In July 1861, Englishman William Howard Russell returned to New York City after an absence of some months and immediately noticed the “changed aspects of the streets.” “Instead of peaceful citizens, men in military uniforms thronged the pathways, and such multitudes of United States flags floated from the windows and roofs of the houses as to convey the impression that it was a great holiday festival.” Before the outbreak of the war, he had seen men in uniform walking about the city, but “they disappeared after St. Patrick had been duly honored, and it was very rarely I ever saw a man in soldier’s clothes during the rest of my stay. Now fully a third of the people carried arms, and were dressed in some kind of martial garb.” Recruiting posters were everywhere as were tailors specializing in military uniforms. Martial engravings filled shop windows. Children walked the streets dressed by parents in the uniforms of French North African Zouaves. And shopkeepers were peddling all sorts of military equipment, no doubt well aware of the increase in the number of soldiers passing their storefronts.1 Businessman Emile Dupré agreed that before the end of April 1861, New York “look[ed] like an army camp.” “There are armed men everywhere,” he informed his parents, “everyone carries a revolver, and we’re living in an absolute torrent of emotion.” The only items people wish to buy, he lamented, were guns.2
The onset of the war had quickly changed the way people experienced New York City. Those changes, however, were not unique to that great metropolis as towns and cities across the North witnessed some degree of the same thing. Public spaces from the center to the outskirts of Northern communities especially took on the aspects of a militaristic society. Rallies and flag raisings in town squares and elsewhere in the aftermath of Fort Sumter’s surrender turned public spaces into arenas of patriotism. The gathering of volunteers continued to keep them as such. The first wave of volunteers used their towns’ open areas first for drilling and then for mustering prior to their transfers to larger encampments.3 Madison, Wisconsin, had just committed the proceeds from a new tax to refurbish its fair grounds, only to have the area become the site of Camp Randall; sheds once used for livestock became housing for new recruits.4 The people of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, watched new recruits take over public and private spaces and a military encampment pop up where there had been none, giving them the opportunity to observe the process of men becoming soldiers.5
Mobilization changed the local landscapes as men joined military companies, as military companies consolidated into larger units, and as places once used for peaceful pursuits accommodated the processes. As the war progressed, recruiting demanded more effort than it had during the spring of 1861 and later in 1863 a federal draft prompted enlisting among those eligible men who had previously hesitated. Consequently, good order required officers situated at convenient places to facilitate and to encourage enlistments as well as to teach the fresh soldiers their new trade.
At the beginning of the war, militia armories were the logical places for enrolling volunteers. In 1861 men joined companies at these buildings in Lowell, Massachusetts, Providence, Rhode Island, and elsewhere.6 New recruiting offices also materialized in urban Philadelphia and Dubuque, Iowa, and in villages such as Rockland, Maine, and North Adams, Massachusetts.7 Similar offices ran the length and breadth of New Jersey.8 Even the small state of New Hampshire had at one time 28 recruiting offices.9
After the Union disaster at Bull Run in July 1861, a second round of recruiting required a continued military presence in communities that had rarely seen soldiers on their streets before the spring of 1861. Josiah Favill, a recruit turned recruiter, noted that during the summer of 1861 the cities of “New York and Brooklyn were transformed into immense recruiting camps.” Indeed, “In all the public squares and parks,” he explained, “hundreds of tents were erected, covered with flags and immense colored bills, on which the advantage of various branches of the service were fully stated.”10 By the late summer of 1861, there were over 50 recruiting offices in the New York City area, including Brooklyn and nearby New Jersey cities.11
Buildings once used for peaceful purposes deferred to the needs of war by becoming recruiting centers. In Chicago, the North Side Turner Hall, a place that German immigrants used for drill, gymnastics, and intellectual development, became the point of recruiting two companies of new soldiers. Cincinnati’s Workingman’s Hall also produced several companies for an Ohio German regiment, while in Indianapolis, Union Hall served as a gathering point for volunteers for an all-German Indiana regiment. During the fall of 1862, Turner Hall in Milwaukee remained a focal point of German enthusiasm for the Union, serving as the drill hall for noncommissioned officers. Over 100 Turnvereins spread across the North in 1861 undoubtedly provided a similar familiar military starting point for the new German volunteers.12
