Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (45 page)

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.
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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 night,” marveled one Georgia private.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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
. …
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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This situation was all the more galling to nonslaveholding whites, who had grudgingly supported the slave system precisely because black slavery was the one social fact which gave them any sense of equality with white planters. Military life forced slaveholders and nonslaveholders into a relationship of class and command that denied race-based equality among whites. Frank Robinson, a Louisiana soldier, complained that “the life of a common soldier… is a great deal worse than that of a common field hand. … Those commissioned officers… are just like the owners of slaves on plantations, they have nothing to do but strut about, dress fine, and enjoy themselves.”
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In many cases, the discipline problem lay not so much with the volunteer soldier as with the volunteer system itself, since volunteer regiments were usually allowed to elect their own officers from among themselves, officers who might be popular as good fellows but who knew neither how to give orders and get them obeyed nor even what kind of orders to give. “In the sense in which the term is understood in the regular armies of Europe,” admitted John William Jones, a Southern Baptist chaplain, “we
really had no discipline
.” At his worst, the volunteer officer could be fully as ignorant and irresponsible as the men he was supposed to command. Thomas Hyde began the war as an officer by “drilling as much as possible by day and studying by candle light in the evenings.” Charles Wainwright was more exasperated at the officers the volunteers elected than at the volunteers themselves. “Their orders come out slow and drawling, then they wait patiently to see them obeyed in a laggard manner, instead of making the men jump to it sharp. …” This was because, as Wainwright realized, the officers had “raised their own men and known most of them in civil life.” A Northern missionary at Port Royal was shocked to see “officers and men… on terms of perfect equality socially” in the Union army. “… Off duty they drink together, go arm in arm about the town, call each other by the first name, in a way that startles an Eastern man.”
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