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

“some outrageous breach of domestic discipline, for which his parental ancestor had taken down the old cow skin [and] with it warmed the seat of his pantaloons”—all of them, said Amos Judson with a grin, are “the patriots upon whom we are depending to conquer the rebellion.”13

Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population. They represented not simply a statistical percentage of the American population but also a healthy cross section of classes and occupations. The Civil War was by no means merely a “poor man’s war.” The Virginia brigade first commanded by “Stonewall” Jackson at Bull Run in 1861 carried on its rolls 811 farmers, 477 ordinary laborers, 107 merchants, 41 lawyers, 26 printers, 142 students, 75 blacksmiths, six bakers, five distillers, two dentists, and four “gentlemen.” The 2nd South Carolina enrolled fifty-three sets of brothers and forty-nine individuals whose net worth in the 1860 census had been listed as greater than $1,000. The same regiment enlisted lawyers, a mathematics professor, three civil engineers, a druggist, and students from Furman College, Erskine College, and South Carolina College, plus fifteen immigrants (from Ireland, France, England, Germany, Scotland, and Sweden). Slaveholders, and those from slaveholding households, accounted for 36 percent of the soldiers of the Confederate army of 1861; more than half the officers were slaveholders, with a combined average wealth of nearly $9,000.14

The 11th Ohio boasted that it had enlisted workmen from approximately a hundred trades and occupations, “from selling a paper of pins to building a steamboat or railroad.” The 19th Massachusetts had six Harvard graduates in its ranks, while the 23rd Ohio carried two men on its regimental rolls who would later be president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley. One study of 1,337 Union recruits from Newburyport, Massachusetts, has shown that high-status skilled workers and professionals were actually overrepresented in the Union army; the rates of enlistment for those in the poorest and wealthiest categories among the Newburyport troops was almost even.15 Similar studies of Concord, Massachusetts, and Claremont and Newport, New Hampshire, have also shown that white-collar workers and independent artisans (the segments of the Northern population with the greatest openness to the Republican free-labor ideology) formed the largest segment of recruits, while soldiers from the lowest and highest wealth categories enlisted at approximately the same rates.16

Taken as a whole, skilled laborers and professionals made up approximately 25 percent and 3 percent, respectively, of the Union Army, which works out to almost exactly the same proportions these groups occupied in the entire male population of the North in the 1860 census. Unskilled laborers made up about 15 percent of the Federal recruits, which means that poor workers were actually slightly under-represented in the Union Army. As for the Confederates, unskilled laborers composed only 8.5 percent of the recruits, a substantial underrepresentation of this group, which otherwise accounted for almost 13 percent of the white Southern population.17

THE MAKING OF THE VOLUNTEERS

Since so much of the responsibility for recruitment fell upon the individual states, and since so few of the states were really equipped to handle recruitment in any systematic fashion, the actual process of raising and organizing a regiment often became a matter of local or personal initiative. The 28th Virginia had actually been born before the war started, as a response in the Lynchburg area to John Brown’s raid by ad hoc companies such as the Blue Ridge Rifles, the Roanoke Grays, and the Craig Mountain Boys. Ten of these companies were organized as a regiment on May 17, 1861, and nine days later they were en route by train to Manassas Junction to become part of the hastily assembled Confederate army that defeated Irvin McDowell at Bull Run. The 3rd Virginia began life as a militia company in Norfolk County in 1856, then expanded to become a four-company battalion, and finally was enlarged to become the 3rd Regiment of Virginia militia the following year. They were called out on April 20 to participate in the capture of the Norfolk Navy Yard, and in July were mustered into Confederate service as the 3rd Virginia Volunteers. The Hibriten Guards were recruited as a company from Caldwell County, North Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and sent off on July 31, 1861, with ceremonies in the town square of the county seat, Lenoir and the presentation of a handmade state flag. On August 27 they were baptized along with nine other companies as the 26th North Carolina.

It was no different on the Union side. The 24th Michigan was recruited in July 1862 after a war rally in Detroit organized by Judge Henry Morrow and Sheriff Mark Flanigan of Wayne County. Morrow and Flanigan, together with a group of recruiting officers, scoured Wayne County for recruits, holding meetings in churches and town halls, and after ten days the regimental quota of 1,030 officers and men had been met. The 17th Maine was recruited that same summer by individuals commissioned by the state governor and state adjutant-general to open recruiting offices and hold recruiting meetings in Portland and the surrounding counties of Cumberland, Oxford, York, Franklin, and Androscoggin; recruiters who were successful in raising full companies would be commissioned by the state as regimental officers, irrespective of whether they had any previous military experience. The 83rd Pennsylvania was originally a three-months regiment, raised single-handedly in April 1861 by John W. McLane, who had been handed a colonel’s commission by the governor of Pennsylvania and authorized to recruit a regiment from his native Erie County. It took McLane only four days of war rallies and buttonholing to enlist 1,200 men; another 400 had to be turned away due to the governor’s limitations on the size of the regiment.18

Recruitment rallies were a ritual of the early days of the war,