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Recruiting in the Civil War

© Andrew Willis

For centuries, officers had come from the upper classes of society for the most part. Family connection and affluence were far better indicators of where a man would end up in the Navy than ability was. John Paul Jones, who was the son of a Scottish gardener, was the most courageous and capable captain in the Navy during the Revolution, but was consistently passed over or even ignored outright in favor of richer and more politically connected captains of lesser ability. Today he is rightly considered the father of the Navy, but at the time was hardly considered anything at all, despite his accomplishments.

That started to change after the Somers affair and the founding of the Naval Academy in the 1820s, though very slowly. By 1861, the ultra-conservative Navy was again stagnant in its attitudes toward upbringing, money and the perception of ability. It was very difficult to change such a deeply ingrained custom, mostly because society at large believed in it. Consequently, enlisted sailors saw officers as better than them intellectually (usually true) and often morally as well (usually untrue). The idea would not change drastically until ubiquitous mandatory education became the norm in the early 1900s, the manpower stresses of World War II and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s pushed the Navy forward on this social front. Prior to the Mexican War, crews were either recruited or impressed from the local populace, at whatever locality in which each individual ship happened to be. By the Civil War, Navy recruiting became more organized but also more bureaucratic, and, as remarkable as it might seem, even less humane.

Instead of being accomplished locally, the navy had created "Naval rendezvous," which were direct ancestors to the Navy Recruiting Stations as we know them today. At the rendezvous, which were located in large cities and mid-size coastal and river towns, the applicants would be processed, contracted, and transported to a receiving ship at a Naval base. This ship was more like a Military Entrance Processing Station than a modern Boot Camp. Here the new sailor would be given a rudimentary physical examination, asked a few questions to test their seafaring knowledge and classified as a landsman, ordinary seaman or able seaman, based on what the recruit already knew. There was no boot camp, there were no schools. There was on the job training, with abuse and the lash for those who didn't learn fast enough. This system worked well during the Civil War for manning the exponentially expanding numbers of ships, but technology would soon make this system as obsolete as the sailing vessels that were rapidly being replaced by steamers.

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