at Appalachian State University. You can learn more about me, and find links to my published articles, at my university's faculty webpage. I have written several books, including Letters from a North Carolina Unionist (2001), co-edited with Michael Thomas Smith; The Southern Mind under Union Rule (2009); Shifting Loyalties (2011); The Seven Days' Battles: The War Begins Anew (2012); and An Environmental History of the Civil War (2020), co-authored with Tim Silver. (A link to all of these publications can be found here). I have another book under contract: Deserter Declarations: Letters from North Carolinians Who Abandoned Their Confederate Units (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press, 2025).

 

This site is part of a comprehensive research project examining North Carolina soldiers and specifically deserters during the Civil War. I am also working on a project exploring the long-term effects of the battle of Gettysburg on the soldiers of the 26th North Carolina and 24th Michigan Regiments, their families, and the communities from which they hailed. I have published several articles from this research, but the book is still in progress.

 

I intend for this site to be an opportunity to share the data and many of the stories I have amassed over the last fifteen years of research into these projects. This is a public site, meant to be shared by all. Several of the databases are ongoing, so if you use the data for research purposes (which you should certainly feel welcome to do--that's why it's here!), please cite the date you accessed it. As I find more data, I will include it and time-stamp the update. Citations are how the word gets spread among academics, so please be generous and cite any information you use as coming from tarheeltroops.org.  

 

I could not have developed this site without the assistance, patience,

diligence, and technical expertise of Dakota Wilson, my graduate assistant

for 2023-2024. Dakota (pictured on the right) did the lion's share of the

scaffolding for this site, to get me to a position where I could make this

material publicly available. 

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Finally, if you have information or data you'd like to share, or corrections

to any data that you see, please reach out so that I can improve the site.

This is very much a community collaboration. 

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