Recruited as sharpshooters and clothed in distinctive uniforms with green trim, the hand-picked regiment of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry was renowned and admired far and wide. The only New Jersey regiment to reenlist for the duration of the Civil War at the close of its initial three-year term, the Ninth saw action in forty-two battles and engagements across three states. Throughout the South, the regiment broke up enemy camps and supply depots, burned bridges, and destroyed railroad tracks to thwart Confederate movements. Members of the Ninth also suffered disease and starvation as POWs at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.
Recruited largely from socially conservative cities and villages in northern and central New Jersey, the Ninth Volunteer Infantry consisted of men with widely differing opinions about the Union and their enemy. Edward G. Longacre unearths these complicated political and social views, tracing the history of this esteemed regiment before, during, and after the war—from recruitment at Camp Olden to final operations in North Carolina.
Recruited as sharpshooters and clothed in distinctive uniforms with green trim, the hand-picked regiment of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry was renowned and admired far and wide. The only New Jersey regiment to reenlist for the duration of the Civil War at the close of its initial three-year term, the Ninth saw action in forty-two battles and engagements across three states. Throughout the South, the regiment broke up enemy camps and supply depots, burned bridges, and destroyed railroad tracks to thwart Confederate movements. Members of the Ninth also suffered disease and starvation as POWs at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.
Recruited largely from socially conservative cities and villages in northern and central New Jersey, the Ninth Volunteer Infantry consisted of men with widely differing opinions about the Union and their enemy. Edward G. Longacre unearths these complicated political and social views, tracing the history of this esteemed regiment before, during, and after the war—from recruitment at Camp Olden to final operations in North Carolina.
The Sharpshooters: A History of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War
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Recruited as sharpshooters and clothed in distinctive uniforms with green trim, the hand-picked regiment of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry was renowned and admired far and wide. The only New Jersey regiment to reenlist for the duration of the Civil War at the close of its initial three-year term, the Ninth saw action in forty-two battles and engagements across three states. Throughout the South, the regiment broke up enemy camps and supply depots, burned bridges, and destroyed railroad tracks to thwart Confederate movements. Members of the Ninth also suffered disease and starvation as POWs at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.
Recruited largely from socially conservative cities and villages in northern and central New Jersey, the Ninth Volunteer Infantry consisted of men with widely differing opinions about the Union and their enemy. Edward G. Longacre unearths these complicated political and social views, tracing the history of this esteemed regiment before, during, and after the war—from recruitment at Camp Olden to final operations in North Carolina.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612348834 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
is a retired historian for the U.S. Department of Defense and the award-winning author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee, C.S.A. (Bison Books, 2010), The Sharpshooters: A History of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War (Potomac Books, 2017), and The Early Morning of War: Bull Run, 1861.
Read an Excerpt
The Sharpshooters
A History of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War
By Edward G. Longacre
Potomac Books
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61234-883-4
CHAPTER 1
Attention Riflemen!
When the North mobilized for war in the spring of 1861, patriotic men from all corners of every loyal state rushed to their local recruiting offices. Yet New Jersey's initial response to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the spark that set the nation ablaze, was decidedly uneven. On April 14, the day that the battered U.S. Army garrison in Charleston harbor surrendered to local attackers, unidentified citizens of Belvidere, the seat of rural Warren County, decorated their town with flags bearing the Palmetto emblem of South Carolina. The editor of the local newspaper, the Warren Journal, put his astonishment in bold print: "SECESSION IN BELVIDERE."
Whether a juvenile prank or a political statement, the banners were quickly torn down and the Stars and Stripes were raised, first over the county courthouse and then atop homes and business places throughout the town. Two days later Edward L. Campbell, a future officer in no fewer than three New Jersey regiments, began recruiting a militia company known as the Warren Guards. Before month's end rallies in support of the war effort were held throughout the county, and on the twenty-ninth the Warren Guards left Belvidere for a training camp in Trenton, the state capital. The company would later become a component of the state's Thirty-first Infantry Regiment.
