On
the outbreak of the American Civil War
the United States Army had 16,000 officers
and men. Of these, 313 officers left to join the Confederate
Army.
On 15th April, 1861, Abraham Lincoln
called on the governors of the Northern states to provide 75,000 militia
to serve for three months to put down the insurrection. Virginia,
North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee, all refused to send troops
and joined the Confederacy. Kentucky and Missouri were also unwilling
to supply men but decided not to take sides in the conflict.
Some states responded well to Lincoln's call for volunteers. The governor
of Pennsylvania offered 25 regiments, whereas Ohio provided 22. Most
men were encouraged to enlist by bounties offered by state governments.
This money attracted the poor and the unemployed. Many black Americans
also attempted to join the army. However, the War Department quickly
announced that it had "no intention to call into service of the
Government any coloured soldiers." Instead, black volunteers
were given jobs as camp attendants, waiters and cooks.
On 22nd July, 1861, Congress authorized a volunteer army of 500,000
men. Individual states were still responsible for equipping and outfitting
the soldiers. However, by the late summer numbers willing to volunteer
dropped dramatically. The Union Army also began to suffer from an
increasing number of desertions.
In January 1863 it was clear that state governors in the north could
not raise enough troops for the Union Army.
On 3rd March, the federal government passed the Enrollment
Act. This was the first example of conscription or compulsory
military service in United States history. The decision to allow men
to avoid the draft by paying $300 to hire a substitute, resulted in
the accusation that this was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
Abraham Lincoln was also now ready to
give his approval to the formation of black
regiments. He had objected in May, 1862, when General David
Hunter began enlisting black soldiers into the 1st South Carolina
(African Descent) regiment. However, nothing was said when Hunter
created two more black regiments in 1863.
John Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts,
and a passionate opponent of slavery,
began recruiting black soldiers and established the 5th Massachusetts
(Colored) Cavalry Regiment and the 54th Massachusetts (Colored) and
the 55th Massachusetts (Colored) Infantry Regiments.
The Enrollment Act resulted in Draft
Riots in several American cities. There was heavy loss of life
in Detroit but the worst rioting took
place in New York City in July. The mob
set fire to an African American church and orphanage, and attacked
the office of the New
York Tribune. Started by Irish
immigrants, the main victims were African Americans and activists
in the anti-slavery movement. The Union
Army were sent in and had to open fire on the rioters in order
to gain control of the city. By the time the riot was over, nearly
a 1,000 people had been killed or wounded.
It is estimated that of those who took part in the American
Civil War, 75,215 were regulars, 1,933,779 were volunteers and
46,347 were drafted and 73,600 were substitutes. Over 250,000 men
were honorably discharged for physical disability arising from wounds,
accidents or disease in the service. Officially, 201,397 men deserted,
of which 76,526 were arrested and returned to their regiments.
Of the 2,128,948 men who served in the Union Army a total of 359,528
were known to have died. This included 67,058 men who were killed
in action, 43,012 who died of their wounds and 224,586 were the victims
of disease. Another 24,872 were killed in accidents or died from other
causes.
William B. Hyde,
9th New York Cavalry.
(1)
Oliver Howard remembers going home for
the first time after deciding to join the Union
Army in May, 1861.
Before entering my front gate, I raised
my eyes and saw the picture of my little family framed in by the window.
Home, family, comfort, beauty, joy, love were crowded into an instant
of thought and feeling, as I sprang through the door and quickly ascended
the stairway.
My wife was patriotic, strong for the integrity of the Union, full
of the heroic spirit, so when the crisis came, though so sudden and
hard to bear, she said not one adverse word. I saw her watch me as
I descended the slope toward the ferry landing, looked back, and waved
my hat as I disappeared behind the ledge and trees.
(2)
Oliver Howard described taking
his regiment, Third Maine Volunteers, on the way to Washington
in June, 1861.
At railroad stations in
Maine, on the approach and departure of our trains, there was abundant
cheering and words of encouragement. However, here and there were
discordant cries. Few, indeed, were the villages where no voice of
opposition was raised. But, later in the war, in the free States after
the wounding and the death of fathers, brothers, and sons, our sensitive,
afflicted home people would not tolerate what they called traitorous
talk.
