By Ronald S. Coddington, 8-27-11
Every volunteer in the 19th Massachusetts Infantry would remember Aug. 28, 1861. The boys in blue tingled with nervous excitement as they slung their overstuffed knapsacks across their backs and boarded a train that would carry them from Lynnfield to Boston on the first leg of their trip to the South.
But for one young man, the day marked a low point in his life.
Isaiah Goddard Hacker, a 22-year-old from the Boston suburbs, had failed a physical examination and was denied enlistment in the regiment. Story has it that the doctor who made the call pronounced him too short: Hacker stood five feet, three and a half inches.
The rejection of Hacker is noteworthy for its rarity. States scrambled to organize medical boards and other institutional infrastructure to support the influx of volunteers in 1861 with varying degrees of success. Physical examinations were performed with little more than a wink and a nod in some parts of the Union early in the war. Volunteer physicians, unfamiliar with military rules and under pressure to enlist as many men as possible, passed recruits who never should have stepped foot into camp.
They failed to heed the warning of Charles Tripler, a doctor in the regular Army who wrote in his 1858 Manual of the Medical Officer, “Let the Surgeon then bear in mind that it is the number of bayonets in the field, and not the number of names upon the rolls, that determines the strength of an Army, and he will be less anxious to pass numbers of recruits.” Hacker’s home state did a better job than most in weeding out unfit men. Regulations established clear guidelines for an examination, calling for recruits to be stripped down and evaluated for a range of specified physical and mental criteria.
Many men rejected after the physical would have given up on the idea of going to war. Not Hacker. He and a friend followed the 19th Infantry as sutlers, or traders who sold food and other goods to the troops.
Soldiers expressed mixed feelings about these itinerant merchants. “Sutlers, as a rule, were described as a swindling, hard-fisted and grinding race,” stated a member of the 19th. One veteran from another regiment offered a more generous view, hailing the sutler’s store as “that wonderful requisite of army life.” He acknowledged that some “sold poor stuff for a large price,” but that
it was a great comfort to many to have a chance to spend something, when they did not know what to do with their salaries. Those bottles of pickles, if they were high priced, were often just the thing when a man was growing bilious. Those sardines, often oiled over things when a man was disgusted with everything he cooked.
After his sutler’s stint ended, Hacker attempted to join the Second Massachusetts Infantry, which needed recruits to fill its depleted ranks. He again failed the physical. Then, in the summer of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a new call for volunteers. Hacker enlisted once more. This time he succeeded — a reflection less of improvements in his stature than the anxiety of recruiters to meet the state quota.
Hacker mustered into the Army as a private for a three-year term and took his place in the ranks of the 38th Massachusetts Infantry. He reportedly made a first-rate soldier and impressed his comrades as “one who always did his duty, and could be relied on at all times.” His company commanders promoted him through the ranks to corporal and then sergeant.
The doctors who had disqualified him twice before may have been surprised at Hacker’s aptitude for the military. But Tripler, the Army surgeon, would likely have understood. His medical manual challenged the centuries-old preference for big and brawny recruits. Tripler reasoned that in the modern era of firearms, including the recent introduction of the rifled musket, smaller men like Hacker had a place in the ranks:
"Quickness of perception, enterprise, and intelligence, certainly do not depend upon bulk of body, but are found comparatively much more frequently in men of small, than in men of large stature. The bulky man, from a consciousness of physical force, due as much to weight as to nerve, may ordinarily possess more physical courage; but the quick-witted, active little fellow, who instinctively makes up, by intelligence and address, for the difference in physical force, thus training and disciplining his mind, however unconsciously, to meet and grapple with superior strength, will make the best and most reliable soldier."
Neither physical size nor mental capacity could have prevented an artillery shell fragment from seriously wounding Hacker at the Third Battle of Winchester, also known as Opequon, on Sept. 19, 1864. He became one of the thousands of casualties suffered by Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s 39,000 Union forces in their victory over Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s 14,000 Confederates at the northern end of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
A dedicated diary-keeper, Hacker recorded the event in his journal.
"We were ordered forward under a heavy fire of grape and musketry, our lines advanced in good order for about 3 or 400 yards when the enemy opened a masked battery on us and a cross fire of musketry which broke our lines and compelled them to fall back, just as we turned to go back a piece of shell knocked me over and broke my ribs on the right side and I had a narrow escape from being taken by the Rebs."
Blood ran from Hacker’s mouth as he retreated with his comrades. He made his way with other wounded soldiers to the front yard of a house-turned-field-hospital in Winchester. A friend visited the next day and found Hacker “very low and thought his recovery very doubtful as it was said he was dangerously hurt internally.” Hacker had suffered two broken ribs and lung damage.
Medical personnel evacuated him to Pennsylvania and admitted him to a military hospital in York, and then sent him home to Massachusetts to convalesce. His recovery was aided by the efforts of Charlotte “Lottie” Webb, the sister of the friend with whom he served as a sutler. She nursed Hacker back to health.
Hacker returned to his regiment and mustered out of the Army at the end of the war. He returned home and married Lottie. They raised three children, including a set of twins. His injured lung troubled him. In 1868, a doctor who feared consumption advised him to go west. And so Hacker and his family moved to Kansas and settled on a farm. The agricultural life did not agree with him, and he found a job as manager of a shoe department in a store in Manhattan, Kan. He died in 1925, at the age of 86.
Ronald S. Coddington is the author of “Faces of the Civil War” and “Faces of the Confederacy.” His forthcoming book profiles the lives of men of color who participated in the Civil War. He writes “Faces of War,” a column for the Civil War News.
From: opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Image: Isaiah Hacker strikes a relaxed pose, holding a forage cap in his right hand; Carte de visite by an unidentified photographer, circa 1862.
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