Thus, public and private property gave way to the needs of war as men mustered for the conflict. New soldiers spilled over into whatever appropriate spaces they could find while they waited to take on the rebels. The great demands of the new volunteer army required that less conventional structures and spaces be pressed into military service for the time being. Some New York soldiers gathered in a Manhattan iron works until they moved up the Hudson River to a flourmill in Yonkers.13 Connecticut volunteers eventually established a camp in a New Haven park, but first slept in Yale University’s Alumni Hall. Other Connecticut volunteers spent the winter months of 1861 and 1862 in a dilapidated New Haven carriage factory.14
State capitals as well as other towns and cities conveniently located along good transportation routes became particular and logical gathering points for the new volunteer regiments. Before heading to the front, Maine volunteers camped in a “grove like park” on the “beautiful slopes between the State House and the river” in Augusta, Maine, close to the state buildings.15 As the people of Maine’s capital city understood, the war demanded new purposes not just for vacant lots but for public parks as well. Not far above New York, the war transformed park-like Davids Island in the East River, a seasonal recreational destination for urbanites, into a military rendezvous in the fall of 1861.16
New York City, a major transportation hub that witnessed the movement of hundreds of thousands of soldiers through its rail and ship depots, constructed a large building in the park in front of City Hall with a capacity to shelter 2,000 men.17 The city’s parks continued to do great service, with the encampment by City Hall housing 70,000 men during the first year of the war. In 1863 officials closed that location, shifting soldiers to the more convenient waterfront battery, but during the summer of 1864 parks still provided resting places for some of the 40,000 soldiers who stopped in New York on their way to the war.18 In the midst of all of this martial activity, the board governing Central Park refused to allow musters in that green space of tranquility, even at one point having sheep make use of meadow space in hopes of discouraging an army presence. By the spring of 1864, however, regiments moved onto park property to practice the military arts.19
Along with vacant lots, parks, and fairgrounds, recruits transformed farmland near towns into army camps. Civilians watched as soldiers erected shelter in empty fields on private property, as they did at Camp Diven near Courtland, New York, and Camp Knox outside of Rockland, Maine.20 Turning fields into military camps was a practice that would continue throughout the war. In 1862, for example, a renewed emphasis on raising troops resulted in even more new camps rising up out of empty fields. In August and September, companies of the Third Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, which had previously served for 90 days, gathered at Camp Joe Hooker at Lakeville to return to the fray as a nine-month unit.21Earlier in July, Camp Vredenburgh appeared on the Revolutionary War battlefield of Monmouth, near Freehold, New Jersey, no doubt reminding the new soldiers tenting there of their forefathers’ struggles to forge the Republic now threatened by the rebellion.22
The new military camps quickly absorbed the recruits and just as quickly prepared them in a fashion for war. A number of these sites became permanent fixtures as the need for mustering and training camps continued longer than Northerners had initially expected. Cleveland, Ohio, hosted seven military camps, including Camp Cleveland, which became a temporary home to around 15,000 soldiers who trained on its 35 acres during the war.23 Camp Randall, established on fairgrounds near Madison, served about 70,000 Wisconsin recruits over the course of the war.24
Just as military camps took over open spaces and buildings once used for civilian purposes, so too did hospitals as communities coped with the more sobering return of injured troops. At the beginning of war, necessity led to the conversion of buildings not especially suited to the medical requirements. Private mansions, hotels, factory buildings, schools, and town halls all became refuges for the men who not too long ago had assembled and trained on other grounds formerly devoted to civilian purpose.25 In larger cities such as Philadelphia, private hospitals became military hospitals even as patriotic citizens established new facilities in advance of the federal government’s efforts to establish a network of purpose-built hospitals.26