(3)
Frank
Wilkeson, who fought in the Union Army, later wrote
about his experiences in Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a
Private Soldier (1887)
Wounded soldiers almost always tore their
clothing away from their wounds so as to see them and to judge of
their character. Many of them would smile and their faces would brighten
as they realised that they were not hard hit and they would go home
for a few months. Others would give a quick glance at their wounds
and then shrink back as from a blow, and turn pale as they realised
the truth that they were mortally wounded. The enlisted men were exceedingly
accurate judges of the probable result which would ensue from any
wound they saw. They had seen hundreds of soldiers wounded, and they
had noticed that certain wounds always resulted in death. After the
shock of discovery had passed, they generally braced themselves and
died in a manly manner.
Near Spotsylvania I saw, as my battery was moving into action, a group
of wounded men lying in the shade cast by some large oak trees. All
of these men's faces were gray. They silently looked at us as we marched
past them. One wounded man, a blond giant of about forty years, was
smoking a short briarwood pipe. He had a firm grip on the pipestem.
I asked him what he was doing. "Having my last smoke, young fellow,"
he replied. His dauntless blue eyes met mine, and he bravely tried
to smile. I saw he was dying fast. Another of these wounded men was
trying to read a letter. He was too weak to hold it, or maybe his
sight was clouded. He thrust it unread into the breast pocket of his
blouse and lay back with a moan.
This group of wounded men numbered fifteen or twenty. At the time,
I thought that all of them were fatally wounded and that there was
no use in the surgeons wasting time on them, when men who could be
saved were clamoring for their skillful attention. None of these soldiers
cried aloud, none called on wife, or mother, or father. They lay on
the ground, palefaced, and with set jaws, waiting for their end. When
my battery returned from the front, five or six hours afterward, almost
all of these men were dead.
Long before the campaign was over I concluded that dying soldiers
seldom called on those who were dearest to them, seldom conjured their
Northern or Southern homes, until they became delirious. Then, when
their minds wandered and fluttered at the approach of freedom, they
babbled of their homes. Some were boys again and were fishing in Northern
trout streams. Some were generals leading their men to victory. Some
were with their wives and children. Some wandered over the family's
homestead; but all, with rare exceptions, were delirious.
(4)
Benjamin F. Butler, Autobiography
and Reminiscences (1892)
In the spring of 1863, I had another
conversation with President Lincoln upon the subject of the employment
of negroes. The question was, whether all the negro troops then enlisted
and organized should be collected together and made a part of the
Army of the Potomac and thus reinforce it.
We then talked of a favourite project he had of getting rid of the
negroes by colonization, and he asked me what I thought of it. I told
him that it was simply impossible; that the negroes would not go away,
for they loved their homes as much as the rest of us, and all efforts
at colonization would not make a substantial impression upon the number
of negroes in the country.
Reverting to the subject of arming the negroes, I said to him that
it might be possible to start with a sufficient army of white troops,
and, avoiding a march which might deplete their ranks by death and
sickness, to take in ships and land them somewhere on the Southern
coast. These troops could then come up through the Confederacy, gathering
up negroes, who could be armed at first with arms that they could
handle, so as to defend themselves and aid the rest of the army in
case of rebel charges upon it. In this way we could establish ourselves
down there with an army that would be a terror to the whole South.
Our conversation then turned upon another subject which had been frequently
a source of discussion between us, and that was the effect of his
clemency in not having deserters speedily and universally punished
by death.
I called his attention to the fact that the great bounties then being
offered were such a temptation for a man to desert in order to get
home and enlist in another corps where he would be safe from punishment,
that the army was being continually depleted at the front even if
replenished at the rear.
He answered with a sorrowful face, which always came over him when
he discussed this topic: "But I can't do that, General."
"Well, then," I replied, "I would throw the responsibility
upon the general-in-chief and relieve myself of of it personally."
With a still deeper shade of sorrow he answered: "The responsibility
would be mine, all the same."
(5)
After being badly wounded at Fair
Oaks, General Oliver
Howard
was taken to a large house that had been converted into a Union Army
hospital.
