Lincoln’s Grand Army

Hoosier Col. Benjamin Harrison

A fervent prewar Republican, Benjamin Harrison was first elected in 1860 as reporter for the Indiana Supreme Court. In 1862, he gained appointed as an officer and served under Sherman in the Atlanta campaign.

In the early postwar, Harrison warned Indiana audiences that “the Southern foe remained just as wily, mean and impudent as ever, and politics would be the new battleground against ex-rebels.” Though he didn’t advocate immediate enfranchisement for former slaves,” he insisted that “should white Southerners remained recalcitrant, the adoption of black suffrage offered the only way to produce truly loyal governments in the South.” The key to a successful peace was to keep the rebels and “their northern allies out of power. If you don’t,” Harrison warned, “they will steal away, in the halls of Congress, the fruits won from them at the glistening point of the bayonet.”

As the Republican national standard bearer in 1888 against Grover Cleveland, Harrison lost the popular vote but lavish Republican campaign spending in crucial swing States bought him victory in the Electoral College. A lasting blot on his presidency was the American-led coup of Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani in 1893.

Hoosier Col. Benjamin Harrison

“Atlanta fell to Sherman in early September 1864 and ten days later Harrison headed home under orders to report to Governor Morton for “special duty.” That duty included recruitment of news soldiers and more important, campaigning for the Republican ticket in the fall election.

After Harrison entered the army in 1862, Hoosier Democrats had secured a court order declaring the supreme court reporter office vacant, and in a special election, Democrat Michael Kerr had defeated an ineffectual Republican candidate. In 1864 the Republicans nominated Harrison again for the position. He stumped the State vigorously, adjuring voters to stand by the Republicans and the war effort, while accusing Democrats of halfhearted resistance to, if not outright sympathy for, the rebellion.” Further, he condemned the Democrats’ notion of State sovereignty as a “deadly poison to national life.”

Moreover, defying the widespread Negrophobia within Indiana, Harrison fervently defended the Emancipation Proclamation and extolled the courageous service of blacks in the effort to suppress the rebellion. Harrison and the entire State ticket triumphed, and Lincoln carried Indiana.

Immediately after the election, Harrison headed for Georgia to rejoin his men [but] received orders to take command of a brigade forming in Tennessee to block a Confederate counteroffensive. He found the brigade a mongrel outfit with many men “quite unfit for duty in the field” – some hardly recovered from wounds, others just back from sick leave, and a large number of raw recruits, including many European immigrants unable to speak English.”

(Benjamin Harrison. Charles W. Calhoun. Henry Holt and Company. 2005, pp. 24-25)

The Union’s “Veteran’s Corps”

In some northern States the amount of total bounty money for one man had risen to $1500 – a very large sum in 1863. If one consults Robert L. Dabney’s “Discussions, Volume IV (1897), he states: “the Secretary of War wrote that “after May 1, 1863, there were 1,634,000 enlistments. And if the cost of each enlistment was $300, which is far below the average bounty, somebody had to pay them a total of $490,000,000. It is then likely the “bounty jumpers” as it is well-known, perpetrated immense frauds with the number of bounties paid being far larger than that of the enlistments.”

The Union’s “Veterans Corps”

“In early November 1863 the veteran northern troops occupying Plymouth, North Carolina first read of financial incentives to reenlist, made necessary due to high bounties paid for new enlistees. To avoid mass desertions of veterans the US War Department needed incentives for existing troops. The following month a New York soldier recorded in his diary that “those regiments whose time expires next fall are asked to reenlist for three years or the war’s duration.” He wrote that the men “were lured by money in sums not imagined earlier: payment of an unpaid original bounty of $100, a new bounty of $400 plus a $2 recruiting premium paid in $50 installments every six months.

This was at a time when the annual family income in New York may have been $350. In addition to the $402 financial incentive was a month-long furlough home to see loved ones while wearing the blue uniform adorned with a gold sleeve chevron of the new “Veterans Corps.” Once at home, the soldier would also receive a $50 bounty from the State of New York and whatever bounty was offered by the soldier’s county and town. The total sum of $750 or more was sufficient to “build a house on his little farm on the road up home.”