As the war continued into 1862, Northerners such as Cordelia Harvey became aware of the inadequacies of army hospitals planted closer to the battlefront and argued that soldiers would best recover in the more salubrious and familiar climate of their home region.27 Also, by 1862, the institutional inadequacies of makeshift hospitals became apparent, convincing the War Department to develop a system of larger general military hospitals in the rear where men might recuperate in more peaceful surroundings.28 Converted buildings, however, remained in use in communities, reminding civilians of how the necessities of war could supersede the purposes assigned to property in peacetime.29 The roofless Estes House in Keokuk, at the southeastern tip of Iowa, was still under construction when it became a point of recovery for many wounded soldiers; it grew into a larger military hospital.30 In Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, the hospital established in the town hall outgrew the original facility to become the Cuyler Army Hospital.31 Madison, Wisconsin’s octagonal Farwell Mansion, built before the war and standing abandoned at its commencement, became an army hospital in October 1863; it also would expand into a larger military hospital.32
The need for hospital space even encroached on a few Northern recreational facilities. Indeed, the very locations that made them attractive resorts might have convinced the authorities of their suitability for a new wartime purpose. The army leased Rhode Island’s Portsmouth Grove Estate, a resort on Narragansett Bay, in the spring of 1862, with its hotel facilities initially supplemented with tents spreading over the nearby grounds.33 Eventually, the federal government took over open space as needed to augment a new system of purpose-built military general hospitals, producing efficient facilities such as West Philadelphia’s large Satterlee Hospital, “twelve acres of ground” therapeutically “removed far enough from the tumult of the crowded parts of the city” that could house 3,500 men.34 By the end of the war, the federal government had developed a network of 204 army hospitals across the North with the ability to hold 136,894 soldiers, bringing the war into places that had not previously seen such human destruction.35
Large and small military encampments gave civilians opportunities to see how their boys adjusted to military life in the rapidly growing volunteer army. Men and women visited nearby camps to spend some time with family members before they left the area, to provide the men with small comforts, and to satisfy their own curiosity about military life. Military encampments thus provided civilians with opportunities to put into action their feelings of patriotism by looking after new soldiers, be they their boys or someone else’s husbands, brothers, and sons. But patriotism could also be fun, as military camps provided some diversion to the normal routines of life. Throughout the war, civilians found it entertaining to watch soldiers engage in drill, while the recruits happily showed off for the young women in the crowds. People living near military camps also had opportunities to attend free concerts performed by military bands, and they enjoyed the added excitement that military units gave to their local celebrations.36
As soldiers welcomed civilians into their social lives, the civilians responded in kind. In June 1864, men from Camp Burnside in Indiana swelled the ranks of the attendees at a Sunday school picnic, making a good impression on the civilians.37 James Randall recalled well-behaved boys marching in disciplined groups to one Midwestern town to attend Sunday services. Randall had especially fond memories of how the Universalist Church welcomed the soldiers, hardly distinguishing the religious occasion from a patriotic meeting. “When we reached the church its doors would be thrown open, and we marched up the aisle to the music of fife and drum,” Randall noted, “to which the minister in the pulpit beat time, while ushers and others made way for us to the most desirable seats.”38
While there was much to enjoy during camp visits, civilians also at times were shocked by the conditions that their soldiers had to endure while the army, the states, and the nation learned how to organize such large numbers of men. A visitor to Camp Curtin in May 1861 reported that “it was a most shocking scene of filth, discomfort and disorder,” and that the men were not adequately fed, leading to “dissatisfied & demoralized” recruits.39 Such first-hand observations, along with newspaper reports and complaints from soldiers, spurred citizens to do something to ease the problems of their men and boys. Concerns prompted by the inadequate food at Camp Curtin led the people of Berks County, Pennsylvania, to donate supplies to the soldiers stationed there.40 Connecticut newspapers also spread the word about the ill-treatment of soldiers. Citizens protested and demanded action from their lawmakers, which led to investigations of the governor’s conduct of the war.41
