Living Hell Read online

  In an environment of overused medical facilities and inadequate hygiene, physicians and nurses also became ill. Confederate hospital surgeon Dr. James McIntosh contracted erysipelas, a skin infection leading to painful inflammation of the tissue and organs, including the nose and mouth, making breathing difficult. Nurses had to cover his swollen face frequently with wet cloths and feed him a hominy paste for sustenance. On the Union side, volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott predicted, “we have taken our lives in our hands, and may have to pay dearly for a brief experience.” Within three months she endured “a sharp tussle with typhoid.” Arabella Barlow, wife of Union General Francis C. Barlow, died of typhus in July 1864, the result of nursing sick soldiers at Fredericksburg, Virginia.37

  Physical complaints, especially dysentery and diarrhea, could become part of a more complex disease broadly labeled nostalgia. In 1861–62, when the condition grew to its peak, it killed two to three soldiers per 1,000; it destroyed 5,000 Federals alone in the first year of the war. Nostalgia, a psychosomatic sickness, progresses in a circular fashion. If a patient had chronic diarrhea, the resultant weakening of constitutional hardiness could induce despondency, with chronic homesickness adding to the spiral of declining strength and energy. Or, the patient might begin by experiencing emotional pining; if there showed no improvement, this could deepen into depression and passivity, opening depleted constitutional resources to attack by disease. Private Ezra Bingham of the 61st Ohio became lonely and isolated, “much depressed in spirits and exceedingly homesick.” One morning, he refused to get up. As his resolution faded, his pulse weakened, and he succumbed to a cough, fever, and “prostration.” He effectively died of depression. Army routine had not provided him exemption from the Bartleby-style predicament of the modern worker.38

  Physicians frequently diagnosed nostalgia in men of later middle age, those with insufficient resources to meet the challenges of camp life. But they saw the disease mostly in youths who often had been the most naively enthusiastic about enlisting for adventure, and who had neither the mental nor physical maturity to cope with adversity and disappointment. Cold reality began when the inductee received his uniform. Clothing often bore little relation to body size and did not fit glamorous images of plumed hussars and bearskin-capped guardsmen. A sixteen-year-old midwestern recruit described receiving his regimental costume in 1861: “My trousers were too long by three or four inches; the shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The cap was an ungainly bag with pasteboard top and leather visor; while the overcoat made me feel a little like a nubbin of corn in a large husk.”39

  There followed months without the stimulation of action, under trying conditions of routine and drudgery, in unfamiliar and often unwholesome surroundings. The letdown produced indifference, depression, and craving for family. “I have been from home for months at a time,” wrote Dick Simpson, 3rd South Carolina, from Fairfax Court House, Virginia, on July 4, 1861, “but I never wished to be back so bad in my life.” Failure to receive pay or letters from home made volunteers feel neglected, forgotten, abandoned. On August 10, 1863, Union Private Joseph H. Diltz wrote plaintively to his wife after a seeming eternity without news: “I have Cum to the Conclusion that you have fergot me intierly.… I want to go home to see you all so bad i dont no what to do.”40

  Physicians recognized the symptoms of nostalgia as early as the seventeenth century, when the sickness was called the “Swiss disease” after being observed in mercenaries from that state serving years away from home. The complaint became documented frequently during the eighteenth to nineteenth century Napoleonic Wars. Many French soldiers, struggling to get back during the 1812 retreat from Moscow, succumbed to homesickness, compounded by exposure and malnutrition.

  Some Civil War medical authorities acknowledged nostalgia as a legitimate and serious illness. Physicians in the field suggested the adoption of some quite enlightened remedies. A February 1863 article by U.S. assistant surgeon De Witt C. Peters seems particularly prescient. He began by deprecating “the policy of enlisting youths who have not attained their proper majority,” arguing that they were “not sufficiently mature in mind and body to undertake successfully the arduous duties of a soldier.”

