Chapter 6: Below the Beast
Supplement to Endnotes
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Endnote 3) Army of the James (AOJ): Some historians place the origins of the Army of the James (not the official name, yet widely used) as late as the spring of 1864, though its formation began in 1863.
Endnote 4) Edward Longacre is the foremost scholar of the ill-starred Army of the James (AOJ). Perhaps Longacre overstates the incompetence of the AOJ. It is undeniable, though, that this Army’s accomplishments, if not widely ignored, were harshly criticized by the northern populace. The Army still gets lost in the deluge of histories written about more “important” organizations. In an article about soldiers who served in southeast Virginia, where Cole would soon serve in the Army of the James, Edward Longacre writes “unlike comrades in Northern Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, Middle Tennessee, and other larger theatres of operations, they saw their contributions go largely unnoticed by the civilian public: they might have been fighting in Siberia for all the national attention they received.” See: Edward G. Longacre, “‘Would to God that War was Rendered Impossible’: Letters of Captain Rowland M. Hall, April-July, 1864," in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 89, no. 4 (1981), p.448; Longacre, “The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History” (Vol. 1-4), pp. 13, 115.
Endnote 5) More on the Army of the James (AOJ), its deep divisions within, and the overlapping problems in Cole's Third New York Cavalry: The letter and records that I examined, suggest that division and backbiting haunted the Army of the James. Cole’s New York Third Cavalry, in this way, was a good fit as it too was fraught with internal antagonisms. Captain Rowland M. Hall -- also from the Third New York Cavalry -- would later complain that his regiment had been taken over by unqualified men and Copperheads. Hall especially didn’t care much for its officers. “Would to Heaven that our Government had good Officers,” he wrote. “These cavalry Officers here are a wretched set of fellows & must be whipped in[to] fighting with gentlemen from the South or elsewhere.” About officers who took promotions over black soldiers, within the Army of the James, Hall vented, “I should think the unfortunate black troops would become demoralized. Their officers are generally of a wretched class.”
The rancor and friction that was part of Cole's experience in the AOJ, seems to have had a lot to do with the New York Third Cavalry; it was through that regiment that Cole initially served in the AOJ. The Third's colonel, Simon H. Mix, was a fierce Republican whose political career fell short of expectations. He eventually lost the support of many of his own soldiers because what they viewed to be patent incompetence. He also had trouble at home. When he was later cut down in battle, some believed that Mix threw himself into enemy fire to end it all. Mix’s men spread rumors that his crumbling marriage fed his suicidal tendencies. When it was reported back to camp that Mix was mortally wounded on the battlefield and taken prisoner, one of his captains “laughed long and loud in derision.” Mix’s “mulatto servant” revealed to the regimental chaplain that Mix acted as if he wanted to be shot.
The men in the Third New York Cavalry found themselves in a theatre of the war that did not meet their aspirations -- even as they were being absorbed into the AOJ. The AOJ’s first commanders, Major General John Dix and his subordinate officers proved indecisive and timid against Lee’s forces in Virginia. The War Department finally dissolved Dix’s command in the summer of 1863 and merged the men into Major General John Foster’s Department of North Carolina (to which Cole belonged during his raids in North Carolina); the War Department named the combined command the Department of Virginia and North Carolina, which came to be known as the Army of the James.
Foster, though, soon proved himself a desk general unfit for field command. What he achieved seemed trifling. In the words of his successor’s wife, Sarah Butler, the oft-maligned Army of the James merely conquered “little villages many miles asunder…taken merely to give éclat to Gen. Foster.” (She was referring to the destructive, yet insignificant raids of Cole and his comrades.) At the end of 1863, six months after Potter’s Raid, the pro-Democrat New York Herald highlighted the hopelessness of Lincoln’s war by singling out for criticism Cole’s superiors and comrades: “what has been accomplished in this command during General Foster’s administration, in a military view, is not of much importance.”
Politically, the Army of the James was Lincoln’s armed citadel. The majority of soldiers in the U.S. army would back their president for another presidential term. When he fretted over his reelection in 1864, he rightly entertained no worries about the Army of the James. Some of its regiments voted better than nine to one for the rail-splitter turned president.
In general, Lincoln was reelected by the same men who elected him the first time -- native-born farmers, skilled workers of some success, and urban professional men. Each state had its own policy concerning the suffrage of soldiers. Some, like New York, made it impossible to tell how certain military units voted. What we can tell is that soldiers heavily supported Lincoln over the ex-general McClellan.
It isn’t clear, though, why Captain Rowland M. Hall complained to his father that Copperheads were taking over the command in 1864. Perhaps this merely shows how Republican soldiers, at least earlier, felt their unit was an extension of their politics and ideology, and how the appointment of Democrat officers over time threatened to disturb this. The black journalist, Thomas Chester, noted too that the AOJ showed waning support for Lincoln at the ballot. This provides more evidence that the AOJ experienced deep tensions over the issues of race and emancipation. Jonathan White’s book on the election of 1864 sheds crucial light on this question. White argues persuasively that the 78% vote of Union soldiers too often distorts historians’ view of the soldiers’ ideology. First, many soldiers, some 20%, did not vote at all. This is likely because they could neither bring themselves to vote for Lincoln and the war’s emancipation aims, or the Democratic Party which increasingly denigrated the sacrifice of soldiers by calling for peace with no real gains made from the blood of comrades. White shows how coercion within the ranks, the fear of retribution from voting with the “traitor” Democrats – the public use of the ballots made voting a visible act – and a general unwillingness to vote against the party that, at the very least, seemed to honor their sacrifices, all brought about a seemingly overwhelming vote for Lincoln and his larger war aims. Their actual ideology, and sentiments about emancipation, White argues, should not be confused with voting percentages. It seems likely that Hall was describing a reality. While the AOJ showed overwhelming support for Lincoln at the ballot, it was also filled with despisers of Lincoln.
