Stanton could not bring himself to take definitive action on any of these openings, and the final steps toward enlisting prisoners might never have been taken had not the Sioux Indians started their war along the Minnesota frontier in late summer of 1862.
Under the fierce generalship of Little Crow, the Sioux attacked the Minnesotans at a time when most of their soldiers were away fighting Confederates, and in a few days slew more than 1,500 settlers. Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota bombarded the War Department with pleas for help at a time when one Confederate Army was thrusting north into Kentucky and another was driving General John Pope back upon the defenses of Washington. No troops could be spared for fighting Indians. After Pope was dismissed from command, Stanton transferred him out to Minnesota to redeem himself, and then gave consideration to a suggestion made by Governor Ramsey: “The 3rd Regiment of Minnesota Volunteers is on parole at Benton Barracks, St. Louis. We need a well-drilled force of which we are now utterly destitute to resist the overwhelming force of Indians now attacking our frontier settlements. Cannot you order the 3rd Regiment to report at once to me, with arms and ammunition, of which we are in great need? This service would not be in violation of their parole. The exigency is pressing. Reply immediately.”9
Stanton was inclined to agree with the governor of Minnesota. The parole system as originally arranged between the Union and Confederacy provided that when one side had an excess of prisoners they were to be paroled and sent home, not to engage in further military activities until exchanged. In 1862 both sides stopped the practice of permitting parolees to go to their homes, and established parolee camps so that men awaiting exchange could be drilled and kept under military discipline. Such was the condition of the 3rd Minnesota, and after studying the parole agreement, Stanton convinced himself that it would not be in violation of the cartel to send these men back to Minnesota to fight Indians. Orders to that effect were issued, but a test of whether or not this was in violation of the parole agreement was avoided because the regiment was declared exchanged on August 27.
On September 9, Governor David Tod of Ohio telegraphed Stanton: “If the Indian troubles in Minnesota are serious and the paroled Union prisoners are not soon to be exchanged would it not be well to send them to Minnesota? It is with great difficulty we can preserve order among them at Camp Chase.” Stanton immediately replied that this was an excellent suggestion, and a week later he sent General Lew Wallace to Camp Chase, near Columbus, to organize the paroled Union soldiers into regiments “for service against the Northern Indians.” He also arranged for several thousand other parolees in camps at Annapolis and Harper’s Ferry to be transferred to Camp Chase for ultimate service against Indians.10
By the end of September, so many parolees were pouring into Camp Chase that Wallace could not handle them. “Do not send any more paroled prisoners here,” he wired Stanton. “It is impossible to do anything with those now at Camp Chase. They generally refuse to be organized or do any duty whatever. Every detachment that arrives only swells a mob already dangerous. The Eastern troops are particularly disinclined to the Indian service.”
In a lengthy report to Adjutant-General Thomas, September 28, Wallace explained that almost every man in camp was “possessed with an idea that because he was paroled he was until exchanged exempt from duty of any kind. … A large number in fact hold paroles which they have sworn to, obligating them not to go into camp or take arms for any purpose in behalf of the United States. … When I announced my purpose in camp that I was to organize them for service against the Northwestern Indians a very few received it with favor. Nearly the whole body protested. Especially was this the case with the Eastern troops. Every objector intrenched himself behind his parole.”11
To further complicate Lew Wallace’s difficulties, the Confederate Army got wind of the scheme to use parolees against Indians, and immediately attempted to block it by adding a no-Indian-fighting clause in their paroles. This came to President Lincoln’s notice on October 3, and he asked the War Department to rule on its validity “based upon the general law and its cartel. I wish to avoid violations of law and bad faith.” After deliberating for 24 hours, Stanton and Halleck telegraphed Lincoln “that the parole under the cartel does not prohibit doing service against the Indians.”12
But this was not the end of the matter. The very next day, October 5, the Confederate government through its prisoner exchange agent dispatched a message to the Union exchange agent, protesting the sending of
officers and men of the U.S. forces who have been paroled and not exchanged … to your frontiers to fight the Indians now in arms against you. This is in direct conflict with the terms of the cartel. Its language is very plain. It says: “The surplus prisoners not exchanged shall not be permitted to take up arms again, nor to serve as military police or constabulary force in any fort, garrison, or field work held by either of the respective parties, nor as guards of prisons, depots or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually performed by soldiers, until exchanged under the provisions of this cartel.”13
In Minnesota by this time, General Pope had scraped together enough volunteer soldiers and militia to put down Little Crow’s Sioux. Two years later when a more widespread Indian war broke out across the Plains, the War Department had reached a position where it could accept without too many qualms the principle of enlisting former enemies into its armies.
