Because of recurrent incidents of this sort, marching orders for companies of the 2nd U.S. Volunteers stationed at Larned, Zarah, and Little Arkansas were postponed until after Colonel Leavenworth’s October peace council. Companies F and H formed part of a force assembled along the Little Arkansas to impress the chiefs of the Kiowas and Comanches with the power of the Great White Father’s army.
On October 10, General Pope wrote an urgent appeal to General Grant requesting authority to consolidate the 2nd and 3rd Regiments and re-enlist the best men for one more year. “They are good soldiers, in good discipline,” Pope wrote. Grant, however, denied the request, and in mid-October, after the peace council ended with a treaty signing, the eight companies stationed from Fort Riley westward began marching to Fort Leavenworth. There on November 7, 1865, all officers and enlisted men of the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Infantry were mustered out of service.71
* Fort Zarah was named for Major Henry Zarah Curtis, killed in action in 1863.
III
Oaths and Allegiances
1
MOST FAMOUS OF ALL the Galvanized Yankees was Henry Morton Stanley, newspaper correspondent and African explorer, best known as the man who found David Livingstone on Lake Tanganyika and uttered the immortal words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
Stanley did not serve in any of the six U.S. Volunteer Infantry regiments. He was among several captured Confederates who took the oath of allegiance and were inducted into a regular Union regiment—two years before the U.S. Volunteers were organized.
Stanley’s real name was John Rowlands. Born illegitimately in northern Wales, he lived a precarious existence until the age of 15, when he sailed for New Orleans as a cabin boy. He jumped ship, and by chance met a wealthy Southern businessman whose name was Henry Morton Stanley. The elder Stanley gave John Rowlands employment and eventually adopted him, insisting that the boy take his name. Among other resolutions, young Stanley pledged himself never to drink intoxicating liquors, a promise which he was to break only once in his lifetime.
In 1860, the father placed his adopted son on an Arkansas River plantation to learn its management, and then sailed for Havana to attend to some urgent business matters. Young Stanley did not like plantation life, and he soon took a job as a clerk in a store at Cypress Bend, anxiously awaiting the return of his adopted father.
A few months later the Civil War began. At first, Stanley had no strong feelings about the war. He was then 20 years old and small for his age—he stood only five feet, five inches—and was shy and lonely. He considered himself an outsider, an Englishman; the war was an American affair and no concern of his. By early summer, however, he was caught up in the war fever, and in July 1861 he joined the Confederate Army.
He saw no major action until the spring of 1862, when his regiment moved to northern Mississippi. On April 6 he was in the midst of the carnage at Shiloh. The next day, when Union forces pushed the Confederates back, Stanley was captured. A few hours later he was on a steamboat with hundreds of other prisoners bound for St. Louis. From there he was sent to a new but already overcrowded military prison, Camp Douglas in Chicago.
“Our prison-pen,” Stanley later wrote,
was a square and spacious enclosure, like a bleak cattle-yard, walled high with planking, on the top of which, at every sixty yards or so, were sentry-boxes. About fifty feet from its base, and running parallel with it was a line of lime-wash. This was the “deadline” and any prisoner who crossed it was liable to be shot. … To whatever it was due, the appearance of the prisoners startled me. The Southerners’ uniforms were never pretty, but when rotten, and ragged, and swarming with vermin, they heightened the disreputability of their wearers; and if anything was needed to increase our dejection after taking sweeping glances at the arid mud-soil of the great yard, the butternut and gray clothes, the sight of ash-colored faces, and of the sickly and emaciated condition of our unhappy friends, were well calculated to do so.1
At one end of the prison enclosure was the office of the commandant, Colonel James A. Mulligan, a considerable hero at that time to the numerous Irishmen of Chicago. The long-haired, droopy-moustached Mulligan had earned a reputation as a wild fighter at Lexington, Missouri, even though he and most of his Irishmen had been captured there. After being exchanged for a Confederate colonel, Mulligan returned to Chicago as commander at Camp Douglas, but he was only marking time until he could organize another Irish regiment.
Among the Confederate prisoners captured at Fort Donelson in February 1862, Mulligan had discovered a number of Irish-born prospects who seemed willing to fight for the Union in exchange for their freedom. Before Stanley’s arrival, Mulligan had sent a message to General H. W. Halleck asking if it were permissible to enlist prisoners of war into the Union Army. Halleck did not know. On March 4 he informed Mulligan that he was passing the query on to General McClellan. A week later Halleck wrote again to Mulligan: “As the War Department does not answer my letter in relation to your enlisting prisoners of war I shall take the responsibility of authorizing you to immediately fill up your regiment in that way. Great caution, however, must be used as to the character of the persons so enlisted. You should make yourself personally acquainted with the history of each recruit received and exercise a sound discretion in the matter.”2
Mulligan of course was delighted. He virtually converted Camp Douglas from a prison camp into a recruiting station and began mustering in Irishmen and other foreign-born recruits. A few days later, however, he received another message from Halleck, dated March 15: “I have just received instructions from the War Department not to permit the enlistment of prisoners of war. You will be governed by these instructions.”3
Evidence indicates that Mulligan conveniently “lost” that second message, and because of poor communications between various divisions of the burgeoning and far-flung U.S. War Department, several months passed before Washington authorities discovered that the fiery Irishman had gone blithely ahead with his enlistment of prisoners. Not until October did the Commissary General of Prisoners discover a roll of 228 Confederate prisoners “who while in charge of Colonel Mulligan at Camp Douglas, Ill., were permitted to enlist. … All this was done without authority and in violation of Colonel Mulligan’s special duty.”4
Sometime in April, at least a month after Mulligan was ordered to discontinue recruiting, a Camp Douglas official informed Prisoner Henry M. Stanley that he could be released “by enrolling as a Unionist, that is becoming a Union soldier.” Although Stanley debated the matter for six weeks, he finally volunteered as a recruit on June 4.
