Glory Road (18 page)

Permitting oneself to be captured in order to get a parole, and thus a chance to slide out of the war sideways, had by this time become a widespread evil fully recognized by army authorities. Many men got to the parole camps without bothering to go through the formality of first being captured by the Rebels. There was a thriving trade in forged parole certificates. A man who got one would straggle off, present himself at the parole camp, and either old-soldier it there or take the first chance to set out for home. Or if he preferred he would simply wander north at once, counting on his parole paper to serve for a pass whenever the provost guard might halt him.
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Extensive as this practice was, however, most of the men who deserted used other means. There was an "underground railway" operating between Alexandria and Baltimore, its object being to get soldiers past the guards and pickets around Washington. It appears to have been operated by Confederate sympathizers, motivated either by Southern patriotism or by a desire to earn an honest dollar. Its agents would take a deserter at Alexandria, smuggle him across the Potomac, and get him over to the Leonardtown road, where he would be hidden until a little group of fugitives had been collected. The men were then taken across country by way of Upper Marlboro to Fair Haven on the Chesapeake shore, where a steamer would put in to take them to Baltimore. On the boat the men would be given civilian clothing, if they did not already possess it, and would be told how to make their way north out of Baltimore.
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Alexandria, to be sure, was a good many miles upstream from the army's camps. But Burnside's administration was never able to keep the men in camp, not even though Burnside's provost marshal, annoyed by "the alarming frequency of desertion from this army," had ordered corps and division commanders to redouble their vigilance, to patrol the immediate vicinity of their camps with infantry, and to maintain cavalry on the roads farther out, arresting everybody who lacked a pass. This was of slight effect. Deserters usually followed the roads that led via Aquia Creek through Dumfries and Occoquan, riding in the wagons of sutlers, army traders, farmers, or others, which were allowed to travel the muddy roads without much examination. Sometimes the men passed themselves off as details sent out to repair the telegraph lines, which was fairly easy to do since most patrols knew nothing whatever about the electric telegraph and could easily be made to believe that it took huge gangs to keep the lines in order.
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But even this represented more trouble than was really necessary. The principal thing was to get across the Potomac into Maryland, for the contraband trade between North and South had such well-established routes through places like Leonardtown and Port Tobacco and passed through an area so strongly Southern in its sympathies that a deserter could usually count on getting north safely once he was over the river. Crossing was not too hard. Navy patrolled the river, but it was easy to hide rowboats along the shore and easy to slide across in them on dark nights. One naval officer frankly told the army people that the only way to stop the transriver traffic in deserters would be to break up all the rowboats between Aquia Creek and Washington, which clearly would be impractical.
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Now and then the army would load a regiment or so on a steamboat and, under navy convoy, cruise down to the "northern neck," the long peninsula between the Potomac and the Rappahannock southeast of Fredericksburg, in an attempt to break up the bases for the contraband trade. These attempts never amounted to very much, except, as one officer noted, that the pillage and freebooting indulged in by the troops probably confirm
ed the inhabitants in their dis
unionist leanings. The creeks and inlets which were the centers for this traffic were very shallow, and the steamers usually ran aground.

Both army and navy kept details on the Maryland side of the Potomac, and each service insisted that the other was muffing its opportunities. According to the navy, the army details there were rowdy, undisciplined, drunken, and insubordinate; army replied that the navy folk showed altogether too much friendship for local secessionists. Both services agreed that there was an immense traffic in contraband goods and spies back and forth between Virginia and Maryland. There was a regular mail and express route north from Richmond via Warsaw Courthouse and Leonardtown to Washington, with two scheduled deliveries a week and an established ferry service, and boss traders were growing rich by it. Cavalry went downstream and raided a ferry point on the Virginia shore, seizing coffee and sugar and tobacco and "nearly fifty barrels of villainous whisky" but causing the smugglers only momentary inconvenience. One Federal officer who had tried in vain to tighten the controls reported that "blockade running and dealing in contraband articles have become professions."
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So here was a veritable Yukon Trail running wide open not twenty-five miles away from the chief supply line of the nation's principal army, crossing deep rivers which were under steady navy patrol, and using highways which were fully controlled by Yankee cavalry and infantry. There are probably several explanations, including the fact that Americans of every generation seem to have a positive genius for smuggling, but the principal one appears to be that Burnside's army was just naturally the kind of army to which things like this were bound to happen. Operating deep in hostile territory, it was going to be run dizzy by enemy agents stealing its secrets and sending them south and stealing its soldiers and sending them north, and its high command simply was not going to know how to stop it.

By the end of January 1863, desertions from the Army of the Potomac totaled 85,123.
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A startling figure, which does not quite mean what it appears to mean.

It does not, for instance, mean that 85,000 men had willfully laid down their weapons and gone home. Heavy as desertions had been, they had not been that heavy. Most of the men who were on the army's rolls but not with the army had not so much run away as drifted away. They had been sloughed off by the army's own inefficiency. With many of them there probably had never been a conscious decision to desert, a moment when the soldier in his own mind ceased to be a soldier temporarily absent and became instead a civilian who was never going to go back unless somebody came and got him.

The hospital system, for instance, was practically guaranteed to leak men back into civil life, and to do it in such a way that the leaks could not easily be plugged. By a freak of chance this was so because the army had been making an honest and generally successful effort to give its men better medical care than any soldiers on earth had ever had before.