As a town or county did not require residency to receive the bounty-paid credit, the soldier home on reenlistment furlough could shop area communities and counties for the highest amount and credit his reenlistment to them. Civilians unwilling to enlist and employers wanting to retain trained workers both contributed to each town’s bounty account to attract substitutes.

Some blowbacks did occur as some “Veteran Volunteers” visiting home would credit themselves to another community so as to not shelter those they considered “shirkers” in their hometowns who avoided the draft.”

(Plymouth’s Civil War: The Destruction of a North Carolina Town. John Bernhard Thuersam. Scuppernong Press, 2024, pp. 160-161)

Letter From Enemy-Occupied Plymouth

The writer below laments the low number of troops left to defend occupied-Plymouth, North Carolina, as the men of the 101^st Pennsylvania Regiment were enjoying a 30-day furlough home. This and $402 was a bonus for “veteranizing,” a device for the retention of northern soldiers coming to the end of their original 3-year term. In addition to the $402 bonus, at home the reenlisting soldier collected generous State, county and town bounties offered as well, often totaling over $1000. Few voluntary enlistments came after the carnage of Fredericksburg; draft riots and poor-quality substitutes forced Lincoln to turn to American and foreign mercenaries. The North Carolina “troops” mentioned below were likely deserters whose families and farms were caught behind enemy lines.

Letter from Enemy-Occupied Plymouth

“There are not over eight hundred troops here now, & a considerable part of them are North Carolinians, & how much they can be depended [on] we do not yet know. A [rebel] deserter came in yesterday. Says he came from Goldsborough & that there are but two rebel troops in this State. Don’t believe him as all the news we have had for the past month shows that the rebels have been concentrating a force in this state. Probably he was sent in to deceive us in hopes we would relax our vigilance & become easy prey the rebels.

Our river gunboat USS Bombshell had a narrow escape last week . . . she went up the Chowan River and was engaged by a rebel battery . . . though not damaged. Harry Brinkerhoff, her commander is considered a brave man. He is a German & is most terribly wicked.

We have two companies of the 2^nd Regiment, Massachusetts Heavy Artillery here now. They are a hard set. Nearly all foreigners. Came out for the large bounties. It is amusing to hear some who are Irishmen talk about their enlistment: They will say: “only six weeks in this country and I enlisted in the Massachusetts “waty” [brogue for weighty or heavy] artillery.”

(Civil War Letters of E.N. Boots from New Bern and Plymouth. Wilfred W. Black, editor. North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, April 1959, pp. 220-221)

An Unequal Duel

Author John P. Cullop (below) asserts that while “Irish immigration increased substantially in 1863 and 1864” and it is difficult to ascertain how many served in the American military, historian Frank L. Owsley estimates “that Ireland, England and Germany contributed over 300,000 men to Union forces . . . [and] there is no doubt that the North relied heavily on immigrant soldiers.” As early as August 1862, Secretary of State William Seward was advised to send all Federal consuls in Europe full particulars about bounties paid to volunteers. Lincoln’s army was bolstered by an estimated 150,000 Irish men, of whom over 35,000 paid lost their lives. At Fredericksburg’s Marye’s Heights in December 1862, over 41% of northern casualties were Irishmen.

An Unequal Duel

“Federal interest in the procurement of recruits from Europe was manifest early in the war. In May 1861, Henry S. Sanford, American minister to Belgium, suggested to secretary of State Seward that as the Lincoln administration apparently intended to rely primarily on volunteers for the army, it was not too early to look abroad for recruits. He reminded the Secretary that the British had received excellent service from the German Legion of Ten Thousand during the Crimean War.

On August 8, 1862, Seward sent all American embassies and consulates in Europe Circular No. 19, which was essentially an invitation to the poor people of Europe to emigrate to the US, emphasizing opportunities for wartime employment but carefully avoiding mention of possible military service. However, mercenary soldiers were uppermost in Seward’s mind, for on September 19, 1862, he wrote American consul general at Paris, John Bigelow that “to some extent this civil war must be a trial between the two parties to exhaust each other. The immigration of a large mass from Europe would of itself decide it.” Many years after the war Bigelow noted that Seward’s circular threw light “upon the mysterious repletion of our army during the four years of war, while it was notoriously being depleted by firearms, disease and desertion.”