The steps by which it arrived at this rationalization were gradual, and make an interesting study of the pragmatics and absurdities of civil wars. The question of foreign-born prisoners, for example, was forever arising. In February 1863, the commandant at Camp Butler, Illinois, reported the presence of a large number of Irish, German, and Polish prisoners of war, some of whom had gone from Illinois to the South for employment before the war, and who claimed they had been conscripted by force. “They are willing to take the oath of allegiance and fight for the Union, and but for the misfortune of locality would ere this be found in the ranks of loyal regiments.”14 Colonel Christian Thieleman, who was organizing a German cavalry regiment, the 16th Illinois, became interested in enlisting these men and brought pressure to bear on the War Department.
At this time Stanton was firmly against such action, and forbade enlistment of former Confederates, even though foreign-born. A month later, however, after receiving notices from other camps of many more such prisoners who were about to be exchanged and returned to the South, he softened his attitude: “The rule is not to permit Confederate prisoners to join our Army. But in any case in which you are satisfied a prisoner is sincerely desirous of renouncing all connection with the rebels, you may on his taking the oath of allegiance send him to Fort Delaware, to be released there after further investigation as to his sincerity and sent North to reside.”15
Meanwhile commanders at various camps were occasionally taking matters into their own hands and permitting small groups of prisoners to swear allegiance and enlist in Union regiments. (Prison commanders changed frequently, and some had no knowledge of War Department policy in the matter.) At Camp Douglas in March 1863 a few former Confederates were inducted into Illinois regiments. At Camp Morton in June, 50 Tennesseans enlisted in the 71st Indiana, 155 in the 5th Tennessee Union Cavalry. “Quite a parade was made of the departure of this last group for Lexington [Kentucky] on June 13. With an escort from the 71st Indiana they marched down Pennsylvania Street to Market and through the heart of the town [Indianapolis] to Union Station where they entrained with rousing cheers.”16
Oddly enough this latter incident occurred on the very day that Confederate General John Morgan was starting his columns North for his great raid through Indiana and Ohio, a raid which would result in the capture of a number of his cavalrymen, some of whom later became Galvanized Yankees and served with the 11th Ohio Cavalry in the West.
In that same month events had moved far enough for Stanton and the War Department to take one more official step toward enlistment of Confederates. Union armies were sweeping up
so many prisoners that there was not room for all of them in Northern camps, and commanders in the field began requesting permission to enlist those who expressed a desire to transfer their allegiances to the Union. Reacting to these demands, Stanton directed on June 20 that “when it can be reliably shown that the applicant was impressed into the rebel service and that he now wishes in good faith to join our army, he may be permitted to do so on his taking the oath of allegiance.”17
This ruling was so loosely administered, however, and so many of the freed and enlisted Confederates deserted at the first opportunity, that Stanton reversed himself on August 26: “The Secretary of War directs that hereafter no prisoners of war be enlisted in our Army without his special sanction in each case.”18 The order of course virtually halted enlistments in the field. Stanton gave General William Rosecrans special permission to enlist a few foreign-born Confederate conscripts, and in September he authorized Governor Morton of Indiana to muster more than 100 Irish Catholic prisoners into an Indiana Irish regiment.
