About the 3d of April I was directed to report in person to General Schenck at Baltimore, [Footnote: Id., p. 175.] and reached that city on the 4th. My relations with General Schenck had been, personally, cordial, and our friendship continued till his death, many years after the war. Whatever plans he may have had were set aside by orders from Washington, which met me at his headquarters, ordering me to report at Columbus, Ohio, to assist the governor in organizing the troops to be called out under the new enrolment and conscription law. This was accompanied by the assurance that this duty would be but temporary, and that my desire to be assigned to active field duty would then be favorably considered. It is not improbable that my report on army organization, which has been mentioned, had something to do with this assignment; but I did not ask permission to visit Washington, though within a couple of hours' ride of the capital, and hastened back to my assigned post. Besides my wish to cut my connection with West Virginia on general military theories of its insignificance as a theatre of war, my stay there would have been intolerable, since General Milroy, in whose judgment I had less confidence than in that of any of my other subordinates, was, by the curious outcome of the winter's promotions, the one of all others who had been put over my head. I could not then foresee the cost the country would pay for this in the next summer's campaign in the Shenandoah, but every instinct urged me to sever a connection which could bode no good. The reasonableness of my objection to serving as a subordinate where I had been in command was recognized, and the arrangement actually made was as acceptable as anything except a division in an active army.
It greatly added to my contentment to learn that General Burnside had been ordered to the Department of the Ohio, and would be my immediate superior. I hastened back to Marietta, closed up the business pending there, and went to Columbus on the 9th of April. The arrangement between Governor Tod and General Burnside proved to be the formation of the Military District of Ohio, including the whole State. I was placed in command of this district, reporting directly to the general, who himself conferred with the governor. My own relations to my superiors were thus made strictly military, which was a much pleasanter thing for me than direct connection with the civil authorities would be; for this involved a danger of cross-purposes and conflicting orders. Brigadier-General John S. Mason, an excellent officer, was ordered to report to me as my immediate subordinate in command of the camps and the post at Columbus, and before the end of the month Burnside directed me to fix my own headquarters at Cincinnati, where I could be in constant communication with himself. All this was done with the most cordial understanding between Burnside and the governor. Indeed, nothing could be more perfect than the genial and reasonable tone of Governor Tod's intercourse with the military officers stationed in Ohio.
My duties under the Enrolment Act turned out to be very slight. The Act (passed March 3, 1863) made, in general, each congressional district an enrolment district under charge of a provost-marshal with the rank of captain. A deputy provost-marshal supervised the enrolment and draft for the State, and the whole was under the control of the provost-marshal-general at Washington, Colonel James B. Fry. The law provided for classification of all citizens capable of military duty between the ages of twenty and forty-five, so as to call out first the unmarried men and those not having families dependent on them. The exemptions on account of physical defects were submitted to a board of three, of which the local provost-marshal was chairman, and one was a medical man. Substitutes might be accepted in the place of drafted men, or a payment of three hundred dollars would be taken in place of personal service, that sum being thought sufficient to secure a voluntary recruit by the government. The principal effect of this provision was to establish a current market price for substitutes.
The general provisions of the law for the drafting were wise and well matured, and the rules for the subordinate details were well digested and admirably administered by Colonel Fry and his bureau. It was a delicate and difficult task, but it was carried out with such patience, honesty, and thoroughness that nothing better could be done than copy it, if a future necessity for like work should arise. There was no good ground for complaint, and in those cases where, as in New York, hostile political leaders raised the cry of unfairness and provoked collision between the mob and the National authorities, the victims were proved to be the dupes of ignorance and malice. The administration of the law was thoroughly vindicated, and if there were to be a draft at all, it could not be more fairly and justly enforced.
There was room for difference of opinion as to some of the provisions of the law regarding exemption and substitution, but the most serious question was raised by the section which applied to old regiments and which had nothing to do with the enrolment and draft. This section directed that when regiments had become reduced in numbers by any cause, the officers of the regiment should be proportionately diminished. As new regiments were still received and credited upon the State's liability under the draft, it of course resulted that the old regiments continued to decay. A public sentiment had been created which looked upon the draft as a disgrace, and the most extraordinary efforts were made to escape it. Extra bounties for volunteering were paid by counties and towns, and the combination of influences was so powerful that it was successful in most localities, and very few men were actually put in the ranks by the draft.
