Circa1865

Yankee Deserters

“The rigor of treating Yankee deserters as prisoners of war appears to have relaxed during the winter of 1862-1863 when so large a number of them had accumulated in the military prisons that the Secretary of War gave instructions to allow such of them as were willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States of America, and then to permit them to seek work where it could be found.

Accordingly, a number were employed by a director of the Tredegar Works at Richmond, who forwarded them to labor in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where their presence duly alarmed the Confederate House of Representatives.

Somewhat more than a year later, in June 1864, an enrolling officer attempted to conscript some Yankee deserters, who, under an oath of neutrality, preferable to an oath of allegiance as it could not be broken by conscription, had secured work near Salisbury, North Carolina, where their conduct had been unexceptional, against the protest of the captain commanding the post.

The War Department, as consistency demanded, discharged the men as protected by their oath of neutrality. But at the same time there were deserters from the northern army who preferred to be treated as prisoners of war.

Beginning with the middle of 1862 a distinct effort was made by Confederate State authorities to encourage desertion from the north’s armies. It was at first directed to the inhabitants of Tennessee in the hope of detaching the State from northern strength to at least neutrality.

General Lee was not mistaken in believing that the Confederacy’s offer of stimulating deserters with release to the north – many printed in German – so that they may spread the story of kind treatment from Southerners.

Grant admitted in a statement that bounty and substitute men had been deserting immediately upon their arrival at the front to take advantage of the Confederacy’s offer to send them through the lines. The Richmond papers on September 4, 1864, announced that several hundred Federal deserters had already availed themselves of the offer and were waiting to be sent north. It may possibly have affected several thousand soldiers all told.

(Desertion During the Civil War, Ella Lonn. Bison Books, 1998 (original 1928). pp. 184-185; 190-191)

“[The] fact remains that that the Civil War was a political and constitutional watershed in United States history. Although the Civil War draft was primarily an inducement to volunteering [with ample financial incentives], the arbitrary arrests [of civilians] and first use of [a clearly unconstitutional] national conscription established important precedents. Economically, power shifted toward the industrialized North.  Moreover, at war’s end the very concept of State sovereignty established by the Founders had little meaning.

As Professor William B. Hesseltine said many years later, it was a “war against the States, both North and South. Within half a century after Appomattox, the federal government began to regulate certain businesses and introduced a graduated income tax. These innovations would have been inconceivable prior to 1860.” Larry Gara, Wilmington College.

(Review of “The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front,” J. Matthew Gallman (Dee Publishing, 1994. Published in Civil War History – A Journal of the Middle Period, Vol. 42, No. 3. September 1996).

$300 Patriots and Deserters

“As a sideline to his regular clothing business, [John N.] Eitel was a recruitment broker. During the Civil War, recruitment for the [north’s] armed services fell largely into private hands. The government itself at first encouraged private recruiting by offering a two-dollar premium to any person who brought in a recruit who was accepted into service.

Gradually this led to private brokers all but taking over the supply side of the recruiting system. And nowhere were they more active than New York City, where the New York County Board of Supervisors offered a $300 bounty for volunteers and permitted another committee to use private brokers for distribution of the bounties. When a man volunteered in New York, the broker who brought him in paid the soldier a part of the bounty price agreed upon beforehand. Then the soldier would assign the whole bounty to the broker, who would collect $300 from the New York County committee. Three hundred dollars constituted a substantial sum of money in those days, and there were thousands of recruits, the bloodiest war in American history.

Opportunities for fraud were abundant in this system not only because of the middlemen and the vast sums of money involved, but also because of the rather primitive record keeping. War Department Detective Col. Lafayette Baker wrote: “Another manner of desertion, and by far more generally practiced [between May and October 1864], was by permitting recruits to desert in transit from the rendezvous in New York to the Island or receiving ships.”

The problem of northern draftees buying substitutes in 1863 bedeviled Lincoln’s unending need for troops. Historian William Marvel writes: By early September administration officials claimed that a thousand conscripts a day were arriving in the national capital, but those men came under increasingly heavy guard. Most of them had enlisted as substitutes [and were described by one New York captain as ‘the ugliest set of Devils that ever went unhung’. Thieves thickly seeded every lot, ready to stomp or stab anyone who resisted their pilfering. Sergeants were soon tying or locking up many of the rest to prevent them from running off, but they still drained away to the rear – or to the enemy.” (Lincoln’s Mercenaries, Marvel, pg. 191).