About this time someone—probably General Gilman Marston at Point Lookout prison—conceived the idea of enlisting captured Confederates into the U.S. Navy. Stanton turned this proposal over in his mind for several weeks, consulted with the Secretary of the Navy, and at last on December 21, 1863, issued instructions to prison camp commanders to make arrangements to enlist into the Navy prisoners willing to take the oath of allegiance.
There was no great rush of prisoners desiring Navy service. Not many of them had any sea experience, and in at least one camp, Rock Island, loyal Confederates organized themselves to block the efforts of the camp commandant to so enlist them. The leaders of this movement secretly enlisted 1,300 fellow prisoners into a paper cavalry regiment of 10 companies, which held steadfast until the autumn of 1864, when a few were beguiled into the Galvanized Yankees with the offer of freedom for going West to fight the Indians. The majority of this group remained loyal to the Confederacy until freed by exchange or the end of the war.
Near the end of 1863, one of the most controversial figures of the Union Army, General Benjamin Butler, entered the listings of those in high command who were interested in converting Rebels into Yankees. Butler was a shrewd politician, a poor military leader, a good hater with a genius for creating enemies as well as whipping his followers into line, ruthless and possessed of such abounding energy that few could ignore him. As Commander of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, he was responsible for the operation of one of the largest of all prison camps, Point Lookout, a Maryland sandspit thrusting into Chesapeake Bay.
Late in December, Butler began an earnest correspondence with Stanton, in which he expressed the opinion that many more prisoners could be enlisted into the army than into the navy. As Butler was a political power in Massachusetts, the Secretary of War decided to bring the matter to President Lincoln’s attention. On January 2, 1864, Lincoln addressed himself directly to the general, informing him that enlistments of prisoners of war into either the army or navy would be permissible under certain conditions. These conditions, the President added, would be explained by his secretary, John Hay, who was to deliver the letter in person. That same day Stanton sent a telegram to Butler stating that the President was sending Hay “to Point Lookout with a letter to you. … You will please meet him there, if convenient, and come to Washington for the purpose of explanations and further instructions.”19 Evidently no effort was to be spared by the administration in gaining Butler’s good will. 1864 was a Presidential election year.
John Hay met Butler on January 9, presenting him with a questionnaire which Lincoln had composed, four questions which were to be asked in privacy to every prisoner at Point Lookout. In addition to the questionnaire, the President had sent a large blank book in which each prisoner was to sign his name and his replies to the interrogation:
Do you desire to be sent South as a prisoner of war for exchange?
Do you desire to take the oath of allegiance and parole, and enlist in the Army or Navy of the U.S., and if so which?
Do you desire to take the oath and parole and be sent North to work on public works, under penalty of death if found in the South before the end of the war?
Do you desire to take the oath of allegiance and go to your home within the lines of the U.S. Army, under like penalty if found South beyond those lines during the war?20
With characteristic dispatch, Butler appointed one of his protégés, Lieutenant F. M. Norcross, a lamed war veteran of the 30th Massachusetts, to direct the questioning of prisoners and recruit those who answered the second question in the affirmative.
On March 1, Private Bartlett Malone, a Point Lookout prisoner from North Carolina, noted in his diary: “Our Company was examined on the Oath question evry man was taken in the House one at a time and examined; the questions asked me was this: Do you wish to take the Oath and join the U.S. Armey or Navey; or work at government work or on Brestworks or Do you wish to take a Parole and go to your home if it be inside of our lines or do you wish to go South. I told him I wished to go South.”21 This answer kept Malone in prison until a few days before the end of the war.
The interrogation of some 8,000 prisoners individually was a slow process, and it was late in March before Butler informed Stanton that he had “more than a minimum regiment of repentant rebels, whom a friend of mine calls transfugees, recruited at Point Lookout. They behave exceedingly well, are very quiet, and most of them I am certain are truly loyal, and I believe will make as efficient a regiment as there is in the service. I should like to organize and arm it at once.”