Harsh as were conditions in the prison, it was no easy decision for young Stanley to make. In his autobiography he described his feelings with his customary vivid style:
We found it to be a dreary task to endure the unchanging variety of misery surrounding us. I was often tempted with an impulse to challenge a malignant sentry’s bullet by crossing that ghastly “deadline” which I saw every day I came out.
In our treatment I think there was a purpose. If so, it may have been from a belief that we should the sooner recover our senses by experiencing as much misery, pain, privation, and sorrow as could be contained within a prison; and, therefore, the authorities rigidly excluded every medical, pious, musical or literary charity that might have alleviated our sufferings. …
Left to ourselves, with absolutely nothing to do but to brood over our positions, bewail our lots, catch the taint of disease from each other, and passively abide in our prison-pen, we were soon in a fair state of rotting, while yet alive. … Everything we saw and touched added to its pernicious influence—the melancholy faces of those who were already wearied with their confinement, the number of the sick, the premature agedness of the emaciated, the distressing degeneration of manhood, the plaints of suffering wretches, the increasing bodily discomfort from ever-multiplying vermin, which infested every square inch. … The men began to suffer from bilious disorders; dysentery and typhus began to rage. Day af
ter day my company steadily diminished; and every morning I had to see them carried in their blankets to the hospital. … Those not yet delirious, or too weak to move unaided, we kept with us; but the dysentery … was a peculiarly epidemical character, and its victims were perpetually passing us, trembling with weakness, or writhing with pain, exasperating our senses to such a degree that only the strong-minded could forego some expression of their disgust.
The latrines were all at the rear of our plank barracks, and each time imperious nature compelled us to resort to them, we lost a little of that respect and consideration we owed our fellow-creatures. For, on the way thither, we saw crowds of sick men, who had fallen, prostrate from weakness, and given themselves wholly to despair; and, while they crawled or wallowed in their filth, they cursed and blasphemed as often as they groaned. In the edge of the gaping ditches, which provoked the gorge to look at, there were many of the sick people, who, unable to leave, rested there for hours, and made their condition hopeless by breathing the stenchful atmosphere. Exhumed corpses could not have presented anything more hideous than dozens of these dead-and-alive men, who oblivious to the weather, hung over the latrines, or lay extended along the open sewer, with only a few gasps intervening between them and death. Such as were not too far gone prayed for death, saying, “Good God, let me die! Let me go, O Lord!” and one insanely damned his vitals and his constitution, because his agonies were so protracted. No self-respecting being could return from their vicinity without feeling bewildered by the infinite suffering, his existence degraded, and religion and sentiment blasted.
Yet, indoors, what did we see? Over two hundred unwashed, unkempt, uncombed men, in the dismalest attitudes, occupied in relieving themselves from hosts of vermin, or sunk in gloomy introspection, staring blankly, with heads between their knees, at nothing; weighted down by a surfeit of misery, internal pains furrowing their faces, breathing in a fine cloud of human scurf, and dust of offensive hay, dead to everything but the flitting fancies of the hopeless!5
When Stanley was first presented with the possibility of escaping his desolation by taking an oath of allegiance and enlisting in the Union Army, he refused. “Every American friend of mine was a Southerner, my adopted father was a Southerner.”
Perhaps it was his bunk mate, W. H. Wilkes of Mississippi, who unintentionally helped the young English-born prisoner to make his decision. Wilkes was a nephew of the Union admiral, Charles Wilkes, who had forcefully taken Confederate commissioners James Mason and John Slidell off a British vessel. The young Confederate Wilkes did not seem to think it strange that his family should be divided by the war, and Stanley may have reasoned that changing allegiances could not be so reprehensible after all.
Six more weeks of prison horrors, the useless flight of time, the fear of being incarcerated for years, led Stanley to the belief that he was going mad. “Finally I was persuaded to accept with several other prisoners the terms of release, and enrolled myself in the U.S. Artillery service, and on the 4th June was once more free to inhale the fresh air.”
Two or three days later he fell ill from dysentery, but sought no medical aid for fear he might be returned to prison. On the day he arrived at Harper’s Ferry, he collapsed, was taken to a hospital, and on June 22 was mustered out of service, a physical wreck.
