CHAPTER XXVII

LINCOLN AND THE SOLDIERS

ANOTHER Serious problem which the failure of the Peninsular Campaign thrust on the President was where to get troops for a renewal of the war. When one recalls the eagerness with which men rushed into arms at the opening of the Civil War, it seems as if President Lincoln should never have had anxiety about filling the ranks of the army. For the first year, indeed, it gave him little concern. So promptly were the calls of 1861 answered that in the spring of 1862 an army of 637,126 men was in service. It was believed that with this force the war could be ended, and in April recruiting was stopped. It was a grave mistake. Before the end of May, the losses and discouragements of the Peninsular Campaign made it necessary to re-enforce the Army of the Potomac. More men were needed, in fact, all along the line. Lincoln saw that, rather than an army of 600,000 men, he should have one of a million, and, July 2, he issued a call for 300,000 men for three years, and August 4 an order was issued for a draft of 300,000 more for nine months.

By the end of 1862, nearly one and a half million men had been enrolled in the army. Nevertheless, the "strength of the army" at that time was counted at but 918,000. What had become of the half million and more. Nearly 100,000 of them had been killed

or totally disabled on the battlefield; 200,000 more, perhaps, had fallen out in the seasoning process. Passed by careless medical examiners, the first fivemile march, the first week of camp life, had brought out some physical weakness which made soldiering out of the question. The rest of the loss was in three-months', six-months', or nine-months' men. They had enlisted for these short periods, and their terms up, they had left the army.

Moreover, the President had learned by this time that, even when the Secretary of War told him that the "strength of the army" was 918,000, it did not by any means follow that there were that number of men present for duty. Experience had taught him that about one-fourth of the reputed "strength" must be allowed for shrinkage; that is, for men in hospitals, men on furloughs, men who had deserted. He had learned that this enormous wastage went on steadily. It followed that, if the army was to be kept up to the million-men mark, recruiting must be as steady as, and in proportion to, the shrinkage.

Recruiting, so easy at the beginning of the war, had become by 1862 quite a different matter. Patriotism, love of adventure, excitement, could no longer be counted on to fill the ranks. It was plain to the President that hereafter, if he was to have the men he needed, military service must be compulsory. Nothing could have been devised which would have created a louder uproar in the North than the suggestion of a draft. All through the winter of 1862-63, Congress wrangled over the bill ordering it, much of the press in the meantime denouncing it

as "despotic" and "contrary to American institutions." The bill passed, however, and the President signed it in March, 1863. At once there was put into operation a huge new military machine, the Bureau of the Provost-Marshal-General, which had for its business the enrollment of all the men in the United States whom the new law considered capable of bearing arms and the drafting enough of them to fill up the quota assigned to each state. This bureau was also to look after deserters.

A whole series of new problems was thrust on the President when the Bureau of the Provost-MarshalGeneral came into being. The quotas assigned the states led to endless disputes between the governors and the War Department; the drafts caused riots; an inferior kind of soldier was obtained by drafting, and deserters increased. Lincoln shirked none of these new cares. He was determined that the efficiency of the war engine should be kept up, and nobody in the Government studied more closely how this was to be done, or insisted more vigorously on the full execution of the law. In assigning the quotas to the different states, certain credits were made of men who had enlisted previously. Many disputes arose over the credits and assignments, some of them most perplexing. Ultimately most of these reached the President. The draft bore heavily on districts where the percentage of death among the first volunteers had been large, and often urgent pleas were made to the President to release a city or county from the quota assigned. Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago "Tribune," once told me how he and