Brigadier General Harvey Graham of Co. B, 1st Iowa Infantry Regiment and 22nd Iowa Infantry Regiment in uniform. Digital ID LC-DIG-ppmsca-50072, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Page 3

Lincoln’s Call for 300,000 Men

Iowa men provided some 76,000 enlistments for federal service during the Civil War, 1861 to 1865. For context, the population of the state was about 675,000 in 1860. Many men re-enlisted for three years after initial three-month deployments, which contributed to the total enlistments reported. Around 13,000 men died from their wounds or from disease, including some deaths due to illness at Camp Pope. When the US soldiers at Fort Sumter surrendered, Iowa’s governor Samuel Kirkwood wrote to the War Department to ask how many Iowa men were needed to fight the rebellion and to ensure the laws of the United States were appropriately executed. The United States Secretary of War initially requested Kirkwood supply 780 militiamen on April 16,1861. By May 10, he increased the request to 970 soldiers. Initial periods of enlistment for volunteers were for just 90 days beginning in 1861 under Lincoln’s proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers across the northern United States. States were expected to recruit men to join state militia companies that would be placed under federal command. This initial call was modeled after George Washington’s call for volunteers to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. Lincoln’s initial call for volunteers asked for the same number of militiamen Washington had requested, taking his response to armed insurrection as a precedent. Lincoln hoped to put a quick end to what he considered was both insurrection and patricidal rebellion. He and nearly everyone else in the North thought the war would be over by the end of the summer but progress was slower than anticipated. With significant strategic losses for the Union army and the reinforcement of the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia in spring 1862, Lincoln decided to publish a call for 300,000 volunteers that summer. Lincoln issued a proclamation that amounted to an executive order and a subsequent law passed by congress created a qualified military draft from states’ militias that gave preference to volunteers. The span of new enlistments was soon increased to three years or until the war ended with nine month terms for reinforcements to replace casualties in active units. The quota established for Iowa in Lincolon’s 1862 call was 10,570 soldiers for three years and another 10,570 for nine months or 21,140 total required to avoid a draft in the state. During the 1862 call for 300,000, Iowa only accepted commitments for three years but the state still was able to contribute 32,443 men to federal service that year. Kirkwood at one point wrote, “Our whole state appears to be volunteering.” ²

The order to create Camp Pope came from the Iowa State Adjutant General’s office on August 11, 1862. The order designated six camps in eastern Iowa that were named for Lincoln, Governor Kirkwood, and four active generals in the United States Army. Camp Pope was named for General John Pope, a directive that proved unfortunate in retrospect given his overall military record. Pope had experienced early success in the Eastern Theater but his leadership led to a major defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas). He was sent to Fort Snelling, Minnesota in 1862 to prosecute a zealous war against the Santee Dakota, the necessity for which was due entirely to failed treaty promises, embezzlement, professional neglect, and inhumane treatment by US Officials at the Dakota agency. Pope spent the rest of the Civil War in Minnesota ostensibly protecting the western frontier from a perceived potential for additional conflict there.³

Camp Pope was one designated place where the men who had volunteered would rendezvous in 1862. In the military, a rendezvous is a designated meeting place for troops in the armed forces. After enlisting, the men were mustered into the state militia and gave their oath of fealty to the United States, its Constitution, and its laws. They then were ordered into quarters and underwent strenuous training through daily drills and inspection at dress parade. Most men were assigned to companies based largely on their own choice and companies were mostly constituted with men from a single county. Companies were mustered into the state service in a specific regiment following an official review. Some soldiers were rejected for medical or other reasons at this point. Finally, the full regiment was mustered into federal service, again with an official review at dress parade. They then were on call for orders to go into the field as they continued to drill daily while waiting. ⁴

The reasons for men to enlist were ultimately a personal choice, but there were a number of social and economic factors that contributed to the decision of a volunteer. That decision was not about abolition of slavery for most men who enlisted. At the start of the war, most men did not agree with emancipation of Black people, the policy of legally freeing of those held in bondage under the Constitution and state laws. By the time Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, most soldiers had changed to the belief that ending slavery was the primary necessity for fighting in the war. Instead of slavery, the initial reasons to join the war effort often were a combination of the belief that the Union could not be dissolved by state legislatures along with far more basic influences from social and financial pressures.