  After describing the physical and mental infirmities pitching youngsters into nostalgia, Peters offered excellent advice to surgeons and line officers: relieve the patient’s mind of its “injurious burden” through kindness, exercise, bathing, and agreeable associations; accompany this treatment with a regimen to improve the tone of the stomach and bowels through generous diet and bracing tonics. Most patients, however, had a slim chance of receiving such benevolent medical handling. Many line officers saw their pasty-faced, lackluster men dragging about the tents as malingerers lacking in character, for whom the best medicine became hard discipline attended by punishment if necessary.41

  Whatever the case, many sufferers died bleakly after illness wasted their bodies and exhausted their will to live. A Union army chaplain wrote to his sister from a hospital at Chapman’s Point, Maryland, on November 3, 1861: “Away in gloomy hospital wards, with home a thousand miles away, and no really friendly voice but mine to soothe them or none to hold their hand in the dread hour and speak a word of comfort, the most of my boys died.” In part to provide proxy mothers for boys dying alone and afraid, as well as to discourage impromptu sexual liaisons, the services chose plain matronly females, not young, attractive, and impressionable girls, as nurses.42

  Nostalgia contributed to desertion. Private Boyd noted in late 1861 that, when tenting in bitter cold brought on husky voices and sore throats, “some of the boys began to think of their mothers and to talk of returning to their comfortable homes in the western counties.” Joseph E. Crowell of the 13th New Jersey, a veteran, wrote in retrospect that “’T was not always cowardice that made soldiers desert. Something stronger than fear caused some to forget their oaths.… It was pure and unadulterated home-sickness.” Senior officers proved largely unsympathetic. When a seventeen-year-old Iowan, caught deserting Sherman’s command in November 1864, pleaded in extenuation, “I just wanted to see my mother,” he was shot.43

  At least by the late summer of 1862, desertion by physically weakened and demoralized soldiers flowed from a stream into a flood. This, in turn, helped shrink the armies, depleted also by expiration of enlistments, and by deaths and disabilities from disease and wounds. Growing reluctance to enlist on the part of civilians meant authorities could not guarantee volunteers to make good these losses. Inevitably, the contestants resorted to compulsion for putting and keeping men in the army, even though both sides claimed to be fighting for individual liberties.

  At first, local authorities and ad hoc bodies applied most of the force. Rebel and Federal officers, with little authority, pressed African Americans into laboring work, such as digging trenches, latrines, and graves. Some commanders punished veterans who refused to re-enlist by denying them furloughs. Other officers ignored the terms of service; men enlisted for one year in Braxton Bragg’s command in the Army of Tennessee found their commitment arbitrarily extended. Those that resisted, Bragg quelled by force.44

  Faced by chronic manpower shortages, military and civil leaders argued for formal national conscription, overriding state objections to heavy-handed use of central power. A universal draft turned out to be a particularly difficult position for Confederate authorities to defend, as they claimed to have gone to war partly to prevent central government from coercing sovereign states. Robert E. Lee found himself caught in this paradox, forced to argue that the Confederate Congress could veto state opposition to drafting to replenish the field armies.

  The Confederacy acted first, through the Conscription Act of April 16, 1862. The law required troops in the army to remain for two more years. It made white males eighteen to thirty-five eligible for three years’ service. However, exemptions existed for state and national officials, railroad engineers, telegraph operators, and, most controve
rsially, large slave owners. You were permitted a substitute if a man not subject to the draft agreed to take your place. The amended law of 1863 raised the enlistment ceiling to age forty-five; by 1864 the range became seventeen to fifty, leading critics to jibe that the Confederacy “robbed the cradle and the grave.”45

  The elements of compulsion and exemption made the law unpopular, molding the conflict into “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.” Resentment continued after the abolition of substitution in 1863 because slave owners could still opt out through a $500 commutation fee. Unreasonably, wealthy men, who would lose most by Confederate defeat, could avoid service, even if staying behind served no vital public interest. The dispute over obligation to serve exposed cracks in the ephemeral unity inspired by the heady days of 1861.

