these bounties was a direct encouragement to desertion ; and, as a very different class of men were tempted by them from those who had enlisted, out of patriotic motives, at the out break of the war, a vast number of those who pocketed these premiums were very willing to go through with the same operation again, and as often as it was practicable to do so. Bounty-jumping, or escaping from the recruiting officers, and enlisting over again, was carried on, in a greater or less degree, all over the country, but the headquarters of the bounty-jumpers and substitute-brokers was in New York.
The Purchase of Enlistment Papers.
It was to New York that the agents of interior counties came for the purpose of filling their quotas, and they always found a horde of brokers ready to accommodate them with real and bogus enlistment papers, each one of which was supposed to represent an able-bodied man, fit for military duty, who had passed the mustering officers, been accepted, and was then ready for service. Whether the papers were bogus or genuine mattered very little to those who purchased, so long as they could obtain credit on them from the authorities at Washington. It would probably not be making too large an estimate to put down one half of the enlistment papers sold to country agents and others as forgeries, while not one half of the genuine ones, no, not one fourth, represented men actually ready for duty.
Of course such stupendous frauds as these could not have been carried on without the criminal connivance of the officials of various kinds, who were, in one way or another, connected with the enlistments. There may have been some honest officers, soldiers, and civilians connected with this service in New York during the last year of the war, but I was never lucky enough to meet any. So far as I could see, the whole of them,—commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, surgeons, clerks, notaries public, and others, were intent only upon making all the money they could while the opportunity for making it lasted.
The bounty-jumping and substituting-frauds were perpetrated in such an open and barefaced manner that I could not help wondering why some efforts were not made by the authorities at Washington to check them. At length, however, the services of Colonel Baker were called in, and he succeeded
