Bounty Jumper - Consequences

Consequences

Due to the number of bounty jumpers taking advantage of being substitutes for those drafted, the Confederate Congress withdrew the law making substitutions possible in December 1863.

Not all bounty jumpers successfully left their new unit. During the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in 1864, one bounty jumper who was a member of the 35th Massachusetts Regiment shouted "Retreat!" causing the entire unit to panic and run back to their earthworks.

A popular place for bounty jumpers to go to was New York City. At one time 3,000 professional bounty jumpers were believed to be in the city. A dozen a day were found in a brief campaign to catch jumpers in February 1863; many were caught while enjoying a brothel. Toward the end of the war, detective Lafayette Baker captured 183 bounty jumpers in a single day by having an infamous broker named Theodore Allen help him use a fake recruitment office; however, Allen eventually ran off to Canada with $50,000 that was used for the purpose of capturing the bounty jumpers.

One bounty jumper became particularly famous. Adam Worth became an international thief, with the theft of Thomas Gainsborough's painting Duchess being his most famous crime. He would become known as the "Napoleon of Crime", a label Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would borrow when creating the character Professor Moriarty, whom Doyle loosely based on Worth. According to William Pinkerton, Worth did actually fight once, for the Union in the Battle of the Wilderness, and once collected a $30 Confederate bounty, only to eventually fight for the Union. Pinkerton further said that Worth did what he did due to greed and lack of patriotism, not for cowardice.

Northerners typically saw bounty jumpers as either "urban, largely foreign underclass" worthy of contempt, or viewed as urban dandies. The view of them as cowardly was generally universal. This wide view allowed Northern authorities to punish bounty jumpers more harshly than other deserters.