  Areas that had been lukewarm toward secession bitterly resented conscription. Their populations were largely of the middling sort, such as yeoman and subsistence farmers settled in the interior, including the mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. “I could be at home if it warent for a fiew big rulers who I cannot help but blame for it,” wrote a small farmer drafted into the 57th North Carolina. “These big fighting men cant be got out to fight as easy as to make speaches,” he added. Fueling the fire, military commanders condoned such inequalities as giving officers leave to supervise cotton seeding, but denying furloughs to ordinary soldiers who needed to plant vegetables vital for family food.46

  The North followed the South’s example of compulsion, with the Militia Act of July 16, 1862, authorizing the President to draft state militias into Federal service. But of more import here was the Enrollment Act of March 3, 1863. This followed upon the initiation of state drafts by Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, precipitated by the crisis of 100,000 bluecoats being absent without official leave. This law, too, had flaws. It made men twenty to forty-five liable to conscription and disallowed exemptions. But, if called to serve, you could hire a substitute or pay a $300 commutation fee each time your name came up in the lottery, once again allowing the better heeled to get off the hook.47

  The loopholes in both conscription acts suggested that Americans had not reached consensus on what should be the uniformly binding civic obligations of individuals in a time of crisis. In particular, it appeared that wealth could exempt a man from risking himself for the public good, despite being a recipient of society’s greatest rewards. Buying one’s way out seemed to carry little opprobrium in the best circles, and so prominent men exercised the option. In a typical defense of the substitution system, the New York Times declared complacently that this constituted the only sure method of preserving that class “who work with their brains—who do the planning and directing of the national industry.”48

  To many commentators, the practice of offering bounties to encourage volunteering seemed even more pernicious than substitution because they argued the bounty introduced a mercenary element into military service. Authorities and newspapers frequently blamed “bounty jumpers” (men who took the bonus, deserted, and reenlisted to get more money) for the majority of desertions. The evidence for so broad a claim seems questionable, although the problem did exist. And the pernicious practice of allowing bounty brokers to run a business in procuring recruits led to nefarious activities such as swindling and kidnap to get an illicit percentage of the victim’s bounty. In any event, we have to suspect that the idea of a money transaction entering into a military arrangement probably bothered critics less than the fact that the bounty usually helped a poor man while substitution favored the rich.

  Adding to perceived class discrimination, officers could resign their commissions to put their personal affairs in order; enlisted men usually had no such option to attend to family needs. Thus, Captain James Wren of the 48th Pennsylvania, after taxing service on the North Carolina coast and heavy fighting in Virginia, resigned his commission on May 18, 1863, even though he had signed on for three years on September 19, 1861. He gave as his reason for leaving that his partner no longer wanted to run his machine-tool business. He rationalized the decision by saying, “I think my services can be dispensed with, and be of no injury to the service.”49

  Similarly, officers more easily got temporary passes to enjoy amenities available in the vicinity of camp. Enlisted men did not get much recreational leave and many consoled themselves with booze. Robert Knox Sneden of the 40th New York, encamped at Leesburg, Virginia, noted in his diary, November 16, 1861, that officers received permission to visit the Washington sights. But, confined to camp, all that the boys could do was avoid the sentries and tie one on in neighboring Alexandria. Drunken fighting ensued and the guardhouse filled accordingly. “Sometime,” he noted, “a whole company in camp have to be turned out armed and quell and arrest the rioters.”50

  In North and South, men resorted to subterfuge to beat the draft, including trying to fail the medical examination through bogus ailments certified by civilian physicians, either out of compassion for the draftee or payment of a bribe. Some men had their teeth pulled, as the army rejected those who could not masticate food or tear open a paper cartridge. Unfortunately, the faking of diseases such as epilepsy and poor sight led exasperated army doctors to pass men as fit who really did have these complaints.51

