A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

A Republic in the Ranks

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

A Republic in the Ranks

Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

ZACHERY A. FRY

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed and set in Miller by Rebecca Evans

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustration: officers and battle flags of the Forty-Fourth New York, The People’s Ellsworth Regiment, ca. October 1864. Courtesy Ronald S. Coddington Collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fry, Zachery A., author.

Title: A republic in the ranks : loyalty and dissent in the Army of the Potomac / Zachery A. Fry.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020] | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019026432 | ISBN 9781469654454 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469654461 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Army of the Potomac. | Soldiers—Political activity—United States. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Regimental histories.

Classification: LCC E470.2 .F895 2020 | DDC 973.7/41—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026432

A version of chapter 1 originally appeared as Zachery A. Fry, McClellan’s Epidemic: Disease and Discord at Harrison’s Landing, July–August 1862, Civil War History 64, no. 1 (2018): 7–29.

A version of chapter 5 originally appeared as Zachery A. Fry, Philadelphia’s Free Military School and the Radicalization of Wartime Officer Education, 1863–64, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 141, no. 3 (October 2017): 275–96.

For my grandfather

Donald A. Weiland

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Hope of the Nation

CHAPTER TWO

A Devotion Almost Idolatry

CHAPTER THREE

We Can No Longer Keep Silent

CHAPTER FOUR

Erase Every Devil of Them

CHAPTER FIVE

Copperheads and Half-Loyal Regular Officers

CHAPTER SIX

What the Sentiment of the Army Really Is

Epilogue

APPENDIX A

Bibliography of 1863 Unit Political Resolutions

APPENDIX B

1864 Reenlistment Analysis Methodology

APPENDIX C

Participation by Regiment in the Philadelphia Free Military School

APPENDIX D

Unit Voting Returns for 1863 Elections

APPENDIX E

Unit Voting Returns for 1864 Pennsylvania Congressional Elections

APPENDIX F

Unit Voting Returns for 1864 Presidential Election

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Col. Ellsworth, Funeral March

The War for the Union—‘Stand by Me, and I’ll Stand by You,’ Gen. McClellan

McClellan Is Our Man

Give Us Back Our Old Commander

Officers and battle flags of the Forty-Fourth New York

Newspapers in Camp, by Edwin Forbes

Officers of the 119th Pennsylvania

Acknowledgments

No Civil War scholar should write without acknowledging a debt to the daunting amount of brilliant literature in the field. Navigating that literature and finding my story’s place in it was a deep honor, but it was no simple task. For assistance with that, guidance on the joys and perils of writing, advice on professional development, and generous friendship in everyday life I am grateful to Mark Grimsley. At a dozen points when it seemed like this project would overwhelm me, he could always be counted on to provide sage support, humor, and steadfastness. The appearance of so much recent work on the political culture of Civil War armies collectively threatened to chip away at any fresh insight my own writing could provide, but Mark was relentless in his positivity, asserting that a topic with such intense coverage must be worth all the agony. He was right. Thanks must also go to John L. Brooke, who tirelessly shepherded me through the intricate historiography of early American politics. I have never met a scholar with wider-ranging abilities or interests. This work, for all its faults, is immeasurably better for his input and that of his insightful graduate students. To Paula Baker I extend deep thanks for helping with this project at the eleventh hour and doing so with an authority unexcelled in the study of nineteenth-century political culture. Allen Guelzo, who spurred my initial interest in the topic, was always willing to listen to my frustrations and ideas. I will forever be grateful for his involvement in launching my career.

A host of other scholars provided feedback, research assistance, and encouragement along the way. Ethan Rafuse traveled to Columbus in 2013 to offer his valuable perspective on how to frame the effort. James McPherson, George Rable, Christian Keller, Christopher Stowe, Lorien Foote, Jennifer Murray, Timothy Orr, Matthew Muehlbauer, and Mitchell Klingenberg all offered helpful insights either in the writing process or at conferences. Peter Carmichael was tremendously helpful, reading the work in its entirety and offering his own input and encouragement to make it a far better effort. When it came time for revisions and publication, the tireless staff at UNC Press, especially Mark Simpson-Vos, Jessica Newman, and Jay Mazzocchi, offered frequent guidance and support.

