A Stillness at Appomattox (5 page)

Yet to say all of that is merely to say that the army had done to its members what armies always do to recruits. The men had changed and that was that, and if the gates of Eden had swung shut nothing had happened that does not happen to everyone sooner or later. But along with all of this, something had happened to the army itself. Once it had reflected what was left of frontier democracy, loose-jointed and informal, bound together by a sharing of traditions and ideals. Now it was becoming professional, and the binder was beginning to look like cold force. Old relationships had shifted, and the typical army campfire was no longer a little glow in the dark lighting the bronzed faces of sentimentalists singing sad little songs. Army life had an edge to it now. The word "comrade" was ceasing to be all-inclusive, and because that was so the gap between officer and man was ominously widening.

In the beginning this gap had not been very impressive. Most of the men had known their company and regimental commanders before the war. They had been neighbors then and they expected to be neighbors again, and although they were willing to obey any orders which seemed to be sensible they saw no reason for anyone to be stuffy about it. Government was mostly by consent of the governed and discipline was casual and haphazard, which sometimes led to odd happenings on the march and in battle. It was getting ever so much tighter and sterner now, partly because loose discipline irked the army command but chiefly because the situation in which the loose discipline of a volunteer army could be tolerated no longer existed.

Except for the old-timers, the Army of the Potomac was not really a volunteer army any more, and it could not be conducted as one. The men who were coming into the ranks now were for the most part either men who had been made to come or men who had been paid to come. The former—the out-and-out conscripts—sometimes made good soldiers, for their principal shortcoming (aside from a certain reluctance to volunteer) was poverty; a draftee with money could either hire a substitute and so gain permanent exemption, or pay a $300 commutation fee and at least win exemption until his name came up in some new draft call. Unfortunately, however, not many of the new recruits were conscripts. Most of them were men who had joined up only because they got a great deal of money for doing it, and in the great majority of cases these men were worse than useless.

The number of men to be drafted in any state, city, or county always depended on the number that had previously volunteered. If many had volunteered, few or none would be drafted. Since nobody liked the draft, it was to everybody's interest to promote volunteering, and this was done principally by the payment of cash bounties. By the winter of 1864 these were running very high. States, cities, and towns were bidding against each other—some were almost bankrupting themselves in the process—and the drafted man who wanted to hire a substitute was bidding against all three. The results were fantastic. The provision by which a drafted man could buy his way out of the service was a remarkably effective device for making young men cynical about appeals to their patriotism. When it went hand in hand with a system of bounties which often ran as high as a thousand dollars per enlistment, there was in operation an almost foolproof system for getting the wrong kind of men into uniform.
⁸

This system had created the institution of the substitute broker—the man who for a fee would find potential soldiers and induce them to enlist. Some of these brokers may have been relatively honest, although there is nothing in any contemporary accounts to make one think so, but for the most part they seem to have inspired army authorities to some of the most glowing invective in Civil War annals. At times they operated precisely as waterfront crimps operated, making their victims drunk, getting them to sign away their bounty rights, and then rushing them through the enlistment process before they recovered. Now and then an authentic deep-sea sailor, congenitally disposed to being shanghaied, got caught in this net. Such men, when they came to, usually made the best of things and went on to become good soldiers.
⁹

Most of the time the broker did not need to go to the trouble of drugging anybody. It was simpler to dredge in the backwaters of city slums and find human derelicts who, for a little cash in hand, would willingly assign their bounty rights and go and enlist. Hardly any of these men were physically fit to be soldiers, but the broker made such enormous profits that he could usually afford any bribery that might be necessary to get them past the examiners. Horrified medical officers in the Army of the Potomac were finding that new lots of recruits often included hopeless cripples, lunatics, and men far along in incurable disease. Of fifty-seven recruits received that winter by the 6th New York Heavy Artillery, seventeen were so completely disabled that even a layman could see it—some, for instance, had but one hand, and a few were out-and-out idiots. Of recruits received by the cavalry corps in March, 32 per cent were on the sick list when they reached camp.

A Federal enrollment officer in Illinois wrote that the substitute broker's business was conducted "with a degree of unprincipled recklessness and profligacy unparalleled in the annals of corruption and fraud." Rising to genuine eloquence in his indignation, he protested that it put the uniform "upon branded felons; upon blotched and bloated libertines and pimps; upon thieves, burglars and vagabonds; upon the riffraff of corruption and scoundrelism of every shade and degree of infamy which can be swept into the insatiable clutches of the vampires who fatten upon the profits of the execrable business."

Helpless immigrants speaking no word of English, some still wearing their wooden shoes, were swept up from the docks at seaports and hustled off to the recruiting officers. A veteran in a Massachusetts regiment said scornfully that more than half of one draft of recruits his regiment got that winter came in under assumed names, and that most of these men forgot what names they had used and were unable to answer at roll call. He remembered that the last set of recruits in whom the regiment felt any pride was a detail that came to camp in the fall of 1862.
¹⁰

Even worse than the gangs sent in by the brokers, however, were the professional bounty-jumpers. These often were out-and-out criminals, who had found that their familiar arts of burglary, highway robbery, and pocket-picking were much more laborious and less rewarding than the racket which was made possible by the high-bounty system. They made a business of enlisting, collecting a bounty, deserting at the first chance, enlisting somewhere else for another bounty, deserting again, and keeping it up as long as they could get away with it. Since the authorities never solved the problem of checking desertion, they were usually able to get away with it about as long as they wanted to keep on trying, and if a few of them were caught and executed now and then the hazards of the profession were, on the whole, no worse than the risks they normally ran with the police

These men brought into the Army of the Potomac an element the army had never had before, and of which it could not possibly make the slightest use. In camp they were valueless, and early in 1864 the army command stipulated that no bounty men could be used on picket or outpost duty. "If those fellows are trusted on picket," remarked one veteran, "the army will soon be in hell."
¹¹
The mere business of guarding them to see that they did not desert or plunder their honest comrades took time and effort that should have been used in other ways. In battle they were a positive handicap. Under no circumstances could they be induced to fight. If by tireless effort a regiment succeeded in getting any of them up to the firing line they would immediately desert to the enemy, and their utter unreliability made any regiment which had them in its ranks weaker than it would have been if it had received no recruits at all.

