At the start of the war, the yankee volunteers signed up for a limited time (one year, six months, I can't remember exactly). When the time was up and they wanted to go home, Lincoln reniged on the deal and forced them to stay. Lincoln lied to the recruits to get them to sign up.
At the start of the war, the yankee volunteers signed up for a limited time (one year, six months, I can't remember exactly). When the time was up and they wanted to go home, Lincoln reniged [sic] on the deal and forced them to stay. Lincoln lied to the recruits to get them to sign up.
That's --all-- wrong.
"A member of the 13th Massachusetts noted that his regiment "listened with respectful attention" while officers urged re-enlistment and extolled the valor of old soldiers, but he added: "It was very sweet to hear all this, but the 13th was not easily moved by this kind of talk. The boys knew too well what sacrifices they had made, and longed to get home again and, if possible, resume the places they had left." In the end the 13th refused to re-enlist, except for a handful who signed up for places in another regiment".
Altogether, there are few facts in American history more remarkable than the fact that so many of these veterans did finally re-enlist —probably slightly more than half of the total number whose terms were expiring. The proffered bounty seems to have had little influence on them. The furlough was much better bait. To men who had not seen their homes for more than two and one half years, a solid month of freedom seemed like an age. A member of the 5th Maine said that it actually seemed as if the war might somehow end before the furloughs would expire, and he wrote of the men who re-enlisted: "What tempted these men? Bounty? No. The opportunity to go home."
It was not hardship that held men back. The 100th Pennsylvania had been marooned in eastern Tennessee for months, cut off from supplies and subsisting on two ears of corn per day per man, but when the question of re-enlistment came up only 27 out of the 393 present for duty refused to sign. In the 6th Wisconsin, which had done as much costly fighting as any regiment in the army, it was noted that the combat men were re-enlisting almost to a man; it was the cooks, hostlers, clerks, teamsters, and others on non-combat duty who were holding back. And the dominant motive, finally, seems to have been a simple desire to see the job through. The government in its wisdom might be doing everything possible to show the men that patriotism was for fools; in the end, the veterans simply refused to believe it. A solid nucleus did sign the papers, pledging that the army would go on, and by the end of March Meade was able to tell the War Depart- ment that 26,767 veterans had re-enlisted.
The men signed up without illusions. A company in the 19th Massachusetts was called together to talk things over. The regiment had left most of its men on various battlefields, in hospitals, and to Southern prison camps, and this company now mustered just thirteen men and one wounded officer. These considered the matter, and one man finally said: "They use a man here just the same as they do a turkey at a shooting match, fire at it all day and if they don't kill it raffle it off in the evening; so with us, if they can't kill you in three years they want you for three more—but I will stay." And a comrade spoke up: "Well, if new men won't finish the job, old men must, and as long as Uncle Sam wants a man, here is Ben Falls."
The regiment's historian, recording this remark, pointed out that Ben Falls was killed two months later in battle at Spotsylvania Court House."
"A Stillness at Appomattox" by Bruce Catton, pp. 35-36
Those men are the heroes of the American Civil War, not the rebels, who mostly packed up and went home.
Walt
Most of the Union men signed up for three years. In the insurgent army the typical term was 12 months. So many regiments were getting ready to go home in the spring of 1862 (143 regiments, I think) that the rebel government passed a conscription act involuntarily making them liable to military service for the duration of the conflict.
This sort of thing eventually led to the disintegration of the rebel armies. The common rebel soldier was fighting against oppressive government (one that might make negroes his social and political equal), and it made little sense to fight for an oppressive government in Richmond vice an oppressive government in Washington.
Walt