Crime And Punishment In The Civil War
Byon November 14, 2013
Long ago, when I was a commander, I had only a limited range of options to try and correct the behavior of soldiers who got out of line. The Uniformed Code of Military Justice (aka the UCMJ) precisely sets out the specifics of each of the laws that govern our behavior. From being "Absent Without Leave" (AWOL), to "Missing Movement," to "Disrespect to a Superior Non-Commissioned Officer," to "Cowardice in the Face of the Enemy," there are a whole host of laws that are unique to my profession.
Yell at your supervisor on the shop floor and he may dock your pay, depending upon the terms of your employment contract, but it is not a crime. A soldier who does the same to his battalion commander might find himself confined, working extra long days, his rank and pay permanently reduced. Each of our laws is designed for our abnormal existence.
Yet at the same time, the UCMJ is explicit in what punishments can be given out, and usually these are quite low level for almost all regular infractions. These might include a few days of working until 21:00 instead of 18:00 and losing your weekends for a month, perhaps being restricted to the barracks and the post for a week or two, or maybe a few hundred dollars taken from the paycheck for a month. Only for the most severe crimes, most of which are the same in the military as in the civilian world, does actual confinement enter the equation. And even then for anything of a serious nature, the full force and safeties built into the system come to the aid of the soldier. He gets a lawyer, who prepares a defense, and the number and depth of the protections of his rights is actually greater for a soldier than in just about any state or federal system of civilian legal process.
In the Civil War? Not so much.
I'll give you a typical first-hand account. This comes from the descriptions left by a man named Frank Wilkeson. He enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and served from late 1863 throughout the rest of the war.
"One punishment much affected in the light artillery was called 'tying on the spare wheel.' Springing upward and rearward from the center rail of every cassion was a fifth axel and on it was a spare wheel. A soldier who had been insubordinate was taken to the spare wheel and made to step upon it. His legs were drawn apart until they spanned three spokes. His arms were stretched until there were three or four spokes between his hands. Then the feet and hands were firmly bound to the felloes of the wheel. If the soldier was to be punished moderately then he was left, bound in an upright position on the wheel for five or six hours. If the punishment was to be severe, the ponderous wheel was given a quarter turn after the soldier had been lashed to it, which changed the position of the man from upright to horizontal. Then the prisoner had to exert all his strength to keep his weight from pulling heavily and cuttingly on the cords that bound his upper arm and leg to the wheel."
Men were also crippled by another not uncommon form of punishment known as "tying on the rack." This one also, obviously, involved bondage, but now the whole of a man's weight was focused on his chest, which was pressed against the edge of a piece of structural iron. In all cases, a gag was also used since the punishment was so painful that it always involved screaming. Wilkeson reported that he had seen men begged to be killed rather than be tied to the rack.
Then there was "bucking and gagging." Here the soldier would be forced to sit in the dirt and bring his knees up to his chest while his hands were brought around to the front where they were tied to his shins. Then they would take a stick or a rod and shove it over his arms but under his knees, gag him, and leave him there, often for hours.
And the list goes on and on. Tying men up by their thumbs for hours, for example, was another common means of "corrective discipline." There seems to have been no end to the potential for cruelty in the name of what the soldiers and officers of the era defined as "good order," and yet few of the memoirs of soldiers after the war mention any real disgust at what we would now consider torture. This, in part, was probably because of the changing nature of the armies.
In 1861 and 1862 both sides filled their ranks with volunteers. By 1863 the drain on manpower was so great that conscription came in and so-called "bounties" were being offered at both the state and federal levels.* Of course, those conscripted were not exactly happy about the issue, and those who "took a bounty" were often just as motivated to desert then go to another state and enlist for yet another bounty, repeating the process as much as they could. Discipline, therefore, went from a self-motivated one among men who had volunteered together for a cause, to one that was imposed by the system.
It is not our way anymore. In a way it shows how this period was "pre-modern" in many ways, despite the technologies beginning to appear everywhere.** Time and again in memoir after memoir, punishments like those I just described appear almost without comment. Indeed, in Wilkeson's case, with admiration, or at least resignation that this was just how it had to be to maintain discipline in the face of the worst war Americans have ever known.
*The "bounty" was usually a few hundred dollars, going up as time, and the war, went on. A similar trick was to act as a "substitute" for a rich man who had been drafted. This was permissible under the rules, and the going rate for that was often slightly more than that of a bounty.
**According to the OED, "modern" has a Latin root in a term which meant "just now." And there have been innumerable sociological, political, and historical arguments about the term and the concept of "modernity." But I particularly like one given to me by one of my advisers back in grad school. He pointed out the root of the word modern is, or at least could be, the Latin "modus," one meaning "to measure." And what are we measuring against? Well, ourselves of course. And so when you look at a particular era you can draw several possible interpretations by asking, "Were these people like us today?" (Or were their systems, or their politics, or their philosophies, etc.)
On Saturday I leave for several weeks of living in tents in warm and sunny rural Cornwall working with the British Army and many other nations. I may be difficult to reach beyond that point, but I will make sure that some of the upcoming fights and one speech are well covered next week. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
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