Pulitzer
Page 3
The deaths and the remarriage of their mother severed the ties that bound Joseph and Albert to home and family. Early in 1864, Albert, not yet fourteen, became the first to leave. He moved into his grandfather’s house and obtained work as a clerk at a life insurance company. Joseph, on the other hand, had grander plans. He was anxious to leave Hungary entirely.
Walking across the square near his house one day, Joseph encountered a childhood playmate from Makó. Joseph filled his friend in on the death of his father and the financial misfortunes that had befallen his family. He then asked if he would like to go to America.
“Well,” replied his friend, “are you going to America?”
“Yes,” said Pulitzer. “I must go because my mother cannot support us and here there is no work.”
Going to the United States was not an outlandish plan for an ambitious Hungarian youth. Since the end of the revolution of 1848, a Jewish Emigration Society in Pest had popularized the notion, and the massive migration from Europe to the United States had begun. But Pulitzer had no money, so his options were limited. He decided his salvation lay in the path taken by his maternal uncle Wilhelm Berger, with whom he had been close. Berger had joined the Austro-Hungarian army, which was open to Jews. That spring Berger had left Hungary for Mexico to serve under Prince Maximilian, who believed he was destined to become that nation’s emperor. It was not military life that Pulitzer sought, but the escape it offered.
Pulitzer had grown tall—six feet one inch—and had a head of thick wavy chestnut hair, like his late father. A Roman nose, supporting thick glasses, and an angular chin protruded from his pale, smooth-skinned, boyish face. Although he was very thin, with long arms, his body had matured into a manly figure. But his poor eyesight barred his entry into to the Austrian army.
Events in the United States presented him with another opportunity. The American Civil War was in its third year, soldiers were dying at a rate of 13,000 a month, and the government had instituted a draft to meet the insatiable demand for more men. To meet the quota imposed on their city, a group of wealthy Bostonians looked eastward for able bodies. They wagered that there were thousands of young men in Europe who would join the American military provided their passage could be paid. The Bostonians commissioned Julian Allen, a member of a new entrepreneurial class of men finding profit in the draft law’s loopholes, to sail to Europe and launch a recruiting drive. For the plan’s backers, the venture, if successful, could be politically profitable; for Allen, it could be financially profitable.
Allen set up shop in Hamburg, Germany. He printed recruitment circulars and placed advertisements in European newspapers that reached Pest. He promised that those who joined would be paid travel expenses, a bounty of $100 when they reached the United States, and $12 a month while in the service in the military. As each man could fetch $900 or more as a substitute soldier, Allen hoped to make at least $650 on each transaction. The scheme became Pulitzer’s escape route.
In early summer of 1864, Pulitzer began making his way to Hamburg, nearly 600 miles northwest. He stopped in Vienna and met up with a cousin and two friends. They all dined at the famous Zum Lothringer inn, known for its selection of Bavarian beers and favored by many Viennese notables. After dinner, Pulitzer and one of his companions sat on a park bench and talked until dawn until he caught a train from the Nordbahnhof for Hamburg.
There Pulitzer located Allen. He was still recruiting men, but by now his methods were attracting unwanted scrutiny. Complaints were made that the men who accepted Allen’s offer of free passage were being misled into thinking they were headed for laboring jobs in the United States. Still, if Pulitzer heard of the complaints, he wasn’t deterred. Following Allen’s instructions, he traveled to the seaport of Antwerp, 285 miles west of Hamburg, from where the next ship of emigrants was scheduled to depart.
For this voyage, Allen chartered the Garland, a German 548-ton, square-rigged sailing vessel. On July 18, 1864, Pulitzer and 253 other men walked up the gangway. In comparison with any other ship taking on passengers in Antwerp that day, the Garland was an unusual sight. Every passenger was male and of military age. No other ship in the harbor sailing to the New World left without families with children.