My personal friends at Ohio State were always willing to help, in the process showing why that institution stands preeminent in the study of war. Of these, I would be remiss not to single out military historians Sarah Douglas, William Waddell, Daniel Troy, Ian Johnson, Frank Blazich, Daniel Curzon, JT Tucker, Jon Hendrickson, Robert Clemm, Amanda Morton, Mason Watson, Hayley Fenton, and Corbin Williamson. Among the active military officers at OSU whose work ethic and scholarship were inspirations, I must mention Gregory Hope, James Villanueva, Devon Collins, Jonathan Romaneski, Joel Higley, and Edwin Den Harder. Scott Laidig, a fellow at the Potomac Institute and a Buckeye through and through, offered his own encouragement. Professors Peter Mansoor, Geoffrey Parker, and the late Joe Guilmartin all contributed their time and effort to help make my work better.

In addition to my Buckeye pards, my old friends from the 2009 Gettysburg Semester have been reliable sources of support, and I am also indebted to the participants in the 2016 West Point Summer Seminar in Military History. My 2017 faculty colleagues in the Department of History at West Point helped an effete civilian understand military culture from the inside, insights which greatly aided this work. I must highlight the faculty in Col. Bryan Gibby’s Military Division of the department for their particular friendship and camaraderie. Above all at USMA, however, were my cadets in HI301 History of the Military Art, impressive young men and women who were a relentless source of inspiration during the revision process. Words can hardly express how much teaching them meant to me and contributed to my growth as a military historian. In the same vein, my fellow faculty and the students at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College impress me on a daily basis. This book is better for their support.

This project was blessed with significant help from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Department of History at Ohio State, the Kauffman Family, Democracy Studies at Ohio State, the General and Mrs. Matthew B. Ridgway Grant from the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, as well as a generous Dissertation Fellowship from the U.S. Army Center of Military History. These funds enabled me to travel extensively for research and inquire for materials from patient staffs as far away as Bowdoin College and the Huntington Library. The staffs at USAMHI, the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania State Archives, and the New York State Library and Archives were especially helpful when I visited.

My family members have borne my deep investment in this story for many years now. My parents sacrificed a great deal to provide me with exposure to first-class historians when I was younger, and my loving grandparents were always there to offer their own unique support. Family friends Ron and Nancy Dupre and their welcoming daughter and son-in-law were especially supportive as I planned research trips. My beautiful wife, Emily, deserves coauthor status for her steadfast willingness to listen—ad nauseam at times—and offer brilliant commentary along the way. She helped me work through difficult passages and celebrated with me whenever I was able to strike research gold, usually helping me on research trips herself. And she has agreed to let me break tradition by leaving the final thanks to our loyal cats: Chester, who came into my life just as I was embarking on this project, and Copernicus, who spent many hours napping behind me while I finished it.

A Republic in the Ranks

Introduction

The ‘Army of the Potomac,’ declared Warren Lee Goss in 1890, was the people in arms. It mirrored the diversified opinions and occupations of a free and intelligent democracy.¹ Goss was a veteran of the Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, and he wrote from the experience of having served in the most fractious of all the Northern field armies in the Civil War. Historians have grappled with the subject of political discord in the Union Army for decades, asking questions principally about partisanship in the high command. Relatively few works have analyzed the deep divisions over the war’s conduct among junior officers and enlisted men such as Goss. This book tells that story.

A Republic in the Ranks charts the contentious process of political education in the Army of the Potomac. To explain that process, it highlights the central part junior officers played in mobilizing the men under their command. An appreciation for the political divide in the subordinate officer corps is necessary for understanding the army’s story, because enlisted men often came to mirror the attitudes and behaviors of their immediate superiors. I argue first and foremost that the Civil War was a political awakening for the common soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Young men who signed up to protect the flag and seek adventure found a conflict far more complex than they had anticipated. Confronting an enemy in arms, a hostile environment in Virginia, and the threat of unrest at home forced these political novices in the ranks to consider the stakes of the war and its progress. But they did not arrive at political maturity entirely on their own. The conflict offered endless fodder for policy debate among older, more educated junior officers who had entered the army with mature political sensibilities already. As a trooper in the First New York Cavalry remembered, enlisted men frequently follow[ed] the example of their officers when it came to expressing political sentiment.² The focus of this story, therefore, is the struggle between Democratic and Republican ideologues in shoulder straps to persuade and educate the army’s ranks.