Sooner or later the soldiers needed to leave their encampments and face new discomforts without the relief provided by nearby civilians. It was usually word of the imminent departure of soldiers that drew out the largest crowds of family and friends who participated in one last celebration to show solidarity with the men, to buck up their spirits, and simply to wish their loved ones farewell. Camps became especially crowded, noisy, and festive immediately before men left for war as families and friends came to say their good-byes. At Augusta, Maine, in 1861 Colonel Oliver Otis Howard met his new regiment amidst the chaos of their encampment where parents, wives, sweethearts, and some drunken soldiers gave a carnival atmosphere to the site as their men prepared to leave the state.42 Over on the coast at Camp Knox near Rockland, Maine, crowds of civilians gathered to visit the men of the Fourth Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment before they broke camp. “The camp grounds were thronged with thousands of the people of this and surrounding towns during the morning,” a local paper reported. “Many were light hearted and gay, enjoying the beautiful morning and the varying scene before them; but many were sad and weeping, and the bright day was to them, doubtless, one of the saddest which had ever dawned.”43
During the early days of the war, citizens continued to show their appreciation to the volunteers by feeding them as they moved closer to the battlefields of the war. Along the routes regiments traveled, people turned out with refreshment for friends and strangers passing through their communities. People graciously tended to the bellies of the First New Hampshire as the regiment proceeded to the front.44 Hartford, Connecticut, butchers and their customers donated a variety of meats, fruits, and vegetables to feed soldiers who would be passing through the city on Christmas day 1861.45 Also, grateful citizens frequently paid similar attention to their soldiers upon their return during the war. When the 49th Massachusetts returned to Pittsfield at the end of the summer of 1863, the citizens adorned their streets with flags, constructed arches, and met the soldiers with bands, fire companies, and other local organizations and prepared a feast for the soldiers.46 In 1864, Milwaukee’s residents happily fed men who had reenlisted in the Sixth Wisconsin. More importantly, the city’s women formed the Wisconsin Soldiers’ Home Association, which established a soldier’s home that tended to the needs of over 30,000 hungry, wounded, and ill returning veterans who stopped in the city on their way to their homes.47
The enthusiastic send-offs were exciting and the presence of returning soldiers sobering, but in between those events, the home folks thought of the absent men, and not just their own family members. “Our soldiers walk just as naturally into our warm living remembrance, into our prayers, as they would walk into the door of their own homes if they were able,” wrote Ohioan Eliza Otis in July 1862 while her husband was away in the service. “I don’t see how any really intelligent, loyal heart can forget them, and I don’t believe they do.” The very fact that a man was a soldier, she continued, “is the key that unlocks all our sympathies, which awakens all our gratitude, and makes [us] remember those whom we have scarcely met as if they had grown up with us by our father’s hearth stone.”48
Military facilities, despite their beneficial impact on some communities, were mixed blessings and provided numerous examples of how soldiers could be problematic neighbors. At Elmira, New York, the boom times created by the military presence there also strained the local postal facilities with so many soldiers, Union recruits, and Confederate prisoners adding their thousands of letters to the mails.49 The people of Elmira, however, suffered more from the lax discipline of the soldiers who sojourned in their town and on one occasion in 1864 had drunken Michigan cavalry troopers rampaging through the streets.50 Throughout the war, farmers had to deal with soldiers who stole chickens and fruit or cut down trees on their land for fuel; city dwellers had to cope with men in blue who generally made a nuisance of themselves in their businesses and on their streets. But soldiers were not responsible for initiating all riotous behavior, although when provoked many of their number failed to exercise restraint. In New Haven, Connecticut, soldiers killed a bricklayer who had insulted the wife of one of their number by calling her a whore.51
While mothers and sweethearts might call to mind their heroes at the front when they saw blue uniforms, they also witnessed good examples of the kind of bad behavior that confirmed their fears about the negative influence of soldiering on the moral lives of their men. Civilians were especially concerned because they assumed that good men made good soldiers and bad men made bad soldiers, with the latter being incapable of seeing the battle through to victory. Northerners had yet to develop the notion that ill-mannered professional warriors could still fight well and win wars.52 Now they confronted examples of the fact that not all soldiers were paragons of virtue, even if the war they fought was a virtuous one. This realization troubled them and continued to make them anxious down to the time their soldiers returned from the war during the spring, summer, and fall of 1865.
