A Stillness at Appomattox (6 page)

A steamship transporting these recruits from New York or Boston to Virginia was usually a floating bedlam. The steamer's civilian crew, more often than not, would be in league with the bounty-jumpers, and sometimes the officers likewise had been bribed, and whisky would be hidden in coal bunkers, in staterooms, and in odd corners below decks. Winter storms being common, hatches were usually battened down as soon as the vessel sailed, and the hold was jammed with desperate unwashed men, most of them seasick and the rest of them drunk, high-stake card games going on in the smoking light of swaying lanterns, bitter fights taking place as the more defenseless recruits were openly robbed. Some fairly important money would be involved, on these trips; a draft of a few hundred men each carrying his bounty might easily have a quarter of a million dollars in cash in its collective possession. Sometimes a group of these replacements would try to mutiny, and then the veterans with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets would go into action. When the steamers came up Chesapeake Bay or the Potomac, and land was not far away, men would spring from the decks to swim ashore, and at such times the guards would coolly fire, reload, and fire again until the swimmer sank out of sight in a little swirl of bloody water.
¹⁸

Early in this winter of 1864 a teen-ager in upstate New York enlisted in a battery of field artillery—a veteran battery on duty in Virginia which had sent back for a few replacements—and to his amazement as soon as he had signed the papers he was put in a penitentiary building at Albany, the army having chosen this place as the only suitable depot for its new recruits. He found approximately a thousand draftees and bounty-jumpers there, closely guarded by double lines of sentinels, and he appears to have been about the only man in the lot who had joined up for love of country.

"If there was a man in all that shameless crew who had enlisted from patriotic motives, I did not see him," he wrote afterward. "There was not a man of them who was not eager to run away, not a man who did not quake when he thought of the front. Almost to a man they were bullies and cowards, and almost to a man they belonged to the criminal classes."

In due time orders came to send 600 of these men down to the Army of the Potomac. After roll call there was a frantic scurrying for cover. Some men cut open their straw mattresses and crept inside to hide. Others hid under bunks, or in latrines. One man was fished out of a huge garbage can in the mess hall, where he had burrowed down under coffee grounds and other oddments. He was kicked down a flight of stairs and prodded out to the parade ground with bayonets. When the detail at last was formed, an officer stepped out and announced that any man who tried to run away during the trip would be shot.

The officer's word was good. Three men were shot dead as the crowd marched through Albany to the steamboat wharf. Two more, who jumped from the steamer as it went down the Hudson, were shot in midstream. Four more were shot in New York, as the men were marched from one pier to another. After the steamer finally unloaded its consignment at Alexandria and the men were put on freight cars to go to the front, five men tried to escape from the moving train and were shot dead. All in all, the young recruit said that his associates were "as arrant a gang of cowards, thieves, murderers and blacklegs as were ever gathered inside the walls of Newgate or Sing Sing."
¹⁹

Recruits like these helped to spoil some men who were already in the army and who might otherwise have behaved fairly well. Every regiment had its quota of scapegraces who were always on hand at mess call but who worked or fought only under compulsion. They tended to follow the lead of the worst elements in camp, and the worst elements now were about as bad as they could be. A veteran in one of Phil Kearny's old regiments left his own classification of the different varieties of worthless soldier to be found in the army:

"I
will explain here and make a few remarks about shirks, bummers, sneaks and thieves, all called camp followers. The first is a man that when the army comes up, and is expecting that every man will do his duty, now that we are ready to meet the enemy, he looks around to see if any of his comrades are watching him and
drops
to the rear—deserts his comrades an time of danger. He then becomes a bummer, and prowls around, and will do anything to keep himself away from danger in the ranks. He then becomes a sneak and tries to get
an ambulance to drive, or 'sich’
After that he becomes the thief, and will steal from friend and foe alike, and is devoid of all principle. Reader, look around you, and see if there is such men in your midst. Shun them as you would a viper, and show to them that they are despised in private life by their neighbors as they were in the army by their comrades."
²⁰

There undoubtedly is exaggeration in some of these accounts. The old-timers in the Army of the Potomac disliked conscripts and utterly despised high-bounty men, and in writing about such people they were not likely to remember anything good about them if they could help it. Certainly the army that winter did get some recruits who made good soldiers. One veteran, admitting that the army as a whole was not as good as it had been a year earlier, asserted that the old battalions were still superb even when they had absorbed fairly large numbers of replacements. Some states sent down whole ne
w regiments, and while these 'h
igh-number" regiments were never accounted the equals of the ones with lower numbers, which had enlisted in 1861 or 1862, several of them made excellent records. The Irish Brigade brought its five regiments up to full strength early in 1864, and it got fighters. Most of the IX Corps regiments filled their ranks during the winter—the corps had been serving in Tennessee, and when it was brought East the regiments were given a chance to go home and do their own recruiting—and the corps does not seem to have lost its old fighting quality with the transfusion. It would undoubtedly be a strong overstatement to say that all of the men brought in by draft and bounty were useless.
²¹
Yet if there is exaggeration in the complaints there is not very much exaggeration. The testimony about the evils which the high-bounty system caused is unanimous, and it comes from high officers as well as from private soldiers. The provost marshal general of the army, in a report written at the end of the war, said flatly that "the bounty was meant to be an inducement to enlistment; it became, in fact, an inducement to desertion and fraudulent re-enlistment." He pointed out that the states paying the highest bounties were precisely the ones with the largest proportion of deserters, and emphasized that desertions all through 1864 reached the astounding average of 7,300 each month. Not only was this a prodigious rise over all former figures; it meant that in the long run the army lost nearly as many men through desertion as it lost in battle casualties.
²²

