Minor Reforms Needed.
September, 1862.
1st. Drunken officers. The public, rightly or wrongly, attribute
part of the mischief at Bull Run to one, Colonel M., commanding the reserve. .
. . If there be no time for courts-martial, why not quietly shelve every
drunkard?
2d. Skulkers. The President found at Harrison's Bar half his
army unaccounted for. The papers tell of crowds of stragglers helping to make
panics in each battle. The enemy shoot their stragglers. We might at least
drop, if not from a tree by a rope, at least from the army list, every skulking
officer. . . . The inclosed cutting gives a hint of where the record can be
found (the Marshall House and City Hotel, Alexandria) of the doings of 135
officers on Sunday, August 31, when our army was in its greatest peril. Why not
call on each to account satisfactorily for his being there on that day? In short,
why not have an efficient police system to correct this crying evil?
3d. Spies. The spies have thus far slain more than any other
arm of the enemy. We hear of one, a famous guerilla, being condemned to die in
Missouri; but it looks like a mere excuse for punishing other crimes. Several
have been imprisoned, some compelled to take the oath!! but not one choked to
death, — they probably being practised in swallowing hard oaths! We see
accounts from Norfolk of three rebel mail carriers caught passing our lines “with
private letters only, nothing of public interest,” and these will doubtless be
leniently dealt with! Who can say what dangerous cipher those private letters
carried? or whether the real object of their mission — a short military
dispatch — was not swallowed or destroyed? . . . Shall we encourage spies and
informers by continued leniency toward mail carriers from our lines to the
enemy's? Washington thought it necessary to hang the noble André. Can it be doubted that
the enemy destroy without any compunction any of our spies or “mail carriers”?
We hang a man for the doubtful military crime of hauling down a flag, and we
let pass free, or punish lightly, men who, by all military usages, and by the
dictates of common sense, deserve the heaviest punishment. Half a dozen spies
hanged would have saved as many thousand lives, and have given confidence to
our own people and soldiers in the earnestness of their leaders, civil and
military. It is not too late to begin.
4th. Robbers, in the shape of contractors, and of army
officers receiving commissions [on purchases or sales for the government]; in
short, the army worms of our military wheat. Of course, eternal vigilance is
the only remedy for this disease. How would it do, as a sort of scarecrow at
least, to insert a clause in each contract, that the contractor becomes by
signing it subject to martial law, both as to his person and property? Without
legislation it would not be binding, but many, nay, most of the new contracts
will run beyond the meeting of the next Congress, when we may have a law for
it, and by signing such a contract, agreeing to be amenable, the party could
not complain that the law was ex post facto.
We who are paying taxes feel that the army contractors and
the commission-receiving officers are eating us up. The soldier feels it in his
bare feet and back, and sometimes in his empty stomach, and a hint from the
Department would surely give us such a law during the first week of the
session. The enemy does not tolerate drunken generals, stragglers, spies, or
thieving contractors. Let us remember the old proverb, “Fas est et ab hoste
doceri.”
SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and
Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 328-31
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