Evidence indicates that Republicans decisively won the struggle for the army’s allegiance. They succeeded for three reasons. First, loyalty to the Lincoln administration resonated in an army disgusted at the sight of slavery, tired of protecting rebel property, and convinced that political expediency would be necessary to secure military victory. Second, many soldiers felt that political disunity was hurting the war effort, and Republicans effectively convinced these men that Democrats at home were seeking to tear the Northern population apart. Finally, and less well-known to historians, pro-Lincoln forces in the army proved effective at fostering political cohesion in their ranks by encouraging widespread participation in the Northern public sphere.

In analyzing the political culture of the Union army, I have opted for the umbrella terms Democrat and Republican to describe the two camps of ideologues vying for influence. I do so while acknowledging that the war’s changing dynamics make it difficult to identify unchanging policy preferences for either group. Still, certain values pervaded each ideology, and an evaluation of political culture should, after all, be focused on underlying values.

As Adam I. P. Smith notes in a recent study of Civil War era conservatism, antebellum Democrats generally joined other Northerners in the common belief that the South and its slaveholding system were materially (if not morally) inferior.³ It is difficult to deny, however, that the party faithful—those who had not jumped ship in the 1850s for Free Soil and, eventually, Republican alternatives—blamed the sectional crisis at least as much on antislavery agitators as on Southern secessionists. The outbreak of war forced Democrats to choose whether traditional opposition politics, including resistance to emancipation, would justify the potential cost to the Union war effort and the party’s future.⁴ Among those Democrats who actively supported the war for Union, some reluctantly joined Republicans on the basis of political necessity and under the belief their alliance would be temporary. A Twenty-Seventh Indiana officer demonstrated the apparent contradictions of this expediency in a January 1863 letter: I am a pro-slavery man in principle, but I will never allow the everlasting negro to get between me and my government … [and] I do not believe we can conquer [the Rebels] without destroying their labor system.⁵ Other War Democrats broadly supported a conflict that would reunify the nation as long as it stopped short of revolutionizing southern society through projects like emancipation.⁶ A third group, the Peace Democrats, opposed the administration and the war altogether by resisting the suspension of civil liberties and any movement on freeing slaves.⁷

As a group, Democrats in the Army of the Potomac typically asserted devotion to a strict conception of the Constitution as the highest moral end and expressed contempt for the corrosion of military discipline from the influences of mass politics. The prewar regular army, where this ideology had its roots, eschewed the outward political passions of the new Republican Party and instead emphasized order. The risk of opposing a wartime administration no doubt also reinforced the Democratic aversion to boisterous politics in the ranks, where attitudes among the party’s supporters ranged from general ambivalence about emancipation to outright hostility toward it. Where disagreement with the civilian authority appeared, therefore, these men tended to hunker down and fume in private to their closest circle of confidants.⁸

Republicans belonged to a relatively new party, and their numbers swelled in the cauldron of war just as they had in the years immediately before Fort Sumter. Republican ideology, as Eric Foner notes, centered on the defense of free labor and free soil, standing in stark opposition to the self-interest of the slaveholding aristocracy. Slavery, Republicans insisted, blighted every place it touched, degrading standard economic measures for the vast majority of Southern whites and rendering the South morally inferior.⁹ Many Republicans—and even a few Northern Democrats—based their revulsion to the South on the belief in a Slave Power conspiracy of well-connected oligarchs seeking to protect and extend the institution. This conspiracy allegation harkened back to earlier anti-Masonic suspicions and called for the defense of basic white equality in a republican system. The potent Slave Power charge had devastated Democratic strongholds in the years immediately before the war, so that by 1860, nearly every Northern statehouse and governor’s mansion housed Republican leadership.¹⁰ The party included a vocal circle of radical abolitionists who would soon use the war as a means to push for full emancipation and civil equality. Critically, however, the majority of mainstream Republicans agreed with Democrats that blacks as a race were indolent, but while Democrats blamed laziness on racial inferiority, Republicans preferred to emphasize the degrading influence of slavery itself.¹¹