Large numbers of Irishmen applied directly to American consuls for enlistment, but were uniformly refused as enlistment had to occur in the United States after emigration. While it was an easy matter to entice Irishmen to the US, it was equally easy to enlist them on arrival. Simply informing the penniless immigrant of the large bounties was often sufficient. Even more attractive were the larger sums offered by speculators who secured substitutes for northerners who wished to avoid Lincoln’s draft.

By April 1864, British Foreign Minister Earl Russell charged that there was strong circumstantial evidence of a well-organized Union military recruiting program in Ireland. This led to a closer scrutiny of Union activity in Ireland but did little to stem the flow of Irish emigrants in 1864.”

(An Unequal Duel: Union Recruiting in Ireland, 1863-1864. John P. Cullop. Civil War History: A Journal of the Middle Period. John T. Hubbell, editor. Vol. XIII, No. II, June 1967, pp.102-109)

The South’s Manpower Advantage

In his efforts to overwhelm the American South’s resistance, Grant ended prisoner exchanges with soldiers returning to the South’s ranks while those in blue went home. He knew the late war, poor-quality conscripts and diseased substitutes he received wouldn’t fight and would desert at the first opportunity. This reality accelerated the capture and removal of colored laborers who represented an important part of the Southern war effort.

The South’s Manpower Advantage

“The responsibility for effectively assembling Negro manpower became that of the Virginia lawmakers and the Confederate Congressmen. Speaking on this point, President Jefferson Davis stated, “much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude.”

This opinion was shared by General Ulysses S. Grant who was well-aware of the need to remove from the South her vast army of noncombatants. Grant said, “the 4,000,000 colored noncombatants are equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age, sex for sex.” Both Grant and Davis early recognized that the mobilization of the Negro constituted an extremely valuable resource.

At the call to repel the Yankee invaders, for example, Virginia looked to its Negro population as a major source of civilian workers. [The majority] of Negroes employed by the quartermaster, ordnance, niter and mining bureaus, and military hospitals were hired through voluntary contracts with free Negroes and the owners of bondsmen.

In February 1862 the State legislature passed an act which required local courts to register all male free Negroes within their jurisdiction between the ages of 18 and 50. The selected free persons were not required to serve longer than 180 days without their consent, and entitled to compensation, rations, quarters and medical attention. Their pay, rations and allowances were borne by the Confederate States.

[In early 1863, and in response to Lincoln’s so-called emancipation decree,] the Richmond Examiner asserted that the North had discovered from this war the value of the slave to the South as a military laborer, and “Lincoln’s proclamation is designed to destroy this power in our hands.”

(The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865. James H. Brewer. University of Alabama Press, 1969, pp. 6-7; 14)

Seddon’s View of Black Southern Troops

By 1856 the new Republican party had acquired control of most northern State governments, while being denounced as the chief “disunionists” of the country for reintroducing slavery agitation as a party tactic.

Its party platform in 1860 was very clear on the territories, favoring subsidies for immigrant homesteaders, and a transcontinental railroad crossing Indian lands in the way of rail lines carrying Northern goods westward. Once Southern members departed Congress in early 1861, Republicans created a Federal corporation, the Union Pacific, which extinguished Indian titles and any defense of their land when driven off by military force. The Indian tribes were to be progressively eliminated as obstacles to settlement and industrial expansion, and before the Civil War ended this policy was in full force.

As the South’s colored population fell into their hands as plantations were overrun, they were designated “contrabands” and utilized as hard labor battalions. As US Colored Troops, they were used as prison guards or cannon fodder in futile assaults and rightly assumed they would suffer the same fate as the Indians under northern rule.

Seddon’s View of Black Confederate Troops

“Hon. James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, in his report, supplemented Mr. Davis’s message with some still stronger recommendations of his own. The slaves, he said, had an even stronger interest in the victory of the Confederacy than did the white people. The latter risked their political independence, but the former their very existence as a race.

If the eternal enemies of the South should triumph, they would extinguish the negroes in a few years, as they had already extinguished the Indians. He recommended that the States which had absolute and exclusive control of the matter, should legislate at once with a view to the contingency of negro enlistments.

