During the 1860 presidential campaign, the new Republican Party, far from relying on a strong centralized national organization, rose to victory on the enthusiasm generated by state contests and local politicians. With secession, President Lincoln faced the national crisis understanding that the Republican governors generally supported the use of force to end the rebellion. Local politicians in Republican-dominated legislatures also declared secession a traitorous attack on a just Constitution.1 Such patriotic zeal was important, for when Lincoln responded to the firing on Fort Sumter with a call to arms, he needed these men and their states to answer. The one thing the administration clearly could not do at this time was to field an army of sufficient size to meet the challenge of secession without the help of the states.
At the outbreak of the war, the U.S. Army consisted of about 16,000 men. Congress was not in session, and the only legal authority Lincoln had was to call for volunteers to serve for 90 days to put down the rebellion.2 Legislation would rectify that limitation in the near future, but Lincoln did not hesitate to do what needed to be done, expecting to go to Congress for confirmation of his actions as commander-in-chief. Before long, the national government became more closely involved in raising troops. In the meantime, the safety of the Union was in the hands of local communities that raised companies of men and state governments that organized them into new volunteer regiments.
Technically, the universal state militia system, the backbone of America’s defense since its founding, should have been able to provide tens of thousands of men—all the men Lincoln believed he needed—to put down the rebellion. It was, however, a system generally rendered ineffectual by neglect. States expected voluntary companies, private groups that allowed men to drill and to socialize, to complement the statutory militia in times of crisis. Even the best of these units could find themselves generally unprepared for a hard, sustained fight with secessionists, but their existence could provide a core group around which other volunteers answered the call to arms and states formed new regiments.3 Learning of Fort Sumter’s fall, Charles Russell, a factory foreman in Derby, Connecticut, immediately led his volunteer company, the Derby Blues, into the army, contributing to the formation of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Infantry.4 The men of the Winnacunnet Guards, a unit based in Hampton, New Hampshire, marched as a group into the First New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry.5 New regiments from Ohio, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania also had volunteer companies as their backbones.6
State governments began to pay more attention to their militias when Southern states began to act on their threats to leave the Union, but the firing on Fort Sumter made military matters essential concerns in capitals across the North.7 Throughout 1861, governors and their states were the primary engines in creating and supplying a force with which to confront the secessionists before a Washington bureaucracy began to deal with many of the usual problems of mobilizing and maintaining an army.8 Governors such as Oliver P. Morton of Indiana and John A. Andrew of Massachusetts acted vigorously to answer Lincoln’s call to arms. While some states were in more favorable financial positions for meeting the crisis, others found it necessary to rely on citizens to help outfit the men who would leave for the front.9
Men of means put their personal fortunes on the line to aid their states in defending the integrity of the nation. Sometimes the donations were idiosyncratic. For example, in Connecticut one patriotic family from the shipbuilding town of Mystic offered its yacht to the government for the duration of the war, while a man from Salisbury promised the government 100 tons of iron, just the thing for producing cannon balls. More immediately practical were the material pledges of local Connecticut businessmen, such as the shop owner in Middletown who gave every last stitch of underwear in his store to a local volunteer company or the Hartford tailors who cut cloth for uniforms without charge.10
Generally, however, wealthy patriots endorsed bank loans and pledged funds to outfit volunteers or to help the families of recruits who went off to war.11 Bank officials raced to lend money to their beleaguered states. In Madison, Wisconsin, businessmen and community leaders even competed with one another in making pledges from their personal funds.12 In the small New Jersey communities of Oxford Furnace and Belvidere, wealthy businessman John I. Blair gave a total of $700 to support volunteers and families.13 On a somewhat larger scale, on April 16 Governor William Buckingham of Connecticut, his effectiveness restricted by an inadequate public treasury and unserviceable weapons, personally vouched for a $50,000 loan, which would allow him to arm his state’s volunteers with modern rifles.14 Across the Northern states, wealthy individuals also used their own resources to raise and equip military units.15
