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By Root 2291 0

As was customary, he was quizzed by an officer filling out the ship’s manifest. Pulitzer said he was a twenty-year-old laborer. His actual age was seventeen; that he lied about this suggests he knew the purpose of the voyage—being underage would have disqualified him for military service. But there were some men who did not know and found out only after the ship cleared the harbor. They probably learned of their fate from a New York recruiter who had sneaked on board in hopes of luring some of the men to his city. The men became riled and protested so vigorously that the captain was compelled to offer to let them off on the coast of England. The group held a meeting and after considering that they were penniless and spoke no English, they decided to go on with the voyage; in the words of the captain, “stand their lot.”

And so the Garland sailed westward.

Chapter Two

BOOTS AND SADDLES

After nearly six weeks at sea, Pulitzer saw the craggy coastline of northeastern America on the horizon. It had been an uneventful passage until the Garland reached the calm waters of Boston harbor on August 29, 1864. There the ship and its unusual cargo were met with a forceful reception.

Boats bearing federal soldiers intercepted the Garland as it neared the first of the islands that separated the harbor from Massachusetts Bay. The soldiers ordered the men on board to take their belongings and lower themselves over the side of the ship onto the smaller vessels. Clueless as to what was happening, Pulitzer and the others found themselves being ferried to Deer Island, which Allen and his partners had selected as a secure place to conduct the final bit of their business after having lost their first batch of European mercenaries to bounty hunters. Under the watchful guard of the soldiers, the men were handed military enlistment documents to sign. Those who complied were given food, a chance to rest, and $100 in greenbacks.

Pulitzer knew the $100 payment was a small fraction of the money earned by the organizers of the voyage for each recruit. The New York bounty hunter, traveling incognito with the men, had promised that larger bonuses could be had in his city. Weighing his options, Pulitzer decided he didn’t like the economics of Allen’s contract and pursued an escape clause. Along with perhaps one or two dozen others, he sneaked away from Deer Island by wading across the narrow and shallow channel of water separating the landmass from the mainland and headed south.

Reaching New York City, Pulitzer joined the hundreds of men milling about the military recruiting tents at City Hall Park, across the street from Park Row, where Horace Greeley and other giants of American newspapers plied their trade. A new recruit could get cash bounties totaling $675, a tempting offer for many, considering that the total annual earnings for a soldier were less than $150 a year. The city had just finished erecting a 216-foot-long narrow wooden recruitment building featuring the latest in technology to ward off bounty brokers. Inside, each recruit was seated on a special armchair against a wall with a movable panel. When the recruit signed the documents and was handed his cash bounty, a switch was depressed releasing a spring that swiveled the chair and the wall leaving the recruit isolated in a back room until his transfer to a training camp.

Despite such efforts, bounty brokers remained busy, and the city’s walls and lampposts were plastered with recruiting posters, including some in German that Pulitzer could read. One town eager for recruits was Kingston, New York, whose draft board made the eighty-mile trip down the Hudson River Valley to set up a tent in City Hall Park. The board members had completed a round of the draft a few days earlier, but the district’s quota had not been met. Furthermore, many among those who were drafted wanted to take advantage of the law’s provision that allowed one to pay another to take one’s place. Among those seeking a substitute was twenty-two-year-old Henry Vosburgh, a member of a family of farmers in Coxsackie,