This was an old message, but the 'Home Guard' question interests me so I'll respond.

According to one or two accounts in print here in Alabama long before Cold Mountain was written, the violence depicted was not uncommon. Some of the stories circulating about Home Guard activities in Shelby and modern-day Chilton County can be quite lurid, let me assure you.

We know much more about battles and leaders than we do about actual conditions at home. In many communities citizens wrote the governor to complain about farms being raided by deserters and others trying to avoid regular military service. Those who had taken to the woods and hills needed some means of feeding themselves, and it was too easy to get caught by remaining too near one's own home. For that reason they preyed on isolated farms, particularly where men who normally would've been there were either away in the army, or had died in service.

Diane Crawford's post outlined Home Guard duties quite well. It doesn't take much imagination to understand that the task of identifying deserters, reluctant conscripts and others living outside the law required one to become inquisitive, suspicious and intrusive with your neighbors. If deserters or other outlaws had been so bold as to rob a war widow's corncrib or break into her home, Home Guards naturally responded in her defense. Desertion was already punishable by death, and taking advantage of a defenseless woman just made the Home Guards angry towards anyone who might be responsible.

Someone in most Home Guard patrols carried a good, strong rope along, just in case it was needed. Gunpowder and buckshot was hard to find -- no sense in wasting it.

Deserters tended to band together to protect themselves and were sometimes bold enough to attack Home Guard patrols. Soldiers home on leave from the army could be ambushed and left dead on the road. When the war ended, some Home Guard members were attacked and killed by those who evidently felt pursecuted by them. In summary, the home front could be a dangerous place during the war.

For what it's worth, the novel Cold Mountain was based on an actual North Carolina soldier who left a hospital at Raliegh NC after being wounded at the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864. Family tradition says he was killed by Teague's Home Guard just a few miles from home:

http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/summer_2004_inman.html