Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/87

 permit him to write to his mother about it? It was hard for me to repeat to him that I could give him no definite assurance; but when the next morning no answer came from the War Department, I wrote to Mr. Lincoln directly—again in disregard of all the rules and regulations—submitting to him a full statement of the case, and asking him to pardon the boy. Then I had not long to wait for a response. The pardon came promptly, and the boy was sent back to his regiment.

The whole affair was hushed up quietly. My insubordinate conduct passed without official notice, and I never heard of the matter again until nearly forty years later, when at one of the annual banquets held by the “Eleventh Corps Association,” composed of survivors of the war, an elderly man, apparently a well-to-do mechanic, was brought to me, who introduced himself as the “deserter” condemned to death, and whose life I had saved in the summer of 1863.

During these comparatively quiet weeks after such arduous campaigns the matter of the reorganization of the Army of the Potomac came naturally to the foreground. In consequence of the casualties of the war, many of the regiments had become reduced to mere skeletons. My division, for instance, which, had all the regiments composing it been up to their original number, would have been 10,000 men strong, counted after the battle of Gettysburg hardly more than 1500 muskets. And many other commands were in a similar condition. The return from the hospitals or from furlough of men who had been wounded or sick, gradually repleted the ranks somewhat, but far from sufficiently, and the few recruits who were furnished us through conscription and the lavish bounty system, were in large part of a character by no means desirable. We became familiarly acquainted with the “bounty-jumper,” the fellow who pocketed considerable sums of money in selling