Bankers, businessmen, and community leaders were not exceptions, but the norm when it came to the people’s patriotic response to the Southern insult to the national flag; they were simply doing with greater resources what citizens of lesser means were doing in communities of all sizes everywhere. After Sumter’s fall, communities quickly gathered to hold meetings to raise money to support the war effort before the federal government began to muster resources of its own. In Morrisville, Vermont, residents at a “very spirited” town meeting passed resolutions “giving their wealth, strength and life if need be to the cause of freedom.”16 Other towns and cities did the same, gathering substantial sums with which to prepare their men for war and to care for the families they left behind. Chicagoans, for example, collected $30,000 with which to purchase equipment for volunteers.17
Smaller communities did the same as Chicago, also realizing that they should share the burden of caring for the families that their men left behind. The people of Springfield, Massachusetts, gathered at a town meeting that raised money to equip volunteers and assist their families.18 Residents of Dover, New Hampshire, resolved to raise up to $10,000 to care for the families of volunteers.19 Eventually, states with borrowed money and budgets in place developed more formal procurement systems. Their politicians generally directed lucrative contracts to businesses within their boundaries, sometimes mixing personal motives with the needs of the state and winning friends along the way.20
In the end, it would be Washington that would centralize the acquisition of the needed war materiel, creating a sizeable bureaucracy unknown before secession and one that would spend more than one billion dollars to supply the men in the victorious armies.21 And, in the end, it would be Lincoln as the commander-in-chief, through the War Department, who would control volunteers for the terms of their enlistments in those armies.22 When the dust settled by the summer, however, regimental organizations rallied by their governors continued to nurture the sense of pride that men held for their particular states. After a brief period of allowing men to elect their own officers, the states assumed the responsibility. Officers who led the regiments carried commissions signed by their state’s governor.23 Men mustered under state flags as well as the old national banner, and carried names into the larger army organizations that included their state of origin.24 Building the volunteer army was federalism in action.
Thousands of young men sought out places in militia regiments at their local armories, visited newly established recruiting offices, or wandered about the countryside hoping to find a place where they could sign up to fight the secessionists. Frequently, the first volunteers rose to the challenge at the end of the patriotic town meetings that were common across the North. On April 20 in Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin, a Union meeting ended with the singing of the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Three cheers . . . for the Stars and Stripes,” and men adding their names to an enlistment roll.25 The pattern repeated itself across the Northern states. In Jacksonville, Illinois, men sufficient to fill two military companies volunteered after its April assembly.26 Throughout Minnesota, similar public meetings helped ambitious men who wished to become officers raise more companies of volunteers than the state could muster into service.27
As men came forward to fill the ranks of new companies of soldiers, it might have been difficult for the reluctant young neighbor or cousin or friend to resist the contagious community desire to answer the firing on Fort Sumter. Northerners could not escape the “military spirit” that Alfred Bellard, a young New Jersey apprentice, observed coming “to a boiling pitch” in the wake of Fort Sumter.28 Indeed, in April James Madison Bowler joined a Minnesota company without first consulting with his future wife. “So many of my friends are going and the cause is so just,” he explained, “that I cannot resist going with them and for the cause.”29
The pattern of building an army town-by-town and state-by-state proceeded in similar ways across the North. Consequently, men and boys went into the service with friends, relatives, neighbors, and work associates. In doing so, they shaped their companies into martial expressions of the communities they were defending. In small communities, whether defined as a college, a factory, or a town, personal bonds encouraged friends and relatives to accompany one another into the service. On April 19, Augustus D. Ayling of Massachusetts reported that he was in a company that also was home to some of his “intimate friends” and “schoolmates.”30 Students from the state normal school in Bloomington filled the 33rd Illinois regiment, which became known as the “Teacher’s Regiment.”31 Wisconsin’s Manitowoc County Guards consisted of almost 100 men who had lived and worked together in a small community.32 And at the outset of the war, Dixon, Illinois, farmers made up the 34th Illinois Infantry.33
