The Most Desperate Scoundrels Unhung: Bounty Jumpers and Recruitment Fraud in the Civil War North

This article explores public attitudes toward wartime recruitment brokers and bounty jumpers. Those who enlisted merely to reap the financial rewards of doing so and then deserted, and often repeated the process, proved a striking example of the prevalence of corruption in northern society. The exposure of this practice touched on deep‐seated public fears. Bounty jumpers displayed greed, cowardice, and a lack of patriotism, all alarming manifestations of corruption and unmanliness. Many northerners were also convinced that bounty jumpers represented either disloyal and inassimilable immigrants or a professional criminal underclass, reflecting intense fears and doubts related to the region’s explosive urbanization and modernization.     

A peculiar condition: A history of the Jumping Frenchmen Syndrome in scientific and popular accounts

ABSTRACT

In 1878, Dr. George Beard reported to other neurologists that in Maine there existed French-Canadian woodsmen who jumped when excited. Beard observed the phenomenon firsthand and his subsequent reports attracted the attention of Georges Gilles de la Tourette in France and other neurologists worldwide for a couple of decades. During the second half of the twentieth century, interest in the jumpers revived among neurologists, as some came forward with similar observations in different parts of Canada and the United States. This article compares and contrasts the scientific reports of the jumping syndrome with those of the popular press and highlights what they revealed about the perceived status of French-Canadian descendants.