Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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service if they had enough money. A drafted man (called a “conscript”) could pay $300 to the government, or hire a substitute soldier to go in his place.
Many substitutes used aliases, and after claiming their fee, deserted at the first opportunity. “A sweet lot of substitutes they send us,” wrote a disgusted Harry Goddard of the 14th Connecticut. “All New York roughs. Of the 380 who reached us, 92 have deserted, four have been shot, and I almost wish they would send them with or in their coffins.”17
Over 200,000 Union soldiers deserted during the war. Gilbert Smith of the 6th Connecticut described the ambivalence he and many others felt at deserters’ executions: “There was 2 men shot for desertion yesterday but I did not go to see them it is something I have a great dislike for but yet I think it serves them right.”18
Soon after the war began, businesses that supplied substitute soldiers opened in many cities. For a fee, the firms provided alternates for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t serve in the military. Some patriotic women, like sisters Elizabeth and Augusta Greene of Norwich, hired substitutes for themselves for the length of the war.
MANY WAYS TO SERVE
Connecticut provided the Union with over a score of Union generals, including Daniel Tyler, J. K. F. Mansfield, Alfred Terry, John Sedgwick, Alpheus Williams, Horatio Wright, Alexander Shaler, and Nathaniel Lyon.
Drafted men reported to this conscript camp in Grapevine Point, New Haven (now the site of Criscuolo Park). Here veteran officers did their best to turn them into fighting men. Most conscripts were reluctant soldiers at best; many were bounty jumpers, intent on escaping so they could enlist elsewhere for the bounty money. To prevent desertions, security at the conscript camp was tight, but that didn’t stop the most determined conscripts. In January of 1865, an officer reported that “the denizens of the guard-house had tunnelled out during the night, and all who cared to go, twenty-six in number, had left for parts unknown.” (George B. Peck, Jr., Camp & Hospital, pp. 16–17.)
Beneath these lofty leaders, Connecticut men filled a huge range of positions that included clerks, commissaries, wagoners, musicians, hospital stewards, and chaplains, each with its own vital function. Soldiers who weren’t fighting men were still crucial to the cause. When a regiment marched eighty miles in three days, it needed a competent commissary who would have rations waiting for the hungry soldiers. Without that commissary, everything broke down.
MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
“Fighting” men were often contemptuous of the soldiers who wielded pens rather than muskets. Clerks usually avoided combat, but their duties were demanding. Eddie Brewer, a clerk in the 14th Connecticut, wrote: “Out of seventeen days we have been at Harper’s Ferry, there have been but five when I could find time to cook my regular meals, and I have often been under the necessity of getting along with one meal, and several times have written until after eleven o’clock at night.”19
TRUE MORAL COURAGE
A post in the Ambulance Corps was also considered a soft job by other soldiers. “I think I would go [into the Ambulance Corps] if I could get a chance to in a moment,” wrote Lucius Bidwell of Middletown; “the dutys are not so hard for thay have no drilling nor fighting to trouble them.”20
For the army clerk, the writing never stopped. Among the constant forms he filled out was the daily countersign, which soldiers needed in order to pass the picket line. Eddie Brewer noted that he made seven copies of the document each day. In September of 1863, Colonel Upham of the 15th Regiment opened this document, folded in a neat triangle, to learn the day’s password: “Petersburg.”
Eddie Brewer (left), a bank clerk in Middletown, enlisted in the 14th Connecticut along with his best friend, Amos Fairchild. Close as brothers, the two young men were comrades until Eddie was pulled from the ranks and assigned to be a clerk at Gen. French’s headquarters. While Eddie wrote orders, his friend Amos went into battle with the regiment. Though being a clerk was considered a safe position by those in combat, Eddie and Amos met exactly the same fate: they died of disease in the army.
But John G. Pelton vehemently refuted Bidwell’s impression of the Ambulance Corps. Like Bidwell, John Pelton had joined the 14th Connecticut in 1862. In the months that followed, his regiment would fight in one major battle after another. (“How I have escaped being killed … is a mystery to me,” Pelton wrote to his brother.)21
But Pelton’s familiarity with battle would prove invaluable. In April of 1864 he became ambulance chief for the Army of the Potomac’s 2nd Corps. Three weeks later, Pelton had his baptism by fire: the battles of May 1864 resulted in over 36,000 Union casualties.
Pelton demanded courage, competence, and sympathy from the hundreds of stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers he commanded. One of his officers, John Harpster, described the duties that Pelton laid out for his men during battle:
We were to keep in the rear of the Army, but, as he significantly pointed out, not too far in the rear! The stretcher bearers were to be allowed to take shelter, provided they did not have to hunt too far from the line for it; otherwise they were to take what came, just as the men on the front line had to; for they were in error, he said, if they thought their office was to carry with it any special immunity from danger … The wounded were to be removed beyond the line of fire as quickly and as carefully as possible, put into the ambulances and removed to the field hospital …
The drivers, during battle … were to keep the two water kegs in their ambulances constantly replenished, and were to be ready to move the instant a wounded man was delivered to their charge. They were to drive carefully, taking every precaution against causing the wounded unnecessary suffering, and, having delivered their charge at the field hospital, were to return to the front as rapidly as possible.22
Pelton was proud of his men, writing that “it requires more true moral courage to advance up to a line of Battle unarmed and unsupported than it does to charge in line nerved by the presence of officers and the excitement of battle.”23 His official reports listed scores of ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers who were killed, wounded, or captured while performing their duties.
Harpster added that “There is another test of the stuff a man is made of to which the ambulance men are put … to take a train load of mangled and mutilated men back to the field hospital and, having delivered your charge, stand a while watching the surgeons cutting and sawing at human bodies, and see the holes dug at the foot of the amputating tables gradually filling up with dissevered arms and legs, and then, with the horror of it all before your eyes … approach again that fatal line of fire … this, I say, will be conceded to be a pretty stiff test of the amount of iron that is in the blood of a man.”24
Once a battle was over, Pelton’s men were not allowed to rest, of course. They were searching the battlefields for wounded, then hurrying their ambulances along clogged roads to reach field hospitals. They often spent all night tending to the wounded; then turned to the care of their horses and mules before they could sleep.
John Graves Pelton was twenty-four when he enlisted for the Union. An intelligent man with a good sense of humor, Pelton quickly became adept at running the ambulance corps. In the spring of 1864, with battle an almost daily occurrence, Pelton smoothly transferred ambulances and personnel from battlefield to battlefield, providing wounded soldiers with swifter, more humane care.
A DUTY TO INSPIRE
In a fight to the death, there was even a place for ministers. For Henry Clay Trumbull, chaplain