Getting away from home, however, could easily serve as the solution to other problems. Amos Judson of the 83rd Pennsylvania had a sharp eye for the kind of men who filled the ranks of his company, and he sketched a few of the more amusing reasons they had for enlisting. “There goes a man who knocked his wife down with a wash board, and then ran off and joined the army to spite her, looking behind him all the time to see if she would call him back.” And when “in melting letters” she “forgave him and called him back to her bosom… he wished the army and the war were at the devil. But it was too late and he is now a patriot.” Or consider the “young man who got into a woman-scrape at home; and in order to save himself from being shot or from suffering the penalty of the law, he left the young woman in her sorrow, ran off and became a soldier.” This was all well and good until “he came to realize that there was as much danger of getting shot in the army as there was at home,” and shortly “he, too, wished that the army was at the devil and that he had staid home and married the girl. But it was too late, and he also became a patriot.” On it went, in inglorious detail—the jealous husband who “in a moment of despair and rage left home and went to the wars,” the foreigner, the professional gambler, and the runaway teenager, guilty of “some outrageous breach of domestic discipline, for which his parental ancestor had taken down the old cow skin [and] with it warmed the seat of his pantaloons”—all of them, said Amos Judson with a grin, are “the patriots upon whom we are depending to conquer the rebellion.”13
Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population. They represented not simply a statistical percentage of the American population but also a healthy cross section of classes and occupations. The Civil War was by no means merely a “poor man’s war.” The Virginia brigade first commanded by “Stonewall” Jackson at Bull Run in 1861 carried on its rolls 811 farmers, 477 ordinary laborers, 107 merchants, 41 lawyers, 26 printers, 142 students, 75 blacksmiths, six bakers, five distillers, two dentists, and four “gentlemen.” The 2nd South Carolina enrolled fifty-three sets of brothers and forty-nine individuals whose net worth in the 1860 census had been listed as greater than $1,000. The same regiment enlisted lawyers, a mathematics professor, three civil engineers, a druggist, and students from Furman College, Erskine College, and South Carolina College, plus fifteen immigrants (from Ireland, France, England, Germany, Scotland, and Sweden). Slaveholders, and those from slaveholding households, accounted for 36 percent of the soldiers of the Confederate army of 1861; more than half the officers were slaveholders, with a combined average wealth of nearly $9,000.14
The 11th Ohio boasted that it had enlisted workmen from approximately a hundred trades and occupations, “from selling a paper of pins to building a steamboat or railroad.” The 19th Massachusetts had six Harvard graduates in its ranks, while the 23rd Ohio carried two men on its regimental rolls who would later be president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley. One study of 1,337 Union recruits from Newburyport, Massachusetts, has shown that high-status skilled workers and professionals were actually overrepresented in the Union army; the rates of enlistment for those in the poorest and wealthiest categories among the Newburyport troops was almost even.15 Similar studies of Concord, Massachusetts, and Claremont and Newport, New Hampshire, have also shown that white-collar workers and independent artisans (the segments of the Northern population with the greatest openness to the Republican free-labor ideology) formed the largest segment of recruits, while soldiers from the lowest and highest wealth categories enlisted at approximately the same rates.16
Taken as a whole, skilled laborers and professionals made up approximately 25 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of the Union Army, which works out to almost exactly the same proportions these groups occupied in the entire male population of the North in the 1860 census. Unskilled laborers made up about 15 percent of the Federal recruits, which means that poor workers were actually slightly under-represented in the Union Army. As for the Confederates, unskilled laborers composed only 8.5 percent of the recruits, a substantial underrepresentation of this group, which otherwise accounted for almost 13 percent of the white Southern population.17
THE MAKING OF THE VOLUNTEERS
Since so much of the responsibility for recruitment fell upon the individual states, and since so few of the states were really equipped to handle recruitment in any systematic fashion, the actual process of raising and organizing a regiment often became a matter of local or personal initiative. The 28th Virginia had actually been born before the war started, as a response in the Lynchburg area to John Brown’s raid by ad hoc companies such as the Blue Ridge Rifles, the Roanoke Grays, and the Craig Mountain Boys. Ten of these companies were organized as a regiment on May 17, 1861, and nine days later they were en route by train to Manassas Junction to become part of the hastily assembled Confederate army that defeated Irvin McDowell at Bull Run. The 3rd Virginia began life as a militia company in Norfolk County in 1856, then expanded to become a four-company battalion, and finally was enlarged to become the 3rd Regiment of Virginia militia the following year. They were called out on April 20 to participate in the capture of the Norfolk Navy Yard, and in July were mustered into Confederate service as the 3rd Virginia Volunteers. The Hibriten Guards were recruited as a company from Caldwell County, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and sent off on July 31, 1861, with ceremonies in the town square of the county seat, Lenoir and the presentation of a handmade state flag. On August 27 they were baptized along with nine other companies as the 26th North Carolina.
