The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

5. “A Burning Shame”: Bounty Jumpers and Recruitment Fraud

5 “A Burning Shame” Bounty Jumpers and Recruitment Fraud _ And what makes Robbers bold, but too much lenity? —Henry VI, Part 3 Not all of the scandals that rocked the Civil War North were as overblown as the hunt for alleged prostitutes in the Treasury Department . Public fears about various forms of recruitment fraud were solidly grounded in reality. The Northern wartime enlistment system was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. The innovative federal conscription system had serious problems, with only 3 percent of those called actually serving, and the rest suspiciously gaining exemptions through one means or another. Ultimately, wildly high cash bounties offered by both local and national authorities succeeded in increasing enlistments, as the proponents of conscription had hoped would indirectly result from the looming threat of the draft—but this process proved deeply flawed, as well. By January 1864, a New York Republican would bitterly contend: “It is one of the unspeakable shames of our country that the business of recruiting has degenerated, by the grossest mismanagement, into the vilest measures of venal corruption.”1 The so-called bounty jumpers—those who enlisted merely to reap the initial financial rewards, and then deserted, often repeating the process— seemed a striking example of the prevalence of shameful corruption in Northern society. Bounty jumpers displayed greed, cowardice, and a lack of patriotism—all alarming manifestations of corruption and unmanliness . Differing attitudes toward manhood and corruption among work- Traitors and Trollops 128 ing people helped make this phenomenon a particularly vexing one. Many Northerners were convinced that the bounty jumpers represented either disloyal and inassimilable immigrants or a professional criminal underclass , reflecting intense fears and doubts related to the region’s explosive urbanization and modernization. A broad range of Northerners fumed and worried over the nation’s seeming inability to muster an adequate force of patriotic men to meet the still defiant enemy in the field. In fact, during the last half of the war, Northern authorities countenanced harsh and brutal punishment for the bounty jumpers, including death, a sentence rarely applied to deserters during the conflict unless thereweresevereaggravatingcircumstances.“Simplesoldierboys”guilty of being temporarily absent without leave from their units had a variety of motivations, as most Northerners realized. Some were homesick and absented themselves during the winter, when campaigning typically died down; some had to assist on their family farms during planting or harvest season; some, disdainful of authority, slipped away for a spot of fun when the spirit so moved them. The punishment of Northern soldiers for such infractions tended to be very light throughout the conflict. Northerners did not, however, extend this indulgence to those who were judged guilty of the crime of bounty jumping. The more frequent executions of Northern deserters during the last stage of the conflict might seem to buttress the arguments of scholars who see a shift in the North during 1864 and 1865 toward a stern, “total war” policy and unyielding public acceptance of government authority.2 But, in fact, the increase in executions of Northern deserters late in the war can best be understood not as the product of a nonexistent emergent Northern consensus on the need for draconian measures and unquestioning obedience to authority, but rather as the result of both rational and irrational popular fears of the bounty jumpers, who for complicated reasons sparked virulent hatred from a wide range of Northerners. A number of factors accounted for the intensity of public loathing toward these troublesome rascals. A continued popular horror at public and private extravagance created an underlying distrust of and hostility toward the entire bounty system. The bounty jumpers themselves seemed to represent all that was wrong with Northern manhood and citizenship. They, like Butler and Frémont, seemingly prized profit and self-interest above the interests of their communities and the nation, thus failing to uphold the most basic tenet of the mythical public virtue still cherished “A Burning Shame” 129 by Americans steeped in the romance of republicanism. Northerners believed bounty jumpers to be cowards, lacking the most fundamental characteristic of idealized manhood. Then, too, the objectionable qualities of these disorderly, seemingly useless citizens could not readily be separated in the minds of middle- and upper-class Northerners from other urban problems that alternately inspired their intense fear or virulent hatred. Like the shoddy aristocrats, in the minds of nativist Northerners the bounty jumpers represented both ethnically and culturally inferior foreign immigrants...