This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [207]
There was a draft act, to be sure, but it contained a flagrant loophole. A man who was drafted could avoid service (unless and until his number was drawn again) by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee; better yet, he could permanently escape military service by hiring a substitute to go to war for him. Clever entrepreneurs eager to make a quick dollar set themselves up in business as substitute brokers, and any drafted man who could afford the price — which often ran up to a thousand dollars or more — could get a broker to find a substitute for him. The substitutes who were thus provided were, if possible, even more worthless as a class than the bounty men. Cripples, diseased men, outright half-wits, epileptics, fugitives from workhouse and poor farm — all were brought forward by the substitute brokers and presented to the harassed recruiting agents as potential cannon fodder. The brokers made such immense profits that they could usually afford any bribery that might be necessary to get their infirm candidates past the medical examination, and the great bulk of the men they sent into the army were of no use whatever.
Any regiment that contained any substantial percentage of bounty men or substitutes felt itself weakened rather than strengthened by its reinforcements. The 5th New Hampshire — originally one of the stoutest combat units in the Army of the Potomac — got so many of these people that it leaked a steady stream of deserters over to the Confederacy; so many, indeed, that at one time the Rebels opposite this regiment sent over a message asking when they might expect to get the regimental colors, and put up a sign reading: “Headquarters, 5th New Hampshire Volunteers. Recruits wanted.” It is recorded that a Federal company commander, finding some of his bounty men actually under fire, sharply ordered the men to take cover: “You cost twelve hundred dollars apiece and I’m damned if I am going to have you throw your lives away — you’re too expensive!”6
The war could not be won, in other words, unless a substantial percentage of the veterans would consent to re-enlist, and the most searching test the Union cause ever got came early in 1864, when the government — hat in hand, so to speak — went to the veteran regiments and pleaded with the men to join up for another hitch. It offered certain inducements — a four-hundred-dollar bounty (plus whatever sum a man’s own city or county might be offering), a thirty-day furlough, the right to call oneself a “veteran volunteer,” and a neat chevron that could be worn on the sleeve.
Astoundingly, 136,000 three-year veterans re-enlisted. They were men who had seen the worst of it — men who had eaten bad food, slept in the mud and the rain, made killing marches, and stood up to Rebel fire in battles like Antietam and Stone’s River, Chickamauga and Gettysburg — and they had long since lost the fine flush of innocent enthusiasm that had brought them into the army in the first place. They appear to have signed up for a variety of reasons. The furlough was attractive, and an Illinois soldier confessed that the four-hundred-dollar bounty “seemed to be about the right amount for spending money while on furlough.” Pride in the regiment was also important; to be able to denominate one’s regiment veteran volunteers, instead of plain volunteers, meant a good deal. In many cases the men had just got used to soldiering. A Massachusetts man wrote home, confessing that he had re-enlisted and remarking, “So you see I am sold again,” and then went on to explain why he had done it: “There are many things in a soldier’s life that