Unlike Democrats who vowed loyalty to the Constitution and to the model of an antipartisan military, Republicans in the Army of the Potomac portrayed the volunteer military as the guardians of civic virtue—the very institution whose voices must, of right, grow louder in times of national crisis. To these men, Democratic officers stifling free expression of political sentiment, especially proadministration sentiment, would have amounted to a veritable gag rule in the ranks.¹² What Mark Neely observes in Lincoln’s 1863 approach to peace Democrats was true also of the president’s supporters in the army—the demand for a noisy patriotism as proof of loyalty.¹³ Republicans believed soldiers should guide the national dialogue, not refrain from it as dispassionate servants. When it came to policy, abolitionists in the army agitated for early emancipation, and mainstream Republicans also came to embrace freeing slaves as a positive war aim. They broadly supported the administration and accused antiwar voices of dividing Northern sentiment and aiding the Confederacy. As previous scholars have noted, Republicans effectively rebranded the party through the National Union movement, thus accepting expedient War Democrats into their ranks but relegating the administration’s most vocal critics to the realm of treason. Republicans in the army were integral to this process, setting the terms for public debate and allowing officers and politicians alike to win over soldiers who believed the only legitimate party was that which supported a war in earnest.¹⁴

The divide between the army’s Democrats, who abhorred partisan passion and articulated loyalty to the Constitution, and Republicans, who advocated vocal loyalty to the administration as a wartime imperative, highlights the problem of civil-military relations explored in Samuel Huntington’s landmark tome The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Under Huntington’s theory of objective control, military professionals remove themselves from broader society and receive trust in the management of violence by virtue of their expertise. In a system of subjective control, however, civilian officials directly infuse political activity into military affairs with potentially riskier consequences.¹⁵ The threat of subjective control was not lost on observers in the 1860s, but Republicans and their allies considered it necessary for victory. Historian Timothy Orr has wisely claimed that the phenomenon of political patronage in the Union Army, at least, may have weakened combat effectiveness and by extension hurt the Northern war effort.¹⁶ Political squabbling certainly prevented the army’s high command from forming a cohesive team, as even the casual reader of Civil War history will recognize. By war’s midpoint, however, the junior officers’ steady mobilization for Republican policies and against peace activism had also given the downtrodden rank and file of the Army of the Potomac a previously elusive sense of purpose.

From 1861 to 1863, Democratic-held state legislatures in the North prevented many soldiers in the field from casting absentee ballots, citing constitutional technicalities to buttress their arguments. As they gained greater interest in political matters, volunteer soldiers fumed at this disfranchisement and found substitutions for voting.¹⁷ They talked around the campfire, circulated internal newspapers, and formed debate societies to argue policy. But the most telling evidence of political interest in the army’s ranks was a vigorous participation in the Northern public sphere.¹⁸ Soldiers wrote home to every newspaper that would print their opinions and official resolutions, and editors published this commentary wholesale to influence the Northern populace. If they could not vote, soldiers would at least exert their political will on loved ones and readers at home through an active role in the public discourse. Junior officers guided this process, at times writing the material themselves before seeking the approval of the ranks. With some exceptions, Democrats, many of whom boasted regular army service, spurned this engagement in the public sphere because it violated prewar conceptions of an outwardly antipartisan military.¹⁹

Culture is ultimately about the underlying values a group uses to sort the meaning of events.²⁰ A reading of the army’s published political correspondence to Northern newspapers and private correspondence shows that the defining cultural value for both sides of the partisan divide was loyalty. Bluntly put, the army’s Democrats professed loyalty to a Constitution that restrained the chief executive, one which supported a view of states’ rights and limited federal interference.²¹ This view drew substantially on the traditional principles of republicanism, including a suspicion of accumulated power, a vigilance for personal liberty, and a demand for upbringing in civic virtue.²² Republicans, on the other hand, rewarded unflinching loyalty to the administration as a wartime imperative. Their view of republicanism was one in which white equality existed free from special interest and aristocracy. And as the war continued, loyalty to Lincoln also meant acquiescence to emancipation and hard war. In gaining political awareness, the majority of soldiers in the army embraced this more radical definition of loyalty. While the army’s most articulate conservative Democrats howled that Lincoln had shredded the Constitution, Republicans and even some War Democrats viewed conservative constitutionalism as little better than a mask for Confederate sympathies.²³

