-
9. The Nomination
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Illinois governor Richard Yates visited the nation’s capital from June 14 through June 21, 1862, accompanied by John Wood, his state’s quartermaster general. Staying at the National Hotel, they spent time with their senators, Lyman Trumbull and Orville Hickman Browning, and gained an audience with the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. The main objective of their trip was routine but important. They came in search of money, federal money, to reimburse the state for funds spent recruiting troops. Then, too, Governor Yates had another pet enthusiasm: putting stars on the shoulders of senior military of¤cers from Illinois. As it happened, western Virginia’s Francis Harrison Pierpont was also in Washington on Friday, June 20. Pierpont served as the Unionist governor of West Virginia, a state recently proclaimed by its citizens but not yet admitted by Congress. Pierpont’s mission paralleled that of Governor Yates.1 Yates, the Republican governor of the fastest-growing state in the West, had real clout, even with Secretary Stanton. Pierpont, no less in®uential as a loyalist governor of at least a portion of a seceded state, had earlier gotten the irascible secretary overridden on military matters. Thus, there was little surprise that day when the honorable secretary of war dictated, signed, and forwarded to the president a document, which the president forthwith sent to the Senate, containing the nominations of Joseph Andrew Jackson Lightburn of western Virginia and John Basil Turchin of Illinois to be brigadier generals of United States Volunteers.2 There is no reason to think that Stanton forwarded these names in order to make a point about the government’s war policy. Pierpont had been obliged to shield his citizens from depredations by Union troops as well as 9 The Nomination The time of the Senate has been chie®y occupied of late in Executive Session on the perennial shower of new Brigadiers. . . . The rank of Brigadier has almost ceased to be a mark of distinction, and if we go on at the present rate, we shall soon have enough of¤cers of that grade to take Richmond without the aid of any privates. —Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1862 from rebel-sympathizing bushwhackers. Lightburn, for his part, had been a diligent regimental commander in his home territory, where it had been far easier to raise troops loyal to the government than it had been for rebels to organize.3 The abolitionist secretary was the bloodiest-minded member of the cabinet, accepting his post only “if no other pledge than to throttle treason shall be exacted.” A lawyer with no military experience, he held to views of war quite as lurid as anything in the textbooks of his boyhood.4 Turchin’s nomination resembled Lightburn’s in that he was the best his sponsors had to offer at the moment. Strategic policy considerations regarding such appointments , if they were to arise at all, would only come later, if and when the nominations required action. No one could have expected on June 20, 1862, that the Turchin and Lightburn nominations would come to anything. Weeks earlier, orators in the Senate chamber had tried to call attention to the fact that serving brigadiers were already overabundant, and a move had been started to limit the number of promotions. Typically, the upper house then proceeded to approve a further raft of them. As a result, few places now appeared open. (Lightburn , in fact, did not receive his star until March 1863.)5 In the summer of 1862, his and Turchin’s nominations were a matched pair of political accommodations , forwarded to the bottom of a deep and thickening pile. In the American army before the Civil War, as one thorough study has it, “promotion was an all-engrossing preoccupation among the increasingly career-minded of¤cers.” Political in®uence in Washington carried no slight weight, particularly when an of¤cer sought to make the great leap up from colonel to brigadier.6 The war provided a bonanza of opportunity for aspiring of¤cers, whether veteran Regulars or new volunteers. It was no less a bonanza for politicians, men who, when advancing the right constituents, might accumulate political chits and enhance their own and their faction’s prestige by the number and quality of their military protégés. Even the president, holding the power to nominate, found himself with a valuable fund of in®uence among of¤cers’ political sponsors. Through 1861 and on into the summer of 1862, governors, senators, and...