Fours days later Butler received his final authorization “to recruit and organize a regiment at Point Lookout, Maryland, to serve for three years or during the war.” On March 28, the regiment was officially designated as the 1st U.S. Volunteer Infantry.22 This was the culmination of the War Department’s two years of circling the sensitive question of allegiances—a complete acceptance of all erring brothers who were willing to repent.
In the early months of 1864, about one in eight of the prisoners at Point Lookout took the oath and became Galvanized Yankees. Many of them had been there on that flat stretch of sand, which was bare of trees, shrubs, or vegetation of any kind, for two years or more. They had endured scorching summers “whose severity during the day is as great on the sandbarren as anywhere in the Union north of the Gulf,” and hard winters “more severe at that point than anywhere in the country south of Boston.” Surrounded by a 15-foot board enclosure, they were “confined in open tents, on the naked ground, without a plant or a handful of straw between them and the heat or frost of the earth.”23
Private Malone recorded the deaths of five men from freezing, hunger so acute “that they caught a Rat and cooked him and eat it.” He also made three entries in April and May 1864, referring to guards shooting into prisoners’ tents, killing and wounding several, and then on June 14 noted briefly that “500 rebels taken the Oath and went outside.”24
To remain loyal to the Confederacy, they had to resist not only their physical discomforts, the brutality of guards, rumors of a collapsing South, but also pleading letters from home. Evans Atwood, captured in Virginia, wrote his wife of the opportunity to take the oath, and she urged him to do so—anything to escape the debilitating prison life.
“Since the receipt of your letter,” he replied,
ten thousand thoughts have wearied my mind, my soul, my very life. … After calm, sober and serious meditation, I have weighed, wondered and re-examined your request and excuse me for so saying—I must follow the path of duty to my country, for which I am now a prisoner. I have gone through many dangers, have passed often by the gates of death … but amid all this I ever thought that your prayers, your sympathy, and your love followed me; but now what must I say? What must I do? I must not disgrace friends, character and more than all, kindred—wife, child! No … I do not think you desire this. Let me stay in prison until released honorably; let me discharge my duty.25
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Lieutenant Atwood did not become a Galvanized Yankee. We have no record of his emotions as he watched 1,000 of his former comrades board the convoy ship George Henry late in April 1864 to sail to their first duty assignment at Norfolk, Virginia. “We arrived at Norfolk,” Captain Robert Benson of the George Henry noted in his diary of April 24, “with our load of soldiers, all Confederates—soldiers who have been as prisoners but are now Federal soldiers, having gotten tired of the Rebel side are disposed to try Uncle Abraham a short time.”26
Thus far in the War Department’s game of oaths and allegiances, nothing had been said about sending the 1st Regiment to the frontier to fight Indians. The regiment was assigned to routine police duties at Norfolk, but under the hard driving of young Colonel Charles Dimon and his eager New England officers, the 1st U.S. Volunteers quickly became a first-class body of soldiers. It was inevitable that Butler and Dimon would want to test them in the field, and on July 27 the regiment was marched down to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The mission was of no military consequence; they seized a few horses and some bales of cotton, fired a few shots at some fleeing guerrillas, and returned to Norfolk.
When General Grant heard of the incident, however, he was disturbed. He had no enthusiasm for trifling with loyalties. Very likely he viewed the experiment as an extremely unmilitary business conceived by three civilians—Lincoln, Stanton, and Butler—who were too much inclined to meddle in military matters which none of them properly understood.
On August 9, Grant as general in chief of the armies, informed the War Department that he was ordering the 1st Regiment U.S. Volunteers to the Northwestern frontier. “It is not right,” he explained, “to expose them where, to be taken prisoners, they must surely suffer as deserters.” From that date to the end of the war, Grant was firmly opposed to using former Confederates against Confederates; in fact, he was opposed to enlisting prisoners for any kind of military service.* On August 28 he issued an order forbidding assignment of military duty to Confederate deserters in the field, but permitting them to be employed as civilians in the quartermaster department provided they took the oath of allegiance.27