By the summer of 1863, the promises of a short war had long since dissolved into blood-soaked reality. When Abraham Lincoln first called for volunteers in the spring of 1861, he asked for only ninety days of service. For countless young men, especially farm boys weary of dull rural life, that seemed like a manageable adventure: enlist, fight for a few months, and return home a hero. They could not have known that the conflict would drag on for four brutal years, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives.
By 1862, after the Union had been driven from Richmond and Confederate forces threatened Washington, Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more soldiers, this time committed to three-year terms. Only a fraction of those men would survive their enlistment. Roughly 2. 7 million soldiers fought in over 237 named battles, along with countless smaller, bloody clashes.
The popular image of these men as brawny, bearded adults was far from accurate. Approximately 420,000 Union soldiers were boys under seventeen, while the Confederacy fielded an estimated 100,000 soldiers under fifteen. These youthful recruits were not landowners defending a way of life; according to reports, many teens on both sides held neutral feelings toward slavery. They joined to escape the monotony of farm life, lured by the promise of adventure and glory.
Desperate to enlist, underage boys bent the rules however they could. Regulations required soldiers to be over eighteen, but recruiters rarely had the means to verify age. Some boys wrote the number eighteen on the sole of their shoe, then answered, “Yes, I am over eighteen,” when asked. Others simply lied, or had their fathers vouch for them.
When all else failed, they relied on the total lack of modern documentation, enlisting with nothing more than their word. Not every young soldier carried a musket. Many signed up for non-combat roles, joining regimental bands as drummers, flautists, or buglers. Others carried canteens, bandages, and stretchers, or assisted surgeons and nurses with the wounded.
Some even acted as messengers, relaying orders across the chaos of the battlefield. General William Sherman would later coin the phrase “War is hell” in 1879, fifteen years after the conflict, but the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg in July 1863 already knew its meaning. On the first day of the battle, Confederate troops marched onto the field in straight, orderly lines, presenting themselves as perfect targets to Union fire. Southern General Alfred Iverson saw only glory in the slaughter, declaring that his men died an honorable death, nobly fighting and perishing without a man running to the rear.
His soldiers remembered it differently. They recalled huddling in the mud while bullets whizzed overhead. One man described the moment when seventy-nine of his fellow soldiers were slain in a single volley. “Great God,” he wrote, “when will this stop?
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The official rations promised to soldiers on both sides included pork, bread, beef, vegetables, potatoes, peas, hominy, roasted coffee beans, and sugar. In practice, supply lines rarely delivered on those promises. The Confederacy struggled far more than the Union. Johnny Reb often subsisted on little more than cornbread, coffee, and cigarettes, supplemented by anything he could steal or forage.
Food that did arrive frequently became infested with insects within days, especially the rice and grain. Soldiers learned to rely on their cunning to survive. They foraged the land, received care packages from home, and even traded with the enemy. Away from the eyes of their officers, Union soldiers would swap their coffee for Confederate tobacco, a quiet, unofficial truce that repeated itself across the lines.
A serious wound was almost a death sentence. A soldier in the 1860s fired his musket every twenty to thirty seconds, packing gunpowder and ball down the barrel with practiced speed. If he was hit, he simply lay where he fell, playing dead in the hope that an ambulance wagon would eventually reach him. If a flask of whiskey was handy, it might numb the pain.
If he was lucky, a horse-drawn ambulance would arrive with medical supplies and patch him up. If not, he would almost certainly perish on the battlefield. But the musket was not the deadliest enemy a soldier faced. Disease killed more men than anything else during the Civil War.
The Union alone lost 44,000 lives to dysentery and diarrhea, a toll equivalent to ten Gettysburgs. Union Private Theodore Gerrish described the conditions grimly. “One of the most disastrous features of the gloomy situation was the terrible sickness of the soldiers. Men were unused to the climate, the exposure, and the food, so that the whole experience was in direct contrast to their life at home.
” Infection ran rampant because doctors did not sterilize their equipment. During the course of the war, hospital workers performed amputations on 60,000 men, and at least one in four died from infection afterward. Race shaped the soldier’s experience as much as rank. The Confederacy was rightly concerned about arming its enslaved population, so southern black men were enlisted mostly for camp labor.
Only in the desperate final weeks of the war did the Confederate Congress act, and on March 13, 1865, it allowed black soldiers to enlist without even promising their freedom after the conflict ended. The move made no difference; the war was over less than a month later. On the Union side, black soldiers were not enlisted until 1862, with recruitment growing after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. Even then, discrimination persisted.
Under the Militia Act of 1862, black privates received $10 a month with a $3 optional clothing deduction, while white privates started at $13 a month and received a $3. 50 clothing allowance. Equality in sacrifice did not mean equality in pay. During the long stretches between battles, soldiers spent most of their waking hours preparing for combat.
They cleaned their firearms, drilled in formation, and learned the intricate maneuvers of battle. At the start of the war, most were hopelessly untrained. Private Gerrish recalled his regiment’s early days. “We had never been drilled, and untrained drum corps furnished us with music.
Each musician kept different time. Each man in the regiment took a different step. We marched, ran, walked, galloped, and stood still in our vain endeavors to keep step. ” The discipline of the professional armies that would emerge later in the war was still years away.
The physical toll of combat was staggering. The rifled muskets used by both sides weighed up to ten pounds and recoiled with tremendous force. Firing the weapon regularly could put a soldier’s arm out of commission for days. Confederate Private Sam R.
Watkins wrote of his experience after a day of heavy fighting. “After undressing, I found my limb all battered and bruised and bloodshot from my wrist to my shoulder, and as sore as a blister. I had shot 120 times that day. ” The muskets also overheated, making them difficult to reload.
Watkins continued, “My arm became so hot that frequently the powder would flash before I could ram home the ball, and I had frequently to exchange my arm for that of a fallen comrade. ”
Many soldiers doubted that civilians could ever understand what they had endured, but some tried to describe it. Union Captain Charles Carroll Morey wrote of one skirmish in stark, immediate terms. “Soon after we arrived on the ground, we were firing.
And just after I had discharged my piece at a Johnny’s head, I turned to reload. I saw a Reb who had got sight of me across his musket, and I can assure you my legs grew very short in a very short space of time, or else it was a joint in them. That is to say, I dropped down out of his sight just in time to hear his bullet whistle over my head. ” After straightening up and finishing his reload, Morey counted himself blessed.
“I don’t know what to say first,” he wrote, “but will say praise God for his goodness in sparing my life while so many of our brave comrades have fallen victims to the enemy shots. ” In a war where disease, infection, and artillery made death almost routine, surviving even a single day in the ranks was a mercy that few could take for granted.