Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

shoot every niggar I cam across.” Even William Tecumseh Sherman was at best indifferent to making the war a crusade against slavery. “I would prefer to have this a white man’s war and provide for the negroes after the time has passed,” Sherman wrote to his wife, Ellen Ewing Sherman, “but we are in revolution and I must not pretend to judgment. With my opinion of negroes and my experience, yea, prejudice, I cannot trust them yet.”8

As the war brought more and more Northerners into close contact with the brutal realities of the slave system, the urge to destroy slavery gradually became an important part of the soldiers’ motivations. “I had thought before that God had made the Negro for a slave for the whites,” Elisha Stockwell of the 14th Wisconsin recalled, but after seeing one slave owner abuse two female slaves, “my views on slavery took a change.” Marcus Spiegel, a German Jew who rose to command an Ohio regiment before his death in battle in 1864, enlisted as a pro-Union Democrat, believing that “it is not necessary to fight for the darkies, nor are they worth fighting for.” By early 1864, Spiegel had seen enough of slavery in Louisiana to change his mind. “Since I am here I have learned and seen more of what the horrors of Slavery was than I ever knew before and I am glad indeed that the signs of the time show towards closing out the accused institution.” Never again would Spiegel “either speak or vote in favor of Slavery; this is no hasty conclusion but a deep conviction.” Later in the war, a white Iowa regiment captured twenty-three prisoners from a Confederate unit that had participated in the massacre of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow; the angry whites interrogated the prisoners, asked them if they remembered Fort Pillow, and then shot them all.9

Sometimes both Union and Confederate volunteers would be led by more pragmatic motives to join the armies. Some simply wanted to get away from home. The Federal army set eighteen as the minimum age for its recruits, but recruiting officers did not mind winking at restless teenagers in order to fill a recruiting quota.10 Henry C. Matrau was just fourteen when he joined Company G of the 6th Wisconsin in 1862, but the mustering officer simply treated the boy’s presence on the line as a pleasant joke:

More than a hundred men who had become interested in the little chap stood around to see if he would pass muster. He had picked out a pair of large shoes into which he stuffed insoles that would raise him up a half inch or more, higher heels and thicker soles had been added to the shoes. The high crowned cap and the enlarged shoes lifted the little fellow up. … I can see him as he looked when he started to walk past the mustering officer. I can see Captain McIntyre of the Regular Army, who mustered our regiment. The minute the boy started down the line, his eyes were fixed upon him, and he watched him until he reached the left of the company. I can see the captain’s smile of approval as the little fellow took his place. He had won the day. He was mustered into Uncle Sam’s service for three years or during the war.11

As many as 10,000 boys below the age of eighteen managed to join the army legally, as drummer boys or musicians. Johnny Clem was a ten-year-old runaway who attached himself to the 22nd Michigan as a drummer boy and whose pay had to be anted up by the regiment’s officers. Clem grew up into a reliable soldier, eventually exchanging his drum for a rifle and actually wangling an officer’s commission after the close of the war (he retired in 1916 as a major general). Besides the legally enrolled Johnny Clems, it is entirely possible that as many as 800,000 underage soldiers, many as young as fifteen, slipped past cooperative recruiters. Elisha Stockwell was one of these fifteen-year-olds when he signed up to join Company I, 14th Wisconsin Volunteers, and though his father successfully voided the enlistment, in February 1862 the boy took the first chance he had and ran away to join the regiment. Stockwell admitted that he thought of politics as “only for old men to quarrel over.” He just wanted to get off the farm and see the wider world.12

Getting away from home, however, could easily serve as the solution to other problems. Amos Judson of the 83rd Pennsylvania had a sharp eye for the kind of men who filled the ranks of his company, and he sketched a few of the more amusing reasons they had for enlisting. “There goes a man who knocked his wife down with a wash board, and then ran off and joined the army to spite her, looking behind him all the time to see if she would call him back.” And when “in melting letters” she “forgave him and called him back to her bosom… he wished the army and the war were at the devil. But it was too late and he is now a patriot.” Or consider the “young man who got into a woman-scrape at home; and in order to save himself from being shot or from suffering the penalty of the law, he left the young woman in her sorrow, ran off and became a soldier.” This was all well and good until “he came to realize that there was as much danger of getting shot in the army as there was at home,” and shortly “he, too, wished that the army was at the devil and that he had staid home and married the girl. But it was too late, and he also became a patriot.” On it went, in inglorious detail—the jealous husband who “in a moment of despair and rage left home and went to the wars,” the foreigner, the professional gambler, and the runaway teenager, guilty of