Military discharge

“ No non-commissioned officer or soldier, shall inlist himself in any other regiment, troop, or company, without a regular discharge from the regiment, troop, or company, in which he last served, on the penalty of being reputed a deserter, and suffering accordingly. And in case any officer shall knowingly receive and entertain such non-commissioned officer or soldier, or shall not, after his being discovered to be a deserter, immediately confine him, and give notice thereof to the corps in which he last served, the said officer shall by a court-martial be cashiered. ”

“ It was about this time that our attention was drawn to the anomaly of the discharge rule. A man who had served for four years could take his discharge as a time-expired soldier. At the same time men were enlisting freely. ”

“ INVALIDING. The loss of force by death, by sickness in hospital and camp, and by temporary depression, is not all that the army is subject to. Those who are laboring under consumption, asthma, epilepsy, insanity, and other incurable disorders, and those whose constitutions are broken, or withered and reduced below the standard of military requirement, are generally, and by some Governments always, discharged. ”

“ Later on, the War Department modified its policy by providing that any soldier who faced unemployment after discharge might, upon his own request, be held in the service for a reasonable time while he tried to locate a job for himself in civilian life, and that, on the other hand, if work were waiting for any man not yet in line for immediate discharge, such a man might, upon submitting proper proof that there was a civilian demand for his services, receive his discharge forthwith. ”

“ The announcement of the severance from the command of the army of one who has been for so many years its distinguished chief, can but awaken in the minds, not only of the army, but of the people of the United States, mingled emotions of regret and gratitude—regret at the withdrawal from active military service of an officer whose lofty sense of duty has been a model for all soldiers since he first entered the army in July, 1840 ”

“ Be it so, but then devise some plan by which the soldier, whose offence is so disgraceful as to need the most humiliating of chastisements, shall be thenceforward excluded from the army. When he leaves the hospital, let his discharge be handed to him. "A fine plan, indeed!" it will be said. "Men will incur a flogging every day to get out of the service." Doubtless they will, so long as service is unlimited. And this is one reason why short enlistments and abolition of corporal punishment should go together. Against desertion, transportation has hitherto been found an ineffectual remedy. ”

“ The actual perils of war, at no time greater than those of mines, railways, or merchant-shipping, would never alone deter men from service; so that we must look for other causes to explain the difficulty of recruiting and the frequency of desertion, which are the perplexity of military systems still based, as our own is, on the principle of voluntary not compulsory enlistment.
What then makes a military life so little an object of desire in countries where it can be avoided is more than its dangers, more even than its loss of liberty, its irredeemable and appalling dulness. ”

“ The sharp action where blows were given and taken, proved less arduous and scarce more dangerous, than the sufferings of the army without an enemy in sight. He writes soon after his arrival—"The affairs of our little southern army are much deranged, and we find ourselves under very considerable embarrassments in our present position; the want of provisions is an inconvenience we have often experienced, but we have never been in a country so unwilling to supply us as at present. By military authority, we collect a kind of casual subsistence that can scarcely be called our daily bread. ”

“ The service itself is severe, and poorly paid; body and soul are valued at ten asses a day! Out of this we have to find clothes, arms, tents, buy off the centurions, yes, and pay for our own discharge.1 The stick, the wounds, the bitter winter, the summer marches, the cruelties of war, or the barrenness of275 peace are everlasting. We shall never get any comfort till the service is entered on fixed conditions, a denarius a day for pay, sixteen years for a discharge; and we are not to be kept on under the flags, but stay in our camps and get our pension in cash. ”

“ When called on they have fought, and fought well. Out of one battalion of say 200 workmen from the armory here, four were killed and died of their wounds, and some eight or ten wounded in a skirmish. But workmen will not fight and work both. This must be accepted as settled in their minds.
I trust the policy of the War Department may be modified towards these men, for the sake of results as to home production, and that legislative action will secure to these men exemption from military service while in the employ of the Government. ”

“ And thus he was employed to the end of the war, enduring, with his compatriots in arms, untold privations, hardships, and dangers. Had he fallen into the hands of the enemy — having left the British service without a discharge — he would have been liable to all the dreadful penalties for desertion. ”

“ On the expiration of three years the soldiers thought themselves entitled to a discharge; the officers alleged that they were engaged for the war. The large bounties given to those who were not bound by previous enlistment heightened the discontent of the soldiers, and made them more zealous in asserting what they thought their rights. In the first transports of their patriotism they had readily enlisted, but men will not long willingly submit to immediate and unprofitable hardships in the prospect of distant and contingent rewards. ”

“ We shall then not need to concern ourselves with ‘the problem of desertion,’ ‘the effect on the army of high wage-rates in civil employment,’ and the rest of it. There will be no problem of desertion: the discernment that recognizes a citizen’s military obligation will find an effective method preventing him from running away from it. All this will come after we have been sorely defeated by some power, or combination of powers, that has not only a navy but an army. ”

“ Hard on their heels came the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who made up the combat divisions in training in the United States. These were the men last to don the uniform—men who were only partially trained, and who could be of no service to the War Department in the activities of demobilization. Their disbandment was not a difficult undertaking. They had been in the service so short a time that there were no complications of back pay and incomplete records to hinder their discharge. ”