For a long time the Confederate authorities made a distinction between Federal deserters who voluntarily came into their lines and soldiers who were captured in battle, and to the former they offered jobs in war plants and freedom from restraint. In the spring of 1864, however, they concluded that it was no go. The deserters were pure riff-raff, of no more use in a Richmond factory than in the Union Army, and one day the Richmond papers announced that henceforth all such would be locked up in prison camps along with soldiers taken in action. The colonel of a Connecticut regiment got a copy of a paper containing that a
nnouncement, and waved it hap
pily in front of his men, declaring:

"The colonel commanding hopes that all the scoundrels who desire to desert to the enemy after swindling the government out of heavy bounties have already left us"; but in case a few still remained he would read the Confederate announcement, which he did, adding that a prospective deserter ought to realize that "neither army considers him fit to be trusted anywhere, or able to earn his living." Since prisoners of war were subject to exchange, the colonel reminded his men that deserters might some day find themselves back with their regiment. If that happened, he said, they would be shot.
²³

What all of this meant was that the Army of the Potomac had to take on Regular Army discipline. The Regulars were used to hard cases and knew how to handle them. In ordinary times a Regular regiment would expect to lose perhaps a fourth of its men through desertion, but it could turn the rest into fighters. Now the volunteer regiments were following suit, caste lines were hardening, and discipline was enforced by brutality.

The artillerists led the way. The volunteer batteries had always had more of a Regular Army flavor than the infantry regiments, possibly becau
se in the early days General Mc
Clellan had taken pains to brigade one regular battery with every three batteries of volunteers, and the force of example had been strong. In any case, the gunners this winter were pounding their recruits into shape, hurting them with cold ferocity when they needed correction. Their favorite punishment centered around the fact that every artillery caisson carried a spare wheel, mounted at the rear of the caisson a couple of feet off the ground at a slight angle from the vertical. An insubordinate artillerist was made to step on the lower rim of this wheel, and then he was spread-eagled, wrists and ankles firmly lashed to the rim. This done, the wheel was given a quarter turn so that the man was in effect suspended by one wrist and one ankle. He would be left in this position for several hours, and if he cried out in pain—as he usually did, before long—a rough stick was tied in his mouth for a gag.

Even worse was being tied on the rack. At the rear end of every battery wagon was a heavy rack for forage—a stout wooden box, running across t
he end of the wagon and protract
ing a couple of feet back of the rear wheels. The man who was up for punishment was made to stand with his chest against this rack while his wrists were tied to the upper rims of the wheels. Then his feet were lifted and tied to the lower rims, so that he was left hanging with all of his weight pressing against the sharp wooden edge of the rack. He was always gagged first, because not even the toughest customer could stand this punishment without screaming. The man generally fainted after a few minutes of it, and some men were permanently disabled. One gunner recalled that men sentenced to the rack sometimes begged to be shot instead.
²⁴

The infantry had no spare wheels or forage racks, but it had its little ways. Commonest punishment was the "buck and gag." The erring soldier was made to sit on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands clasped over his shins. After his wrists were bound together a heavy stick was thrust under his knees and over his arms, and a gag was tied
in
his mouth. He was then left to sit there for some hours, suffering no extreme of pain but utterly helpless and voiceless, enduring cramps, thirst, and the jibes of unfeeling soldiers. It was also found effective to tie a man by his thumbs to the branch of a tree, pulling him just high enough so that he could keep his thumbs from being torn out of joint only by standing
on
tiptoe.

In a way there was nothing new about all of this. Brutal punishments had always been on tap, but hitherto they had hardly amounted to more than the army's backhanded way of cuffing the ne'er-do-wells and misfits who had found their way into the ranks. Now the harshness was becoming central. An important number of soldiers responded to that sort of language, and therefore it was being addressed to all of the soldiers. There was a new tone to the army. The old spirit had been diluted and the old ways had changed. The veterans drew closer together, seeming almost to be aliens in the army which they themselves had created.

And the great danger now was that the veterans might presently get out of the army altogether and leave everything to the newcomers. Under the law they might do this, and nobody could stop them, and if that happened the war was lost forever, because conscripts and bounty men could not make Robert E. Lee's incomparable soldiers even pause to take a deep breath.

Federal regiments in the Civil War enlisted, usually, for three years. There had been a number of nine-month regiments, earlier, and some had come in to do a two-year hitch, but the three-year enlistment was the rule. Now the time was running out. The old 1861 regiments had just about finished their terms. In May and June and July and August they would come to the end of their enlistments, and under the law there was no way to compel their members to remain in service if they did not choose to remain.

Fighting was expected to begin in April or May. The prospect, therefore, was that just as the campaign got well under way the army would begin to fall apart. The army authorities could see this coming but there was nothing on earth they could do to keep it from happening except go to the veterans —hat in hand, so to speak—and beg them to re-enlist.

The big thing was to get them to re-enlist as regiments, and inducements were offered. If three fourths of the men in any regiment would re-enlist, the regiment could go home as a unit for a thirty-day furlough, and when it got back to camp it would keep its organization, its regimental number, its flag, and so on. In addition, the veterans would be cut in on some of this bounty money. Adding state and Federal bounties together, the average soldier who signed on for a second enlistment would get about $700, on which he might have quite a time for himself during that month's furlough. So the authorities put on a big campaign, and the old regiments were called together and cajoled and orated to, and the men observed that on such occasions a good deal of whisky seemed to be available for the thirsty.