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2 FILLING THE RANKS RALLYING TO THE COLORS Martial enthusiasm spread through the Upper South in the wake of the surrender of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call to put down the rebellion. Meetings, rallies, and calls to arms brought out the men in numbers that would certainly dampen the confidence of Yankee aggressors. Those men who had been happy to remain in the Union as long as the federal government had left alone their cousins in the Deep South now were eager to pick up arms to stop Lincoln’s aggressive response to Sumter. In Tennessee, even before formal secession and despite the strong Unionist sentiment in the eastern part of the state, 20 companies of men mustered near Knoxville to defend the Confederacy.1 Likewise, Virginia’s governor John Letcher called out the militia, and companies that had been inactive since the capture of John Brown rapidly formed up to march on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry.2 It was a process repeated throughout the newly seceded states. The patriotic town meetings that followed in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter stirred Northern souls just as the call for independence rallied Southerners to their new national banner. Speeches, songs, a Mexican War veteran, and perhaps a woman who audibly regretted her sex for keeping her from defending the flag fueled the enthusiasm of the crowd. Northern town meetings often concluded with men stepping forward to volunteer for companies of soldiers that would be gathered up into regiments organized by their state governments. Not to be outdone by their new enemies, numerous eager volunteers pressed themselves onto the various military organizations being formed. On April 21, 1861, Josiah Favill went to volunteer his services to a three-month company of the 71st NewYork, but he discovered that “it was not so easy to join this regiment, as the armory was crowded with men, mostly fine young fellows, all crazy to be enrolled.” Fearing he would be left out, he directly approached the company’s captain and convinced him “to squeeze me in.”3 Favill was not alone. Men rushed to join companies giving little consideration to anything “beyond the opportunity to go,” recalled Wisconsin veteran Rufus Dawes, except for “the fear that some one else would get ahead and crush the Rebellion before they got there.”4 Consequently, volunteers filled their states’initial quotas so rapidly that some governments found it difficult to cope with the martial enthusiasm. The Jasper 40 THE CIVIL WAR Grays of Iowa had to wait over two months before the governor could accept them into the state’s volunteer Fifth Iowa Infantry regiment.5 Many Northern men thought they would miss out on a grand adventure, given how quickly their states produced their required quotas. If in April or May 1861 they were not accepted into a volunteer company or if their company was not accepted into a regiment, they could find themselves marching home, missing out on the adventure of a lifetime. Such a worry, New Jerseyan Robert McAllister told his wife, “dampens our feelings very much.”6 This concern was not unwarranted, and men went beyond the borders of their home states to find places in regiments. Other patriots agreed to longer enlistment periods to guarantee that they would have a hand in subduing the rebellion. When a Lowell, Massachusetts, company of 90-day men learned that the state was no longer accepting short-term volunteers, they voted to serve for three years.7 After all, most of these men assumed that the war would be over and they snug before their home fires in the not too distant future. Other men had no choice but to wait. Ben Hirst and his neighbors in the Rockville, Connecticut, state militia company were prepared to go to war in the spring of 1861 but discovered that they were superfluous soldiers, Connecticut having filled its quota of 90-day men before they could present themselves. Some men tried to find a place in a three-year regiment, but the company itself remained home and met for regular drills, until its members entered the federal service during the summer of 1862.8 Farther west, in the wake of a patriotic town meeting where “patriotism was effervescent,” 30 young men joined the Prescott, Wisconsin, Guards only to learn that the governor did not need them. Unwilling to give up on the war, they “began drilling every day, studied the tactics , erected a liberty pole...

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