(The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Oxford University Press. 1991, pp. 95-96)

New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, firmly believed that conscription was unconstitutional as the federal government was to depend upon the States to furnish needed troops. He charged Lincoln’s draft with bringing disgrace upon the American name and shamed his administration. Seymour further declared that neither the President nor the Congress had a right ‘to force men to take part in the ungodly conflict which is distracting the land.’ Seymour also charged – and proved – that Lincoln levied higher draft quotas upon New York’s Democratic voting districts as part of a ‘manifest design to reduce the Democratic majority of voters.’ In short, the draft was designed, it appeared to Seymour, ‘to take Democrats into the army and exempt Republicans.’

New York City’s bloody draft riot which began July 11, 1863, ended the lives of some 120 residents as blue-coated soldiers hurried from Gettysburg opened fire on them with muskets and cannon. At least five black men were hung as demonstrators denounced Lincoln’s emancipation war. Strong anti-draft riots occurred across the State to include Buffalo, and throughout the north.

In Boston, though the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment was available, Gov. John Andrew feared that the sight of colored soldiers might excite his white citizenry. This colored regiment contained nearly 400 men enticed mostly from Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania to count toward Massachusetts troop quota and leave white residents at home. Only 22 soldiers were Massachusetts residents; 3 were Canadians. The black soldiers were hurried away and replaced with white men.

The governor’s fears were realized on July 14, 1863, when nearly a thousand angry residents – many of them women and children – gathered in front of the city’s Cooper Street Armory. After they hurled paving bricks at the wooden doors, a nervous officer inside ordered a field cannon loaded with grapeshot wheeled to the door and opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 14 and maiming many more.

This senseless slaughter of civilians recalled the massacre just over 93 years earlier, when British soldiers fired into a crowd of three hundred jeering and rock-throwing Boston residents. Eight were killed and five wounded. The post-riot investigation featured future US president John Adams representing the British soldiers.

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf. 1948, pg. 305)

Ohio congressman Samuel S. Cox stood out in the north as one who repeatedly challenged Lincoln’s wartime policies. A prewar Ohio newspaper editor in Columbus, he entered Congress in 1857 and served through 1865. As a War Democrat who wanted to somehow preserve the union, his efforts were directed toward effecting a rapid conclusion of the war before extreme bitterness had cut too deeply – and conciliation might still be possible.

Northern Democrat Thorn in Lincoln’s Side

“In the postwar, Cox said in retrospect: Could not this union have been made permanent by a timely settlement, instead of being cemented by fraternal blood and military rule? By an equitable adjustment of the territory this was possible . . . the Crittenden proposition . . . the Republican Radicals denounced . . . They were determined to prevent a settlement. Those who thought to counteract the schemes of secession were themselves checkmated by the extreme men of the Republican party.

Early in January 1862 Cox wanted to obtain from Lincoln his view regarding prisoner exchanges with the South. Asking if he would look to the safety of captured northern soldiers & sailors, Lincoln replied “You will have me recognize those [Southern] pirates as belligerents?” This was, then, the sum of his reasoning against the exchange or prisoners. It had in it no element of humanity or international law. With Cox’s prodding, an official agreement was established with the Confederacy in mid-1862.

By the spring of 1862 the tempo of fighting had increased along with the temper of northern politics, as the Radical Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania pressed for the confiscation of Southern property and emancipation of the South’s slaves. Congress had already in August 1861 enacted a confiscation act for property used for “insurrectionary purposes.” Stevens now wanted confiscation of the property of all “enemies,” slaves of all persons supporting the rebellion to be “forever free of servitude.” Cox denounced this proposal on June 3rd and urged Lincoln to reassure the public mind as to the purpose of the war. Playing upon the fears of the northern fears of freedmen flooding northward he asked: “will Ohio troops fight at all if the result should be the movement of the black race by the millions to their own State?”

Pressing his point, he said: “I would protect against this ambiguous policy” of professing a war to preserve the union but actually fighting a war to abolish slavery.  As for the cause of the war, he argued: “Slavery is the occasion, but not the cause . . . but slavery agitation, north and South, is the cause.”

Rep. Cox noted that “Indiana and Illinois, the latter Lincoln’s home State, already forbade the entrance of Negroes into their States. Ohio Republican legislators, resenting Cox’s obstructionist attacks on Lincoln’s administration, proceeded to redistrict the State under the new federal reapportionment act that cut Ohio’s representation from 21 to 19. Cox’s district was redrawn to make his reelection impossible.