“ The punishment for desertion when joined in by two or more soldiers in the execution of a conspiracy, or for desertion in the presence of an outbreak of Indians or of any unlawful assemblage which the troops may be opposing, shall not exceed dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement at hard labor for five years. ”

“ So, too, with many of the batteries; all the officers, generally four in number to each, were men educated for their profession. Some of these went into battle at the beginning under division commanders who were entirely without military training. This state of affairs gave me an idea which I expressed while at Cairo; that the government ought to disband the regular army, with the exception of the staff corps, and notify the disbanded officers that they would receive no compensation while the war lasted except as volunteers. ”

“ But it is not only necessary that the States bring men into the field. It is necessary that this be done at an early period. Recruits which do not join the army until the autumn, come too late for anything but to increase expense, and to lose their lives by the diseases incident at that season, to those who have not been accustomed to the habits of a military life. Nor is this all. Recruits sent forward at a late period only serve to fill up the vacancies occasioned by sickness, deaths, and desertions, without increasing the effective force of the army. ”

“ However, at the termination of the war, those regiments were brought back, and disembodied in the locality where they had been raised; and many persons might reasonably expect very disagreeable and injurious results from the return of those whose departure was regarded as a happy riddance by the community from which they had been abstracted. But very few instances occurred of the discharged militia-men relapsing into disreputable habits and criminal practices. Military service had produced a great and most desirable reformatory effect. ”

“ Perpetual unrest and the maintenance of big naval and military armaments imposing immense burdens upon the people—heavier here in proportion than anywhere else, owing to our habitual administrative wastefulness—not to forget a pension-roll without calculable limit—all this producing militarism of the most prodigal kind. ”

“ The right to this depends upon section 1290:
'When a soldier is discharged from the service, except by way of punishment for an offense, he shall be allowed transportation and subsistence from the place of his discharge to the place of his enlistment, enrollment, or original muster into the service. The government may furnish the same in kind ”

“ Congress by special enactment raised the travel allowance for discharged soldiers to five cents a mile, payable for the distance between the place of discharge and the soldier’s home, whether the entire journey could be accomplished by railroad or not. Congress also granted a bonus of $60 to every soldier—payable also at discharge. Thousands of soldiers, when they came up for discharge, were entitled to back pay. Thus every man received a considerable sum of money with his discharge certificate, and for the overseas soldier this sum probably averaged more than $100. ”

“ Yet even now whole classes obtained exemption and the right of substitution as usual forced the burden of service on the poorer classes, so that of the 100,000 men called on for the regular army and 200,000 for the Volunteers, only some 180,000 were actually raised. Desertion, generally regarded as the curse of professional armies, became a conspicuous vice of the defenders of the Republic, except at moments when a supreme crisis called forth supreme devotion—moments which naturally were more or less prolonged in proportion to the gravity of the situation. ”

“ Can any thing (the exigency of the case indeed may justify it) be more destructive to the recruiting service, than giving ten dollars bounty for six weeks service of the militia, who come in, you cannot tell how, go, you cannot tell when, and act, you cannot tell where, consume your provisions, exhaust your stores, and leave you at last at a critical moment?
These, Sir, are the men I am to depend upon, ten days hence ; this is the basis, on which your cause will and must for ever depend, till you get a large standing army sufficient of itself to oppose the enemy. ”

“ One by one soldiers will pass suddenly from ferocity to apathy: the spring of will will break, leaving millions of derelicts fit only for the hospital or the asylum. This is what the German military authorities mean when they say that the war will be decided by nervous endurance. ”

“ Hence, there were but slow and scanty levies of men in the most critical emergencies of our affairs; short enlistments at an unparalleled expense; and continual fluctuations in the troops, ruinous to their discipline, and subjecting the public safety frequently to the perilous crisis of a disbanded army. Hence also arose those oppressive expedients for raising men, which were occasionally practised, and which nothing, but the enthusiasm of liberty, could have induced the people to endure. ”

“ We will not here allude to desertion, for then, men and muskets too sometimes go off without being discharged. At times soldiers are found unfit for service; they have purchased their liberty; the army has been reduced; their period of service has been completed; or some crime has been committed by them, on account of which they are dismissed with disgrace. It often happens, however, that a soldier, unfit for one duty, is very capable of performing another, and thus many are invalided; they are put on garrison duty, though unfit for general service. ”

“ After forty-five, while discharged from labor, the citizen still remains liable to special calls, in case of emergencies.' There are, of course, no such numerous exemptions from this industrial service as qualify very greatly the rigor of the Continental military service of the present day. ”

“ It is a sad truth that the army is discouraged and depleted to a degree never known before. Homesickness is epidemic. A man shot himself the other day because refused a furlough. Desertions have been fearfully numerous among enlisted men, and officers have urged every possible excuse for leaves of absence. A man with my appetite stands no chance whatever, and our regimental surgeon laughs when I assure him that I am suffering from acute heart-disease. Therefore, my only hope is a wound, and I welcome our prospective raid in exchange for dreary picket duty. ”

“ The condition of the various branches of the public service resorting from the Department of War, and their administration during the current year, will be exhibited in the report of the Secretary of War and the accompanying documents herewith communicated. The organization and discipline of the Army are effective and satisfactory. To counteract the prevalence of desertion among the troops it has been suggested to withhold from the men a small portion of their monthly pay until the period of their discharge ”