Prior to the opening of the Civil War, Iowans held complex views toward the human rights issue of slavery as well as political issues such as centralized government, the nature of democracy, and the concept of the United States as a whole, which was echoed across the North. Nearly all white people were racist by today’s limited standards, regardless of their position on the ownership of people as a source of free labor. Iowa workers were often against slavery but not for ethical or religious reasons. Instead, working white men saw free labor provided by enslaved Americans as unfair competition for them as wage workers. Many Iowans were against increasing slave holding territories, largely for religious reasons, but most were not abolitionists before 1857. Abolitionists who wanted an immediate and complete end to slavery were considered radicals through most of the 1850s. That changed with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. ⁵ 

This new law was introduced by northern Democrat Stephen Douglass and was as much an appeasement to southern planters as it was an attempt to maintain the union of the United States. The law placed the policy decision of allowing people to own other people as personal property in the hands of the voters of any new territories anywhere in North America. The continuance of legal private enslavement in the South was also ensured by default. The Missouri Compromise was a flawed set of laws that tenuously held conflict over so-called free labor in check. It did so by limiting any new slave territories to those that were established south of Missouri’s southern border in return for the admittance of Missouri to the United States as a slave state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned that fragile compromise and Iowa generally became more radical as a result. A growing number of Northerners began to support abolition for religious and ethical reasons. Still, for many men who would volunteer to fight for union over secession, the final straw that led men to join the military to fight the southern rebellion, as it was viewed in the North, was exactly the act of secession itself. For many men, the dissolution of the Union was a wrong that was perceived as amoral as well as unconstitutional. The northern centrist view that slavery was allowed by the Constitution but should be gradually phased out was especially popular among Douglas Democrats who were staunch supporters of the United States as it stood before secession in every way. The attempt to leave the Union and the attack on Fort Sumter led these men to not only enlist themselves but to go on to organize whole companies of soldiers to fight for the preservation of the United States. ⁶ 

There were additional reasons that men gathered under the roof of the pro-Union cause and disagreed with southern slave-owning states rights rhetoric. In his book Dear Catherine, Dear Taylor, Richard Kiper relates the research of James McPherson and Joseph Frank who looked into the historical and political underpinnings of the motivation for men to enlist and even to re-enlist after their initial term of service was up. McPherson and Frank separately concluded there were many motivations to enlist, including patriotism, fear of anarchy if the government collapsed, sense of duty, and even a desire for adventure. Frank gathers these objectives under the umbrella term political awareness. Again, for northern volunteers, slavery was not initially the main issue that led to enlistment. Many were opposed to the notion of emancipation. But by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was formally made, soldiers had pivoted to acceptance of freedom for Blacks with a strong majority favoring a complete end to slavery by the end of the war. ⁷ 

Johnson County Courthouse around 1862. Photo by an unknown photographer between 1857 and 1870, by which time a tower had been added to the roof. Copy available in Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Johnson_Cty_Courthouse.JPG 

The first mass meeting to rally militia volunteers in Johnson County occurred in Iowa City at the courthouse on the evening of April 18, 1861. The crowd was so large that people stood in the street, straining to hear the proceedings. Charles M. Howe, a student at the University of Iowa, decided it was his duty to enlist at the event. The prevailing sentiment at the meetings was to place political differences over slavery and other government policy to one side and to join in the effort to preserve the union through force of arms. The same sentiment was clearly on the mind of S. C. Jones who wrote about a year later that “a feeling came over me at this time that I was needed in the defense of my country, and that my country was fiercely assailed by subtle enemies.” He described his enlistment as a patriotic duty. He wrote that he had followed the speeches of politicians in Congress and while on the stump during their campaigns. He strongly felt the war was about both slavery and rebellion. He noted many of the veteran men from Company B, Washington Guards, of the First Iowa Volunteer Infantry formed the basis of the new unit. ⁸

Not all men who enlisted did so as a patriot. Many felt social and financial pressure to go to war. Kenneth L. Lyftogt describes some of the social pressures for men deciding to go to war or staying at home while their friends, neighbors, and male relatives signed up. Stay-at-homes was a derogatory nickname used to describe young men who didn’t enlist. Joe Cobb of Andrew Iowa was reluctant to join the army but he received so much social abuse, especially from young women, that he eventually enlisted. Clara Hobbs, a volunteer nurse during the war and a unique example of this type of service, said Joe was from Andrew, Iowa. She related that young women mocked him and called him a coward by sending him a white feather, a common sign of cowardice in popular use since the eighteenth century. He gave in and enlisted in the Twelfth Iowa. William Garret Piston and Richard W. Hatcher stated that the reputation of the soldiers would become the reputation of their communities as the war progressed. To fight and win brought recognition to their communities and shame to them if they stayed home. When Taylor Pierce, who enrolled with the Twenty-Second Iowa, wrote to his wife from Camp Pope he hoped she would not hear of anything shameful about their military reputation. Sarah Kenyon of Plum Creek Farm near Oneida in Delaware County wrote about their hired hand who quit working at their farm to enlist. He had heard he could sign up for three months service but when he didn’t want to sign up for the required three full years instead of just three months, he received so much peer pressure in town that he ended up enlisting anyway. ⁹