  Conscription provoked violent resistance, a bleak underside to the mythic picture of patriotic devotion undergirding sectional unity in support of the glorious cause. In the South, although protests broke out in some major cities, core resistance tended to center in rural interior and upcountry areas that showed only lukewarm support for secession. Confederate provost marshals could not enforce the draft in large areas because of fierce push-back, sometimes by whole communities. It proved easy, too, in the many forested areas of the South, for draft evaders to fade into the woods where they might team up with Rebel and Yankee deserters, forming bands large enough to successfully resist army units sent against them.52

  Northern opposition to the draft ranged from the marble quarries of Vermont and the Pennsylvania coalfields to the midwestern farming areas of Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota. But the fiercest riots occurred during 1863 in urban areas such as Detroit, where the 27th Michigan had to be called in to quell the mob. Moderate and Peace Democrats, afraid of Republican centralization of and potential abuse of power, orchestrated many of these incidents. As in the Confederacy, people on the lower socioeconomic rungs of society featured prominently in crowd makeup, as they had the weakest political voice, were most vulnerable to conscription, and had the least ability to provide for their families during enforced absence.53

  The most notorious rioting occurred in New York City, starting on July 13, 1863, and lasting for five days. The first draft lottery drawing became pivotal in provoking the violence. Discrimination inherent in the substitution system figured largely in negative publicity. For example, on July 11, two days before the rioting began, the New York Daily News charged that the draft “virtually exempts the rich and fastens its iron hand upon the poor alone.” Uncle Sam’s hypocrisy seemed evident when, shortly before the riots, the socially elite 7th Regiment left for the front without 400 members who received permission to stay behind because of “business engagements.”54

  At first, protesting crowds showed a mixed composition, including native New Yorkers, Germans, and Irish. They began relatively peacefully, but, as demonstrations grew, young Irishmen increasingly took the lead. Although their compatriots had volunteered in large numbers early in the fighting, heavy death tolls and horror stories from the battlefield had chilled the war spirit. The boys had other grievances, feeling vulnerable to job competition from blacks while their brothers in blue suffered death for slave freedom. African Americans had recently replaced striking Irish stevedores.55

  Also suggesting the caste and class roots of anger, the fiercest rioting boiled out of the wards with the worst tenements and living conditions. Dr. Stephen Smith, who ran the typhus ward on Blackwell’s Island, observed the squalid environment of poor
rioters. “In certain populous sections are fat-boiling, entrails-cleansing and tripe-curing establishments, which poison the air for squares around with their stifling emanations.” A health inspector reported, in one two-block area, a stream of blood and slimy animal parts stretching from a slaughterhouse on 39th Street to the Hudson River. Completing the witch’s brew, the riot’s third day turned out to be the hottest of the year.56

  Predictably, Radical Republicans, military officers, and African Americans proved prime targets of violence. The mob caught, tortured, and killed Colonel H. T. O’Brien of the city garrison, who had ordered his men to fire on a crowd. William Jones, a harmless black carter, suffered beating and hanging from a tree, his body set alight and burning while his killers danced around the corpse. Some in the city’s political establishment gave their tacit approval.57

  The rioting produced more than 300 deaths, with many more injured, and about 2.5 million dollars in property damage. Critics said the police would have had a better chance at containing the trouble if they’d had a mounted section like the London Metropolitan Police, with trained horses to scatter crowds. But British Bobbies rarely faced firearms that made riders into sitting ducks. The ineffective and inconsistent response of civic and military authorities, which had done no contingency planning and felt unsure of the proper tactical procedures, proved a more important reason for failure.58

  The rioting burned out when elements of the Army of the Potomac were dispatched to the city. Also helping to assuage discontent, Tammany Hall, like other local and state officials, put aside funds to help poor men with families buy substitutes or provide for their dependents during their absence, once again acknowledging the class discrimination inherent in conscription legislation. Associations throughout the warring sections made similar arrangements. Yet resentment continued, adding to a swelling desertion rate that finally reached over five thousand per month in both armies.59