Blood and Daring (21 page)

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.
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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.
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On the morning of December 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.
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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:

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Governor General Monck and British minister Lyons 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.
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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.”
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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.

As the war progressed and the need for recruits increased, the issue of Canadians and Maritimers being forced into service became a more serious problem. For instance, in January 1863, Ebenezer Tyler was asleep in his house on Wolfe Island, not far from Kingston, when a group of armed American soldiers led by Captain Haddock arrived by boat, pulled Tyler from his bed, and ferried him to New York.
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Haddock claimed Tyler was an American deserter. Tyler insisted he was a native Canadian who had never left his homeland. He was nonetheless pressed into uniform and shipped away.

Tyler managed to contact a British consul and Lord Lyons was soon in Seward’s office. Monck and Lyons were at that moment dealing with a number of cases of Canadians being either mistaken for American deserters or flagrantly kidnapped and forced into military service. The Tyler case seemed cut and dried, and Lyons demanded action.

Seward reluctantly agreed. He issued a statement that referred to the Tyler case as a “violation of the sovereignty of a friendly state.”
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He understood the enthusiasm that had led to the soldiers doing what they did, but chastised them for having done it. Seward took the matter to Lincoln, who personally promised that Haddock would be dishonourably discharged and Tyler would be allowed to leave his regiment and return home to Canada.
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Tyler was soon home with his family.

The Tyler case was unique only for its happy ending for, like him, many Canadians and Maritimers came to know the process of crimping. Crimping is not immoral or illegal, as it refers simply to encouraging and helping someone to enter military service. The word assumes a menacing and pejorative turn, however, when implying that men are unwillingly enlisted through trickery, force, or the threat or actual use of violence. That form of crimping became common practice.

Lincoln’s 1862 Militia Act had fuelled crimping in Canada and the Maritimes, but his Enrollment Act in March 1863 made it increasingly common, open and aggressive. The law established new quotas for Northern congressional districts and provided greater cash incentives for enlistment. The federal government offered $100 for each and every man between the ages of twenty and forty-five. When local and state governments chipped in, the total bounty often became $300, and in some places as high as $500. The sums were quite generous, as they equalled most men’s annual income. The new law continued the allowance of a $300 commutation or substitution fee for those whose means outpaced their patriotism. With the news of battlefield carnage and Matthew Brady’s stunning photographs making it all so real for those at home, the market for young men willing to serve as substitutes rose—and with it the ruthlessness of unscrupulous crimpers filling their pockets by filling demand.

Initial attempts to implement the draft had met with protests, and riots broke out in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin. The worst riots tore up New York City streets for five days and nights. Poor New Yorkers attacked the homes and businesses of the rich who could afford commutation fees. African-Americans were beaten up and some lynched. The city’s large Irish community acted against other ethnic minorities and African-Americans who were seen as economic competitors. The violence subsided only with the arrival of five regiments of soldiers rushed in from Gettysburg.

Despite the riots and simmering opposition, by the fall of 1863 enlistments began to trend up. Meanwhile, many young men recognized a chance to turn a profit and began to shop around and offer themselves to provost marshals offering the highest reward.
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Others began bounty jumping; that is, they enlisted in one community, collected the bounty, deserted, enlisted in another, and then started all over again.