Pulitzer was among the last to board. As was customary, he was quizzed by an officer filling out the ship’s manifest. Pulitzer said he was a twenty-year-old laborer. His actual age was seventeen; that he lied about this suggests he knew the purpose of the voyage—being underage would have disqualified him for military service. But there were some men who did not know and found out only after the ship cleared the harbor. They probably learned of their fate from a New York recruiter who had sneaked on board in hopes of luring some of the men to his city. The men became riled and protested so vigorously that the captain was compelled to offer to let them off on the coast of England. The group held a meeting and after considering that they were penniless and spoke no English, they decided to go on with the voyage; in the words of the captain, “stand their lot.”
And so the Garland sailed westward.
Chapter Two
BOOTS AND SADDLES
After nearly six weeks at sea, Pulitzer saw the craggy coastline of northeastern America on the horizon. It had been an uneventful passage until the Garland reached the calm waters of Boston harbor on August 29, 1864. There the ship and its unusual cargo were met with a forceful reception.
Boats bearing federal soldiers intercepted the Garland as it neared the first of the islands that separated the harbor from Massachusetts Bay. The soldiers ordered the men on board to take their belongings and lower themselves over the side of the ship onto the smaller vessels. Clueless as to what was happening, Pulitzer and the others found themselves being ferried to Deer Island, which Allen and his partners had selected as a secure place to conduct the final bit of their business after having lost their first batch of European mercenaries to bounty hunters. Under the watchful guard of the soldiers, the men were handed military enlistment documents to sign. Those who complied were given food, a chance to rest, and $100 in greenbacks.
Pulitzer knew the $100 payment was a small fraction of the money earned by the organizers of the voyage for each recruit. The New York bounty hunter, traveling incognito with the men, had promised that larger bonuses could be had in his city. Weighing his options, Pulitzer decided he didn’t like the economics of Allen’s contract and pursued an escape clause. Along with perhaps one or two dozen others, he sneaked away from Deer Island by wading across the narrow and shallow channel of water separating the landmass from the mainland and headed south.
Reaching New York City, Pulitzer joined the hundreds of men milling about the military recruiting tents at City Hall Park, across the street from Park Row, where Horace Greeley and other giants of American newspapers plied their trade. A new recruit could get cash bounties totaling $675, a tempting offer for many, considering that the total annual earnings for a soldier were less than $150 a year. The city had just finished erecting a 216-foot-long narrow wooden recruitment building featuring the latest in technology to ward off bounty brokers. Inside, each recruit was seated on a special armchair against a wall with a movable panel. When the recruit signed the documents and was handed his cash bounty, a switch was depressed releasing a spring that swiveled the chair and the wall leaving the recruit isolated in a back room until his transfer to a training camp.
Despite such efforts, bounty brokers remained busy, and the city’s walls and lampposts were plastered with recruiting posters, including some in German that Pulitzer could read. One town eager for recruits was Kingston, New York, whose draft board made the eighty-mile trip down the Hudson River Valley to set up a tent in City Hall Park. The board members had completed a round of the draft a few days earlier, but the district’s quota had not been met. Furthermore, many among those who were drafted wanted to take advantage of the law’s provision that allowed one to pay another to take one’s place. Among those seeking a substitute was twenty-two-year-
old Henry Vosburgh, a member of a family of farmers in Coxsackie, in Greene County.
Pulitzer became Vosburgh’s salvation. At the Kingston tent, on September 20, 1864, Pulitzer agreed to serve as a soldier in his place for one year in return for approximately $200. To do so, Pulitzer swore two separate times that he was twenty years old, though he was still only seventeen. The district’s provost marshal, a commissioner of the board as well as the surgeon of the board, certified that the gangly teenager before them was “free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity…sober…of lawful age” and signed Pulitzer’s papers.
With money in his pocket, Pulitzer entered a New York jewelry store. He had a tiny hole drilled into an 1864 gold dollar, a small coin about a half an inch in diameter. A delicate chain fastened the coin to a gold ring, thereby making a device by which a woman could hold her handkerchief, then a fashion accessory in Hungary. On the reverse side of the coin, the jeweler engraved Elize’s maiden initials, “E.B.” Pulitzer mailed the resulting creation to his mother, better proof than any letter of his success in the New World.