A history of Union Army ideology must also address what politics meant to soldiers who hailed from different parts of the North. The Army of the Potomac fielded regiments from each of the principal Northern regions—New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest. Of these three, the vast majority of the army’s organized political activity—and also its most controversial activity—emerged from the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. The irony of more stable Republican strongholds such as Massachusetts and Maine was that relatively little partisan controversy existed to force soldiers to act in the public sphere.²⁴ In contrast, regions with strong Democratic activity propelled soldiers from divided states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to stake out their political loyalties clearly and categorically. In this effort to disqualify political adversaries, soldiers embraced much of the political culture of the Upland South identified by Nicole Etcheson—an emphasis on republicanism (again, a white man’s republicanism), honesty, hard work, and manliness.²⁵ The imperatives of masculinity—in this case, identifying political opponents and conspicuously challenging their honor—were ubiquitous. Although it was state politics that often animated public sphere engagement, Union soldiers emphasized the importance of a united North opposing the slaveholding Confederacy. This resistance to the hardline Democratic fire in the rear was meant to unify soldiers with what they considered true loyalty on the home front, demonstrating at least the rhetorical potency of antiparty sentiment.²⁶

Using appeals to the value of loyalty, both Republicans and Democrats struggled with each other to persuade the men in the ranks. The process by which youthful soldiers gained this political awareness was often acrimonious and heavy-handed. The army’s heated political activity occurred in the context of raucous partisanship, corruption, and electioneering that had come to characterize the political system since at least the early 1850s.²⁷ Opposing viewpoints were often topics for scorn, not debate, and officers utilized party resources from outside the army to guide the process. Soldiers then used faculties of reason and critical thinking learned in common school and churches before the war to weigh different political options. In the end, the Republican conception of loyalty resonated. The bonding from campfire discussion, the experiences of war in slave states, the need for more manpower, and the appearance of extreme voices in the Democratic Party pushed soldiers into the Republican camp. In addition, one great advantage Republicans enjoyed while educating politically naïve soldiers was the clarity of defining loyalty to a sitting administration. Fidelity to an abstraction, however, such as the ideal of a strict Constitution, required more nuance than frenetic wartime politics allowed, especially in a rigid military atmosphere.²⁸

This work benefits from the work of numerous political historians. In her study of Civil War–era Democrats, Jean Baker emphasizes antebellum schooling and the family as the two primary means by which Democrats experienced civic training and political socialization.²⁹ In light of this long-trajectory view, it may seem improper to ascribe the development of a coherent political culture to an institution that lasted only four years, as the Army of the Potomac did. But the camp debate societies which proliferated in the army filled the function of schools, and soldiers often received political reinforcement from the mess and the company instead of families at home. Moreover, the war placed young men in an environment where it was impossible to escape politics, and the rapid pace of dramatic, even revolutionary, events prodded them into a crash-course of political involvement.

This book wades into a robust dispute over the nature of public political engagement in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the conclusions of Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin. Established scholarship, they insist, has relied on newspapers and party boasting to support an exaggerated view of nineteenth-century political acuity. They propose that the early 1850s—the time, it turns out, when future Civil War soldiers were being reared—was a period of particularly low engagement for most American citizens.³⁰ My findings about the political naivete of many early enlistees offer some support for this contention. Most young men did not march off to war as Republican or Democratic ideologues. Although a broad foundation of civic education was evident in the Union Army—and although many soldiers were at least generally aware of the partisan contours that had torn the nation apart—the 1861 recruits spoke with an earnest but relatively simplistic patriotism. It remained for the war to provide a deeper education on the complex issues of the conflict.

The young professionals and academy students who attained junior and field-grade officer positions in early regiments were, as a group, the most politically aware of the bunch. They were the active prewar partisans, and their experiences spanned voting for Lincoln and the new Republican Party, John Bell and the more moderate Constitutional Unionists, Stephen Douglas and Northern Democrats, or even, in the case of some lower midwesterners and Mid-Atlantic men, John C. Breckinridge and the Southern Democrats. This enthusiasm, arguably the same conveyed in Jon Grinspan’s brilliantly conceived The Virgin Vote, pushed them to embrace partisanship as a source of identity in the turbulence of the mid-nineteenth century.³¹ Indeed, their interest in politics reached maturity in the late 1850s and finally, in the case of Republicans, translated into the Wide Awake marches of 1860, a dress rehearsal for the army of thinking bayonets that voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln four years later. And among those who were the most politically acute and often entered the army as white-collar junior officers, the best way to insure a pro-Republican education for the men under their command was to reduce politics to a simple duality of loyalty versus disloyalty.³²