The October 1862 Republican congressional defeats can be traced to waning enthusiasm for Lincoln’s stalemated war, waning enlistments and threatened conscription, arbitrary arrests of citizens and newspaper editors, and fear that his emancipation crusade would flood the north with freedmen in search of cheap wages. The Democrats were victorious in 14 of the Republican-redrawn 19 congressional seats.

Cox, outraged by Republican charges of disloyalty against northern Democrats, retorted: “Who brought on this war and then dragooned Southern Negroes to fight battles in which they would not even risk their own lives? How many abolitionists were hiding from the draft or paying for substitutes to fight for them?

In a mid-December 1862 speech Cox blamed Lincoln’s administration for the Radical rule that had resulted in a divided country, a national debt of $2,500,000,000, a tariff paying “millions into the pockets of capitalists from consumers,” the destruction of “the rights of personal liberty,” and the deaths of “at least 150,000 of the best youth of the country.”

During 1863 congressional Democrats steadily opposed the actions of Lincoln’s Administration, citing New England’s responsibility for the war, the unconstitutionality of federal emancipation, and the arbitrary despotism of the President.”

(Sunset Cox: Irrepressible Democrat. David Lindsey. Wayne State University Press, 1959, pp. 52-70)

Author Jonathan W. White’s book “Emancipation, the Union Army and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln” (LSU Press, 2014) contends that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton utilized intimidation tactics to ensure Lincoln’s election and use the soldier vote to help accomplish it. His assistant secretary, Charles A. Dana, admitted to using the full power of the War Department to ensure Lincoln’s electoral triumph. Stanton also employed creative solutions for filling the blue ranks with soldiers.

By May 1864, the initial three-year enlistments had expired and strong measures utilized for re-enlisting the veterans. The hated draft was causing riots in northern cities, and Grant complained often of the useless soldiers he was sent — paid substitutes and draftees who often deserted at the first opportunity.

Desperate to retain the veterans, Stanton demanded additional government bounty money to entice them to stay, one-month furloughs home to show off their “Veteran Volunteer” sleeve chevrons, and commanders rewarded with promotions for re-enlistments obtained. Commanders unsuccessful in their re-enlistment efforts were denied promotion or cashiered.

The bounty money made soldiers wealthy men for the time, but naturally caused them to avoid battle in order to spend it. White estimates that only 15 percent of veteran soldiers re-enlisted, leaving 85 percent who walked away, as it had become an abolition war rather than the “save the Union” banner they had enlisted under. Additionally, they saw emancipation bringing many black freedmen north in search of employment, thus depressing wages and taking jobs from white northerners.

Penalty for Not Re-Enlisting

In May [1864] the three-years’ service of the regiment had expired; and three hundred and seventy-five men who had not reenlisted as veterans were mustered out and made their way home as best they could. On arriving in New York, they drew up and adopted a series of resolutions. They began by rehearsing an order of Col. [Henry L.] Abbot, dated May 21, urging them to “stand by their colors, and not march to the rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon.”

The reason for their non-re-enlistment seems to be stated in the charge against Col. Abbot:

“That he has spared no pains to place over us a military aristocracy, subjecting us to every variety of petty annoyance, to show his own power, and take away our manhood; subjecting men to inhuman and illegal punishments for appealing to him for justice; disgracing others for attempting to obtain commissions in colored regiments; . . . about May 4 ordering his heavy artillery men who had not re-enlisted, into the ditch for the remainder of their term of service, thus placing us on a level with prisoners under sentence for court-martial; and finally capping the climax by leaving us to the tender mercy of provost-marshals, turning us loose on the world, without pay, without officers, without transportation, without rations and without our colors.”

(The Military & Civil History of Connecticut, During the War of 1861-1865. W. Croffut & J. Morris. Ledyard Bill. 1869, pg. 558-559)

The North’s war-weariness in late 1863, despite the capture of Vicksburg and stand-off at Gettysburg, had increased after the well-publicized greed of manufacturers supplying shoddy equipment to the army, and speculators overcharging the government “for everything from spoiled food to broken-down horses . . . was everyone out to feather his own nest? Was it fair for some men to go out and put their lives on the line while others stayed home and made big profits?” Bostonian aristocrat John Murray Forbes insisted that Lincoln now frame the war as a struggle by “the People against the Aristocrats” of the South.