Stanley’s career in the Union Army was brief, but he was not yet finished with the American Civil War. He left Harper’s Ferry on foot, and spent almost a week walking 24 miles to a farm near Hagerstown. There a kindly farmer took care of him until he regained his health. He worked in the Maryland harvests, went to Baltimore and took a job on an oyster schooner, eventually found a berth on a sea-going ship. He was determined to make his way to Havana and rejoin his father, but when he reached Cuba he learned that the elder Henry M. Stanley was dead.
Once again he was alone in the world. Returning to New York, Stanley enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and thus probably became the only man ever to serve in the Confederate Army, the Union Army, and the Union Navy. By now a fair sailor, he soon earned a rating on the Minnesota as ship’s writer, his duties being to transcribe the log and other ship records.
While the Minnesota was off Fort Fisher, North Carolina, Stanley witnessed at close hand several sea and land battles, and while writing these up for the ship’s records, an idea came to him to compose some narratives of the exciting events and send them to newspapers. Thus began Stanley’s career as a journalist and writer.
He became so interested in writing that he wanted to do nothing else. After the Minnesota docked in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Stanley became so bored that he decided he had had enough of the U.S. Navy. On February 10, 1865, in company with another young sailor, Stanley deserted.
Stanley’s three failures as an American soldier and sailor seem a strange beginning for a man who in a few years was to become one of the great figures of the nineteenth century.
There was one final piece of irony in his American adventures. After he deserted the navy, Stanley felt a compulsion to see the West. He reached the frontier in the spring of 1865, just as the organized regiments of Galvanized Yankees were marching out from Fort Leavenworth to help hold together the breaking lines of communication between East and West. He visited many of the same places where these men soldiered—stations along the Platte, Salt Lake City, Denver. In Colorado he built a flat-bottomed boat and floated down the Platte, stopping occasionally at camps and forts manned by the 5th and 6th U.S. Volunteers. When he reached Omaha, for some inexplicable reason this sober young man got gloriously drunk. He roamed the streets all night, singing and yelling, and next morning swore he would never become intoxicated again.
Stanley was a Galvanized Yankee before that epithet was even invented—and then only for a brief time—but he surely met and talked with some of the men who had made the same hard choice he had made back in 1862 in Camp Douglas prison. One can but wonder what his emotions were toward these erstwhile brothers-in-arms. Sympathy, pity, envy? Or was it remorse? Why, when he reached Omaha, did he feel compelled to break a pledge he had made to himself as a youth never to touch intoxicating liquors, a pledge he did not break again as long as he lived?
2
In the first year of the Civil War, military leaders were too much occupied with other matters to give any deep thought to conversion of allegiances. No large-scale battles were fought in that preparatory year and comparatively few prisoners were taken. In 1862, however, events moved on a grander scale. Many thousands of soldiers were engaged across half a continent; captives began to crowd each other in dreadful prison pens.
Because the Union did not recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation, the business of exchanging prisoners presented a tricky problem, but eventually a cartel was devised for the parole and exchange of captured soldiers. The system never was very satisfactory to either contender; one side or the other would suddenly change the rules or suspend exchanges altogether.
Not long after this exchange system was put in operation, Northern prison commandants—such as Colonel James Mulligan—discovered that some of their prisoners had no desire to be exchanged. In the spring of 1862 these defectors were few, and most of them were foreign-born, with no strong sense of allegiance to any country. Yet they were there and something had to be done with them.
After Colonel Mulligan audaciously arranged to enlist Henry M. Stanley and 227 other Confederate prisoners into the Union Army, leaders in the upper echelons of the War Department began to ponder the problem of loyalties. Americans had inherited the English ideal of natural allegiance to one’s country, yet they had also endured a long period of travail from the Revolutionary War through the War of 1812 during which they had rejected that doctrine. By the 1860’s, however, loyalty to the Union was a sacred thing to millions of Americans, and there was something repellent in the idea of lightly transferred fealties.
The fact that the Confederacy was not recognized as a legitimate government, but only as an erring group of states, made it possi
ble for Union leaders to reason that nemo potest exuere patriam, the doctrine that no one can cast off his country, was not applicable to captured Confederate soldiers. If there was no Confederate States of America, then a captured Confederate soldier was not committing an act of treason if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. In the spring of 1862 the policy makers could reason that far but no farther; the idea of enlisting former enemies was still too uncomfortable to accept. Prisoners were permitted to take the oath on condition that they would remain north of the Confederate lines, and they were required to give a bond of $1,000 as security for this condition.6 For the next two years, the War Department would approach and retreat from the idea of enlistments with great caution and suspicion—until at last in 1864 President Lincoln gave it his endorsement.
The most powerful man in the cabinet, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, was one of those who seemed unable to make up his mind on the question. As early as July 10, 1862, Stanton authorized United States Marshal Robert Murray to interview prisoners of war in New York “for the purpose of ascertaining whether any and how many are willing to enter into the military service of the U.S.”7 About the same time, the commissary general of prisoners, William Hoffman, informed Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas that some prisoners had expressed a wish “to remain at the North and enter our service.” On August 5, the governor of Indiana wrote General Halleck that a number of rebel prisoners in Camp Morton “desire to volunteer into our Army instead of being exchanged. I am in favor of accepting them, believing they can be trusted and it will have a good effect.”8