Dr. Hammond, my personal friend, met me
near the house, saw the blood, touched my arm, and said: "General,
your arm is broken." The last ball had passed through the elbow
joint and crushed the bones into small fragments. He led me to a negro
hut, large enough only for a double bed. Here I lay down, alarming
an aged negro couple who feared at first that some of us might discover
and seize hidden treasure which was in that bed.
My brigade surgeon,
Dr. Palmer, and several others soon stood by my bedside in consultation.
At last Dr. Palmer, with serious face, kindly told me that my arm
had better come off. "All right, go ahead," I said.
"Not before 5 p.m., general." "Why not?" "Reaction
must set in." So I had to wait six hours. I had received the
second wound about half-past ten. I had reached the house about eleven,
and in some weakness and discomfort occupied the negro cabin till
the hour appointed. At that time Dr. Palmer came with four stout soldiers
and a significant stretcher. The doctor put around the arm close to
the shoulder the tourniquet, screwing it tighter and tighter above
the wound. They then bore me to the amputating room, a place a little
gruesome with arms, legs, and hands not yet all carried off, and poor
fellows with anxious eyes waiting their turn.
On the long table I was nicely bolstered; Dr. Grant, who had come
from the front, relieved the too-tight tourniquet. A mixture of chloroform
and gas was administered and I slept quietly. Dr. Palmer amputated
the arm above the elbow. When I awoke I was surprised to find the
heavy burden was gone.
(6)
Army surgeons normally used chloroform to send soldiers asleep while
they amputated their limbs. James Winchell, a soldier in the Army
of the Potomac, recorded after the war how he had his arm amputated
while he was fully conscious.
Surgeon White came to me and said: "Young
man, are you going to have your arm taken off or are you going to
lie here and let the maggots eat you up?" I asked if he had any
chloroform or quinone or whisky, to which he replied "No, and
I have no time to dilly-dally with you." I said it was hard,
but to go ahead and take it off. He got hold of my arm, pulled the
bandage off, pushed his thumb through the wound and told me to "come
on", and helping me up we walked to the amputation table. They
put me on the table, cut off blouse and shirt sleeves filled with
maggots, and after a lot of preliminary poking and careless feeling
around my arm and shoulder they made me sit up in a chair, and wanted
to hold my legs, but I said "No, I won't kick you." I set
my teeth together and clinched my hand into my hair, and told them
to go on. After cutting the top part of my arm and taking out the
bone, they wanted me to rest an hour or so; to which I refused. I
wanted but one job to it. Then they finished it, while I grasped for
breath and the lower jaw dropped in spite of my firm clinch. I was
then led away a short distance and left to lie on the hot sand.
(7)
George Norris wrote about his brother
John Norris in his autobiography Fighting Liberal (1945)
From the opening weeks of the Civil War - from Fort Sumter and Bull
Run - my mother lived daily in fear John would enlist in the Union
army. She decided to exact from him a promise not to enter the armed
service. That gave her a temporary peace of mind; and then when John,
no longer able to bear the spectacle of his friends marching off in
uniform, went off like them, she gave herself the luxury of a few
tears in my presence as she went about her household tasks.
In maturity I could understand
John's struggle with himself. He had been raised in a rigid and unswerving
devotion to all
promises. A promise made was a promise to be kept. Undoubtedly it
was with great effort that he told mother of his decision to enlist.
My mother, like all mothers, hated war; but at the time I thought
it was John's failure to keep his word to her that caused my mother's
sharpest grief. Never before had he broken a promise. It was on this
record of obedience that she had rested confidently.
When he went away she
watched the mails for letters that came from him, with long waits
in between. She treasured those letters more than any other possession,
reading and re-reading them, and then tying them in a packet with
red ribbon and placing them away carefully in a tin box. Red ribbon
was scarce in that impoverished household of girls.
There was the initial
shock when the news came that John had been wounded in the Battle
of Resaca which preceded Sherman's triumphant entry into Atlanta.
But the message itself was reassurring; a bullet had pierced his leg,
and the wound did not appear to be serious. He had written that after
receiving medical care he had been able to rejoin his company without
delay and would continue the march, nearing its end. Then word arrived
of his death from infection which had set in. And while he was sinking
he wrote mother a letter seemingly inspired by the knowledge death
was near.
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