There were other types of communities that sent groups of their men to war, communities that might have been rooted in geographical locations but also had other personal ties uniting the volunteers. Working men stuck together. A group of Terre Haute, Indiana, railroad workers, for example, went off to fight, while Suffeld in Hartford County, Connecticut, produced a company consisting of cigar makers 34 Massachusetts shoemakers who had participated in an 1860 rally joined the Lynn Mechanic’s Phalanx 35 And Galena, Illinois, provided enough lead miners to form the 34th Illinois Infantry, aptly nicknamed the “Lead Mine Regiment. 36 Solidarity reigned among some of these groups, with Brooklyn Navy Yard workers pledging family assistance and Philadelphia printers promising to “keep all members . . . in good standing” while they were off fighting 37
Young men who had organized to support Lincoln’s campaign for the presidency provided another antebellum group that could transfer its loyalties to army units. In 1860, these political activists, known as the Wide Awakes, had marched first through the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, wearing a uniform consisting of caps and capes and carrying torches. The organization, which enlisted men and organized them into military-style units, spread across the state and elsewhere in the North. Such organizations provided a committed core for the recruiting of volunteers in Connecticut in 1861.38
Germans also came to the new volunteer army in ready-made organizations prepared to fight for liberty in their adopted country. These volunteers earlier had participated in the Turnvereins, clubs that drilled young men in fitness activities as well as the handling of weapons. The Turners would give the Union cause 16 regiments.39 The German gymnasts were an interesting example of a social and ethnic community contributing its men to the volunteer army, but other ethnic communities also contributed their men and boys to the Union cause. Irish militia companies in Chicago, for example, eventually brought their members into the 23rd Illinois Infantry, and other ethnic groups residing in that city joined common organizations.40 Indeed, Illinois provided numerous examples of the ethnic organization of military units that might have given their German, Irish, and Scots members some comfort in familiar surroundings.41 In the end, states quickly filled their quotas leaving some men wondering if they would miss out on the war and governors complaining that they should be allowed to do more for the Union.42
Despite such initial enthusiasm, there were men who were not so quick to leave behind their communities. Some young men felt that their familial and business obligations were legitimate reasons to stay put, at least for the time being. Politics, however, played a large role. Sometimes, entire volunteer companies whose members disagreed with the Lincoln administration’s war refused to step forward. In Wisconsin some Democrats had political objections to Lincoln’s call and refused to serve, again showing the underlying tensions that were easily overlooked in Northern communities during the spring of 1861. Some Wisconsin volunteer companies consisting of Irish and Germans also disbanded rather than be obligated to respond.43
Other communities, even as they raised troops for Lincoln, expected to keep men behind for the legitimate purpose of home defense, suggesting their localism, their trust in their own efforts, and their expectations of the federal government at least at the outset of the war. In April 1861 in Terre Haute, Indiana, the community planned on raising four companies, with two of them ready to go off to war while the remaining two companies would stay home “except in extraordinary cases.” The people there expected “squally times along the Ohio River as Kentucky no doubt will go with the balance of slave states.”44 Farther west, Governor Thomas Carney advanced the state of Kansas $10,000 to muster about a company’s worth of men to guard the state’s border. Lincoln initially did not give him permission to raise more men for local defense, but the state did so later in the war when it feared invasion.45
Some wives and girlfriends cautiously urged their menfolk to calm down, to wait and see how things would develop, and, in the meantime, to tend to their own lives. In April 1861, Illinois resident Lizzie Little wrote to her fiancé George Avery, urging him to delay enlisting. “Let some battles be fought, see the power you have to contend with, for I believe it is a fierce one,” she advised with some prescience. “The South will not be conquered in a day as some here vauntingly boast but in the end we may hope may we not for complete victory.” From her perspective, she offered practical advice. After all, the country would need intelligent men to reconstruct the Union once the war was over, she argued. Wait until “the loafers of our cities, the scum of society show their valor ere the working efficient men take the field.”46