On the 15^th [of March 1865] the subject of enlistments came up in the Virginia legislature . . . and on the 27^th instructed its Senators to vote for the [negro] enlistment measure in the Confederate Congress. [About this time] a letter of General Lee’s was published looking to approval, considering it “not only expedient but necessary.” If the Confederates did not make use of the slaves, the Federals would.

The vote in the Senate on the final passage of the bill, March 7, 1865, the President was authorized to ask for and accept from slave owners the services of as many able-bodied slaves as he thinks expedient; to the same to organized by the commander-in-chief under instructions from the War Department, and to receive the same rations and compensation as other troops.

Mr. Lincoln did not think much of the impressment and enlisting of slaves. He said, in a speech made at Washington on the 17^th of March, that the negro could not stay at home and make bread and fight at the same time, and he did not care much for which duty was allotted to him by the Confederate government. “We must now see the bottom of the rebels; resources.”

(Confederate Negro Enlistments. Edward Spencer. Annals of the War, Written by the Leading Participants, North and South. 1879, pp. 547-552)

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

Virginia’s historic colonial capital, Williamsburg, was established upon the former Middle Plantation in 1699 and named in honor of England’s King William III. In 1722, the town was granted Royal Charter as a “city incorporate” which is believed to be the oldest charter in the United States. The College of William and Mary is older than the town, founded in 1693 under royal charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II. It is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the US and ninth oldest in the English-speaking world.

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

“The early morning of February 6^th [1864] found us in line, and we marched into Williamsburg. [Our column] was comprised of 139^th and 118^th New York regiments, two regiments of colored troops, and I believe a single battery, all under command of Col. Samuel Roberts.

As we marched through the town it was plain to be seen that it had suffered from the effects of the war; few inhabitants were left, many houses deserted and many burned. William and Mary, one of the oldest colleges in America, had also been destroyed by Union soldiers in revenge, it was said, for having been fired on from its windows. Though the walls were mostly standing, it was completely ruined.

Our picket line extended from the York to the James Rivers, about four miles; and with gunboats on either flank was a strong one. The object of the expedition seems to have been making a stand at Bottom’s Bridge while the cavalry made a dash at Richmond and burning the city if possible.

One of the pickets posted at Williamsburg was at the old brick house one occupied by Governor Page of Virginia. It was built of brick imported from England. The library in the mansion was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, and the walls had been covered with books from floor to ceiling; but now the shelving had been torn down, and the floor was piled with books in wretched disorder – trampled upon – most pitiful to see. In the attic of this old house the boys found trunks and boxes of papers of a century past – documents, letters, etc.

Among the latter were those bearing the signatures of such men as Jefferson, Madison, Richard Henry Lee; and one more signed by Washington.”

(25^th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Samuel H. Putnam. Putnam, Davis and Company, Publishers. 1886, pp. 245-250)

Lincoln Chooses War

“The interval of eighty days between [Sumter] and the assembling of Congress gave Lincoln a virtual monopoly on emergency powers. Between his attempt to reinforce and resupply Fort Sumter – the latter odd since its garrison obtained food from Charleston markets – and the meeting of Congress in July, Lincoln had a virtual monopoly on assuming claimed “emergency powers.” After several States solemnly withdrew from the 1789 Constitution, Lincoln declared an “insurrection” to exist in seven States and called forth 75,000 militia to suppress this claim. On April 19, 1861, Lincoln proclaimed a naval blockade – an act of war – of all States bordering the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, including North Carolina which remained within the Union at that time. In his July 1861 message to Congress, Lincoln explained his clearly unconstitutional actions while asserting that “this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy . . . can . . . maintain its territory against its own domestic foes.” It is clear that he was not familiar with Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, for “waging war against Them [the States] or aiding and abetting their enemies.”

Lincoln Chooses War

“. . . the South considered secession a peaceable act, while according to the [Northern] point of view such secession was null and required a defensive attitude on the part of the federal government with a readiness to strike in retaliation for any act of resistance to the national authority. This drifting policy, accompanied by conditions in the social mind which can only be described as pathological, had led to the Sumter crisis; and war was upon the country with each side protesting that its actions were purely defensive, and that the opponent was the aggressor.

