Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [11]
Pulitzer became Vosburgh’s salvation. At the Kingston tent, on September 20, 1864, Pulitzer agreed to serve as a soldier in his place for one year in return for approximately $200. To do so, Pulitzer swore two separate times that he was twenty years old, though he was still only seventeen. The district’s provost marshal, a commissioner of the board as well as the surgeon of the board, certified that the gangly teenager before them was “free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity…sober…of lawful age” and signed Pulitzer’s papers.
With money in his pocket, Pulitzer entered a New York jewelry store. He had a tiny hole drilled into an 1864 gold dollar, a small coin about a half an inch in diameter. A delicate chain fastened the coin to a gold ring, thereby making a device by which a woman could hold her handkerchief, then a fashion accessory in Hungary. On the reverse side of the coin, the jeweler engraved Elize’s maiden initials, “E.B.” Pulitzer mailed the resulting creation to his mother, better proof than any letter of his success in the New World.
A few days after enlisting, Pulitzer walked south past City Hall Park to the tip of Manhattan and boarded the steamer John Romer with other recruits. It took them rapidly up the East River, past Throgs Neck and into the western end of the Long Island Sound to the skinny, 100-acre Hart Island. The army used this isolated spot to train its recruits, but the ragtag, multilingual collection of misfits now arriving posed a considerable challenge. The brigadier general in charge was reaching the end of his patience. Draft boards were meeting recruitment quotas, he said, “with men whom they can obtain by any means of bargain, deception or fraud, with which to liquidate upon paper their old obligations to the Government, regardless alike as to whether the men so obtained are fit for soldiers.” By his count only about half the recruits made decent soldiers. In the coming months, he would discharge forty-five recruits upon their examination at Hart Island, seventeen of them for being underage. Pulitzer, however, escaped his detection.
Pulitzer also avoided joining the less desirable and more deadly infantry. Good timing and his childhood knowledge of horseback riding landed him a place in a cavalry company. “I wanted to ride a horse, to be a horse-soldier,” Pulitzer said. “I did not like to walk.” He knew that in European armies regiments were often named after famous people, such as royalty. “So I inquired for the names of some of the regiments of horsemen, and was told of one called Lincoln. I knew who he was and so went to that regiment.”
The First New York “Lincoln” Cavalry, as it was called, was organized at the beginning of hostilities by Carl Schurz, one of the best-known German “forty-eighters” who had come to the United States following the suppression of the revolutionary movement. By the time Pulitzer joined the First Lincoln regiment, its original luster had worn off. Three long years of chasing Confederates in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland had taken their toll; and the men, at the end of their tours of duty, were mustering out in large numbers.
On November 12, 1864, Pulitzer joined his regiment at Remount Camp near Harpers Ferry. The reinforcements were a welcome sight throughout the camps. “For a time, their arrival, appearance, equipment, created an excitement,” an Ohio soldier wrote in his diary. “Many were the surmises that many of them would be minus some of their fancy equipment before another week.”
Pulitzer was assigned to Company L, one of four German-speaking companies under the command of German-speaking officers. The men in his company were brewers, locksmiths, mechanics, painters, tailors, and bakers from Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Prussia and were older than both Pulitzer’s real age and his false age, which by now he gave as eighteen when asked. In completing the paperwork upon arrival, he also told his superiors that if something were to happen to him they were to contact his grandfather