When soldiers congregated in towns, they looked for liquor, which often made them rowdy and turned them into lascivious creatures. Such a combination of vices caused problems in the communities where these men were stationed. Camp Wood at Fond Du Lac housed some soldiers who were “as wild as bucks, would get drunk occasionally and then would fight at the drop of the hat.” On one occasion, the soldiers, “gloriously drunk,” wrecked two saloons and ruined other property. A disagreement with some antiwar Democrats—Copperheads as loyal Union men called them—prompted the rampage. “Luckily no one was killed,” recalled James Randall, “but the copperheads were driven from town effectively as snakes if the like named were driven from Ireland by St. Patrick.” A group of sober soldiers quelled the riot, and the drunken men “got to bed to sleep off their booze.” Even the perpetrators admitted “that the whole affair was extremely disgraceful.”53 At times, soldiers, sober or otherwise, were just being patriotic after their own fashion. On March 5, 1863, soldiers from Camp Chase at Columbus, Ohio, joined a mob that destroyed the offices of Crisis, a Democratic newspaper. Brigadier General James Copper chastised the soldiers, reminding them that their duty was “to uphold the laws, not violate them.” Forgetting your duties as soldiers,” he scolded them, “you have become rioters and burglars; and instead of being, as you ought to be, the protectors of the rights of citizens, you have become their assailants.” The general warned the men against such future violations of the citizens’ “sacred” rights in their “persons and property,” but the men went unpunished. The journal, published by the antiwar Lincoln critic Samuel Medary, resumed its activities.54
In April 1864, a mob of soldiers ranging upward to 200 in number and many of them drunk rescued an inebriated veteran who the Hartford, Connecticut, police had jailed for fighting. One local reported that the men were “mad with liquor” and uncontrollable, consequently “they had matters their own way.”55 During the summer of 1864, soldiers kept Springfield, Illinois’s forces of order busy with their drunken larks, while in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, police required assistance from the army to maintain order.56 Indeed, the drunkenness that was common among soldiers contributed to the violence that disrupted communities and kept provost guards well employed. In October 1863, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the provost marshal arrested three soldiers “who were found in the Street, near midnight, intoxicated and engaged in riotous conduct, making indiscriminate attacks upon all who passed by.”57 Earlier in the war, Keokuk, Iowa, witnessed an outburst of violence when a proprietor of a saloon attempted to remove some troublesome soldiers. As the local paper reported, there were some soldiers in the town “who are, we are very sorry to say, making themselves very offensive to our citizens.” That was reason enough to justify organizing a committee to help keep the peace, but soldiers were not always responsible for striking the spark that caused tension between town and camp to erupt into violence.58 In November 1862, drunken Keokuk firemen threw rocks at the Estes House, a hotel where convalescent soldiers were quartered. Men poured out of the building to answer the insult and, reinforced by other soldiers in the town, they routed the firemen and citizens who had joined in the brawl.59
Liquor and sexual misbehavior appeared to go hand in hand. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, experienced an apparent increase in the activities of brazen prostitutes who found the expanding numbers of “dissipated soldiers” to be good customers.60 Also, when Jacksonville, Illinois, began hosting new recruits at the county fairgrounds, its less respectable establishments saw their business grow. In turn, the city government increased the police department’s authority to deal with the problems caused by drunkenness and prostitution. Despite this diligence on the part of Jacksonville’s leaders, one popular local brothel favored by soldiers continued to be the point of origin of frequent fights until it closed near the end of war.61
In some communities, problems caused by soldiers worsened as the war continued and less savory characters enlisted to take the bounties offered to enlistees or the fees paid to men who would stand as substitutes for draftees. Desertion became a problem among these soldiers, who once on the run committed crimes against person and property. In early 1865 in Connecticut, for example, authorities caught a group of deserters in possession of stolen property and burglar’s tools.62 Deserters disrupted the peace and quiet of places like Sandusky, Ohio, a railroad depot town, and were problematic in some counties in the Midwest where they banded together to avoid capture.63 No wonder the editor of the Indianapolis Daily Journal made sure to publicize the execution at a nearby camp in December 1864 to warn other potential deserters and bounty jumpers of the fate that was awaiting them.64
Other communities increased their police forces to deal with the problem. During the summer of 1863, the town fathers of coastal Belfast, Maine, established a town coast guard not only to provide some protection in case of Confederate raids, but also to quell disturbances caused by soldiers passing through town. The town watch’s authority expired in November, but necessity prompted its reestablishment during the winter of 1864 and 1865.65 Jacksonville, Illinois, civic leaders also responded to problems related to the war by increasing the pay of its law enforcement officers, hiring additional men for its police, and arming its force with large truncheons, which were, according to a local newspaper editor, “about the size of a rolling pin, of hard wood, and heavy enough to fell an ox.”66