A few days after enlisting, Pulitzer walked south past City Hall Park to the tip of Manhattan and boarded the steamer John Romer with other recruits. It took them rapidly up the East River, past Throgs Neck and into the western end of the Long Island Sound to the skinny, 100-acre Hart Island. The army used this isolated spot to train its recruits, but the ragtag, multilingual collection of misfits now arriving posed a considerable challenge. The brigadier general in charge was reaching the end of his patience. Draft boards were meeting recruitment quotas, he said, “with men whom they can obtain by any means of bargain, deception or fraud, with which to liquidate upon paper their old obligations to the Government, regardless alike as to whether the men so obtained are fit for soldiers.” By his count only about half the recruits made decent soldiers. In the coming months, he would discharge forty-five recruits upon their examination at Hart Island, seventeen of them for being underage. Pulitzer, however, escaped his detection.
Pulitzer also avoided joining the less desirable and more deadly infantry. Good timing and his childhood knowledge of horseback riding landed him a place in a cavalry company. “I wanted to ride a horse, to be a horse-soldier,” Pulitzer said. “I did not like to walk.” He knew that in European armies regiments were often named after famous people, such as royalty. “So I inquired for the names of some of the regiments of horsemen, and was told of one called Lincoln. I knew who he was and so went to that regiment.”
The First New York “Lincoln” Cavalry, as it was called, was organized at the beginning of hostilities by Carl Schurz, one of the best-known German “forty-eighters” who had come to the United States following the suppression of the revolutionary movement. By the time Pulitzer joined the First Lincoln regiment, its original luster had worn off. Three long years of chasing Confederates in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland had taken their toll; and the men, at the end of their tours of duty, were mustering out in large numbers.
On November 12, 1864, Pulitzer joined his regiment at Remount Camp near Harpers Ferry. The reinforcements were a welcome sight throughout the camps. “For a time, their arrival, appearance, equipment, created an excitement,” an Ohio soldier wrote in his diary. “Many were the surmises that many of them would be minus some of their fancy equipment before another week.”
Pulitzer was assigned to Company L, one of four German-speaking companies under the command of German-speaking officers. The men in his company were brewers, locksmiths, mechanics, painters, tailors, and bakers from Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Prussia and were older than both Pulitzer’s real age and his false age, which by now he gave as eighteen when asked. In completing the paperwork upon arrival, he also told his superiors that if something were to happen to him they were to contact his grandfather Mihály Pulitzer; he made no mention of his mother or stepfather.
Although it was a relief to be among German speakers, Pulitzer did not get along well with the men. He may not have been at fault. Veterans who had been fighting for years resented recruits who had joined solely for the bounty. They felt, as one soldier wrote, “those money soldiers are not worth as much as they cost for when you hear firing ahead you may see them hid in the woods.”
When Pulitzer joined his regiment, the presidential election had just concluded and the news of Lincoln’s reelection was reaching the soldiers. Pulitzer witnessed the jubilant celebration, especially among German-Americans, who overwhelmingly supported Lincoln. The moment was a remarkable contrast to the world Pulitzer had left behind. Here were troops in the midst of war voting and even permitted—though certainly not encouraged—to vote against their commander in chief. It was Pulitzer’s first taste of American electoral politics.
A less significant introduction to another American custom followed a few weeks later. On November 28, the men took a pause from their military duties to celebrate Thanksgiving, which Lincoln had recently proclaimed a national holiday. Turkeys and other food sent to battlefields by families, friends, and citizens in New York were distributed around the camps. “With one eye on the lookout for hungry rebels prowling around the camp, we eat our Thanksgiving feast without further molestation, and are thankful,” wrote a lieutenant in Pulitzer’s regiment.
