![]() ![]() ![]() The immediate response produced a camp at the eastern base of Shuter’s Hill, where officers on temporary assignment hastily threw together tents to house a motley crowd of deserters, walking wounded, men returning from furlough, and recruits, all generally demoralized. General Banks it would be best to establish a general camp in some central position on the Virginia side, and to order the military governors of Alexandria and the District of Columbia to pick up all stragglers and convalescents and send them there. Some arrangement must be made to collect all the stragglers and convalescents who are now wandering about Alexandria and Washington, unable to rejoin their regiments, and keep them together until an opportunity offers to send them back. On September 10, exactly a week before the great battle, stragglers (perhaps some from the regiment mentioned) looted the commissary storeroom in Alexandria and the next day General Heintzelman, newly in command of the Defenses of Washington, received the following instructions: One such regiment, supposed to be in the field with the Twelfth Corps, had so worn itself out in the previous summer’s campaign that their nominal division commander would report after Antietam that “The First District of Columbia Volunteers had, with the exception of the colonel and adjutant, entirely disappeared from the command by sickness and desertion.” There were also men on leave, authorized or not, those attempting to return from leave, and those who’d simply dodged or deserted from their regiments. These included convalescents from the hospitals, no longer requiring treatment but also neither discharged nor well enough to rejoin their units. As many as 70,000 men crowded the camps and garrisons, most from the Army of the Potomac, on the march or encamped awaiting orders, or in the forts surrounding the capital, and others on special duty or part of provisional units.īut among this mass not all served with their commands. In the week before the bloodiest day in American history at Antietam, the Defenses of Washington teemed with soldiers. The Convalescent Camp and the Rendezvous of Distribution in Civil War Arlington Posted on: November 9th, 2022
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