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

and mounted riflemen)—in all, that worked out to 1,105 commissioned officers, a number of whom were Southerners from the seceded states, and 15,259 enlisted men.9 Furthermore, few of the regiments were together in one place, almost all of them having been broken up piecemeal to garrison forts in the West or along the borders. It was, in truth, little more than a police force. There was no general staff to coordinate the army’s various functions—recruitment, planning, training, mapmaking. The cavalry contained no heavy cavalry units, only light cavalry useful for skirmishing and scouting. Three-quarters of the army’s artillery had been scrapped at the close of the Mexican War, and artillery units had been “made to serve either as infantry or cavalry, thus destroying almost completely their efficiency as artillery.” No force of such tiny proportions was likely to bring the secessionists easily to heel.

What was worse, Congress was at that moment out of session, and without congressional sanction, Lincoln lacked constitutional authority to raise a national army. Nor could Congress be assembled at the drop of a hat for the emergency. Unlike the Senate, the representatives in the House were still elected in 1860 on a staggered schedule that varied from state to state, and the new Congress did not usually expect to fully assemble itself after an election year until December of the following year—which, in this case, meant December 1861. At the very best, even with speeding up some state elections, there was little hope of getting the new Congress together before July, when a number of crucial border-state elections would finally be complete. Maryland, in fact, would not hold its congressional elections until June 13, and Kentucky not until a week after that.10

Lincoln did have one other recourse for recruiting soldiers, and that was the 1795 federal militia statute that had originally delegated to President Washington the authority to call up the militia of the various states in the event of insurrection. So on April 15, two days after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln issued a proclamation that declared the Confederate states in rebellion and called for the states of the Union to provide the federal government with 75,000 militia for three months (the statutory maximum), with the numbers to be apportioned among the states. Two weeks later, he issued a second call, this time for the recruitment of forty regiments of state volunteers (a little over 42,000 men) and the expansion of the regular army by eight regiments of infantry and one each of artillery and cavalry. Although Congress approved both acts retroactively—in fact, greatly expanded the numbers of volunteer recruitments, up to a million men—nothing in the 1795 statute had authorized either of these follow-up calls, and Lincoln would later have to justify his actions largely on the admittedly vague basis of the “war power of the government.”11

The calls for militia, volunteers, and an expanded regular army created a parallel system in the Union armed forces, which would be composed of three kinds of military organizations. First, at the core of the army would be the old regular U.S. Army regiments, which enlisted men directly into service as long-serving professional soldiers, and which were known simply by their regimental numbers (i.e., 1st U.S. Infantry, 5th U.S. Cavalry). Second, rising into existence at the call of the various state governments would be the volunteer regiments, which were recruited by the states, marched under state-appointed officers carrying their state flag as well as the Stars and Stripes, and were identified by their state regimental number (i.e., 83rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 1st Minnesota Volunteers, 20th Maine Volunteers, 19th Massachusetts Volunteers). These volunteers were a makeshift category, to save Congress the expense of permanently commissioning officers and mustering men into a dramatically expanded Federal service, which might prove legally difficult to disband once the wartime emergency was over.

Unlike regulars, the volunteers remained state-based, and they signed up for two- or three-year periods, after which they returned to civilian life and their units evaporated without any further fiscal obligations. The British had invented the volunteer system during the Napoleonic Wars, also to save themselves the expense of permanent expansions of their army, and the United States had taken over the example in the Mexican War, where the bulk of the U.S. forces were volunteers. In a pinch, the president was always able to call upon the supposedly vast reservoir of state militia. However, only a few states actually had a reasonably organized militia system to start with (New York’s was the best, with about 45,000 men on its rolls, followed by those of Ohio and Indiana), so in practice militia units were usually employed only on emergency rear-echelon duties, to free up the volunteers and regulars.12

This system might have been more confusing had it not been for the fact that the regular army regiments never numbered more than a handful compared to the vast outpouring of volunteer recruits (Pennsylvania alone raised 215 volunteer infantry regiments during the course of the war), and for the fact that the volunteer regiments were frequently commanded by regular officers who were commissioned into state volunteer service. At the beginning of the war, though, it caused no end of chaos. State volunteer regiments often chose their own uniforms and weapons, elected their own noncommissioned and company officers with minimal regard for their competence, and generally behaved little better than a mob of hunters at a turkey shoot. Regiments such as the 79th New York arrived in Washington garbed in Highland kilts; the 72nd Pennsylvania copied from the daring French-Algerian colonial troops known as Zouaves the dashing Zouave uniform, complete with baggy red trousers, a cutaway monkey jacket, and a red fez and turban; the 3rd Maine reported for duty in uniforms of gray. Regimental drill often had to wait until the newly elected officers could learn, from a variety of popular handbooks or from the presence of a few old regulars, how to give the necessary orders.

Nevertheless, the volunteers were all that Lincoln at