Booknotes: High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac

New Arrival:

• High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor by Edwin P. Rutan II (Kent St UP, 2024).

It is a common enough suggestion in both the popular and scholarly literature that the Union Army of the Potomac's late-war volunteers were highly mercenary in motive (taking advantage of the high enlistment bounties offered by local, state, and federal governments) and far more prone to shirking and deserting than their presumably more patriotically motivated veteran comrades. When they did go on the offensive against Lee's hardened veterans in 1864-65 they were so unreliable that they were next to useless—expensive to feed, clothe, and equip but through their bad conduct on the line were more dangerous to their comrades around them than they were to the enemy. What few seem to ask is whether all, some, or none of those longstanding assumptions and damning opinions (which began during the war itself) are actually supported by hard evidence. Edwin Rutan's fresh examination of the topic in High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor seeks to set the record straight on the matter.

In Rutan's view, perspective has been skewed by a number of factors. For instance, "historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers."

The author adopts a systematic approach to his reexamination of late-war Army of the Potomac recruits. More from the description: "Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians."

In the end, Edwin Rutan's High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac "offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac." Looking forward to reading this.