It was no different on the Union side. The 24th Michigan was recruited in July 1862 after a war rally in Detroit organized by Judge Henry Morrow and Sheriff Mark Flanigan of Wayne County. Morrow and Flanigan, together with a group of recruiting officers, scoured Wayne County for recruits, holding meetings in churches and town halls, and after ten days the regimental quota of 1,030 officers and men had been met. The 17th Maine was recruited that same summer by individuals commissioned by the state governor and state adjutant-general to open recruiting offices and hold recruiting meetings in Portland and the surrounding counties of Cumberland, Oxford, York, Franklin, and Androscoggin; recruiters who were successful in raising full companies would be commissioned by the state as regimental officers, irrespective of whether they had any previous military experience. The 83rd Pennsylvania was originally a three-months regiment, raised single-handedly in April 1861 by John W. McLane, who had been handed a colonel’s commission by the governor of Pennsylvania and authorized to recruit a regiment from his native Erie County. It took McLane only four days of war rallies and buttonholing to enlist 1,200 men; another 400 had to be turned away due to the governor’s limitations on the size of the regiment.18
Recruitment rallies were a ritual of the early days of the war, and like religious revivals, they had the capacity to bring the full social pressure of local communities to bear on potential recruits. John D. Billings, who served in the 10th Massachusetts Artillery, came to recognize a fairly predictable pattern in recruitment rallies that appealed to the social self-definition of white males. “The old veteran of 1812 was trotted out, and worked for all he was worth, and an occasional Mexican War veteran would air his non-chalance at grim-visaged war,” Billings remembered, but the clearest challenge of all would come from “the patriotic maiden who kept a flag or handkerchief waving with only the rarest and briefest of intervals, who ‘would go in a minute if she was a man.’” The town newspaper in Cornwall, Connecticut, actually urged the “Women of Cornwall” to “hurry along your husbands, sons, and brothers to the field! The exigencies of the hour demand the sacrifice: let it be made.” The same charms worked on Confederate volunteers as well. “If men were all like the Ladies we would Whip old lincon before Tomorrow nig
ht,” marveled one Georgia private.19 The pressure to be a man, or to avoid becoming a “woman” while women were becoming “men,” put a substantial squeeze on any townsman’s reluctance to enlist. At other points, the recruitment meeting would apply the fervor, as well as the structure, of an evangelical revival:
… Sometimes the patriotism of such a gathering would be wrought up so intensely by waving banners, martial and vocal music, and burning eloquence, that a town’s quota would be filled in less than an hour. It needed only the first man to step forward, put down his name, be patted on the back, placed upon the platform, and cheered to the echo as the hero of the hour, when a second, a third, a fourth would follow, and at last a perfect stampede set in to sign the enlistment roll, and a frenzy of enthusiasm would take possession of the meeting.20
To enlist was a conversion to true manhood; to skulk was a fall from social grace.
Recruits usually moved from the recruiting meeting or office to a “camp of rendezvous,” which could be almost anything from a city park to a county fairground. The quartermaster of the 121st New York simply leased part of a farm “for the season … for the purpose of allowing the same to be used as a military camp.” Since most recruits in the early stages of the war arrived as companies rather than fully formed regiments, the “camp of rendezvous” was the place where the plethora of local companies were sorted out into regiments for the first time. The largest of these camps in the North was Camp Curtin, outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was the single most important east-west junction point for the northern railroad system, and Camp Curtin’s location one mile north of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main Harrisburg depot made it the prime location for the organization of Pennsylvania troops as well as a major supply dump for military equipment for the Army of the Potomac. All in all, 106 regiments were organized at Camp Curtin. But close behind Curtin in organizational numbers were Camp Chase at Columbus, Camp Morton in Indianapolis, Camp Butler in Springfield, Illinois, and Camp Harrison and Camp Dennison in Cincinnati.21
There recruits were issued blankets, tin plates and cups, forks and knives, and, once they had been officially mustered into United States or Confederate States service, uniforms. The official uniform of the United States Army in 1861 included a long dark blue frock coat with matching wool pants and a broad-brimmed hat known by the name of its designer as the “Hardee.” These regulation hats “were neither useful nor ornamental,” remembered a soldier in the 13th Massachusetts. “They were made of black felt, high-crowned, with a wide rim turned up on one side, and fastened to the crown by a brass shield representing an eagle with extended wings, apparently screaming with holy horror at so base an employment.”22 There were few enough of these outfits available in 1861 to issue to the volunteers, but the shortages went unlamented since the volunteers preferred to show up in their own homegrown varieties of uniforms anyway. Italians who had fought under Garibaldi in the Italian wars of national unification organized the 39th New York under a collection of former Garibaldini officers—Ercole Salviatti, Luigi Delucchi, Luigi Roux, and Amborgio Bixio—and kitted themselves out in uniforms inspired by Garibaldi’s Italian revolutionaries.
