Punishment
Bounty jumping could be a capital offense. In 1864 three bounty jumpers were executed on the parade grounds of Camp Morton in Indianapolis, Indiana. At Governor's Island in early 1865, bounty jumper James Develin was executed; he had been turned in by his wife after she caught him with another woman. Bounty jumpers were more likely to receive death sentences than those deserters who left due to homesickness, or to help the family farm, or simply as a lark against authority. In another incident, a bounty jumper attempting to escape his captors was shot when one of them overtook him, placing the pistol directly to the back of the man's head while both were running.
Not all punishments were capital. When a man who bounty jumped 32 times was caught, he was sentenced to four years in prison. The infamous Andersonville prison held hundreds of bounty jumpers.
Bounty jumpers also faced torture. One method to torture bounty jumpers was by use of thumbscrews.
Read more about this topic: Bounty Jumper
Famous quotes containing the word punishment:
“A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“A poor widow, by the name of Baird, has a son in the Army that for some offence has been sentenced to serve a long time without pay, or at most, with very little pay. I do not like this punishment of withholding pay—it falls so very hard upon poor families.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)