I referred to, and linked to this information via the page, “Daniel H. Otis: His Story,” because Niven’s highly-readable work gives invaluable and much-needed insight as to why men enlisted in the early years of the war, and just how mundane farm life was for many of these young men who eventually became soldiers, including Daniel Otis who worked on his family's Maromas farm.
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Why Men Enlisted
Each enlisted man had received an average bounty of $100 from his town, $100 from the Federal government, and $90 from the state. If he was married and had children, he received, in addition to his army pay of $13 a month, a maximum state allowance of $10 a month. A uniform allowance was also granted to enlisted men. Officers received pay ranging from $45 a month for second lieutenant to $95 for full colonel. They were eligible for bounties but were required to pay for their rations and customarily supported a body-servant.
In 1862, total income for a private, including bounties and pay, was sufficient to support a family of five for a year at a modest living standard. For those…who were factory workers, bounties and pay prorated over one year would have been roughly equivalent to their civilian wages. For those who came from a farm background, income from military service frequently meant an increase in family purchasing power. However, if the enlisted man happened to be a farm owner and operator with minor children, as many were, army pay and bounties did not compensate for the loss of his management and labor. (However, for someone as young as Daniel Otis, with no family to support, nor any personal property of his own to worry about, these generous bounties were quite a large sum of money that could go a long way for him!). Agricultural commodity prices were rising, it was true, but the hard-scrabble acres that covered most of the state needed careful management if they were to support a family and allow for continuing investments in stock, fertilizer, and equipment that would maintain minimum productivity.
Surely, bounties could not have been a prime inducement to the volunteers (of the three-year regiments of July/August 1862—the regiments Daniel Otis was a part of)….and regiments formed earlier were not even granted these. When bounties and substitute fees rose high enough to provide a real incentive, they were to attract no better material than thugs, thieves, the lame and the halt, if not the blind.
Why then did the men enlist?
Why, after enlistment, did so many raw troops display such personal bravery, such response to command? How was it that those who did not die of disease and exposure were able to endure what we, in the twentieth century (and now twenty-first century), would regard as unspeakable food, frightful camp and hospital conditions, and utterly exhausting marches and counter-marches?
How did they manage to fight it out to the end when they knew that many of their general officers were incompetent or reckless of human life or both? What was the stimulus that kept them going when they were perfectly aware that there were slackers at home who provided bounty-jumping deserters for substitutes? And what of the speculators, who were making money everywhere at the expense of an enlisted man’s comfort and even his life?
Yet manage they did.
Some straggled, some wrote angry letters home, more learned to drink and swear. But there were no mutinies in the Connecticut three-year regiments, very few desertions, except among the substitutes, and rarely disrespect for officers.
Patriotic revivals, conducted by respected community leaders, had been important factors in the original enlistment of the three-year regiments. Connecticut communities were neighborly places, but class lines were more clearly defined than today. When the leading men of the cities and towns asked for recruits, they were generally successful, at least through the year 1862.
A good example of this phenomenon is the tiny factory village of Voluntown, Connecticut:
Ira Briggs, owner-manager of the sole cotton mill, conducted war meetings which resulted in thirty-eight enlistments. Briggs was the most important man in Voluntown. Almost everyone worked in his Beachdale mill, lived in Beachdale-owned tenements, and traded at the Beachdale-owned company store. Briggs was a self-made man, a driver, as any small manufacturer had to be if he was to succeed in Connecticut of the early sixties (1860's that is), yet he was neighborly and matter of fact in his relations with the workers.
When Ira Briggs spoke for the Union, it meant more than just another patriotic speech to his spinners and weavers. Perhaps Briggs evoked in some empathic fashion a vicarious kinship with his overworked, underpaid men, in which they were able to identify themselves with him, with his success, with his prominence. But we can imagine that he really captured the imagination of his audience when he promised the young workers an escape from their hard, monotonous life to a glorious crusade.
Suddenly there must have seemed a way out of all the daily problems, all the labor, all the boredom of life in a dreary mill town (and the same would have definitely applied to the farmer, especially one of Daniel's age). Briggs, the owner, who gave or withheld the daily bread, the figure of authority, had voiced his personal concern and had asked the young men of Voluntown to share it with him.
Scenes like this were duplicated all over the state with more of a flourish, more distinguished orators, and larger audiences in the cities, but with the same message, the same images, the same close rapport between the great ones on the dais and the workers and clerks in the audience.
(My note: an even more appropriate example is that of Company B, of the 14th Connecticut—which was Daniel Otis’ company. Here, Elijah Gibbons played the part of the prominent individual, similar to Ira Briggs.
Gibbons was once a sexton at the First Baptist Church in Middletown, foreman at the local ‘William & Benjamin Douglas Pump Works,’ and military officer. He also had the backing of his mentor, friend, and fellow abolitionist, Benjamin Douglas—an even more prominent individual, who was a three-term mayor of Middletown, and one-term Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.
Gibbons opened his recruiting office on Main Street in Middletown on July 16, 1862. Within three weeks of opening his doors, Gibbons was able to enlist more than the one-hundred men that was needed to make up a fully mustered company! Enlistments were filled with such speed that Gibbon’s success became the talk of the town throughout Connecticut.
Read a summary of Middletown’s own “Patriotic Revival,”—their “Grand Mass Meeting”— HERE, in the July 30, 1862 newspaper The Constitution. Benjamin Douglas spoke at this meeting). End my note.
The great religious revival that had begun in 1857 merged into the patriotic revivals of 1861 and 1862. These were to fill up the ranks of the 18th Connecticut (the regiment the author used as an example earlier in his book), and seven more three-year regiments in record time (one of these seven includes the 14th Connecticut which Daniel Otis belonged to).