The offer of extra bounties to induce volunteering brought into existence "bounty-jumping," a new crime analogous to that of "repeating" at elections. A man would enlist and receive the bounty, frequently several hundred dollars, but varying somewhat in different places and periods. He would take an early opportunity to desert, as he had intended to do from the first. Changing his name, he would go to some new locality and enlist again, repeating the fraud as often as he could escape detection. The urgency to get recruits and forward them at once to the field, and the wide country which was open to recruiting, made the risk of punishment very small. Occasionally one was caught, and he would of course be liable to punishment as a deserter. The final report of the provost-marshal-general mentions the case of a criminal in the Albany penitentiary, New York, who confessed that he had "jumped the bounty" thirty-two times. [Footnote: Provost-Marshal-General's Report, p. 153.]
Another evil incidental to the excessive stimulus of volunteering was a political one, which threatened serious results. It deranged the natural political balance of the country by sending the most patriotic young men to the field, and thus giving an undue power to the disaffected and to the opponents of the administration. This led to the State laws for allowing the soldiers to vote wherever they might be, their votes being certified and sent home. In its very nature this was a makeshift and a very dubious expedient to cure the mischief. It would not have been necessary if we had had at an early day a system of recruiting that would have drawn more evenly from different classes into the common service of the country.
The military officers of the department and district had nothing to do with the enrolment and drafting, unless resistance to the provost-marshals should make military support for these officers necessary. We had hoped to have large camps of recruits to be organized and instructed, but the numbers actually drafted in Ohio, in 1863, were insignificant, for reasons already stated. Three or four very small post garrisons were the only forces at my command, and these were reduced to the minimum necessary to guard the prison camps and the depots of recruiting and supply.
General Burnside had not come West with a purpose to content himself with the retiracy of a department out of the theatre of actual war. His department included eastern Kentucky, and afforded a base for operations in the direction of East Tennessee. Mr. Lincoln had never lost his eagerness and zeal to give assistance to the loyal mountaineers, and had arranged with Burnside a plan of co-operation with Rosecrans by which the former should move from Lexington, Ky., upon Knoxville, whilst the latter marched from Murfreesboro, Tenn., upon Chattanooga. This was better than the impracticable plan of 1861, which aimed at the occupation of East Tennessee before Chattanooga had been taken, and the task was at last accomplished by the method now used. It was by no means the best or most economical method, which would have been to have but one strong army till Chattanooga were firmly in our hands, and then direct a subordinate column upon the upper Holston valley. It was utterly impossible to keep up a line of supply for an army in East Tennessee by the wagon roads over the mountains. The railroad through Chattanooga was indispensable for this purpose. But Mr. Lincoln had not fully appreciated this, and was discontented that both Buell and Rosecrans had in turn paid little attention, as it seemed, to his desire to make the liberation of East Tennessee the primary and immediate aim of their campaigns. He had therefore determined to show his own faith in Burnside, and his approval of the man, by giving him a small but active army in the field, and to carry out his cherished purpose by having it march directly over the Cumberland Mountains, whilst Rosecrans was allowed to carry out the plan on which the commanders of the Cumberland army seemed, in the President's opinion, too stubbornly bent.
Burnside's old corps, the Ninth, was taken from the Army of the Potomac and sent to Kentucky, and a new corps, to be called the Twenty-third, was soon authorized, to contain the Tennessee regiments which had been in General Morgan's command, and two divisions made up of new regiments organized in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois under the last call for volunteers. To these were added several Kentucky regiments of different ages in service. General Parke, so long Burnside's chief of staff, was to command the Ninth Corps, and Major-General George L. Hartsuff was assigned to the Twenty-third. In a former chapter I have spoken of Hartsuff's abilities as a staff officer in West Virginia. [Footnote: Chap, vi., ante.] His qualities as a general officer had not been tried. He was wounded at the beginning of the engagement at Antietam, where he commanded a brigade in Hooker's corps. [Footnote: Chap, xv., ante.] That was his first service under his appointment as brigadier, and he had necessarily been out of the field since that time. My own expectation was that he would make an excellent reputation as a corps commander, but it was not his fortune to see much continuous field service. His health was seriously affected by his wounds, and after a short trial of active campaigning he was obliged to seek more quiet employment.