These pro-Union activities aside, Belvidere's early display of Southern sympathy suggested a statewide ambivalence toward the unfolding hostilities. Even the lowering of the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter did not silence a number of editors and politicians who blamed the Republican Party in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular, rather than the "fire-eaters" of the Deep South, for the coming of war. Most of the antiwar rhetoric emanated from the industrial centers of the North. The Paterson Daily True Register declared that "the contest ... has been forced upon us by the Administration ... and because it can terminate in no beneficial results, it is the more to be deplored." The Newark Daily Journal doubted that Republicans had the stomach to wage a war and the skill to prosecute it effectively. Three days after Sumter's fall the Hunterdon County Democrat wondered "whether New Jersey will consent to remain divided by the arbitrary lines of black Republicanism, or adopt a Constitution which as sacredly regards the rights of others as it protects her own."
Fiery editorials in opposition to the Lincoln administration did not seem out of place in such a politically conservative orbit as New Jersey. By 1861 the state had become a bastion of Democratic Party influence, so much so that the Republicans had taken to calling themselves the Opposition — that is, in opposition to the majority party. With few exceptions, the results of the recent national and state elections had affirmed the Democratic ascendency. In the general election Lincoln had failed to win a majority of New Jersey's votes. He fared especially poorly in the northern counties, where Democrat candidates won three of five vacant seats. On the national level, the only Opposition victors hailed from South Jersey, where an antislavery Quaker heritage remained influential and liberal social and racial attitudes were relatively prevalent. The Opposition's candidate for governor, Charles S. Olden, a moderate Republican, had won office in Trenton but primarily because the Democrats had run a candidate with an unsavory personal reputation who alienated voters of every political persuasion.
New Jersey's economy was a major factor in its political orientation. The state had long enjoyed close commercial ties to the South. For decades industrial centers such as Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson had supplied Southern markets with all manner of goods and services for farm and home (a famous saying held that the South "walked on Newark shoe leather"). Largely due to the Southern trade, so important to New Jersey's economy, at war's commencement prominent politicians including a former governor as well as the editors of newspapers in Newark and New Brunswick called for the state to ally itself with the Confederate States of America. If unwilling to take so drastic a step, New Jersey should stand alone, independent of both North and South.
Cultural and social ties also lent New Jersey a Southern perspective. Large numbers of Southern-born students matriculated each fall at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and hundreds of Southerners vacationed every summer at the Jersey seashore. Confederate president Jefferson Davis's second wife was descended from a distinguished New Jersey family. Census records indicate that by 1860 the state was home to more than 6,000 native Southerners. As many as several hundred Jerseymen would serve in the armies of the Confederacy, while four natives or longtime residents of the state would become Confederate generals. Although present-day historians have effectively refuted earlier descriptions of New Jersey as the "northernmost border [slave] state," a small number of slaves toiled within its borders. Loopholes in the state's 1844 act that supposedly eradicated the institution meant that not until the Thirteenth Amendment became law in 1865 was slavery expressly prohibited in New Jersey. Little wonder that when the time came to proclaim one's allegiance, Jerseymen at first felt somewhat conflicted and torn.
But the period of indecisiveness was brief. War fervor has a way of uniting peoples of disparate views in a common cause. In the weeks and months following the events in Charleston, a large measure of political opposition to the war was swept away as Democrats and Republicans alike confronted a crisis of almost biblical proportions. By assaulting federal property and firing on the nation's flag, the South had forfeited much of the political capital she had stored up through decades of cooperation with the Democratic Party. The need to rally to the nation's defense silenced or at least muted much of the criticism aimed at Washington by the editors and politicians of North Jersey. In some cases this was the result of a true conversion to the cause of saving the Union; elsewhere it was brought on by compulsion and pangs of self-preservation. When a Unionist mob threatened to ransack the offices of Newark's nay-saying Journal, its editor quickly decided that the Lincoln government deserved his support, however conditional he might make it. Other antiadministration journals just as speedily altered their editorial slant, especially when it became clear that support of the true patriots who rushed to enlist led to increased readership.
And rush they did. During the three and a half months between the war's opening shots and its first sizable land battle — First Bull Run (or First Manassas), on July 21 — recruiting in New Jersey was a growth industry. In mid-April Lincoln called to the colors 75,000 militia to combat "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." This was a patently inadequate number to coerce the South to return to the Union, but Lincoln's hands were tied by statutory restrictions. At this same time he called for a special session of Congress to meet on July 4 to lay the groundwork for a more realistic basis on which to wage war.
