Twenty Dollars Additional Pay for Volunteers

 

The following letter from Mrs. Louis T. Wigfall of Texas to her daughter in early 1861 relates the Fort Sumter affair in which Senator Wigfall obtained the surrender of Major Robert Anderson, and a very low opinion of how Northern volunteers were attracted to the colors

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman

North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission

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Twenty Dollars Additional Pay for Volunteers:

“Montgomery, April 26 [1861].

“The people here are all in fine spirits….No one doubts our success…I suppose the chief fighting will be in Maryland and Virginia…..

April 29:  You allude to reports given in the Northern papers of the Fort Sumter affair. It is only what might have been expected of them, that they would garble and misrepresent the truth; but I must confess that Major Anderson’s silence, and the disingenuous bulletin he sent to Cameron have surprised me. 

He takes care not  to tell the whole truth, and any one to read his statement would suppose he had only come out on those conditions, whereas, he surrendered unconditionally – the US flag was lowered without salute while your father was in the fort. This was seen, not only by your father, but by the thousands who were on the watch, and it was only owing to General Beauregard’s generosity (misplaced, it seems, now) that he was allowed to raise it again, and to salute it on coming out of the Fort, and take it with him….And this conduct too, after the kind and generous treatment he met with from the Carolinians.

I don’t think though that the military enthusiasm can be very high at the North as I see they are offering $20 additional pay to volunteers a month. That speaks volumes. I suppose it is to be accounted for in the anxiety to get rid of the mod population who might be troublesome at home.”

(A Southern Girl in ’61, The War-Time Memories of a Confederate Senator’s Daughter, Mrs. D. Giraud Wright, Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905, pp. 49 -51)