Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (44 page)

The war not only endangered the possibility of popular government by inviting foreign intervention but also raised the question of whether, if the Confederacy succeeded, popular government could ever be made to work again at home. “If the ground assumed by the States in revolt is yielded, what bond is there to hold together any two States that may remain—North or South, East or West?” asked Ezra Munday Hunt, a surgeon in the 19th New Jersey. “What becomes of our national power, or title to respect? In such an event, must not the wealth and enterprise and energy of this young nation become the prey of contending factions, and our very name be a hissing and a byword among other nations?” On the other hand, declared one Union colonel at a mass Union rally in Indianapolis in February 1863, if the Union was saved, it would keep the principle of republican government alive for the benefit of every other nation yearning to throw off the shackles of aristocracy. It “would be to not only strengthen our own government, but to shed a radiating light over all the other nations of the world by which the down-trodden people could see their way to liberty.” As a Harvard student named Samuel Storrow (who enlisted in the 44th Massachusetts) explained to his disapproving parents, “What is the worth of this man’s life or of that man’s education if this great and glorious fabric of our Union… is to be shattered to pieces by traitorous hands… If our country and our nationality is to perish, better that we should all perish with it.” This was nationalism of a very ideological sort—not the Romantic nationalism of race and blood, but a highly intellectualized, universal nationalism, based on the open-ended promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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For many other men in the Northern armies, as in the Confederate armies, there were considerations that impelled them to sign their lives away that had nothing to do with politics or ideology. Like his Southern counterparts Patrick Cleburne and Joseph Newton Brown, Edward King Wightman of the 9th New York enlisted out of a simple sense of civic obligation. “It is not only desirable that our family should have a representative in the army, but where we are so well able to furnish one, it would be beyond endurance disgraceful for young men [to be] living peacefully and selfishly at home, while the land is rent by faction and threatened with ruin by violence.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a “pretty convinced abolitionist,” but he remembered as his prevailing reason for joining the 20th Massachusetts the need to demonstrate his manhood to his generation. “As life is action and passion,” Holmes wrote twenty-five years later, “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.” Samuel Hinckley, a Massachusetts mill owner, heartily approved of his son’s enlistment in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, believing that “this civil war will work good to the young men of this age & land.” Peace and prosperity had led to softness and effeminate self-indulgence; now, “money-making & peddling give place to higher aspirations and this war is marking a distinctly manly character in our young men.”
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Few of the white Union recruits listed any interest in destroying slavery as a motivation for enlistment. The 24th Michigan Volunteers gave as their collective reason for enlistment to “fight for the Union and maintain the best government on earth,” not the abolition of Southern slavery. Indiana sergeant Samuel McIlvaine wrote his parents to explain that he had enlisted to defend “this Government, which stands out to the rest of the world as the polestar, the beacon light of liberty & freedom to the human race.” So in February 1862 Sergeant McIlvaine made no effort to stop “three or four slave hunters” from entering the regiment’s campsite and seizing two runaway slaves who “got mixed with the Negro cooks and waiters and were thus endeavoring [to] effect their escape to the North.” Even though the runaways had armed themselves with a pistol and a butcher knife, “they had evidently counted on being protected in the regiment but they were sadly disappointed, as they were disarmed by their pursuers and taken back without molestation on our part.”
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Some Union soldiers were, in fact, even more hostile than their Confederate counterparts to the notion that the war had anything to do with slavery. “If
anyone
thinks that this army is fighting to free the Negro, or that that is any part of its aim, they are
terribly mistaken
,” declared Massachusetts sergeant William Pippey. “I don’t believe that there is
one abolitionist
in
one thousand
, in the army.” Indianan John McClure had enlisted because he thought “we were fighting for the union and constitution” and not “to free those colored gentlemen.” He was enraged by the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s apparent aim of having “all the niggars on an equality with you” and wished that “if I had my way about things I would shoot every niggar I cam across.” Even William Tecumseh Sherman was at best indifferent to making the war a crusade against slavery. “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed,” Sherman wrote to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, “but we are in revolution and I must not pretend to judgment. With my opinion of negroes and my experience, yea, prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.”
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As the war brought more and more Northerners into close contact with the brutal realities of the slave system, the urge to destroy slavery gradually became an important part of the soldiers’ motivations. “I had thought before that God had made the Negro for a slave for the whites,” Elisha Stockwell of the 14th Wisconsin recalled, but after seeing one slave owner abuse two female slaves, “my views on slavery took a change.” Marcus Spiegel, a German Jew who rose to command an Ohio regiment before his death in battle in 1864, enlisted as a pro-Union Democrat, believing that “it is not necessary to fight for the darkies, nor are they worth fighting for.” By early 1864, Spiegel had seen enough of slavery in Louisiana to change his mind. “Since I am here I have learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before and I am glad indeed that the signs of the time show towards closing out the accused institution.” Never again would Spiegel “either speak or vote in favor of Slavery; this is no hasty conclusion but a deep conviction.” Later in the war, a white Iowa regiment captured twenty-three prisoners from a Confederate unit that had participated in the massacre of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow; the angry whites interrogated the prisoners, asked them if they remembered Fort Pillow, and then shot them all.
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Sometimes both Union and Confederate volunteers would be led by more pragmatic motives to join the armies. Some simply wanted to get away from home. The
Federal army set eighteen as the minimum age for its recruits, but recruiting officers did not mind winking at restless teenagers in order to fill a recruiting quota.
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Henry C. Matrau was just fourteen when he joined Company G of the 6th Wisconsin in 1862, but the mustering officer simply treated the boy’s presence on the line as a pleasant joke:

More than a hundred men who had become interested in the little chap stood around to see if he would pass muster. He had picked out a pair of large shoes into which he stuffed insoles that would raise him up a half inch or more, higher heels and thicker soles had been added to the shoes. The high crowned cap and the enlarged shoes lifted the little fellow up. … I can see him as he looked when he started to walk past the mustering officer. I can see Captain McIntyre of the Regular Army, who mustered our regiment. The minute the boy started down the line, his eyes were fixed upon him, and he watched him until he reached the left of the company. I can see the captain’s smile of approval as the little fellow took his place. He had won the day. He was mustered into Uncle Sam’s service for three years or during the war.
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As many as 10,000 boys below the age of eighteen managed to join the army legally, as drummer boys or musicians. Johnny Clem was a ten-year-old runaway who attached himself to the 22nd Michigan as a drummer boy and whose pay had to be anted up by the regiment’s officers. Clem grew up into a reliable soldier, eventually exchanging his drum for a rifle and actually wangling an officer’s commission after the close of the war (he retired in 1916 as a major general). Besides the legally enrolled Johnny Clems, it is entirely possible that as many as 800,000 underage soldiers, many as young as fifteen, slipped past cooperative recruiters. Elisha Stockwell was one of these fifteen-year-olds when he signed up to join Company I, 14th Wisconsin Volunteers, and though his father successfully voided the enlistment, in February 1862 the boy took the first chance he had and ran away to join the regiment. Stockwell admitted that he thought of politics as “only for old men to quarrel over.” He just wanted to get off the farm and see the wider world.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.