Attracting Volunteer Mercenaries

“In mid-October [1863], though the election campaign was on, the Lincoln administration felt obliged to call for an additional 300,000 volunteer troops for a three-year tour of duty. This time the Massachusetts quota was set at 15,126 men.  Governor [John] Andrew realized more than ever that if he was not allowed to raise the State bounty, enlistments would surely falter.

Only 6,353 volunteers enlisted and mustered between January 1 and October 17, 1863, including black regiments, according to the governor’s report to the General Court on January 8, 1864. This was a poor showing indeed, but symptomatic of the war-weariness that had crept into almost every aspect of Northern life during the fall of 1863.

Where would 15,000 more men come from? Andrew decided to call a special session of the legislature, which convened on November 11, 1863. By this time, Congress had raised the US bounty to $402 for those who had already served not less than nine months, and to $302 for new recruits. The Massachusetts legislature now offered an additional $325 for new recruits, as well as for any veteran who might reenlist for 3 years of the duration of the war.

Penalties were assessed against Massachusetts men enlisting in units sponsored by another State. Massachusetts, however, welcomed enlistees from other States. Several unsavory developments, however, came out of this increase in bounties for new enlistments. The number of bounty-jumpers increased greatly – men who would enlist, receive their bounties, and then skip town to try the same scheme in another State.

But perhaps the greatest evil was a private enlistment company, headquartered in Boston, set up to bring immigrants from Europe to serve in the Union army.  It originated in the fall of 1863 when John Murray Forbes spoke with associates about encouraging foreign immigration as a way to increase the State’s manpower quota.

Several investors were attracted by the speculative possibilities in Forbes’s plan, and organized their own company. The company made contacts with European immigrants and paid for their transportation to America in return for signing an agreement to serve in a Massachusetts regiment. After paying for the emigrants passage, the Boston company would then extract a percentage from the bounty as a profit.

Some of the foreign emigrants later claimed that Massachusetts agents had either forced them into service against their will, or deceived them with false promises and misrepresentations. The colonels in the regiments to which these men were assigned were equally unhappy. Most of the new recruits could not speak English or understand orders, and many were massacred in the Wilderness campaign only a few months later.”

(Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield, Thomas O’Connor, Northeastern University Press, 1997, pg. 185-187)

Gideon Welles on Grant, Republicans and Conscription

Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (1802-1878), was Connecticut-born, a Democrat until 1848, left for the Free-Soil party and then joined the nascent Republicans in 1854. Claiming to be anti-slavery, his father had been a Connecticut shipping merchant and very likely participated in New England’s transatlantic slave trade. He was appointed to Secretary of the Navy by Lincoln as a reward for past party support.

The following is excerpted from The Diary of Gideon Welles.

August 2, 1864, Tuesday: “[Grant is reticent] and, I fear, less able than he is credited. Admiral Porter has always said there was something wanting in Grant, which Sherman could always supply, and vice-versa, as regards Sherman, but that the two together made a very perfect general officer and [they] ought never to be separated. Grant relies on others but does no know men – can’t discriminate. I feel quite unhappy over this Petersburg [Crater battle] – less however from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him.

God grant that I may be mistaken, for the slaughtered thousands of my countrymen who have poured out their rich blood for three months in the soil of Virginia from the Wilderness to Petersburg. Under his generalship[, and who] can never be atoned in this world or the next if he without Sherman prove a failure. A nation’s destiny almost has been committed to this man, and if it is an improper committal, where are we?”

August 27, Saturday: Much party machinery is just at this time in motion. No small portion of it is a prostitution and abuse. The Whig element is venal and corrupt, to a great extent. I speak of the leaders of that party now associated with the Republicans. They seem to have very little political principle, they have no belief in public virtue or popular intelligence, they have no self-reliance . . . [and] little regard for constitutional restraint. Their politics and their ideas of government consist of expedients, and cunning management with the intelligent, and coercion and subordination of the less-informed.”

August 31, 1864, Wednesday: The complaints in regard to recruiting are severe and prolonged. They come in numbers. The impending draft of the army indirectly benefits the Navy, or induces persons to enter it. Their doing so relieves them and their localities from the draft. Hence the crowd and competition. Then come in the enormous bounties from the State and municipal authorities over which naval officers have no control, and which lead to bounty-jumping and corruption.”

(Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, Volume II, Howard K. Beale, editor, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 92; 122; 129)

The brief Gettysburg address of Lincoln was described by listeners as “a wet blanket” after Edward Everett’s stirring oration, but it did announce the end of the original confederation of States. While Northern governors expected words of appreciation for the sacrifices of the various States supporting his war, “Lincoln rose at Gettysburg to talk of the nation.” He did not “mention that four score and seven years before, the Father had brought forth thirteen independent States.”  As Lincoln spoke of government of the people and by the people, few were aware that a hundred miles away General Robert Schenck’s blue-clad soldiers were patrolling the election polls in Delaware.

A New Nation of Men of Lesser Minds

“Only three times did groups of [Northern] governors assemble to formulate policy. The Cleveland meeting of Western governors and [Pennsylvania’s Governor] Curtin in May 1861 came at the height of initial enthusiasm for the war, and the governors merely demanded that more attention be given to the West.  Lincoln accepted their pledge of cooperation and gave the governors so much work in raising troops that they had no time for further consultation over campaign strategy.

The Providence meeting of New England governors sent a committee to Lincoln to demand cabinet changes, but the President skillfully . . . turned them away. [Massachusetts Governor] Andrew led his neighbors from Providence to Altoona, but was unable to get agreement from other governors for schemes to use Negro troops [to avoid drafting white men] and replace McClellan with Fremont.

On the eve of the conference Lincoln issued the preliminary emancipation proclamation and cut the ground out from under Andrew’s radical plot.  Thereafter the governors attempted no meeting, and Lincoln dealt with them separately.

Lincoln had an enormously swollen patronage to dispense . . . but no part of the patronage was at the disposal of the governors. Moreover, the military patronage was at the President’s disposal. Governors might appoint company and regimental officers, but promotions from grade to grade and the selection of general officers depended on the President. The army and the civil patronage – as the experiences in the Border States, in Ohio in 1863, and in the campaign of 1864 proved – put the Republican Party exclusively in Lincoln’s hands.

But in the long run Lincoln’s victory over the governors was the triumph of a superior intellect. Of the sixty-three chief executives of the States only [New York’s] Horatio Seymour could approach the President in quality of mind. Seymour’s partial success in blocking conscription was a tribute to his intellectual power [and he] might have prevented the destruction of States’ rights [in the North].  But Seymour stood alone [and most] of the others were mediocrities who owed their positions to “availability” rather than to ability.

And this, above all, made Lincoln the architect of the new nation. The victory of nationalism over localism, of centralization over States’ rights, was, in the last analysis, a victory of a keener intellect over men of lesser minds. The new nation that emerged from the Civil War was not solely the result of the military defeat of the armies of Robert E. Lee. It was equally the result of the political victory that Abraham Lincoln’s mind and personality won over the governors of the Northern States.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors, William B. Hesseltine, Albert A. Knopf, 1955, pp. 391-392)

The following are editorials appearing in the February 11, 1863 issue of the Allentown Democrat, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a newspaper highly critical of Lincoln’s war and impending use of black troops to quiet widespread draft resistance.

“A Question: The Republican party we assert is an Abolition party. If we tell them so, most of them deny it. Now, if they are not Abolitionists, we would ask them to point us out the word or paragraph of any Republican paper that ever opposed Abolition, or that now condemns the 1^st of January Abolition Proclamation. Do they not to a man sustain the President in his n****r policy, either by open declaration or by significant silence? Be sure they do, and they only expose their hypocrisy by attempting to conceal it.”

“The Homogenous Army: The administration organs are preparing the way for a general decapitation of all generals who are not abolitionists, and the [New York] Tribune and Wendell Phillips declare any man unfit to lead the Union armies who does not adopt the radical [program] all the way through.

If it be true that no man but an abolitionist should be a general, certainly no man but one of the same faith should fight in the ranks. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. A general’s ability to lead an army depends on his genius and knowledge of the art of war, and not on his ideas of ethnology and diversity of the races of mankind –

A man may make a good soldier who never voted the abolition ticket, and if conservative sentiments disqualify a general to lead an army, it also disqualifies the soldier from being fit to follow. If we must have abolition generals, let us have an abolition army, and then the war will soon come to an end beyond all manner of doubt.”

(Allentown Democrat, February 11, 1863)