Book Review: High Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor
High Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor. By Edwin P. Rutan II. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2024. 312 pp. Softcover. $39.95.
Reviewed by John Hennessy
Conventional wisdom, especially as it relates to the Civil War, is usually simplistically incomplete or flat-out wrong. More importantly, it dies hard. Edwin Rutan’s latest book, High Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor, is a carefully crafted, creatively researched and compelling death blow to conventional wisdom as it relates to the service of late-war enlistees and draftees in the Army of the Potomac.
The default view: late-war soldiers coming into the Union army were usually reluctant, avaricious, disloyal, dysfunctional, or cowardly. Ever-increasing bounties lured some. Some came as hired substitutes. The looming draft coerced others. The patriotic fervor that had inspired enlistments in 1861 and 1862 had faded. The old soldiers of the Army of the Potomac looked upon these late-comers (at least initially) with disdain or suspicion. These new men, the thinking went, were hardly patriotic, lured instead by money. “Bounty jumpers”—men and substitutes who enlisted, collected their bounty or fee, deserted, and then enlisted again—became symbols of this new generation of soldiers. After the war, Southerners especially relished painting these late-war men (and indeed the whole Union army) as “mercenaries” (though it’s worth noting that the Confederacy had conscription, bounties, and substitutes, too, and nefarious characters who exploited them all). Historians have largely and uncritically accepted these characterizations. That, after all, is the definition of conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom is often built on anecdotes and assumptions. Rutan’s book is built on data. He dove impressively into regimental rosters, unit returns, compiled service records, and the census to create a database of 250,000 records related to the soldiers who served the Union in the last year of the war. It is by far the most ambitious compilation of data of its kind. From this and other sources, Rutan gives us insights simply not found elsewhere. This is original research at its best—a rare thing in the world of Civil War history.
The first half of this book is largely analytical. Rutan gives us a highly useful portrait of how the Union built its armies—the “pragmatic” but imperfect responses (bounties, the draft, substitutes) the government used to recruit soldiers as the demand for men grew during an evolving and expanding war. He notes “that patriotism alone has never been a sufficient motivator in the United States for a prolonged, large-scale war.” (204) While not denying that bounty jumpers and unfaithful substitutes (fewer than 20 percent of the new enlistees) plagued the army and damaged the public’s perception of late-war replacements and units, Rutan argues persuasively that once in the field the desertion rates of late-war regiments usually approximated the rates among the war’s first responders of 1861-1862.
Then there is the question of the performance of late-war replacements and new regiments in the field. The second half of the book tracks the experiences of these units from the outset of the Overland Campaign to the end of the war. He points out that replacements (including draftees) added to “old” Pennsylvania units that marched into the Wilderness in 1864 often equaled or exceeded in number the veterans in those regiments. “The late-war replacements did not ‘ruin’ these regiments,” Ruhan tells us, they “kept them going.” (108)
To adjudge the effectiveness of late-war regiments in battle, Ruhan rooted through the combat experiences of dozens of new units, combining commentary from both within and outside these units to assess their effectiveness. He observes that many of these units had experienced leadership at the regimental and company levels—men who had served as officers or enlisted men earlier in the war. Though these regiments sometimes went into battle with virtually no preparation (before engaging at the Wilderness, the 17th Vermont had conducted exactly two regimental drills) they learned quickly and usually earned the respect of older regiments. Those that did not do well generally suffered from poor leadership or some internal malaise. The point is not that all late-war replacements were uniformly excellent soldiers or outstanding units. Rather, the point is that the conventional wisdom that early-war enlistees were the war’s only patriots and that late-war replacements and regiments were mere reluctant “mercenaries” is demonstrably incorrect. They materially contributed to Union victory.
This book is no rehash; nor is it simply a synthesis of others’ work. It is an impressive example of original research using tools and resources largely unavailable to earlier generations, combined with thoughtful analysis and judicious use of primary sources. It is a book that tells us something new on almost every page—an indispensable source on the Army of the Potomac and its ultimate effort to help restore a nation.
*The author has posted online the “HIBO database” that underpins the statistical work in this book. You can explore it at www.latewarunionsoldiers.org.
John Hennessy recently retired as the Chief Historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he worked for the final 26 years of his NPS career. He is the author of four books, most notably, Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas. His books and dozens of articles and essays have appeared under the imprint of Simon & Schuster, Cambridge University Press, Stackpole Books, LSU Press, the University of North Carolina Press, and another dozen publications. He is presently at work on several projects, including a history of the Fredericksburg region before, during, and after the Civil War, and a book exploring the sometimes-tenuous relationship between the Army of the Potomac and the government it served. He lives in Fredericksburg.
