Those Who Have Borne the Battle (8 page)

According to McPherson, unlike other historic armies, “Religious fanaticism and ethnic hatreds played almost no role” in providing motivation to serve in this war. The authoritarian controls of the modern military were less common in the volunteer commands. “Discipline was notoriously lax in Civil War volunteer regiments. Training was minimal by modern standards.” In explaining unit cohesion, endurance, and sacrifice, he makes a case for “the complex mixture of patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood, and community or peer pressure.”
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Still, these enlistees had to fight in an extended and brutal war. A recent comprehensive assessment of men in combat acknowledges that ideology may motivate men to volunteer, but it is not a factor in battle: “Ideology is simply disconnected from behavior when the bullets and shrapnel are flying.”
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Following an extensive review of letters that Union and Confederate soldiers wrote home, McPherson concluded, “A large number of those men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them.” He insisted that this concern was motivated by a commitment to their cause. “In the Civil War patriotism was not the last refuge of the scoundrel; it was the credo of the fighting soldier.”
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It is a compelling story, and there are no polls to challenge—or corroborate—it. Surely, there are problems with letters as a source; they may not be the best forum for honest self-assessment or for candid comments about motive and purpose. Despite this, they provide some critical records and important insights.

Even near the end of the war, when men had been beaten down, seen heavy human losses, suffered from wounds and illness, marched too far and slept too little, missing their homes and families all the while, Union
soldiers were still motivated by a sense of honor and a commitment to duty. Confederates talked of the same things, of liberty and of freedom for their states—of protecting the South from being a subordinate colony dominated by the North. Both Northerners and Southerners insisted that they were defending the legacy of the American Revolution. In fact, slavery was always the dominant factor in explaining what the fight was all about. It is just that fewer discussed it.
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As the war continued and as the casualties mounted, both the Union and the Confederacy needed to expand their mobilization and extend the enlistment terms of early volunteers. Northern states were usually quite successful in meeting their quotas and sent to the Union forces units carrying their state colors and banners. In the South, one estimate is that half of the adult white males served in the army—John W. Chambers called this a mobilization “never before matched in American history and seldom equaled in any nation.” The Confederate states utilized volunteers but found this source inadequate, so by 1862 they switched to a conscription system to fill the ranks. In the end, about one-fifth of the Confederate troops were conscripted—with the fee for hiring a substitute set so high that only the wealthiest Southerners could escape this summons.
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The draft came later in the North—partially because the population base was so much larger and because the Union government had more money to provide as a bounty payment to “volunteers.” In March 1863, however, Congress did approve an “enrollment” act—following lengthy discussion, including some deeply held reservations about the meaning and consequences of empowering a government with the coercive authority to command military service from its citizens.

Even though the state volunteer units were nationalized under Union command during their service, they were still fundamentally state organizations. In order to organize the conscripts, the legislation provided for a new concept, the “national forces,” and mandated that all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five were liable to be called to service at the summons of the president. All immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens were subject to these provisions as well. Implementing the lotteries that were to select the draftees
became very difficult in some jurisdictions, leading to bloody draft riots in New York City and Boston. Some Union regiments were even dispatched to New York from the field at Gettysburg to help suppress the riots there.
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The initial draft legislation was not adequate to meet manpower goals, because many who were summoned simply ignored the call. Subsequent legislation provided more effective, coercive conscription tools while expanding the pools of those eligible to include more foreign immigrants as well as black Northerners. Despite all of this, only about 8 percent of the Union army came from conscription—and the majority of these “draftees” were actually substitutes, hired under the provisions of the law by those who were summoned through lottery and had the financial means to provide a surrogate.

The Civil War draft was in many ways a complicated, politically embarrassing system—and many considered those who were mobilized in this manner second-class soldiers. These were not the volunteers, the vaunted “citizen soldiers” of American memory. Left unsaid in postwar celebrations of their service was that “volunteers” often received very generous enlistment bonuses. Some who joined did so only following tremendous social pressure. These expedients did not necessarily fit into the national narrative of men fulfilling the duty of citizens to the Republic. The expense of these significant bounties or bonuses and the embarrassment of hired substitutes were such that the government never used these measures again following the Civil War.
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The Civil War was a transitional war for Americans in many ways. As it became clear it would be a prolonged war, it tested the capacity of both North and South to mobilize and maintain armies in the field. This required more than the rapid mobilization, engagement, and then hasty demobilization of volunteer forces, which had been the pattern for nonregular troops in all previous American wars. The need for financial incentives and even conscription to meet extended manpower needs might have tarnished the image of citizen soldiers responding to the patriotic call. But it didn't.

