Blood and Daring (20 page)

Edmonds embarked on nine more missions behind enemy lines. She went disguised as a slave, a peddler and once, ironically, as a woman. Each mission was dangerous and each successful. Explaining her willingness to risk all in such dangerous undertakings, Edmonds later wrote, “I am naturally fond of adventure, a little ambitious and a good deal romantic, and this together with my devotion to the Federal cause and determination to assist to the utmost of my ability in crushing the rebellion, made me forget the unpleasant items, and not only endure but really enjoy, the privations connected with my perilous positions.”
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With the completion of each mission, Edmonds returned to her regiment and to nursing or riding dispatches and mail. After one assignment that had her in the saddle for three straight days, she was handed a weapon and participated in the battle of Williamsburg. After the bloody battle of May 1862 she recalled, “The dead lay in long rows on this field, their ghastly faces hid from view by handkerchiefs or the caps of their overcoats, while faithful soldiers were digging trenches in which to bury the mangled bodies of the slain.”
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Edmonds searched the wounded for signs of life and helped with the burials.

Although heavily outnumbered, the tough and stubborn Southern defenders stymied McClellan’s efforts. With McClellan missing opportunity after opportunity but his army still close and dangerous, Confederate president Jefferson Davis put Robert E. Lee in overall charge of the South’s campaign. In late June, showing the audacity for which he would become famous, Lee attacked. His bold gamble became known as the Seven Days Battle. It was an inspired move that took McClellan completely by surprise and left 1,734 Federal troops dead and more than 13,000 wounded or missing.

Edmonds reported men dying from sheer exhaustion.
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She served throughout the battle, delivering increasingly desperate messages. At one point, when an enemy shot panicked her horse, she dismounted and tried to calm the beast, but it bit her arm and kicked her side. She bound her bleeding arm in a sling and staggered to a field hospital. Still oozing blood, she offered assistance to the doctors and helped bind and comfort the wounded men arriving in alarming numbers from the front.

Still in great pain, Edmonds put herself back in the saddle as aide and dispatch rider for General Philip Kearny. She was directly involved in five major battles: Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm and Malvern Hill. Each seemed worse than the last, with fatigue threatening the morale of all.

The Army of the Potomac had been so close to Richmond that soldiers had seen its church steeples, but by July 14 the Union’s effort was spent. McClellan blamed Lincoln and a lack of reinforcements for the devastating loss, but he had simply been out-generalled.
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Along with the rest of the devastated and defeated army, Edmonds and Riggins, whose regiment had played significant roles at the Gaines’ Mill and the Seven Days battles, plied their way through the warm Chesapeake back to Washington.

While the Peninsula Campaign ended well for the Confederacy in July of 1862, in April things had looked dark. The Confederate army was outnumbered and Richmond was under threat. At Shiloh, near the Tennessee-Mississippi border, Confederate general Beauregard, hero of Fort Sumter and Manassas, had suffered a stunning loss that cost 107,000 men, a quarter of those under his command.
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With only about 5.5 million white citizens to the North’s 22.5 million, the Confederates felt their losses more deeply. They could not win a war of attrition. To continue the fight, the Confederacy needed more men than the Southern states’ voluntary enlistment programs could provide.

With McClellan’s massive army on his doorstep, Confederate president Davis had called a council of war. Lee emphasized the significance of recent
Southern casualties, new military needs, and the dwindling numbers of fresh recruits. He argued that those whose patriotic zeal had inspired them to join a year before would soon be seeing their enlistments expire. After a good deal of spirited debate, Davis approved America’s first conscription.

Davis signed the law on April 16, 1862. It provided for the draft of all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. All who had already signed up for one year had their commitment extended to three. The age limit would be raised to forty-five in September, and in February 1865 it changed again to include those from seventeen to fifty. The law eventually excluded railroad and canal workers, telegraph operators, druggists, teachers and those who owned more than twenty slaves.

A number of states declared that the new law violated the concept of states’ rights—the very concept that most Southern leaders claimed the war was all about. The governors of Georgia and Alabama publicly stated their refusal to aid in its implementation. However, regardless of opposition in many quarters and the uneven way in which the law’s regulations were enforced, the threat of being drafted had its intended effect. Men began enlisting to avoid what would be considered the humiliation of being forced into service.

With the confidence felt in the early spring, Lincoln had approved the closure of Northern recruiting offices. But the combination of McClellan’s stalled campaign, western armies bleeding men, and Confederate troops stubbornly holding out within a few dozen miles of Washington, led to their reopening. On July 6, Northern governors were asked to do all they could to encourage recruitment. The response was tepid at best. Two weeks later, governors received a letter from Washington announcing a call for 300,000 men, with each state’s quota listed. Again the governors balked. Seward announced the notion of a draft. He sweetened the deal by offering a $100 inducement from the federal government—called a bounty—for every new recruit who enlisted before the draft took place. Union governors were encouraged to top up bounties with state and local cash incentives, and to offer advances upon signing. Those wishing to avoid the draft could pay a substitute a
$300 commutation fee to go in their stead. The Confederate law had a similar clause, whereby a draftee could hire a substitute to take his place.

Lincoln signed the Militia Act on July 17, 1862. It called for each state to raise a nine-month militia, with quotas linked to population numbers. Most states met their quotas, and in those that could not the War Department established a draft. In every state, local tax assessors began making lists of eligible men. Recruitment ads appeared as posters and in newspapers. Most echoed the theme of a Detroit newspaper ad with the large, bold tag-line: “Avoid the Draft! $522 Bonus! $10 Advance.”
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There was not a word about duty. Patriotism was being purchased—or at least rented.

