by John Boyko
Lincoln signed the Militia Act on July 17, 1862. It called for each state to raise a nine-month militia, with quotas linked to population numbers. Most states met their quotas, and in those that could not the War Department established a draft. In every state, local tax assessors began making lists of eligible men. Recruitment ads appeared as posters and in newspapers. Most echoed the theme of a Detroit newspaper ad with the large, bold tag-line: “Avoid the Draft! $522 Bonus! $10 Advance.”54 There was not a word about duty. Patriotism was being purchased—or at least rented.
As had happened in the South, Northern recruiting offices were overwhelmed with young men wanting to sign up before being drafted. But thousands felt otherwise and fled. While there had been many cases of deserters running to Canada beginning in the fall of 1861, the threat of conscription in the summer of 1862 added draft dodgers to the flood of men pouring over the border. In August, the Detroit Free Press reported “an exodus” of men fleeing through the city on their way to Canada.55 There were similar reports from Chicago, Rochester and Buffalo.
So many young men were making their way over the border that popular crossing points were reinforced with Union soldiers. On August 8, partially to help stem the tide of desertions, Congress passed a law rendering it illegal for those subject to military service to leave the country. When news spread of Lincoln’s intention to quickly sign and enforce the law, a new wave of deserters and draft dodgers crossed the border. At Niagara Falls, four hundred men fled in a single day.56 Some border crossings witnessed screaming matches. Many cases of fights and drawn weapons were reported, and there were riots in Detroit and Buffalo.57
Exploitative entrepreneurs quickly appeared to meet the sudden demand for fake discharge papers. Those with genuine documents made good money selling them to forgers, who bleached out names and other personal information and sold copies of blank forms. Many men took a simpler way out, avoided populated border crossings, and quietly slipped across the imaginary line to freedom.
In the Maritimes, soldiers running from their units—and civilians running to avoid becoming part of one—were dubbed skedaddlers. So many young men crossed the Maine border and made their way over a long esker into Carleton County, New Brunswick, that the area became forever known as Skedaddle Ridge. Those on New Brunswick’s Montebello Island, within sight of Maine across the waves, renamed an increasingly busy spot Skedaddler’s Reach.
By the war’s end, about twelve thousand Americans had found their way over the border as either deserters or draft dodgers.58 As the number of skedaddlers increased over the summer and fall of 1862, Canadian and Maritime opinion of them, which had been positive at the beginning, soured. In provinces where thousands still needed to travel to the United States to find work or liveable salaries, the skedaddling Americans swelled the labour pool and depressed wages. Many farmers who hired cheaper American boys discovered some truth to the skedaddlers’ reputation for leaving if work became too hard or before it was done. Skedaddlers saw their reputations further sullied by rumours of un- or underemployed young Americans forming gangs or becoming involved in criminal activity.59
WAR’S BRAVERY AND DRUDGERY
After the Peninsula Campaign, Edmonds found herself back in camps around Washington. She was incredibly busy with new outbreaks of camp diseases. Disease would eventually kill more soldiers than battles: of the 360,000 Union troops who lost their lives in the war, 250,000 died from disease.60 From the camp of his New York regiment, Charles Riggins sent a mournful letter home to his sister in Canada: “Four of our Company are in the hospital—Sick with the measles. Two of them slept in the same tent with me for about a week. I have had a bad headache for about three days.… I have broke out all over with a kind of rash & they itch awful bad.”61 Two weeks later things were much worse: “There were three thousand sick men sent away yesterday. There had been five men buried since last night & as I write this they are carrying another one out. They are dying all over the whole army forty & fifty every day.”62
Typhoid fever took the life of Jasper Wolverton in October 1861, just four months after he had volunteered to serve. In April 1863, his brother Alfred died of smallpox. Peter Anderson, who was to fight with the Wolverton brothers at Antietam, had left Guelph, in Canada West, to enlist with an Ohio regiment and was also in McClellan’s camp. He wrote to his sister, “I have been for four months at deaths very door, most of the time delirious with the typhoid fever.”63