A New Hampshire soldier reported indignantly that "such another depraved, vice-hardened and desperate set of human beings never before disgraced an army," and he pointed out how the bounty-jumpers and substitutes, simply by their presence in camp, corrupted the relationship between officers and men in the veteran regiments:

"Before their advent, common toil, hardship and danger, for months and years, had made them a band of brothers. Between the officers and men there existed the most perfect confidence and friendship. Punishment was uncalled for, as disobedience, demanding it, was unknown; and camp guard had long been a thing of the past. The men came and went almost at their pleasure."

But as the new men came in this idyllic situation changed?

"No pleasure or privilege for the boys in camp any more, for the hard lines and severe discipline of military necessity apply with a rigidness never before applied."
¹²

A Connecticut soldier called the 300 recruits his regiment got that winter "the most thorough-paced villains that the stews of New York and Baltimore could furnish—bounty-jumpers, thieves and cutthroats, who had deserted from regiment after regiment in which they had enlisted under fictitious names, and who now proposed to repeat the operation. And they
did
repeat it." Two hundred and fifty of the 300, he said, ran away within a few weeks.
¹³

In three years of war the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac had seen many things, but they had never seen anything like the habits and morals of these new comrades in arms. One veteran remembered listening, dumfounded, to the tales the new men told: "They never tired of relating the mysterious uses to which a 'jimmy' could be put by a man of nerve, and how easy it was to crack a bank or filch a purse. They robbed each other as freely as they did others. We noticed on their arrival that nearly every man had his pocket cut."

The bounty-jumpers had plenty of money, and when they were not picking one another's pockets they spent their spare time gambling. Poker had always been a favorite diversion of the private soldier, but the games that developed now were played for huge stakes, with professional cardsharps sitting in: "Thousands of dollars would change hands in one day's playing, and there were many ugly fights indulged in, caused by their cheating each other at cards." A man in the 13th Massachusetts wrote indignantly:

"We often talked over, among ourselves, this business of filling up a decent regiment with the outscourings of humanity; but the more we thought of it, the more discontented we became. We longed for a quiet night, and when day came we longed to be away from these ruffians."
¹⁴

Some of the new men found army life pleasant—three meals a day, lodging taken care of, plenty of chance to loaf—and instead of deserting they became old soldiers, in the traditional army meaning of the term, pretending to be sick or disabled so that they could avoid drill and take their ease in the hospital tents. Some claimed to have rheumatism so badly that they could not bend their knees. The doctors would chloroform such men, and while they were unconscious would manipulate their legs. If this indicated that nothing was actually wrong, the men when they came out from under the anesthetic would be sent back to camp on foot, guards walking close behind ready to jab them with bayonets if they faltered. An Illinois soldier recalled a man who spent weeks in hospital, insisting that one of his hip joints was crippled by some obscure malady. In desperation the hospital stewards one day strapped him to his cot and applied red-hot pokers to the hip. After the third application the man cried out in pain and admitted that he had been shamming. He was allowed to stay in hospital until the burns healed and then was sent back to duty.
¹⁵

An immense amount of work was required by the mere task of getting the new recruits from the enlistment centers to the army camps. Details of veterans were sent north to do guard duty at the recruit camps, and they quickly found that nothing but prison discipline would do.

In Boston Harbor there was an island on which new recruits were housed, uniformed, given some rudiments of drill, and assigned to different regiments. Men from the 22nd Massachusetts were sent up to guard this camp, and they found the work irksome. Day and night, every foot of the island's shore had to be patrolled to foil desertion. The shore was rocky and in winter the rocks were icy, and sentinels slipped and fell and wished fervently that they were back along the Rapidan. One man wrote fondly: "Large portions of Virginia are absolutely free from rocks." The veterans guarded the steamers which brought recruits to the island, and at the wharf they had to search all of the new men as they came ashore, seeing to it that no liquor or weapons were smuggled into camp. They took each recruit's money from him and deposited it with the provost marshal's clerk, for delivery when the man finally reached his regiment. It was held unwise to let the men have any money while they were on the island, for fear they would bribe their way to freedom.

One of the men who performed this guard duty wrote that "Some of the most noted, hardened and desperate villains in this country" were to be found among the recruits, and he said that to smuggle money past the guards these men would hide hundred-dollar bills in anything from hollow coat buttons to the inside of their ears.
¹⁶
A soldier who guarded a similar rendezvous at Hiker's Island, New York, wrote: "As for the conscripts, they were unspeakable," and asserted that many of them had to wear the ball and chain while they were waiting for assignment to combat regiments. An artillerist from the IX Corps, guarding replacements at a camp in Kentucky, wrote that he and his fellows "preferred to go into an engagement with the enemy rather than guard such a rabble," and a New Hampshire veteran who guarded recruits at Point Lookout, Maryland, said that "there were many desperate and dangerous criminals among them who would not hesitate to commit any crime that passion, avarice or revenge might incite them to." He remembered with glee one group of six which got hold of a rowboat and tried to escape in it. For punishment, four of the men were compelled to carry the row-boat around camp all day long, while their two fellows sat in it and industriously rowed in the empty air.
¹⁷