Off
To The War With Good Men and True Maj. Sullivan Ballou
excerpt from For Love and Liberty
“I’m Off to the War with the Good Men and True, And Hadn’t You Better Come Along Too?” *
The forty-eight hours after the surrender of Fort Sumter saw men rushing to enlist in military units in both the North and the South. Often, there were more volunteers than available places. In the more densely settled urban North, a soon-to-be Private in the First Rhode Island regiment, one of the first three mustered, Albert Sholes, recalled:
"although Fort Sumter was fired on Friday at daybreak, it was not until Saturday that here the certain news was known . . . . Wherever men congregated, the question was prominent as to what would be the outcome. On the Sabbath, in every church, patriotic sermons were preached."
That Sabbath was a day of anxious waiting for all our people, old and young, and on Monday morning, everybody was out early for the morning papers. Sholes vividly detailed the high tension that prevailed throughout the entire Civil War in a populace dependent on the printed page and the linear distribution of news by newspapers. Not always able to wait for the news to reach them, people eagerly went to the news.
The mail train arrived at my home station, Valley Falls, at 7:40 and at that early hour a hundred citizens were at the station to obtain a copy of the Providence Journal. As many eyes as could focus on the page gazed over the shoulder of him who opened the first copy. There they saw the confirmation of the surrender of the Fort, Lincoln's call for 75,000 men and the ‘modest announcement= of Sprague for the first regiment and a battery. The war had begun.
Albert Sholes and a schoolmate read the papers together. In a scene repeated in home and farms all throughout the state, Albert asked his mother for permission to enlist and obtained her reluctant approval.
At 9:20 arrived on Canal Street and hitched our horse opposite the old Providence Artillery Armory. A large crowd was inside and overflowed the doors. Everybody was excited and within we could hear somebody apparently delivering an address which was every moment punctuated by cheers and shouted responses.
Pushing in we discovered the Speaker to be Nicholas Van Slyck, then City Attorney and Captain of the Artillery. In impassioned words, he told of the struggles of our forefathers to form and maintain the Union . . . .Was it any wonder that when he had concluded and called for those who would go to the defense of the Flag, more than 200 names were signed in an hour, where but fifty were needed . . .?
The First Regiment needed to fill seven companies of men fit enough to see real action. There was no guarantee that the many existing militia men who volunteered were healthy enough, and additional men were needed to round out the tally, so a formalized selection process was established. The services of Sullivan Ballou in his capacity as Judge Advocate General of the Militia were urgently needed, and he spent a very busy week helping to organize the regiment, as Albert Sholes noted:
"On Wednesday morning, the two hundred gathered again a the armory where inspecting officers John S. Slocum and Sullivan Ballou were to select the fifty to fill the company.
Captain Slocum mounted a table at the west end of the room and with the men clustered around him, he selected one after another to go to the room at the other end, where Dr. Rivers would examine them."
Sholes caught “Slocum's eye and he came down. He called Major Ballou to the table” to take his place selecting men. After trying to dissuade Sholes, and suggesting he return instead to school, Slocum gave in, threw his arm around the young man's shoulder, and personally took him in to Dr. Rivers. The doctor “turned me about, patted me on the back and chest, and said, ‘All right, you'll do.’” Sholes was obviously not scrawny, consumptive or deformed - the main criteria in the early days of the war when men were admitted to service rather casually, and became a private.
Quotes from:
Albert E. Sholes, Personal Reminiscences of Bull Run; Read at the
Thirtieth Annual Reunion of the First Rhode island Regiment and the First
Battery Association at Lakewood, Rhode Island, July 21, 1910 by Albert E. Sholes
of Flushing, New York. No publisher.
* From the Civil War song, “The Why and the Wherefore”
| Robin Young was educated at California State University at Fullerton and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She taught public policy in the graduate program at California State University at Long Beach for ten years and has lectured widely on topics ranging from genealogical research to the Civil War. She lives in Southern California. Her new book Love & Liberty: The Untold Story of Major Sullivan Ballou , published by Thunder's Mouth Press, is scheduled for release in December, 2005. |