There were also a number of financial incentives to joining up. Beyond the regular pay, soldiers were offered federal and state enlistment bonuses, called bounties and premiums. This in itself could be a substantial enticement for single men, but for those with a family farm, the bonuses and regular pay may have felt like a necessity. Before the war, many subsistence farmers had begun to find they were raising more produce than needed and they could barter or sell it. Many businessmen and some farmers would sell excess products, mostly grain and animals for cash. The main farm to market transportation for Iowa farmer products were riverboats. Railroads had come to eastern Iowa during the 1850s, but progress of building across the state was slowed by recession and accusations of mishandling of funds were made. At the start of the war, the Confederates blockaded the lower Mississippi and railroads raised their rates beyond what was profitable for most Iowans. At the same time Southern investors pulled their funds from Midwestern banks causing financial difficulties. As Midwestern bank notes lost their value and without a cost-effective way to get products to market the financial situations of many Iowans became critical. The soldiers, many of whom were subsistence farmers or farm hands, found the pay to be quite good and many sent money back home. This helped their families to survive the financial crisis that lasted for the first years of the war as well as offset their absence from their farmwork. Some, including S. C. Jones and Taylor Pierce, were able to pay for costs on their farm during the war. Jones and Jacob Switzer, both young and single, managed to even save a substantial amount of money from their federal payments. Women on family farms secured out other sources of income as well. While many women took up the farm work their husbands, male relations, and farm hands had left undone, some also became farm hands themselves. For her part, Sarah Kenyon seemed disdainful of the idea of going to war, but she saw her main purpose in life was hard work and survival on their farm. She expressed fears about her family’s day to day existence there on Plum Creek but the war was far away and not of much concern to her. Her husband wrote less about the war than she, but when he tried to enlist he hadn’t been allowed because of a disability with his hand. When Sarah expressed a certain amount of disdain for the war, she may have been more closely related to her husband’s safety and sense of honor than to larger political or moral motives. Ideas as big as chattel slavery, the concept that people can be owned as private property, or an indivisible union didn’t weigh on her mind. In September of 1862 she referred to secessionists raiders and Indigenous warriors as potential threats, but notably she didn’t consider herself a southern sympathizer for being against the war. It seems she just felt it was practical to avoid war. ¹⁰

Iowa was not unanimous in its response to the call for troops. Some actively discouraged enlistments. Dennis A. Mahoney, for example, used his newspaper to publish calls to not enlist and was so vocal that a US Marshall working on behalf of the Lincoln administration saw him as a threat to the United States and detained him without charge. The the editors of the Iowa City Weekly Republican claimed that The Democrats of Iowa’s Third Congressional District had doomed their party to perdition for placing Mahoney on the ballot for their congressperson. Iowa overall was a strong supporter of Lincoln, though pockets of anti-federal resistance operated in Iowa. In the 1862 call for 300,000 volunteers, a third more Iowa men volunteered than required to avoid conscripted military service. ¹¹

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Notes to page 3

2. Julie Holcomb, editor, Southern Sons, Northern Soldiers: The Civil War Letters of the Remley Brothers, 22nd Iowa Infantry, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004, page xiii; John E. Briggs, “The Enlistment of Iowa Troops,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, volume 15, number 3, 1917, pages 337, 338, 353, 354–355 https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ijhp/article/id/32428/; Abraham Lincoln, Order Retiring Winfield Scott from Command, November 1, 1861, Abraham Lincoln to William H. Seward, June 29, 1862 and Abraham Lincoln, Call for Troops, June 30 1862, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, volume 5 [Oct. 24, 1861-Dec. 12, 1862], [annotated], New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953, pages 10, 293–294, 296–297 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5 (Return ↩)

3. N. B. Baker, “State of Iowa, Adjutant General’s Office, General Orders, No. 84, August 11, 1862” Daily Democrat and News (Davenport), August 15, 1862, page 1; Jeffery C. Burden, editor, Samuel D. Pryce, Vanishing Footprints: The Twenty-Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry in The Civil War, Iowa City: Camp Pope Bookshop, 2008, page 51; “John Pope (1822–1892),” Encyclopedia of Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/pope-john-1822-1892/; “The US-Dakota War of 1862,” Historic Fort Snelling, Minnesota Historical Society, https://www.mnhs.org/fortsnelling/learn/us-dakota-war (Return ↩)