As in every war, Civil War soldiers complained about food, illness, their officers and boredom. Riggins wrote: “We have been here now for six days & the other day we got mouldy crackers with maggots in our bacon—nearly ran away with the same—our coffee is half beans & our sugar is mixed & wet & that is about all we get from day to day.”64 All yearned for home. Jasper Wolverton wrote to his sister: “A great many of those who came with us have got very homesick. Some of them intend returning immediately. We intend to leave when we can’t stand it any longer.”65 Riggins seemed to have escaped this heartache. From McClellan’s camp in late July 1862, he wrote: “I do not fret like some do that are here about home, home sickness is hurting a good many here, worse than their wounds.… I try to be at home where ever I am.”66
As the soldiers trained and complained, General McClellan rebuilt his army and tried to deflect blame for his disastrous results. Battles continued to rage in the west. New Orleans fell to the Union. In late August, Lee moved 50,000 troops north and met McClellan’s Army of the Potomac at the Second Battle of Bull Run. It was another draw and even bloodier than the first, with 25,000 casualties. But a more tragic fight was on its way.
In September 1862, Lee drove into Maryland. His intention was to take the war to the North, and threaten Washington while stirring the considerable Confederate support in that state. He also wanted to lend credence to a Northern peace movement, and add pressure on Britain to recognize the South.67 On September 15, with only 19,000 troops, Lee formed lines facing the Union’s 70,000. They met near a creek called Antietam, and the most deadly battle in the war began.
Edmonds was at Antietam as 2nd Michigan’s field nurse. She was moved by the courageous manner in which so many faced their final moments, sincerely believing that a faith in God was the only reason for personal resilience and military victory.68 Riggins, Anderson and two Wolverton brothers were also among the Canadians at Antietam. Because of strict orders and military censors, they were not able to write home about specifics of the battle, but Riggins managed to sneak a story into a letter to his mother about happening upon a Confederate camp and enjoying the food the fleeing rebels had left behind.69
The cost on both sides was unfathomable. In two days, 17,000 men were wounded and 6,000 had died. Lincoln was pleased that Lee had been forced to retreat back to Virginia but could not believe that McClellan had failed to seize the opportunity to pursue and crush him. In early October, Lincoln visited McClellan but could not entice the reluctant general to action. He followed the meeting with a telegram explicitly instructing him to move, but McClellan claimed his horses were too tired. Lincoln responded with rare sarcasm: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that could fatigue anything?”70 A few days later, Lincoln fired him.
On her way back toward Washington, Edmonds rode over old battlegrounds—Bull Run, Centreville and more—and encountered disturbing sights. Men and horses lay unburied, swollen and stinking in the sun. She heard of Confederate guerrillas selling Union skulls at ten dollars each.71
The fall was a period of relative quiet for Edmonds and her regiment, but in early December she was on the move again. She found herself witness to the Battle of Fredericksburg. Her experience as a dispatch rider had become well known, so she was back in the saddle, serving under the 2nd Michigan’s new commander, General Orlando Poe. Edmonds’s regiment was now part of an enormous army of about 120,000 troops under the leadership of newly appointed Major General Ambrose Burnside.* On the morning of Dece
mber 11, the battle began. Edmonds raced along the front, delivering messages.
Burnside ordered men to attack up a hill on the right flank called Marye’s Heights. At the top was Confederate lieutenant General James Longstreet’s corps: well dug in, well defended and ready. Union men slowly walked up the hill and into the horror of a merciless killing zone. Tramping over the bodies of hundreds of their falling comrades, most dead and others pitifully writhing in pain and crying for water, wave after appalling wave turned their shoulders against the steel-filled air as if resisting a strong wind. Longstreet’s men actually began to cheer each new drive up the hill, each as brave as it was futile.