This work also follows historian Mark Neely in utilizing wartime newspapers as legitimate sources of evidence for political engagement, rather than dismissing them out of hand as sensationalist propaganda manipulated by party agents.³³ Skepticism about newspaper reliability is always healthy for Civil War historians. Mid-nineteenth-century journals were not so much sources of news as they were filters for partisan messaging, and often the facts they reported were based on rumor and sensationalism. But by 1863, politically acute officers and newly educated enlisted men had cracked the code on partisan newspaper publishing and were contributing to the phenomenon willingly and earnestly. Unlike previous studies of Civil War soldier motivation, this book relies on mid-to-late-war newspapers as untapped evidence of soldiers’ efforts to capitalize on partisanship and set the terms of debate in the North.³⁴

A growing subfield in Civil War literature has addressed the average Union soldier’s relationship with politics, heightening our understanding of how remarkably ideological Civil War soldiers were. This book builds on that consensus by interpreting the relatively rapid process of wartime political maturation.³⁵ Much of this literature has focused quite naturally on attitudes toward emancipation. James McPherson and Chandra Manning insist most Union soldiers came willingly to endorse freeing the slaves as a necessary measure to crush the rebellion. In 2014, halfway through the writing of this work, Jonathan White’s Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln appeared, a powerfully argued volume which attempts to correct what that author perceives as an emancipationist overreach evident in the work of most modern historians. Lincoln’s victory with army voters in 1864 had less to do with some remarkable proemancipation shift in the sentiments of Union soldiers, White argues, and more to do with the fact that Democrats had been systematically purged from the ranks and intimidated through show-trials. The presidential election witnessed fraud and strong-arming to compel obedience to the administration, and even those who voted Republican frequently rationalized it as more anti-Copperhead than proemancipation. Thus, White argues, the oft-cited statistic that 78 percent of the Union army’s voters supported Lincoln and the Republican Party fails to account for fully 20 percent who did not vote at all and who, White contends, may very well have cast their lot with the Democrats and George B. McClellan under fairer circumstances.³⁶

This book, which tests White’s theories using the Army of the Potomac as a case study, takes issue with his interpretation of the Union army’s political story. The combination of unit political resolutions, nearly comprehensive voting returns for the army, more contextualized reenlistment numbers, and largely untapped officer correspondence with home front politicians together bolster the argument that the president’s party, through the mobilization efforts of subordinate officers, widely won the allegiance of the rank and file. Although chapter 6 and Appendix F will illustrate that McClellan actually gained more votes in the Army of the Potomac specifically than scholars have previously recognized, this statistic alone needs contextualization. Lincoln won the army vote because the vast majority of longest-serving Union soldiers put into action what they had since accepted from junior officers—that loyalty to the president and to the expedient policies of emancipation, the draft, and hard war made the North stronger in its struggle against the Confederacy. In fact, the army’s profound anti-Copperhead activity primed the ranks to accept these administration policies. To be sure, hardline Democrats had faced intimidation, trial, and even dismissal from the ranks, stories which will be addressed throughout this volume. But for all its faults, the army’s voting processes were tame and orderly compared with the underhanded practices of polling places elsewhere in mid-nineteenth-century America.³⁷ Contrary to White’s interpretation, soldiers’ private writings, public declarations, and voting tabulations from elections previous to 1864 all indicate a consistent, energetic, and willing shift toward Republican ideology as the war progressed.³⁸

This political education in the Union Army was hardly unprecedented in western military history. A surge in political pamphleteering during the English Civil War enabled similar messaging to soldiers, to the extent that the Puritan Soldier’s Catechism in Cromwell’s New Model Army codified beliefs and values in much the same way as the 1863 resolutions emerging from the Army of the Potomac.³⁹ The practice of Northern editors and party leaders influencing debate in the Union Army carries a strong echo of the London-based Levellers radicalizing Protestant soldiers.⁴⁰ Likewise, historian John Lynn has described how effectively French civilian authorities in the 1790s taught soldiers to embrace the radicalism of the Revolution and how, in the process, they showed men that devotion to the government and the people trumped allegiance to any army officer. This patriotic message imbued newspapers, songs, festivals, and political clubs everywhere the average soldier turned.⁴¹ For the Army of the Potomac, junior officers enabled a similar political education, and these parallels should serve to remind historians just how radically politics shaped the military experience for the average Union soldier—indeed, just how radically the American experience in the Civil War reflected Huntington’s tenuous subjective control.

