OCCUPATION AND THE UNION MILITARY EFFORT

Scholarship on Civil War soldiers has explored in detail the immediate experience and long-term impact of combat. Disease, hard marching, and exposure to the elements all took a toll during the conflict, but above all, as one scholar put it, “the major psychological trauma that Civil War soldiers encountered related to the terror of battle.” Another historian noted that “even victory had a price” for Union veterans because the “terror of this unprecedented war long outlived the stacking of arms at Appomattox.”38

This rich literature raises an obvious question: What about soldiers who never really “saw the elephant”? What did it mean to have little or no chance of engagement with the enemy’s regular forces? On the Union side, William F. Fox’s classic Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 highlights strikingly different types of service. The Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps anchored one end of the spectrum in terms of combat. It included individual regiments that suffered the largest percentage and numerical loss in any battle, the regiments that sustained the largest numerical loss for the whole war, and, quite remarkably, thirty-five of the one hundred Union regiments that lost the most men in battle. On the other hand, the United States fielded “over 300 regiments which were not in action, with as many more which were under fire but a few times. A large part of the Union Armies was used in protecting communications, guarding lines of supply, in garrison duty, and as armies of occupation.”39

An emerging body of work examines the many thousands of men, in both white regiments and United States Colored Troops units, who rendered their principal duty as occupying forces. Gregory P. Downs’s After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015) and Andrew F. Lang’s In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (2017) expose the futility of seeking to understand Civil War soldiering—and its impact over time—through the creation of a universal template featuring combat.

Union troops occupied approximately one hundred cities, towns, and hamlets across various parts of the Confederacy as well as in the loyal slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. They dealt extensively with Confederate civilians, often had sustained contact with African Americans as refugees or residents of the occupied areas, protected railroads and lines of communication, and mounted forays to deal with local guerrillas. In large cities such as New Orleans and Nashville, they acted as police and represented a crucial component of the effort to implement the process of Reconstruction.

White and black soldiers often reacted differently to occupation duty. Much like soldiers deployed to deal with Indian threats in remote areas, a significant number of officers and enlisted men in white units resented their situation. They looked to the great national armies as most responsible for saving the Union and lamented having to deal with politics, counterinsurgency, boring garrison duty, and the complex process of emancipation. As citizen-soldiers carrying out a civic responsibility, they had enlisted to crush armies of Rebels who would destroy the work of the revolutionary generation. But as occupiers, they resembled British regulars who had menaced republican liberty during the revolutionary era.

Charles O. Musser of the Twenty-Ninth Iowa Infantry, stationed in Little Rock, Arkansas, groused in June 1864 of exile to a backwater. Reading about U. S. Grant’s confrontation with Robert E. Lee in Virginia, he expressed a “wish we could be transfered to the ‘Army of the Potomac.’ I would rather go there and run the chances of being Shot than Stay here all Summer.” Most comrades in the regiment also wanted “a change of Department,” he added, and if the Virginia campaign “is to be the decisive one of the war, we would like to participate in it.”40

Another Iowan wrote from near Brownsville, Texas, in April 1864, about unpleasant elements of occupation. “Upon our arrival [at] Santiago,” his regiment realized “there was daily labor for hundreds of men and which of necessity must have been performed by soldiers. . . . Forts and fortifications were to be made requiring the labor of hundreds of men for months. Streets were to be swept and cleaned daily and this is work of a very disagreeable character.” In this instance, African American soldiers—“the laborers of the Army”—would be assigned most of this tedious work. “I thank the originators of the Corps d’ Afrique,” stated Benjamin F. McIntyre coldly, “for taking from us such labor as belongs to menials.”41

“Pickets of the First Louisiana ‘Native Guard’ Guarding the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western Railroad.” The accompanying text, which betrays common racial prejudice from the era, pronounced black soldiers “impervious to miasma” and thus well qualified for occupation duty in the Deep South. “Among the cypress swamps of Louisiana negro soldiers are invaluable” because conditions “unendurable to our soldiers of the North” hold “no horrors to them.” (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 7, 1863, front cover.)

Black soldiers, who after 1863 composed a significant percentage of the occupying forces, often displayed attitudes antithetical to those of white counterparts. Well aware that combat against Confederate military forces represented the ideal for citizen-soldiers, most USCT men nonetheless considered occupation a valuable dimension of the war effort. It placed them on the slaveholders’ ground, allowed them to provide a measure of protection for black refugees, and directly undermined governmental and social structures that sustained slavery. Whereas many white occupiers questioned the use of military forces to control Confederate civilians, USCT soldiers typically welcomed the opportunity to impose a harsh regime on their enemy’s home front.

The diary of William Woodlin of the Eighth USCT describes an operation in Florida typical of innumerable others. A “three days tramp” in early June 1864 “brought in quite a large quantity of cattle & two prisoners who were taken to Jacksonville on the whole it was quite a successful foraging expedition. two adult Contrabands with their children were brought in, as well as a goodly No. of white trash whom we did not keep long . . .”42

In May 1865, most U.S. soldiers believed their military obligation ceased with the reestablishment of the Union and emancipation. The loyal citizenry agreed. Congress reduced the size of the volunteer army from a million to only eleven thousand within eighteen months. The regular army, by 1869, mustered just thirty-seven thousand, many of them deployed in the West. These figures underscore how little support existed to approve—and fund—a large army of occupation in the South. This reality lessened the possibility of equality across racial lines during Reconstruction and highlighted an ideology that limited the army’s peacetime role in a constitutional republic.