Voices such as Miss Little’s, however, could not withstand the drumbeats and speeches that rallied communities to war. Women could indeed be as patriotic as their menfolk, especially when they offered their sons and husbands to the war effort. In April 1861, Vermonter Ann Stevens witnessed an acquaintance—“a noble woman” she called her—“with red eyes” proclaim that “she will give up her husband for her country.”47 In Boston, a mother watched the Sixth Massachusetts leave for war, her son in its ranks. She remarked, “If the country needs my boy for three months, or three years, I am not the woman to hinder him . . . for if we lose our country what is there to live for?”48 In the end, women performed a great service by accepting the inevitability of their menfolk’s new military commitments, while taking comfort in cultivating a trust in God.49 When one Wisconsin woman witnessed her husband sign his papers, she said to him, “God bless and protect you, my husband.” But another Wisconsin woman whose husband had joined the army exhibited another motivation for men to sign their recruitment papers; she made it clear that her spouse would live an unhappy existence if he had not rallied to the cause. “I would almost despise my husband and would think him a sneak,” she said, “if he hadn’t gone.”50
Politicians and editorialists reminded women that they, too, had a stake in the outcome of the conflict and certainly had work to do. Wisconsin women heard Governor William A. Randall ask them to make bandages. “It is your country and your government as well as theirs [the men going off to fight] that is now in danger, and you can give strength and courage and warm sympathies and cheering words to those who go to do battle for all that is dear to us here.” Randall, of course, was relying on women to accept their traditional roles of nurturer and nurse. “I commend the soldiers to your kindness, encouragement and prayers” Randall continued, “with full confidence that when occasion calls, many, very many Florence Nightingales will be found in our good land.”51
Elsewhere, men might note that women could have a significant impact on the morale of the soldiers they sent off to war and needed to show a positive attitude, even if saddened by the forthcoming separation. An editorialist in Troy, New York, remarked, “A woman’s gentle encouragement, and high-souled abnegation of herself, can exercise more influence in determining the conduct of a true man, than any other thing on earth.” Women will make men better soldiers by giving them their emotional support. “There is not a soldier [that] will enter the field of battle with firmer step and more invincible will,” the writer continued, “if the voice of the woman he loves best has cheered him in his departure and he knows she waits to hear that he has done well his part.”52 Indeed, young women in Wisconsin and probably elsewhere across the Northern states were not above cajoling, coaxing, or embarrassing young men into enlisting while they also enthusiastically participated in the local rallies that usually preceded the call to volunteer for service.53
While women could not participate in the rush to volunteer, they did what they could to aid their menfolk. When Cleveland, Ohio, women discovered that men at a local camp were without blankets, they promptly collected the necessary items by driving carriages up and down the city’s streets alerting people to their purpose; they continued to do so until they had a sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the camp. At the same time, another group of Cleveland women sewed a thousand shirts for volunteers over two days of intense work.54 Middle-class women in Dubuque, Iowa, took it upon themselves to organize as the Ladies Volunteer Labor Society and sewed uniforms for two companies of soldiers.55 The women of Winona, Minnesota, provided their local company with what turned out to be the only outfits that came close to marking them as a military unit among all the other volunteers in the First Minnesota.56 On a Sabbath day back east in Hartford, Connecticut, “A great many ladies served God . . . by serving their country, in making uniforms for its gallant defenders.”57
Clothing soldiers was but one way that women contributed to the initial rush to arms during the spring of 1861. Nursing sick recruits and feeding their healthier comrades at the various rendezvous camps were other ways of using the skills of homemakers to fight the insurrection. Jacksonville, Illinois, women sewed and baked for the new soldiers at Camp Duncan, first coming together in church groups that developed into more formal voluntary associations.58 Women from Keokuk, Iowa, brought cakes to soldiers at the training camp, enjoying the break in their own daily routines by witnessing the drills, a practice that wives, daughters, and curious women would continue across the North throughout the war.59 And when time permitted, women, such as those in Madison, Wisconsin, produced grand banquets for their men before they left for battle.60 These women could rise to the challenge not only because they had the valuable skills of homemakers, but because they had developed organizations ranging from sewing circles to temperance groups that had allowed them to rally for quick collective action.61