For a volume on such a well-worn topic as the Army of the Potomac, it is important to state up front what this work does not aim to do. It is not a narrative history of the Union army in the eastern theater. That wider story has been told by able historians as long ago as Bruce Catton in the early 1950s and as recently as Stephen Sears in 2017.⁴² It is also not interested primarily in operational military concerns. Although combat deserves its place at the core of military history, this volume shows that most of the army’s political debating and voting happened in times of relative quiet.⁴³ Lastly, this book is not primarily the story of the army’s high command. Scholars such as Sears, Ethan Rafuse, Brooks Simpson, and Stephen Taaffe have all lent their impressive skills to telling that side of the story. Furthermore, the conservative Democratic proclivities of the army’s high command are as well-known to historians and general readers as the radical agenda pushed by their antagonists in Washington.⁴⁴

Instead of examining the high command, this work argues that to understand the emergence of a distinct political culture in the army requires a serious study of its junior officer level. For most of the war, Republicans and Democrats at that level struggled against each other to foster cultures in their ranks amenable to party ideologies. These men—captains and lieutenants in company command, as well as majors and colonels at field-grade rank—had the most direct contact with the ranks. They were usually slightly older and more educated, and therefore the most likely in their regiments to enter the war with mature ideological convictions. As Baker’s and Neely’s studies make clear, studying the family is essential to understanding the development of political culture. In the Union army, perhaps the best way to understand small-unit cohesion is to think of the company as a substitute family, Reid Mitchell notes. If so, then the father figure in this family was the company commander, and soldiers often looked to him for guidance on political matters.⁴⁵ Although class differences usually separated the common soldier from his commander, a phenomenon Lorien Foote has interpreted, this work contends that junior officers frequently bridged that gap by appealing to shared notions of duty, loyalty, patriotism, and manhood.⁴⁶

Junior officers were also among the army’s most ambitious men. Throughout the war, regiments elected junior officers, while men from civilian life seeking officer appointments made direct appeals to state officials through the process of political patronage. In both cases, prominent citizens or comrades wrote recommendation letters to Northern governors and adjutants general offering assurances about the political reliability of young men seeking promotion.⁴⁷ Thus, Democrats wrote Governor Horatio Seymour of New York praising a volunteer’s devotion to the Constitution, while Republicans assured Pennsylvania’s Andrew Curtin of a soldier’s loyalty to the administration. These letters, which survive relatively untapped in various state archives, form a critical part of the evidence base for this book. They show how inextricable conceptions of party loyalty and military duty were for the generation that led companies and regiments in the Civil War.

Finally, in examining political activity in the Army of the Potomac itself, this book is indebted to the work of three scholars in particular, men who know the army’s story more intimately than anyone since the last veteran died. John J. Hennessy has written numerous brilliant essays about the partisan dynamics which paralyzed the army. A reading of his judicious analysis heavily influenced my understanding of this topic.⁴⁸ Second, Timothy J. Orr’s work, especially on the politics of promotion, pushed me to investigate the partisanship of junior officers and their crucial role.⁴⁹ Lastly, John Matsui’s brilliant First Republican Army forced me to reconsider the importance of John Pope’s forces prior to their integration into the late-1862 Army of the Potomac.⁵⁰ This book stands as simply the latest in an emerging critical mass of scholarship on the Union army’s political story. It is an honor to have this work stand next to theirs.

Summary

Each chapter in this work analyzes a different political crisis point for the army, typically a period lasting several weeks between active campaigning, when a flurry of political activity dominated the news. The first two, dealing with 1862, describe how the ideologically motivated officers fumed with partisanship while political novices in the ranks started to grapple with the war’s policy dimensions in war-torn Virginia and Maryland. The four remaining chapters then deal with how partisan officers competed to guide this newfound awareness in the ranks through the tumult of 1863 and 1864.

Chapter 1 begins by describing the average Union soldier’s educational background, the rage militaire which compelled these young men to enlist, and the process allowing enlisted men to elect company commanders at the outset of the conflict. It then focuses on the aftermath of the Seven Days’ battles, when the army languished on the James River for most of July and August 1862. There, political neophytes struggled to rationalize how McClellan, a figure they revered because of his personal magnetism and constant presence in the war effort’s material culture, could have met with such frustration trying to seize Richmond. They bristled at partisanship and blamed Union setbacks on disunity and a lack of will at home. Anxious to finish the war, many grimaced at the sight of slavery and called for reinforcements through an immediate implementation of the draft.

The debate among more educated ideologues in McClellan’s camp on the James River was heated. Congressional wrangling over emancipation and the Second Confiscation Act convinced the army’s long-standing Democrats that Lincoln’s party was distracting from