34 



ARMY, UNITED STATES. 



troops had been raised ; or that of Mr. "Whit- 

 ing, Solicitor of the War Department, in a 

 speech delivered in Boston in November, that 

 the colored troops alone then numbered 155,- 

 000 men. The fact that four calls for troops 

 were made in the course of the year indi- 

 cates either that the casualties of the service 

 were greater than in any previous year of 

 the war, or that the men called for were 

 not in reality obtained, whatever the re- 

 turns might show. The latter is in all proba- 

 bility the true cause of the frequency of the 

 calls; and from their apparent inefficacy to 

 recruit the army to an extent commensurate 

 with the magnitude of its operations, it may 

 be presumed that the military strength on 

 January 1st, 1865, was not greater, if so great, 

 as a year previous. The neglect of duty in the 

 examining surgeons in passing men physically 

 incapacitated for service, the frauds of bounty 

 and substitute brokers, and the wholesale de- 

 sertions of "bounty jumpers-" (as those re- 

 cruits or substitutes are called who systemati- 

 cally desert after receiving their bounties, and 

 often with the connivance of Government em- 

 ployes), have reduced the number of enlist- 

 ments to a comparatively small percentage ; 

 and hence the repeated calls of the President 

 for additional men, instead of enormously in- 

 creasing the strength of the army, barely en- 

 able it to maintain its standard. On one point 

 only an explicit official statement of the results 

 of recruiting has been made public. The Pro- 

 vost Marshal General, in reference to the re- 

 enlistment of veteran volunteers during the fall 

 of 1863 (see vol. iii., pp. 22, 23) says : " Over 

 one hundred and thirty-six thousand tried sol- 

 diers, who would otherwise, ere this, have 

 been discharged, were secured for three years 

 longer. Organizations which would have been 

 lost to the service were preserved and recruited, 

 and capable and experienced officers were re- 

 tained in command. The force thus organized 

 and retained has performed an essential part 

 in the great campaign of 1864, and its im- 

 portance to the country cannot be over-esti- 

 mated." 



A temporary addition was made to the army 

 in the spring and summer of 1864 of a class 

 of troops known as " Hundred-day men," num- 

 bering about 100,000, and voluntarily furnished 

 by the governors of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, 

 Iowa, and Wisconsin. They were organized as 

 regiments, and to serve one hundred days from 

 the date of their muster into the service, unless 

 sooner discharged. It was further stipulated 

 that they should receive no bounty, nor be 

 credited on any draft. Their services having 

 been accepted, Congress appropriated $25, 000,- 

 000 for equipping them, and during May and 

 June the hundred days' men went forward in 

 large numbers to perform garrison duty and 

 otherwise relieve old and disciplined troops 

 who were sent to the front. 



Immediately after the call of July 18th for 

 500,000 men, the Provost Marshal General 



issued a series of instructions for the guidance 

 of enlisting officers. The bounties provided by 

 law were announced to be, for recruits in- 

 cluding representative recruits (white or col- 

 ored) for one year, $100 ; for two years, $200 ; 

 for three years, $300. A first installment of 

 bounty, amounting to one-third of the whole 

 sum, was to be paid to the recruit when mus- 

 tered in. The premiums previously paid for 

 procuring recruits were discontinued, and nei- 

 ther drafted men nor substitutes, furnished 

 either before or after the draft, were to be en- 

 titled to bounty from the United States. The 

 "representative recruits," alluded to above, 

 were those offered by persons not fit for mili- 

 tary duty, and not liable to draft, from age or 

 other causes, who desired to be personally rep- 

 resented in the army. The Provost Marshal 

 General issued a circular to further this laud- 

 able project, and ordered the names of persons 

 thus represented by recruits to be officially re- 

 corded. Many others, also, in anticipation of 

 the draft, furnished substitutes for one, two, or 

 three years, for whom they received no bounty 

 from the General Government, although gene- 

 rally assisted by the town, county, or State in 

 which they resided. The amount of these 

 local bounties differed in different parts of the 

 country. In the agricultural districts, where 

 every able-bodied man could find abundant 

 occupation during the harvesting season, it was 

 no uncommon thing to offer from $1,200 to 

 $1,500 for a three years' recruit; and even 

 among the large floating population of un- 

 naturalized foreigners in the seaboard cities, 

 from which substitutes were mainly drawn, the 

 prices demanded were unprecedented in the 

 history of the Avar. 



The act of Congress of July 4th, 1864, having 

 provided that the State Executive might "send 

 recruiting agents into any of the States de- 

 clared to be in rebellion, except the States 

 of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana, to re- 

 cruit volunteers, who should be duly credited 

 to the States procuring them," a series of in- 

 structions on the subject were, on July 9th, 

 promulgated by the War Department. The 

 recruiting agents were to report through the 

 commanding officers of certain designated ren- 

 dezvous for the reception of this class of re- 

 cruits, to the commander of the military district, 

 department, or army in which such rendezvous 

 might be situated, and were to be subject to all 

 the rules and articles of war. Commanding offi- 

 cers were further directed to afford agents all 

 reasonable facilities for the performance of their 

 duties, to dismiss or arrest those guilty of im- 

 proper conduct, and to prevent recruiting by 

 unauthorized parties. Many of the States 

 hastened to avail themselves of the opportunity 

 thus offered to fill their quotas without draw- 

 ing upon their population. Gov. Andrew, of 

 Massachusetts, was one of the first to ap- 

 point recruiting agents, and the Executives of 

 Ohio, Connecticut, Michigan, Maine, and other 

 States, soon followed his example. Gov. Sev 