For quote of Sarah Butler to Harriet Heard, see, November 27th, 1863 in Benjamin Franklin Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War. Vol. 3, February 1863-March 1864 (Norwood, Mass: Plimpton Press, 1917), pp. 163-64. See New York Herald quoted in: Longacre, “The Army of the James, 1863-1865: A Military, Political, and Social History" (Vol. 1-4), p. 6; On Mix, see: Longacre, “‘Would to God that War was Rendered Impossible’: Letters of Captain Rowland M. Hall, April-July, 1864,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. 89, No. 4” pp. 452, 455; Edward Wall, “The First Assault on Petersburg," New Jersey Historical Society III, no. 4 (1918), 201-02; Longacre, Army of Amateurs, p.13; Longacre, “The Army of the James, 1863-1865,” pp. 21-2, 115; For voting and soldiers, see: Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front, edited by R. J. M Blackett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); and especially, Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2014); Oscar O. Winther, “The Soldier Vote in the Election of 1864," New York History 25, no. 4 (1944), 440-58; OR, Series 1, Vol. 42, part III, pp. 562-69; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 544-45; Longacre, The Army of the James, 1863-1865, pp. 100-01; John C. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997), pp. 339-43; on supposed Copperheads in the AOJ, see: Longacre, “‘Would to God that War was Rendered Impossible,’" pp. p.452.
Endnote 8) On Butler’s towering ambitions and political machinations before he took command of the AOJ, see a longer piece that I removed from the book, 6.8, here.
On opposition to Butler within the AOJ: Late in the war, General “Baldy” Smith, one of Butler’s highest-ranking officers -- and reportedly no less contentious than Butler -- pressed General Grant, the head of all Union armies, for an accounting of Butler’s commission as a Major General: “I want simply to call your attention to the fact that no man since the Revolution has had a tithe of the responsibility which now rests on your shoulders, and to ask you how you can place a man [like Butler]... who is as helpless as a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium-eater in council?” See: Holzman, Stormy Ben Butler, pp. 126-27; General William F. Smith to General Grant, July 2, 1864, in OR, Series 1, volume 40, part II, p. 595.
Endnote 14) When George Cole transferred into the Third New York Cavalry, his seniority as captain was changed in regimental records to the date of his transfer -- September, instead of May, the month of his enlistment. Due to this, other captains outranked him within his new regiment, though he technically had seniority. He argued that this regimental system was unfair and inconsistent from unit to unit. “I find the usages of other [regiments] would make me senior,” he wrote his superior. Cole admitted that the official regulations were “somewhat obscure.” Though it may have amounted to less than a week’s seniority, Cole insisted that “Having had much more & longer service than any of our officers, I naturally wish whatever I may be entitled to in position.” Captain George W. Cole to General Foster [undated] found in Compiled Service Record of George W. Cole, 3rd New York Cavalry. NARA, Washington DC.
Endnote 20) Cole wrote as if he saw his own battlefield exploits through the senses of others. His “tall black appearance,” yelling while under assault, and raising the regimental flag with his own hands. Aided, perhaps, by the daguerreotypes he had posed for to capture how he looked in his uniform, his own memory of events had come to resemble what his exploits should have looked like to others -- in a newspaper account or in the mind of a reporter like Henry Raymond.
Endnote 22) On pipelaying and wirepulling: From the late 1830s on, the term was used by various political groups to denounce corruption, particularly in politics. The term supposedly originated with electoral fraud in 1838, wherein a plumber from Philadelphia promised to send nineteen plumbers to vote for a Whig candidate in New York City. See: David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 195; In many cases “pipe-laying” was explicitly presented as the antithesis of merit-based promotions and station, or a direct threat to free labor. All parties used it. Democrats wielded the term to denounce Whigs, Henry Clay, and the “black tariff” of 1842. In an anti-Whig diatribe, defending the patriotism of Irish-Americans, one antebellum editorial denounced “internal improvements” and “canal enlargement” as ways to buy working-class votes, and in particular Irish men’s loyalties. Here laying pipe meant trying to court Irish-Americans with chicanery and double talk in an election year. See: “A Letter to Farmer Issachar," The United States Democratic Review 15, no. 76 (October, 1844), p. 388; “Whig and Fogey Pipe-Laying: Free Trade and the Irish Vote," The United States Democratic Review, 31, no. 170 (August 1852), pp. 105-11.
Endnote 24) Just more than a year later, realizing that he was soon to be replaced by Grant, Halleck wrote a letter to Grant’s ally, General Sherman, to thank Sherman for his “kind allusions” in a speech he delivered in Memphis. Halleck wrote in the letter begun with, “My Dear General,” that the armies in the west did not suffer from the epidemic in laying pipe and infighting: “There is less jealousy and back-biting, and a greater disposition to assist each other. Here we have too much party politics and wire-pulling. Everybody wants you to turn a grindstone to grind his particular ax, and if you decline he regards you as an enemy and takes revenge by newspaper abuse.” See: H. W. Halleck to Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman, February 16, 1864 in OR, Series 1, Volume 32, Part II, pages 407-08.
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