As had happened in the South, Northern recruiting offices were overwhelmed with young men wanting to sign up before being drafted. But thousands felt otherwise and fled. While there had been many cases of deserters running to Canada beginning in the fall of 1861, the threat of conscription in the summer of 1862 added draft dodgers to the flood of men pouring over the border. In August, the
Detroit Free Press
reported “an exodus” of men fleeing through the city on their way to Canada.
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There were similar reports from Chicago, Rochester and Buffalo.

So many young men were making their way over the border that popular crossing points were reinforced with Union soldiers. On August 8, partially to help stem the tide of desertions, Congress passed a law rendering it illegal for those subject to military service to leave the country. When news spread of Lincoln’s intention to quickly sign and enforce the law, a new wave of deserters and draft dodgers crossed the border. At Niagara Falls, four hundred men fled in a single day.
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Some border crossings witnessed screaming matches. Many cases of fights and drawn weapons were reported, and there were riots in Detroit and Buffalo.
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Exploitative entrepreneurs quickly appeared to meet the sudden demand for fake discharge papers. Those with genuine documents made good money selling them to forgers, who bleached out names and other personal information and sold copies of blank forms. Many men took a simpler way out, avoided populated border crossings, and quietly slipped across the imaginary line to freedom.

In the Maritimes, soldiers running from their units—and civilians running to avoid becoming part of one—were dubbed skedaddlers. So many young men crossed the Maine border and made their way over a long esker into Carleton County, New Brunswick, that the area became forever known as Skedaddle Ridge. Those on New Brunswick’s Montebello Island, within sight of Maine across the waves, renamed an increasingly busy spot Skedaddler’s Reach.

By the war’s end, about twelve thousand Americans had found their way over the border as either deserters or draft dodgers.
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As the number of skedaddlers increased over the summer and fall of 1862, Canadian and Maritime opinion of them, which had been positive at the beginning, soured. In provinces where thousands still needed to travel to the United States to find work or liveable salaries, the skedaddling Americans swelled the labour pool and depressed wages. Many farmers who hired cheaper American boys discovered some truth to the skedaddlers’ reputation for leaving if work became too hard or before it was done. Skedaddlers saw their reputations further sullied by rumours of un- or underemployed young Americans forming gangs or becoming involved in criminal activity.
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After the Peninsula Campaign, Edmonds found herself back in camps around Washington. She was incredibly busy with new outbreaks of camp diseases. Disease would eventually kill more soldiers than battles: of the 360,000 Union troops who lost their lives in the war, 250,000 died from disease.
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From the camp of his New York regiment, Charles Riggins sent a mournful letter home to his sister in Canada: “Four of our Company are in the hospital—Sick with the measles. Two of them slept in the same tent with me for about a week. I have had a bad headache for about three days.… I have broke out all over with a kind of rash & they itch awful bad.”
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Two weeks later things were much worse: “There were three thousand sick men sent away yesterday. There had been five men buried since last night & as I write this they are carrying another one out. They are dying all over the whole army forty & fifty every day.”
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Typhoid fever took the life of Jasper Wolverton in October 1861, just four months after he had volunteered to serve. In April 1863, his brother Alfred died of smallpox. Peter Anderson, who was to fight with the Wolverton brothers at Antietam, had left Guelph, in Canada West, to enlist with an Ohio regiment and was also in McClellan’s camp. He wrote to his sister, “I have been for four months at deaths very door, most of the time delirious with the typhoid fever.”
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As in every war, Civil War soldiers complained about food, illness, their officers and boredom. Riggins wrote: “We have been here now for six days & the other day we got mouldy crackers with maggots in our bacon—nearly ran away with the same—our coffee is half beans & our sugar is mixed & wet & that is about all we get from day to day.”
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All yearned for home. Jasper Wolverton wrote to his sister: “A great many of those who came with us have got very homesick. Some of them intend returning immediately. We intend to leave when we can’t stand it any longer.”
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Riggins seemed to have escaped this heartache. From McClellan’s camp in late July 1862, he wrote: “I do not fret like some do that are here about home, home sickness is hurting a good many here, worse than their wounds.… I try to be at home where ever I am.”
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As the soldiers trained and complained, General McClellan rebuilt his army and tried to deflect blame for his disastrous results. Battles continued to rage in the west. New Orleans fell to the Union. In late August, Lee moved 50,000 troops north and met McClellan’s Army of the Potomac at the Second Battle of Bull Run. It was another draw and even bloodier than the first, with 25,000 casualties. But a more tragic fight was on its way.

In September 1862, Lee drove into Maryland. His intention was to take the war to the North, and threaten Washington while stirring the considerable Confederate support in that state. He also wanted to lend credence to a Northern peace movement, and add pressure on Britain to recognize the South.
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On September 15, with only 19,000 troops, Lee formed lines facing the Union’s 70,000. They met near a creek called Antietam, and the most deadly battle in the war began.

Edmonds was at Antietam as 2nd Michigan’s field nurse. She was
moved by the courageous manner in which so many faced their final moments, sincerely believing that a faith in God was the only reason for personal resilience and military victory.
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Riggins, Anderson and two Wolverton brothers were also among the Canadians at Antietam. Because of strict orders and military censors, they were not able to write home about specifics of the battle, but Riggins managed to sneak a story into a letter to his mother about happening upon a Confederate camp and enjoying the food the fleeing rebels had left behind.
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The cost on both sides was unfathomable. In two days, 17,000 men were wounded and 6,000 had died. Lincoln was pleased that Lee had been forced to retreat back to Virginia but could not believe that McClellan had failed to seize the opportunity to pursue and crush him. In early October, Lincoln visited McClellan but could not entice the reluctant general to action. He followed the meeting with a telegram explicitly instructing him to move, but McClellan claimed his horses were too tired. Lincoln responded with rare sarcasm: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that could fatigue anything?”
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A few days later, Lincoln fired him.