Yet the social environment had to be just right for such emotional appeals to take hold as vigorously as they did. And once the recruiting drives of 1862 had gathered up the impressionable young men—the adventurous, the patriotic, the discontented—revivalist techniques would lose their appeal. Meanwhile, they accomplished their purpose by making a clean sweep of the best potential military manpower still remaining in the state. Tough, ambitious, frustrated individuals, they enjoyed military life at first as a welcome relief from the farm, the mill, or the dry goods store. And their character and stamina were strong enough to keep them in the ranks long after the glamour had worn off.
Society in Connecticut betrayed a kind of disorientation that stemmed from the tensions and the uncertainties of the incomplete industrial state. Old and comforting landmarks were receding, yet the further shore was still a smudge along the horizon, more to be imagined than perceived. To the young and ambitious, this neutral ground, this becoming rather than being, seemed in some vague way to represent opportunity; and they were eager to leave behind what remained of older constraints and limitations, to push on with the course.
The nascent nationalism of the North, stimulated by the transportation and communication advances of the industrial revolution, was already a power in the land. But much of the naïveté, the simplicity, the parochialism of the old order remained—just enough, in fact, for young men to see in a volunteer army and a great patriotic war in “foreign” places an acceptable means of escape from a life which suddenly seemed hard, narrow, and commonplace.
The new order was crude, brash, demanding, though the paternalism of the early industrial revolution had not as yet given way to the impersonal factory system that was to characterize the postwar period. It had, however, become progressively less benevolent.
Mill Workers
Sixty-five to seventy hours of labor each week were considered the normal schedule. In appearance and in function many of these mills and factories reflected the capital scarcity of the times. They were rickety, poorly-ventilated wooden, stone, or brick buildings, most dating back to the 1820's.
City Life
A worker’s life in the cities of Connecticut was little better. Whether a young man lived in a succession of Connecticut mill-town tenements or in the rapidly developing urban industrial slums, his standard of living was low, his opportunity for advancement narrow, but his physical endurance was apt to be fairly high. If he could survive until his mid-twenties the epidemics of typhoid fever, dysentery, and typhus in the summer, or the winter complaints of tuberculosis and pneumonia, and still work a 72-hour week in the factories, he could stand considerable hardship.
To many, army life in 1861 and through most of 1862, must not have seemed excessively hard or even particularly dangerous until the blood baths of Antietam and Fredericksburg dispelled this particular notion. And by then, Connecticut had enlisted almost all the native manpower it would ever recruit.
Farm Life
(Gives insight into the type of life Daniel Otis probably lived on his family's Maromas farm)
Farm life was rugged too. Whatever the romanticizers have said about the charm and beauty of the rural scene, the average young Connecticut farmer or farmer’s son of the 1850's found little time to rhapsodize on the psychic benefits of the agrarian idyll. It took an enormous amount of man and beast hours to wrest a living out of the average Connecticut farm. During the spring, summer, and fall, when the countryside was at its loveliest, farmers were busiest with their crops. Grueling, back-breaking labor, six days a week, was absolutely essential.
Farm machinery, just beginning to appear, would not materially lighten the farmers’ burden until well into the postwar period. The innate conservation of the countryside and the high cost of such equipment ruled against wide use, but more important was the fact that most Connecticut cash crops—dairy, tobacco, orchard products, and potatoes—still required traditional farm labor techniques.
The long harsh winters were times of heavy work too—animal care, woodcutting for family used and extra income, ice-cutting, and endless repairs of farm equipment. An isolated Connecticut farm looks charming in a Currier and Ives winter scene or in a colorful Prang’s chromo, but it was a bleak and uncomfortable place, with icy drafts, unheated bedrooms, and no conveniences.
Cyrus Northrop described Ridgefield, a typical Connecticut farm community, in the winter of 1858:
“No one there,” he wrote in his diary, “all desolate—trees naked—grass dead—houses dreary and cold—church solemn and desolate—everything like a deserted village. Oh, give me the city in the winter—the city where is life—where men move and you see them and if one dies, it does not seem as if the graveyard has swallowed the entire place."
The farm family’s diet was generally more plentiful and varied than that of a mill worker. Connecticut farms, even those that specialized in tobacco culture, raised most of the family foodstuffs. Salted mutton, pork, and codfish were staples, together with turnips, potatoes, cabbages, and hull corn (a kind of hominy) and dried beans. Some poultry was raised, mainly for eggs but not for meat, because chickens and turkeys consumed too much expensive grain.
Since the salted meats and the root crops were replenished but once a year, farmers families were used to the distinct flavors of sprouted, moldy potatoes, soft, acrid turnips, and strong, stringy meat. Fresh meat was always something of a luxury, to be indulged on infrequent Sundays and holidays, and briefly at slaughtering time in the fall. Smoked meat was also considered expensive and seldom appeared on farm tables.
Farm boys, like factory workers, were certainly well prepared for the army diet. They were also used to hard work and were healthier than the town and city volunteers, except in one important respect. The relative isolation in which they lived made them highly susceptible to such childhood diseases as measles, mumps, and chicken pox, and they seemed less able to cope with the infectious diseases like dysentery and pulmonary disorders that swept through the army camps.
Life on the farm for most of the young men during this period of changing social values was, if anything, more restrictive than life in the mill town and infinitely more sterile than city life. Travel into the outside world, beyond their native village or marketing place, was reserved for very special occasions. It was a question of time and money, interchangeable factors to the subsistence farmer. Stagecoaches, the only means of public transportation for a majority of Connecticut farmers, were too expensive to be used for social trips. Wagons and teams could be better employed at home, and so could the man-hours consumed in travel when it took an entire day to make a ten-mile round trip. Factory workers at least traveled about in search of work in slack season; farmers were almost as closely tied down to their native region as feudal serfs.