One of the last things that the women of a community frequently did before their men left for war was to join prominent men in public ceremonies that included the presentation of the flags they had made or procured for the regiments. In 1861, the Second Connecticut received its colors at New Haven. The local Home Guard formed a hollow square before the liberty pole on the town green “enclosing all the ladies who had worked on or were interested in the flags.” “Two pretty girls held the flags, assisted by two gentlemen. Mr. Foster made a short and spirited address to the regiment, and their Colonel replied in a few brave words, and then Dr. Leonard Bacon read the twentieth Psalm, ‘in the name of our God we will set up our banners,’ etc., and made a beautiful prayer, and amid the shouts and cheers of the crowd, the frantic waving of handkerchiefs and flags and the quiet weeping of some who were sending off their dearest ones to all the chances of war, the glittering waving splendors were lifted aloft and the regiment swept on.”62 Regimental flags, blessed by the touch of local women, became powerful symbols of the soldiers’ communities and families, reminders of home and reminders of their reasons for leaving it behind.63
Flag presentations and farewell ceremonies, perhaps including a last banquet for the soldiers and their friends, could not pass without additional speeches by local politicians and prayers offered by local clergy, reminding citizens and soldiers alike about the reasons for the events they were now witnessing. But eventually, the boys and men of the communities had to leave for the front. Minnesota volunteers left Goodhue County encouraged by the Red Wing brass band.64 People cheered on the men of the First Michigan Engineers as their train carried them through Michigan and Indiana.65 Catholic soldiers might have found some additional comfort in the presence of their clergymen involved in the departure ceremonies. In 1861, Irish Chicagoans sent off its Irish Brigade with a mass celebrated by the local bishop, while New York City’s Irish Brigade’s flag presentation ceremony had several high-ranking churchmen in attendance.66
The women left behind grasped the first reality of war as they watched their menfolk depart from home. As activist Mary Livermore later recalled, they faced it with a heroic demeanor as they tried to mask their own “exquisite suffering.”67 They were losing the company of husbands, brothers, and sons for what might have been the first time in their lives. Women also readily grasped the seriousness of the situation, some perhaps better than the soldier boys they were sending off to war. When one Maine regiment left the state capital of Augusta in early June, they briskly trotted off to the train cars to the sounds of “sobbing mothers, wives, and dear ones.”68 At Jersey City, New Jersey, women at the station “were crying and wringing their hands,” while the boys who were setting off to war went to the trains as if they were engaged in a frolic.69
Women wept as they said their good-byes, but they attempted to assuage their sorrow by selflessly grasping the larger needs of their country. In April 1861, Ohioan Amanda Wilson fretted about her brother George, encamped and awaiting orders to move to the seat of the war. “Yet,” she admitted, “we would not love him if he were not willing to fight for our Country.”70 And as Esther Claflin reassured her husband Gilbert after he left for the army in the fall of 1862, “if by making this great sacrifice we can help the cause of truth and liberty is it not better than living merely for ourselves?”71
These were sad times for the home folk, and as waves of enlistment continued to deprive them of family members throughout the war, a new group of women came to understand what their counterparts had experienced in the first rush to arms. In September 1862, Rachel Cormany confided in her diary that when she learned of her husband’s enlistment, “I felt an undescribable [sic] heaviness in my heart.”72 She became calmer after praying, but “at times still I am overcome, tears relieve me very much, my heart always seems lighter after weeping freely[.] In daytime I get along very well but the nights seem very long.”73
Rachel Cormany was not alone in her sadness as other women throughout the war knew that they had to adjust to the novel circumstances, whether it was their husbands or sons who left them at home to worry about the future. In May 1861 Lizzie Caleff informed her future husband Madison that thinking about their separation “sends a thrill of sorrow through my heart that is not very easy subdued.” After sending off her husband in the spring of 1861, Iowan Emeline Ritner admitted that she “felt as if I had been to a funeral”; nevertheless, “I must train myself, and get used to it.”74 Indeed, a Vermont wife well understood the potential sacrifice that she faced as her husband left for the war. That woman “with red eyes” said “she will give her husband up for her country.”75