Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

and like religious revivals, they had the capacity to bring the full social pressure of local communities to bear on potential recruits. John D. Billings, who served in the 10th Massachusetts Artillery, came to recognize a fairly predictable pattern in recruitment rallies that appealed to the social self-definition of white males. “The old veteran of 1812 was trotted out, and worked for all he was worth, and an occasional Mexican War veteran would air his non-chalance at grim-visaged war,” Billings remembered, but the clearest challenge of all would come from “the patriotic maiden who kept a flag or handkerchief waving with only the rarest and briefest of intervals, who ‘would go in a minute if she was a man.’” The town newspaper in Cornwall, Connecticut, actually urged the “Women of Cornwall” to “hurry along your husbands, sons, and brothers to the field! The exigencies of the hour demand the sacrifice: let it be made.” The same charms worked on Confederate volunteers as well. “If men were all like the Ladies we would Whip old lincon before Tomorrow night,” marveled one Georgia private.19 The pressure to be a man, or to avoid becoming a “woman” while women were becoming “men,” put a substantial squeeze on any townsman’s reluctance to enlist. At other points, the recruitment meeting would apply the fervor, as well as the structure, of an evangelical revival:

… Sometimes the patriotism of such a gathering would be wrought up so intensely by waving banners, martial and vocal music, and burning eloquence, that a town’s quota would be filled in less than an hour. It needed only the first man to step forward, put down his name, be patted on the back, placed upon the platform, and cheered to the echo as the hero of the hour, when a second, a third, a fourth would follow, and at last a perfect stampede set in to sign the enlistment roll, and a frenzy of enthusiasm would take possession of the meeting.20

To enlist was a conversion to true manhood; to skulk was a fall from social grace.

Recruits usually moved from the recruiting meeting or office to a “camp of rendezvous,” which could be almost anything from a city park to a county fairground. The quartermaster of the 121st New York simply leased part of a farm “for the season … for the purpose of allowing the same to be used as a military camp.” Since most recruits in the early stages of the war arrived as companies rather than fully formed regiments, the “camp of rendezvous” was the place where the plethora of local companies were sorted out into regiments for the first time. The largest of these camps in the North was Camp Curtin, outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Harrisburg was the single most important east-west junction point for the northern railroad system, and Camp Curtin’s location one mile north of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main Harrisburg depot made it the prime location for the organization of Pennsylvania troops as well as a major supply dump for military equipment for the Army of the Potomac. All in all, 106 regiments were organized at Camp Curtin. But close behind Curtin in organizational numbers were Camp Chase at Columbus, Camp Morton in Indianapolis, Camp Butler in Springfield, Illinois, and Camp Harrison and Camp Dennison in Cincinnati.21

There recruits were issued blankets, tin plates and cups, forks and knives, and, once they had been officially mustered into United States or Confederate States service, uniforms. The official uniform of the United States Army in 1861 included a long dark blue frock coat with matching wool pants and a broad-brimmed hat known by the name of its designer as the “Hardee.” These regulation hats “were neither useful nor ornamental,” remembered a soldier in the 13th Massachusetts. “They were made of black felt, high-crowned, with a wide rim turned up on one side, and fastened to the crown by a brass shield representing an eagle with extended wings, apparently screaming with holy horror at so base an employment.”22 There were few enough of these outfits available in 1861 to issue to the volunteers, but the shortages went unlamented since the volunteers preferred to show up in their own homegrown varieties of uniforms anyway. Italians who had fought under Garibaldi in the Italian wars of national unification organized the 39th New York under a collection of former Garibaldini officers—Ercole Salviatti, Luigi Delucchi, Luigi Roux, and Amborgio Bixio—and kitted themselves out in uniforms inspired by Garibaldi’s Italian revolutionaries.

The officers’ uniforms were dark blue cloth, single breasted, bordered, and its seams were faced, with gold braid. Its deep cuffs and its standing collar were scarlet cloth. … The trousers had double broad red stripes down the outer seam. The hat was of stiff black felt, round in the crown and very wide in the brim, and loaded with a massive cluster of drooping dark green cock-feathers on the left, a la Bersaglieri. …23

The gaudier the uniform or the less in conformity it was to regulations, the less likely it was to win favor in the eyes of army quartermasters or West Point regulars, and the harder it was to replace them when, after a few months, they wore out.

By the spring of 1862, the general uniform pattern of the Union armies had settled into the use of a navy blue frock coat or sack coat, with sky-blue or robin’segg-blue trousers, and either a black felt slouch hat or a baggy-looking flat-topped forage cap sometimes called (after its French pattern) a kepi. Only four sizes of this standard uniform were manufactured for Union army use, which compelled most soldiers to develop some kind of crude sewing skills in order to make them fit, and shoes were simply hard leather brogans, square-toed and ill-fitting at best. “My first uniform was a bad fit,” remembered Warren Lee Goss, a Massachusetts volunteer. “My trousers were too long by three or four inches; the flannel shirt was coarse and unpleasant, too large at the neck and too short elsewhere. The