For uncounted generations—ever since military life was invented, as a matter of fact—all of the world's armies had apparently operated on the theory that the soldier was always going to be healthy. If he fell ill or got wounded he was a poor dog. Provided he did not die too quickly, he would eventually be put in a hospital and allowed to get well if he could, but getting well was pretty much his own responsibility and no concern of the army. From the military viewpoint, the ailing soldier was just a nuisance and the big idea was to get him out of the way.

But in this war it had to be different. Here the army was of the people and the people kept in close touch with their soldiers. If the soldiers had troubles the people quickly became concerned, and the people had devised a number of most effective ways to make their concern felt in high places. The war had not been going on very long before the War Department had to overhaul its hospital system from top to bottom so that the soldier could have better care.

In fact, before the War Department quite knew what was happening its hospital system was being overhauled for it, the instrument of overhaul being the United States Sanitary Commission. In its essentials, the Sanitary Commission was the women of America, brought together through thousands of spontaneously organized Ladies' Aid Societies and grimly determined that their menfolk in this war were going to be looked after properly. It also included doctors, bankers, merc
hants, and men vaguely but justl
y known as "civic leaders." It had almost unlimited financial backing, and it enjoyed enough sheer political influence to move mountains. By the middle of 1861 the commission had won quasi-governmental status, plus War Department permission to inquire into the sanitary condition of the troops, the provision of nurses and hospitals, and similar matters.

It appears that the War Department, which knows nothing about women, originally supposed that the commission would be quite happy with this permission to investigate and that the things investigated might go on as they had gone on before, but the War Department was quite mistaken. The commission was presently getting Congress to vote a thorough reorganization of the army's medical department, and in the peninsular campaign the commission was running hospital ships, providing nurses and medical supplies, getting sick and wounded men brought back to where their lives might be saved, and in general turning the army way of doing things upside down. By the end of 1862 the entire system of collecting, housing, and treating sick and wounded soldiers had been transformed.
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This, of course, was all to the good, and the soldiers had reason to bless every last member, officer, and paid employee of the Sanitary Commission. But in the process of providing medical care for soldiers in a manner to satisfy the women of America, the War Department also tried to make the state governors happy, and the result was a system by which a man who went to hospital could very easily slip out from under army control altogether.

What the department did for the governors was to establish general hospitals in the Northern states and to provide that sick or wounded men might be transferred to these from the front, either singly or in organized bodies, if it seemed likely that the change would help them to recover. This pleased the soldiers, who were glad enough to get back home, and it simply delighted the governors, who could gain much political advantage from getting them back. (For one thing, they could
vote,
and for whom would a soldier vote if not for an ardently patriotic war governor?) Before long most of the states had agents who visited army hospitals in the forward areas, looked up home-state patients, and pulled wires to get them sent to the home-state hospital. Thus there developed a steady flow of men moving from the areas of active operations to the Northern states. By the middle of the war it was estimated that between one and two hundred thousand men had been transferred to the various Northern hospitals.
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Which would have been all right, except that when a man was sent to a general hospital in his home state the odds were quite good that the army would never see him again.

The hospitals were practically independent. Each was run by a medical officer who was answerable to the surgeon general of the army, not to any line officer. The soldier who got into the hospital was completely out from under the control of his own outfit. Neither his company commander, his colonel, nor his army commander had any authority to order him back to duty. That could be done only by the medical officer who ran the hospital, who did not need to take anything from army brass. He had generally got his job through political patronage, and his patron would be the governor of the state, who, as a result, had effective control of the situation.

Thus all kinds of openings were offered to the soldier who was not eager to get back to the front. It was often possible to induce the hospital director to carry him on the rolls as sick long after he had recovered. If he had any useful little skills, if he could cut hair or mend cupboards or tend chickens or do any of the other little things that need to be done at behind-the-lines army posts, he was likely to be kept forever.

Medical directors were authorized to detail convalescents as nurses, orderlies, cooks, and so on, and an army officer familiar with such arrangements reported that in most cases the men so detailed "ceased to be soldiers in fact and spirit" and became "mere hangers-on of hospitals." Not long before his own dismissal McClellan was pleading for a strict investigation of each Northern army hospital "to ferret out the old soldiers hidden away therein." Such an inspection, he said, would produce more fruit in one week than the entire recruiting service would yield in three months. He added that not more than a tenth of the soldiers who went to the home-state hospitals ever rejoined the army, and cited the case of one regiment which had sent five hundred men to hospitals in the rear and had got back only fifteen or twenty of them.
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The general theory was that a man's own home was the best place for his convalescence. Normally, a soldier recovering at a Northern hospital had no trouble getting leave to go home, and if he could not get leave there was little or nothing to keep him from going home anyway. Once he got home, whether he was there legally or otherwise, no one in authority had any especial incentive to get him back. His own regiment could not touch him because he was absent from the hospital rather than from the regiment. The hospital was supposed to call him in and return him to his proper command as soon as he was strong enough, but it was more likely than not simply to forget about him. If the hospital authorities happened to be unduly conscientious about such things there were various dodges that could be tried. Away from his own regiment where people knew him, a man could pretend that he was a victim of some wasting disease brought on by overexposure. Naturally, a malingerer usually picked some malady whose symptoms were rather vague and nonspectacular; rheumatism was the favorite, and before the war was half over the army had been compelled to prohibit the granting of medical discharges for rheumatism under any circumstances whatever.