Among the courageous Union soldiers at Fredericksburg was Canada East’s Captain John C. Gilmore. His 16th New York Infantry was advancing but faltering against a withering rain of Confederate lead at Salem Heights. Gilmore grabbed the fallen regimental colours from the blood-soaked mud, waved them high, and then advanced up the hill. Inspired, his men rallied and followed him forward. For his bravery that day, Gilmore was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.*
When the Union’s rattled General Burnside finally ordered a withdrawal, Edmonds, like everyone else involved, was shaken. She was also sick, having fallen ill during the Peninsula Campaign and never fully recovered. In April 1863, an increasingly ailing Edmonds arrived with her regiment at camp near Lebanon, Kentucky. The combination of illness, fatigue and relentless stress led to a collapse. She later explained:
All of my soldierly qualities seemed to have fled, and I was again a poor cowardly, nervous, whining woman; and as if to make up for lost time and to give vent to my long pent up feelings, I could do nothing but weep hour after hour, until it would seem that my head was literally a fountain of tears and my heart one great burden of sorrow. All the horrid scenes that I had witnessed during the past two years seemed now before me with vivid distinctness, and I could think of nothing else.72
Suffering from emotional trauma and malaria, she coughed, shivered and endured nightmarish hallucinations. Despite her emotional and physical incapacitation, Edmonds remained lucid enough to realize that if she entered one of the many hospital tents for treatment, her identity would be discovered. She came up with only one option—she left.
On April 19, 1863, she limped from camp and purchased a ticket for the first train out, disembarking in Cairo, Illinois, where she checked into a hotel to rest and recover. When she finally emerged, wan and weak, Edmonds discovered her name on a list of deserters. After another few days spent regaining strength, she left Cairo, her men’s clothes, and Franklin Thompson behind.
While Edmonds was again reinventing herself, the momentum of the war shifted. On July 4, 1863, the Confederate commanders at Vicksburg, Tennessee, surrendered what many had believed to be an impregnable fortress of a city to Union General Ulysses S. Grant. With Vicksburg’s fall, the Mississippi belonged to the Union, and the Confederacy was split in two. On the same day, Robert E. Lee began his retreat after being beaten at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. While Vicksburg was important, Gettysburg became engulfed in a romantic aura. The setting was beautiful, the sacrifice both horrible and heroic; the magnificent, seemingly unbeatable Lee was beaten; and in commemorating the fallen four months later, Lincoln’s eloquence would reach its zenith.
Many Canadians and Maritimers were at Gettysburg. Charles Riggins was there. His 14th U.S. Infantry arrived on July 2, the battle’s second day, and took up a position at Little Round Top. His regiment engaged Confederates charging up the wooded section of the hill on the Union’s far left. Under heavy fire and taking casualties, they held the line and then moved back up the hill where they helped to hold it.
The 20th Maine included about twenty New Brunswickers. On July 2, playing their part in the desperate attempt to hold Little Round Top, but with ammunition nearly spent, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge down the hill. George Leach from Fredericton and Alex Lester from Saint John were among the men who ran down Little Round Top that afternoon, and among the forty who died saving the day for the Union—helping seal the Confederacy’s fate.
Canadian Francis Wafer was there too. In the spring of 1863, while completing medical training at Queen’s Medical College in Kingston, he had been approached by Union recruiters. Seeing an opportunity to gain some first-hand medical training, he enlisted with New York’s 108th Regiment as its assistant surgeon. Wafer gained some field experience before arriving at Gettysburg on the battle’s second day. He performed surgery in a small stone house on Taneytown Road, with artillery thundering and shells crashing nearby. Through fear and fatigue, Wafer sawed and sewed and marvelled at the stoicism of the blood-soaked, wounded men.73
PRISONERS
Also at Gettysburg, but on the Confederate side, was Canada West’s Dr. Solomon Secord. He had been promoted to surgeon in early 1863 and reassigned to General James Longstreet’s Corps. He was in the woods on the third day of the battle when General George Pickett’s Virginians left the cover of the trees to take their fateful walk up a gentle rise to meet devastatingly relentless Union fire. When the rains came the next day and Lee’s defeated army began to withdraw, Secord volunteered to stay behind and continue tending the ten to twelve thousand wounded left on the field. He was taken prisoner but, according to common practice, allowed to continue to treat the suffering men of both sides.