4. Daily Democrat and News (Davenport), August 12, 1862; State Democratic Press (Iowa City), August 16th, 1862, page 2; Daily Iowa State Press (Iowa City), Saturday, July 15th, 1899, page 5; Iowa City Weekly Republican, September 17th, 1862, page 3; [Clarence] Ray Aurner, Leading Events in Johnson County, Iowa History, volume 1, 1912, pages 288, 468, 150; [Samuel Calvin] Jones, Reminiscences of the Twenty-Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Iowa City: no publisher provided, 1907, page 7 https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesoft02jone; State Democratic Press (Iowa City), September 11th, 1861, page 3 (Return ↩)

5. For a deeper look at this period in the history of Iowa and the upper Midwest, consider the following works. Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009, Lowell Soike. Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2013; Kenneth L. Lyftogt, Iowa and The Civil War, three volumes, Iowa City: Camp Pope Publishing, 2018, 2020, 2022; Robert Cook and Robert Dykstra in Marvin Bergman, Iowa History Reader, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2008; David Brodnax, “Breathing the Freedom’s Air: The African American Struggle for Equal Citizenship in Iowa, 1830–1900,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 2007 https://doi.org/10.21985/N25X58; Robert Cook, “The Political Culture of Antebellum Iowa: An Overview,” Annals of Iowa volume 52, 1993 https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.9742; Robert Dykstra, Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993; Robert Dykstra, “White Men, Black Laws,” Annals of Iowa, volume 46, 1982 https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.8897, Hubert H. Wubben, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement, Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980 https://archive.org/details/civilwariowacopp0000wubb; Joel Silbey, “Proslavery Sentiment in Iowa, 1838–1861,” Iowa Journal of History, volume 55, number 4, 1957 https://archive.org/details/iowajournalofhis55stat/page/n309/mode/2up; Robert Rutland, “The Copperhead of Iowa: A Re-examination”, Iowa Journal of History, volume 52, number 1, 1954 https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/ijh/article/id/33429/ (Return ↩)

6. “The Unionism We Go For,” Iowa City Weekly Republican, September 4th, 1861, page 2; Kenneth L. Lyftogt, Iowa and The Civil War, volume 1, Iowa City: Camp Pope Publishing, 2018, page 215 (Return ↩)

7. Richard L. Kiper, editor, Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor: The Civil War Letters of a Union Soldier and His Wife, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002, page 9 citing James. M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pages 6, 18–28 and Joseph A. Frank, “Measuring the Political Articulateness of United States Civil War Soldiers: The Wisconsin Militia,” Journal of Military History, volume 64, 2000, pages 75–76 https://www.jstor.org/stable/120787 (Return ↩)

8. Ellen M. Rich, “The State University of Iowa and the Civil War,” Iowa Historical Record, volume 15, number 1, pages 395–397 https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000050770; Harrison John Thornton, “The State University of Iowa and the Civil War”, The Annals of Iowa, volume 30, number 3, 1950, page 200 https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.7096; [Samuel Calvin] Jones, Reminiscences of the Twenty-Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry, 1907, page 6 https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesoft02jone (Return ↩)

9. Kenneth L. Lyftogt, Iowa and The Civil War, volume 1, Iowa City: Camp Pope Publishing, 2018, pages 226–227; Richard Gear Hobbs and Clarissa Emely Gear Hobbs, “Autobiography of Clarissa Emily Gear Hobbs Hobbs with Introductory Note,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, volume 17, number 4, 1925, page 675 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40189809; William Garrett Piston and Richard W. Hatcher, Wilson’s Creek, 2000, page 48; Richard L. Kiper, editor, Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor, 2002, page 27; Sarah Kenyon, Letter written on November 24, 1861, “Letters of John and Sarah Kenyon,” Iowa Farm Letters, 1857–1865, Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa, Iowa Exploration in Iowa History Project, 2003 https://iowahist.uni.edu/Frontier_Life/Farm_Letters/letters_of_john_and_sarah_kenyon.htm#Oct%2011%201861 (Return ↩)

10. Robert Rutland, “The Copperhead of Iowa: A Re-examination,” 1954, page 21; [Samuel Calvin] Jones, Reminiscences of the Twenty-Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry, Iowa City: [no publisher provided], 1907, page 40 https://archive.org/details/reminiscencesoft02jone; Richard L. Kiper, editor, Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor, 2002, page 28; Sarah Kenyon to unnamed recipients, October 11, 1861 and October 9, 1862, November 24, 1861 “Letters of John and Sarah Kenyon,” Iowa Farm Letters, 1857–1865, Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa, Iowa Exploration in Iowa History Project, 2003 https://iowahist.uni.edu/Frontier_Life/Farm_Letters/letters_of_john_and_sarah_kenyon.htm (Return ↩)

11. Robert Rutland, “The Copperhead of Iowa: A Re-examination”, Iowa Journal of History volume 52, number 1, 1954, page 7; Iowa City Weekly Republican, August 27th, 1862, page 2, Richard Kipper, Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor, 2002, page 1. (Return ↩)