The officers’ uniforms were dark blue cloth, single breasted, bordered, and its seams were faced, with gold braid. Its deep cuffs and its standing collar were scarlet cloth. … The trousers had double broad red stripes down the outer seam. The hat was of stiff black felt, round in the crown and very wide in the brim, and loaded with a massive cluster of drooping dark green cock-feathers on the left, a la Bersaglieri. …23
The gaudier the uniform or the less in conformity it was to regulations, the less likely it was to win favor in the eyes of army quartermasters or West Point regulars, and the harder it was to replace them when, after a few months, they wore out.
By the spring of 1862, the general uniform pattern of the Union armies had settled into the use of a navy blue frock coat or sack coat, with sky-blue or robin’segg-blue trousers, and either a black felt slouch hat or a baggy-looking flat-topped forage cap sometimes called (after its French pattern) a kepi. Only four sizes of this standard uniform were manufactured for Union army use, which compelled most soldiers to develop some kind of crude sewing skills in order to make them fit, and shoes were simply hard leather brogans, square-toed and ill-fitting at best. “My first uniform was a bad fit,” remembered Warren Lee Goss, a Massachusetts volunteer. “My trousers were too long by three or four inches; the flannel shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The forage cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; the blouse was the only part which seemed decent; while the overcoat made me feel like a little nubbin of corn in a large preponderance of husk.”24
The Confederate dress regulations adopted in September 1861 specified a uniform of similar design, but adopted cadet gray as the official uniform color, largely since many state militia units were already clothed in gray uniforms of their own design and purchase. As the blockade progressively cramped Confederate supplies, Confederate uniforms became shabbier and more improvised; by the end of the war, some Confederate soldiers were dressed in old farm clothes and captured Federal uniforms. What was worse, supplies of chemical dye had become so scarce that Southerners were forced to resort to common vegetable dyes to color what uniforms they could make, and so produced frock coats and trousers not in gray but in a brownish, mousy color nicknamed “butternut.” “Dirt and tatters seemed to be the rule in their clothing,” thought a Union prisoner captured by Stonewall Jackson’s men, “from their rusty slough hats, sandy beards, sallow skins, butternut coats, and pantaloons down to their mud-stained shoes.”25
If the “camp of rendezvous” was too small, then the next stop for a newly organized regiment would be a larger “camp of instruction,” where the volunteer was supposed to learn the basics of drill and discipline. At the beginning of the war, the “camp of instruction” frequently turned into a local entertainment. “Crowds of ladies and gentlemen repair every afternoon to the ‘Camp of Instruction’ of the Virginia Volunteers, at the Hermitage Fair Grounds,” reported one Richmond newspaper. “The proficiency of the Lexington Cadets… is something wonderful to behold, and worth going a long distance to see.” Henry Handerson joined the Stafford Guards on June 17, 1861, near Alexandria, Louisiana; he spent ten days putting his affairs in order, then joined his company on board a river steamer that brought them to “Camp Moore, the camp of instruction,” sixty miles north of New Orleans. “Here we were fairly initiated into the mysteries and miseries of a soldier’s life, though the miseries of this camp were bliss itself when compared with the more serious discomforts of our later experience.” Handerson and Stafford Guards were then united with several other companies to form the 9th Louisiana, under the command of Richard Taylor, the son of former president Zachary Taylor.26
Unfortunately, since the United States had fought its last major war more than thirteen years before in Mexico and had kept up only the tiniest regular army since then, most young Americans of military age had never in their lives encountered the reality of military life, and knew next to nothing of military drill and discipline. Everything had to be taught from the very beginning, including something as simple as how to stand at attention. Moreover, few of the volunteers seemed inclined to take drill, discipline, or the military itself with the spit-and-polish seriousness it demanded. The volunteer never ceased to think of himself as an independent American and experienced a good deal of confusion and irritation at being made to obey orders he could see no sense in. Charles S. Wainwright, a Federal artillery officer, was exasperated by “how little snap” the first volunteers he met in 1861 “have generally.” Michigan lieutenant Charles Haydon was annoyed to find that “many of the men seem to think they should never be spoken to unless the remarks are prefaced by some words of deferential politeness. Will the gentlemen who compose the first platoon have the kindness to march forward, or will they please to halt, &c. is abt. what some
of them seem to expect.”27
Discipline in the Confederate armies was, if anything, even worse. As Robert E. Lee ruefully admitted, “Our people are so little liable to control that it is difficult to get them to follow any course not in accordance with their inclination.” He acknowledged to the Prussian army observer Justus Scheibert that Confederate soldiers were second to none to terms of bravery, but “give me also Prussian discipline and Prussian forms, and you would see quite different results!” One major difficulty in imposing discipline on Southern soldiers was that the discipline, regimentation and authoritarianism of camp life was very nearly identical to that of the plantation, and Southern whites resented and resisted efforts to impose on them what looked for all the world like the discipline they imposed at home on black slaves. One Georgia private insisted that “I love my country as well as any one but I don’t believe in the plan of making myself a slave. …” When he wrote home, he did not hesitate to compare military life with plantation slavery: “A private soldier is nothing more than a slave and is often treated worse. I have during the past six months gone through more hardships than anyone of ours or Grandma’s negroes; their life is a luxury to what mine is sometimes.”28
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 34