Along with almost every loyal state, New Jersey responded eagerly to Lincoln's call. Though its once-thriving militia system had been allowed to decay over the past decade and more, the state easily met its initial quota of four regiments of citizen-soldiers. Led by a militia stalwart from Newark, Brig. Gen. (of state troops) Theodore F. Runyon, this motley but eager aggregation of 3,000 left the state capital at Trenton for Washington DC on May 3.
Early-war enthusiasm was so strong that New Jersey's supply of soldier material far exceeded the demands placed on it by the War Department. Long after the militia departed, Trenton teemed with recruits for the "Jersey Blues" (a traditional name for the state's military forces, dating to the Revolutionary War). There were so many would-be warriors that when the government called for additional volunteers Governor Olden quickly formed three regiments of three-year men. Before the end of June, following a perfunctory training period in Trenton, the First, Second, and Third New Jersey Volunteers were off for the nation's capital. Formed into a brigade along with a New York regiment under a former regular army officer, Col. William R. Montgomery, they were integrated with the state's four militia outfits and constituted a division under Runyon.
Although Runyon's command was a part of the army that attacked the Confederate defenses at Bull Run, the poorly armed, indifferently trained division was fragmented to guard various depots and outposts well in rear of the battlefield. Only two of its components, the First and Second Volunteers, were called to the scene of fighting late on the day of the battle, by which time the defeated Federals were in full retreat. Although the First New Jersey stayed long enough to help cover the withdrawal, the Second turned about and without orders rushed back to Washington. Here was a most inauspicious start to New Jersey's effort to help save the Union.
The debacle of July 21 cast a pall on state recruiting, as it did almost everywhere in the North. In the immediate aftermath of the battle Lincoln issued another call for volunteers. This time New Jersey's assessment — like the original quota, based on the state's population — was five regiments. By late September enough recruits had come forward to meet the quota. Some enlisted from patriotic motives, others to avail themselves of the bounties paid by the various counties and communities of the state. In some cases these bonuses amounted to more than one thousand dollars, paid in monthly amounts throughout a soldier's term of service. Yet whereas the First, Second, and Third New Jersey had gone to war at or close to their ordained strength of 1,000 officers and men, the Fourth through the Eighth Regiments numbered 900 men each, or slightly fewer. According to a recent wartime history of the state, "the burnished glory of arms had begun, ever so slightly, to tarnish."
Because no large-scale engagements took place through the rest of the year to enable the Union forces to redeem themselves for Bull Run, the apparent statewide decline in volunteerism might have been expected to continue. Instead, when the War Department on September 5 authorized the raising of additional regiments, New Jersey experienced an unexpected burst of patriotic enthusiasm. In contrast to the ten-company structure of the state's earlier organizations, the Ninth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry attracted enough volunteers to fill twelve companies. Here was an almost unheard-of anomaly, one that would not be resolved until November 1862 when the excess companies were disbanded, their officers discharged, and the enlisted men transferred to other units of the regiment that needed filling up.
One reason for the wave of recruits was that from the outset the Ninth New Jersey was publicized and promoted as an elite organization, a regiment of skilled marksmen. Dating from Bunker Hill and the Battle of New Orleans, sharpshooters had held an honored place in the annals of American warfare. Their skill with the long arm enabled them to take an especially heavy toll of the enemy. At extreme distances they could decimate advancing troops, shattering their formations and, by picking off the officers, depleting their leadership. To honor their special prowess and enable them to blend in with terrain and foliage, sharpshooters wore distinctive uniforms of green. The envy of lesser mortals, they carried themselves with a proud bearing, one justified by their carefully honed expertise.
Even before recruiting for the Ninth formally got underway, rumors spread through the northern counties of the state that New Jersey was looking for skilled riflemen. On August 20 a notice in the Newark Daily Mercury announced the recruitment of a company of sharpshooters for attachment to "Colonel Berdan's Company." This was a reference to the imminent formation of what would become the most celebrated body of marksmen to participate in the war. The creation of Hiram Berdan, a mechanical engineer from New York acclaimed as the finest rifleman in prewar America, the supposed "company" would evolve into a full-size regiment formally known as the First U.S. Sharpshooters. Composed of picked men from five states, dressed from head to toe in stylish green, Berdan's men would set the standard for crack shots in the ranks of the Union armies. The widespread publicity they attracted would spawn the raising of a second regiment of marksmen which, though smaller than the First and not commanded by Berdan himself, would benefit from its identification with him.
