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9. Shoulder Straps and Courts-Martial
- Louisiana State University Press
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chapter 9 Shoulder Straps and Courts-Martial An able, efficient, and respected officer corps was essential to regimental esprit de corps. The field and staff officers and company-grade line officers held the critical responsibilities of training, disciplining, and leading the enlisted men—and inspiring them by example in combat. They also faced the challenge of upholding those responsibilities while earning the respect of their charges—a task made difficult because of the potentially adversarial nature of the two-tiered caste system of officers and enlisted men. A commission and a pair of shoulder straps brought a man power, privilege, and prestige. An officer received substantially higher wages (although he paid his own clothing and food expenses), occupied a larger tent, ate meals cooked by servants, had whiskey when he wanted it, gave orders and assigned duties to his underlings, and could tender his resignation if he chose to do so. Those perquisites of office created a gulf between enlisted men and their leaders. Officers could widen that gulf and damage esprit de corps by abusing their authority and lording it over their men, or they could bridge the gulf and foster esprit by displaying a friendly and fatherly regard for their boys while still maintaining the rights of rank. Ambitious men, both officers and enlisted men, sought higher rank, and rivalries for office could be detrimental to esprit de corps. As in other volunteer regiments, political tugs-of-war played a role in the selection of officers in the 154th New York. George Taylor bluntly asserted, “The officers of our own regiment and, I may as well say, in our company are in their positions as a result of party favoritism.” “There was a great deal of politics to the square yard of the 154th N.Y. Vols.,” Captain Matthew Cheney recalled in the postwar years, “and especially around Dr. [Henry] Van Aernam’s Head Quarters.” Advancement usually required a knowledge of political as well as military tactics.1 Attrition in the officer corps was constant. As officers resigned or became casualties of disease or battle, replacements were generally recommended by the regiment’s commander, who ideally had the best knowledge of qualified 205 brothers one and all candidates. By the end of its service, a fighting regiment like the 154th New York typically had a largely different set of officers in place than the ones that accompanied it to the front. The 154th was mustered in at Jamestown with a full complement of thirty-eight officers, and almost fifty more men were commissioned during the regiment’s service. Only twenty-five officers were mustered out at the end of the 154th’s service. Sixteen of them had proven their leadership abilities in the ranks, generally as noncommissioned officers, before their promotions. Only one officer—Second Lieutenant Warren Onan of Company C—held the same position throughout the regiment’s entire service, and he spent most of it on detached duty as commander of the brigade ambulance corps. During three years of war, the regiment was purged of incompetent, cowardly, drunken, or imperious officers. Promoted in their place were men so attuned to the enlisted men in temperament that they drew scant mention in the men’s letters. Attrition, promotion, and esprit de corps molded a regiment with an ideal balance between its leaders and its led. Enlisted men resented officers for several reasons. “It takes a rough wicked man to get office here as a general rule,” Barzilla Merrill wrote from Camp John Manley in April 1863. He sensed that some prominent Cattaraugus County men seemed more interested in getting good berths as officers for themselves and their cronies than they did in having the war end. The thought that officers could wish the war prolonged for their own advancement and gain made enlisted men bitter. “I wish every offaser had thare little 13 dollars a month and had to cary a Napsack and eat with us,” Horace Howlett wrote. He continued, “Then they would not want to keep the thing [going] eny longer then posable.” Enlisted men scorned the resentments of officers bypassed for promotion. “If they cannot go forward as fast as they like or as fast as they are entitled to they are like a sulky mule,” George Taylor wrote; “they don’t want to draw at all...