George Washington in the 1770s had warned that a nation could not depend upon patriotism alone to provide the sacrifice that military service required: “Motives of public virtue may for a time . . . actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested, but they were not of themselves sufficient to produce a persevering conformity to the redefined dictates and obligations of social duty.” Patriotism may have led officers to enlist at the outset of the Revolution, but it was not sufficient. As Washington's political ally Noah Webster more directly put it: “The truth is, no person will labour without reward—Patriotism is but a poor substitute for food and clothing, but a much poorer substitute for Cash.” Webster was defending pensions for Revolutionary War officers at the time he wrote this and noted that if, indeed, public virtue was what had motivated the officers, then “patriotism deserves some uncommon reward.”
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In the winter of 1863–1864, 136,000 Union volunteers whose initial three-year enlistment was ending agreed to reenlist. This decision was facilitated by $400 federal bonuses, plus whatever state and local bounties were offered, a thirty-five-day furlough, and a special chevron for their uniforms. This reenlistment bonus was considerable: in 1860 the average annual income of nonfarm employees was $363, and for farm laborers it was less than half of that amount. Each of the volunteer units was able to keep its identity if three-quarters of its troops reenlisted—thus putting great peer pressure on holdouts. McPherson has insisted that the financial rewards, while important, were for many soldiers not as important as their conviction and commitment to finish the war successfully. As one indicator of this commitment to the Union cause, he points to the presidential election of 1864, when the choice was a vote between Lincoln and completing the task or the Democratic opponent, former general George McClellan, and a negotiated peace. Faced with these choices, McPherson noted that 78 percent of Union soldiers voted for Lincoln, even though nearly half of them came from Democratic backgrounds.
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The size of the Union army in April 1865 was 1,056,000. Because of the turnover due to short-term volunteer enlistments and the impact of casualties who were lost to service, more than 2.2 million served in the Union army or navy for some period during hostilities. The navy never exceeded 44,000. Approximately one-quarter of the “volunteers” were
foreign born, with German and Irish Americans representing more than two-thirds of this group. The size of the “regular” army had not exceeded 25,000 during the war. Obviously, by war's end there were fewer things differentiating regulars from volunteers in terms of their experiences. Only the regulars had an ongoing obligation. There are some further descriptions that profile the Civil War troops. The average age of Union soldiers was 25.8 and for Confederates 26.5. Thirty percent of Union and 36 percent of Confederate soldiers were married. The greatest number of white Union soldiers were from the Midwest, more than 40 percent of the total. More than 47 percent of the white Union soldiers were farmers, with 16 percent unskilled workers and 25 percent skilled workers.
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Black Americans had served in the armed forces beginning with the American Revolution. Faced with a manpower crisis, George Washington had rescinded an earlier order that did not allow their service. In the War of 1812 blacks had served in significant numbers in the navy and had been with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.
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In April 1865 some 120,000 of the soldiers in the army, more than 12 percent, were “Colored Troops.” The navy had an even higher percentage of African Americans than the army.
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For the remainder of the nineteenth century, in the Great Plains Indian Wars and in the Spanish-American War, black troops, regulars, would serve professionally and courageously. Unfortunately, by World War I, Jim Crow culture would restrict their options and distort their actual and potential contributions as soldiers.

 

 

The massive demobilization of the Union forces began in the spring of 1865, shortly after General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant of the Army of the Potomac at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. The Confederate soldiers stacked their arms and went home. General Grant provided some food rations and allowed the soldiers in Lee's army to keep their horses and mules. Within days the remaining Confederate forces surrendered or simply left the field. The War Department determined that the US Army would be maintained at 50,000 officers and enlisted men, actually larger than the regular force
during the war. By 1875, as needs for occupation forces in the South seemed to lessen and especially as Northern politicians drew back from Reconstruction efforts in the old Confederacy, the army was authorized at 25,000. This was a fraction of the size of European armies, but Americans were of a mind that there was but a fraction of the need for a standing army.
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From the Civil War to the end of the century, Americans were captivated by their own growth, by urbanization and industrialization, and by the settlement of the final Great Plains frontier. While it was a period in which militia units were often called up to police strikes and to deal with problems of civil unrest, with the exception of the Spanish-American War, it was only the occupation of the last frontier that would engage a standing army. The causes and conduct of many of the “Indian Wars” are questionable today. But there were several instances where the mounted-warrior culture of the plains tribes held their own against the army. This, however, might happen only for a battle or a short campaign. The end result could never have been doubted. It was a violent time. Robert Wooster calculates that between 1866 and 1873, the army engaged in 589 confrontations with the Indians, resulting the in the deaths of 367 soldiers. There is no good count of the Indians killed, including women and children; it was substantially more.
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As the nation prepared for the centennial on July 4, 1876, word came back that on a hill sloping down to the Little Big Horn River in Montana Territory, a Seventh Cavalry regiment unit commanded by Colonel George Custer had been defeated—with no survivors. The losses were as many as 215 men, including scouts and civilians accompanying the unit. Custer was foolish and arrogant, a common-enough human condition perhaps, but always potentially lethal when commanding men in battle. The army was shaken, and the nation found it hard to believe that such a thing could happen in such a strong and confident republic. The army and the country having lost this battle nonetheless shortly won the war. And once the Great Sioux Wars were over, the budget cutters moved against the army.

In the centennial as in the founding year, there was little disposition to sustain a standing army in peacetime (the Democrats and Southerners
had a particular animus toward the army). There were other engagements in the West, ending in the tragic massacre by US Army troops of more than 300 Sioux Indians, largely women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in December 1890. With this the Indian “wars” were effectively finished.
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The regular army stood at about 28,000 officers and men when the Spanish-American War began in 1898. President William McKinley ordered immediate mobilization, first calling for 125,000 volunteers and then adding another 75,000 within weeks. The new volunteers included a new organizational category, federal volunteers, as compared to the traditional and still dominant state volunteer units. The most prominent of the federal volunteer units was Theodore Roosevelt's “Rough Riders” (actually Leonard Wood was the commanding officer). Federal and state volunteers proved a major part of the force obviously, even as the military operations depended upon the regular forces. The regulars were seasoned veterans, including Civil War officers and men who had served on the frontier.