Attentive to the powerful influence of the term, state officials, in raising the Ninth New Jersey, prevailed on the War Department to authorize its recruitment as a rifle regiment. On September 17 Charles Scranton of Warren County published a broadside headed "ATTENTION RIFLEMEN!," which solicited 101 men "to form a company of Sharp Shooters" for the Ninth Regiment. Scranton, a prominent member of Governor Olden's staff, sought men "between 18 and 36 years of age, medium height, all good marksmen." The company was to be headed by Capt. James S. Nevius of New Brunswick, whom Scranton had recommended highly to New Jersey's adjutant general (for unrecorded reasons, however, Nevius never commanded the unit). Two weeks after Scranton's appeal was published, Elias J. Drake of Newark, who would become captain of Company K of the Ninth, was appointed by state officials to raise a second company of sharpshooters "as a flank company" of the Ninth.
The Ninth Regiment was recruited to a large extent from among the rural communities and coastal areas of the state, which abounded in experienced woodsmen and watermen. As J. Madison Drake commented, more so than the majority of Northern recruits, the men of the Ninth were "accustomed to the use of the rifle from boyhood." Company D, which drew from the wildfowlers and baymen of northern Ocean County, was especially blessed with good marksmen. Two other companies of the Ninth would consist of German-born target shooters from Newark, several of whom were veterans of European wars.
As soon as recruiters for the Ninth enlisted the requisite number of men, they were sent by train to Trenton where they commenced training. Thanks to the overflow of recruits, Camp Olden, on the outskirts of the city, quickly became a bustling place. The War Department had decreed that the outfit should be "ready for marching orders" within thirty days of rendezvousing in the state capital, which meant that the men would be something less than polished soldiers by the time they left Trenton for Washington. But there was no help for it; the war would not wait for them to learn more than the basics of military life. The balance of their education would consist of on-the-job training.
Looking back almost forty years later, historian Drake offered a pleasant, if perhaps overly poetical, description of the men who flocked to the regimental rendezvous in early September 1861. He recalled "bright-faced men, in the hey-day of youth," who had left "their happy homes on the mountains, as well as from hamlets embosomed in picturesque valleys, where freemen grow stalwart and their souls are fired with love of country. They came from the cabins which dot the sandy beach from Monmouth to Cape May ... from cottages by the riverside, and among those artificial streams [that is, canals] by which commerce avoids the perils of our treacherous coast; from the lines of the railways which their sinewy arms assisted to construct; from the mines where ores were being delved to forge instruments of war; and ... from college, office, workshop, mill and factory, determined to lend their best efforts in resisting the reckless men who were striving to subvert the nation's liberties."
The first group of approximately 100 men, most of them German immigrants and second-generation German Americans — reached Camp Olden on September 13. That same day they were mustered into federal service by 1st Lt. Charles H. Brightly of the Fourth United States Infantry; logically enough, the unit was designated Company A. Its first commander, Capt. Frederick Rumpf, one of the European veterans, presumably had the support of the men under him, yet he would remain in command for less than three months before abruptly resigning his commission and leaving the regiment.
If Rumpf lacked the wherewithal to shoulder the responsibilities required of him, the same could not be said of the camp's commander, Maj. Charles Adam Heckman. Pennsylvania-born, a resident of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and of German parentage (he spoke with a noticeable accent), Heckman had been handpicked for the job by the camp's namesake. Although not a professional soldier, he looked and behaved like one. The governor had been impressed by his military background, which included Mexican War experience as a sergeant in the celebrated Regiment of Voltigeurs (a French term for riflemen). During the earliest days of the present conflict Heckman had served as a company officer in the First Pennsylvania Volunteers. Between wars he had clerked in a hardware store and been a conductor on the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Heckman was also a dedicated musician; according to nineteenth-century New Jersey historian John Y. Foster, "his flute was scarcely less precious to him than his sword."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sharpshooters by Edward G. Longacre. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of Potomac Books.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Attention Riflemen!,
2. Down to the Sea in Troopships,
3. Jersey Muskrats,
4. "Charge, Ninth, Charge!",
5. Working on the Railroad,
6. Failed Raids and Futile Pursuits,
7. Southern Excursion,
8. Sweet Home North Carolina,
9. Veteran Volunteers,
10. The Killing Fields,
11. Decline and Revival,
12. War's End, and After,
Appendix: Regimental Roster,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,