Two weeks later, Secord was sent to Virginia’s Fort Monroe, then to another prison at Fort Norfolk, and finally to Maryland’s Fort McHenry. He was among seven thousand Confederates captured at Gettysburg. Secord carefully noted the schedules of the McHenry guards and which were most alert. On October 10, he escaped. He slowly made his way south and eventually located his old regiment. He returned to service as the Georgia 20th’s surgeon. He was later promoted and served in the office of the Inspector of Hospitals in Richmond.
Secord was one of many Canadians and Maritimers who spent time as prisoners of war. Shortly after being granted a transfer from support to active combat duty, Alonzo Wolverton had been captured, though he quickly escaped. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and led men in many battles including the decisive struggle at Chattanooga in November 1863. Later that year he was captured again and imprisoned in Villanow, Georgia. Conditions were so horrible that many contemplated suicide. Wolverton was one of those released after signing a pledge to never again bear arms against the Confederacy.74 He ignored his pledge, and by October was part of General Sherman’s ruthless drive across Georgia to the sea.
E.L. Stevens left Sackville, New Brunswick, in February 1863 to enlist with Maine’s 1st Infantry Volunteers. On May 5, 1864, he was wounded and captured at the sprawling Battle of the Wilderness. For three weeks he was transferred through several camps until being placed in the notorious and barbaric Andersonville prison. He was exchanged for a Confederate soldier in December.
Saint John’s Robert Hayborn left home in 1852 to find work in the United States and his brother soon joined him. With the outbreak of war, they enlisted in the 1st Louisiana Cavalry. The brothers fought at Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Williamsburg, Corinth and Murfreesboro. At Gettysburg, a minié ball pierced his right arm and, suffering a loss of blood, he fell and was captured. He was taken to Camp Chase in Ohio and then to Fort Delaware. He was exchanged on March 7, 1865.75
Some prisons allowed men to write home, and military officials sometimes wrote to families with the news of a loved one’s capture. Mary Elizabeth Gray, for example, received a letter at her home in Kingston from John Collins of the 11th U.S. Infantry Recruiting Office, Watertown, New York. He gently informed Ms. Gray that her brother Edward had been captured by Confederates in a battle outside Petersburg. He did not know where Edward had been taken but supposed it was to one of the many camps around Richmond. He tried to console her by explaining that he too had a brother captured and had not heard from him since March. He ended with a hope that peace might soon return to the land.76
Governor General Monck and British minister Lyon
s tried to intercede on behalf of Canadian and Maritime prisoners, but were hampered by their excessive workloads and inadequate staff, and the need to deal with sketchy information and an American government often unwilling or unable to help. Another complication was that any British subject who enlisted with the Confederate or Union forces had broken the law. This point was made in a circular from Lyons to all British consuls in the United States on May 3, 1862.77 Further, British foreign secretary Russell (in 1861 he was raised to a peerage and was no longer Lord but Earl Russell) was of the opinion that the United States had the legal right to consider those captured in uniform as prisoners of war and therefore to treat them as they would captured Americans. How could Britain claim to be maintaining its neutrality when so many of their citizens were being captured in uniform? Lyons was thus given a direct order: “You should abstain from making any formal official demand for the liberation of such Prisoners and … you should not call upon the U.S. authorities to lay down any general rule or make any formal declaration as to the course they will take regarding them.”78 Lyons and Monck backed off a little, acting only when there was undeniable proof that a particular person had been unwillingly pressed into service and his regiment was known. It was clear that little could or would be done.