Lincoln took many other war measures. He issued two proclamations of blockade . . . He decreed an expansion of the regular army on his own authority [with] a further call on May 3^rd for recruits to the regular army beyond the total authorized by law. Increasing the regular army is a congressional function, with Sen. John Sherman stating that “I never met anyone who claimed that the President could, by proclamation, increase the regular army.”

Lincoln’s message to Congress on July 4^th, 1861, stated: “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand and public necessity; trusting . . . that Congress would readily ratify them.” In a word, the whole machinery of war was set in motion by Lincoln, with all that this meant in terms of federal effort, departmental activity, State action and private enterprise.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction. James G. Randall. D.C. Heath & Company. 1937, pp. 360-366)

Bounties Produce Bounty-Jumpers

By May of 1862, Lincoln demanded more troops from Northern governors who responded that their citizens “had developed an immunity to patriotic appeals,” and some other inducement than oratory was required. This was to begin the North’s descent into the hiring of well-paid mercenaries with which to subdue the truculent American South. During the war, the US government would pay – with its fiat money greenbacks – roughly $750,000,000 in recruitment bounties for soldiers.

Bounties Produce Bounty-Jumpers

“[Northern] governors were finding that Lincoln’s threat of a draft a compelling reason to raise men. An exception, however, was found in Ohio, where blunt Governor John Brough did not face the problem of reelection in 1864. Freed from the political anxieties that weighed upon his colleagues, Brough had time to think of the costs of the recruiting program.

Under the threat of Lincoln’s draft, States, counties and townships had been giving bounties, bidding higher and higher for the lives of men, until it was possible for a potential soldier to obtain a thousand dollars for joining the army. The local communities were bankrupting themselves to avoid the draft of their citizens. The system, as Brough saw it, was destroying the confidence of the people in the government, was compounding corruption and undermining patriotism.

Brough’s solution, however, was political suicide: Let the States fill their quotas by their own drafts and let them agree to a common bounty policy. When Stanton reported to Congress that the governors asked for delays in drafting, Brough hastened to disclaim any such intention. The financial situation was bad, and recruiting had ceased: Brough wanted the draft made promptly.

But more than he wanted a draft, Brough wanted an end to the war. The bounty-bought enlistments did not produce soldiers; they only contributed bounty jumpers.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp. 349-350)

The Irish Brigade

Ironically, New York’s Irish Brigade was led by Thomas Meagher, a rebellion leader in the 1848 drive for Irish independence. Captured and sentenced to death – though commuted to life in prison – he escaped to America and organized a unit of New York Irishmen. Many Irish emigres served in the Southern armies, greatly concerned that northern victory would bring a flood of emancipated slaves northward to obtain the low-paying jobs on which they depended.

His brigade was decimated at Fredericksburg in December 1862 while advancing on Lee’s well-defended position at Marye’s Heights with 1600 men and soon retreating with barely 1000 able to walk. After further decimation at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Meagher’s brigade was reduced to well-under regimental strength with 600 men.

Postwar, Meagher was appointed Secretary of State for the Montana Territory by Andrew Johnson, and later as Territorial Governor. He fell off a steamboat and drowned in 1867 under mysterious circumstances, believed to be intoxication, suicide or possibly a political murder.

Irish Brigade

“At Fredericksburg the Irish Brigade was almost wiped out. When it became apparent to [its] leader that there was no prospect of being allowed to recruit new members for the New York regiments of the brigade, it was decided to consolidate the three regiments with perhaps 300 effective men into a battalion of six companies and muster out [unneeded] officers. General Meagher had previously asked leave to resign, as his brigade no longer existed except in name.

Meagher thought it a mockery to keep up a brigade with the few men left and great wrong to consolidate regiments that had attained great renown. Although its 63^rd Regiment served through the Wilderness Campaign – its ranks being recruited by the addition of three new companies and by augmentations – as a distinctive Irish organization it may be regarded as nonexistent after Meagher’s resignation.”

(Foreigners in the Union Army & Navy. Ella Lonn. LSU Press, 1951. p. 122)