For the remainder of November and December 1864, Pulitzer rode about the Shenandoah Valley as General Sheridan moved his forces like chess pieces, threatening but rarely engaging the enemy. Typical of Pulitzer’s rare encounters with Confederate forces was one on November 22, when his company crossed the Shenandoah River and rode in a double line toward a long hill. A line of Confederate infantrymen rose to the crest from the other side. Shots were exchanged, but no bullets found their mark, and the two forces then went their own ways.
Long rides were the center of Pulitzer’s life as a cavalryman. At times, engagements between Union and Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley that winter caused serious losses on each side; but Pulitzer spent his time traveling up and down the valley, confronting snowy, sleety weather but hardly any rebels. Nonetheless, it was arduous work. For a tall city lad like Pulitzer, the days spent in the hard wood-and-leather saddle produced chafed legs, cramps, and a sore back. At night, exhausted, he tended his horse and cleaned his weaponry during the little time that remained before bedding down.
Pulitzer’s pain and exhaustion were soon replaced by tedium and boredom when, at the end of December, the men set up camp for the winter near Winchester, Virginia. Pulitzer’s winter home consisted of a hut made of log walls, three to five feet high, with a canvas roof and a brick or stone fireplace. Now, instead of endless miles of riding, he settled into a routine regulated by a bugle. Its call signaled each day’s activities, including endless drill formations at the sound of “Boots and Saddles.”
Warfare resumed with the advent of spring but Pulitzer remained far from harm’s way. Instead of following his company to the battle lines, he was assigned to a detachment protecting a general who remained encamped far behind the lines of engagement. The only combat Pulitzer saw was on a chessboard at which he and another recruit had, in the words of his opponent, “the pleasure of whiling away many weary hours.” In this manner Pulitzer served out the end of the war only seventy-five miles from where he first joined his company.
April 1865 brought elation and sadness to the troops. On April 9, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, signaling an end to the war. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated. “The effect of the news of the death of the President cannot be described,” wrote one member of Pulitzer’s regimental. “All through the camps there was unwonted silence…. It was the saddest day in camp that the soldiers had ever known. It was as if a pall had been let down upon them.”
The war at an end, Pulitzer rejoined his company in Alexandria, Virginia. The victorious Union commanders planned a massive review of the forces in Washington. In the early morning of May 22, 1865, Pulitzer rode with the gathered cavalrymen
west across the Long Bridge, a narrow wooden bridge that traversed the Potomac and emptied near Fourteenth Street. They continued on to Bladensburg, a few miles northeast of Washington in Maryland, where they camped for the night and groomed their horses and themselves for the grand review in the morning.
May 23 dawned bright, cool, and breezy. Rain had fallen earlier in the week, subduing the dust—perfect conditions for a parade. Pulitzer woke at four o’clock when reveille was sounded. After downing breakfast, he and the men rode into Washington, halting three blocks east of the Capitol. Like the nation, the Capitol had been greatly transformed during the war years. New wings extending on each side had more than doubled its size and a cast-iron dome weighing 8.9 million pounds, topped by a statue called Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace, rose 287 feet 5.5 inches above the soldiers. In his homeland, the imperial government buildings were built for rulers whose power stemmed from their heritage; Pulitzer now stood before an equally impressive edifice that celebrated democracy.
Promptly at nine, the review began. Pulitzer’s company fell in behind General Custer, whose men wore a “Custer tie”: a red scarf thrown dramatically over the shoulder. The regiment marched in such tight formation, with horses lined from curb to curb, that the only things in Pulitzer’s line of vision were the man and horse on each side and ahead of him. Years later, he would recall little “but how sore my knees became riding in close formation and pressed against the others in line.”
The procession moved past the north side of the Capitol and down the hill into Pennsylvania Avenue. On the hillside, hundreds of school-children were gathered, the girls wearing colorful ribbons and the boys sashes; they sang “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” Ahead of the soldiers, for as far as they could see, men and women lined the avenue leading to the Executive Mansion. The crowds were orderly—liquor sales having been banned for two days—and cheered lustily. In front of the White House, a reviewing stand was festooned with flags and floral arrangements. There the new president, Andrew Johnson; generals Grant and Sherman; and cabinet members sat, rising to their feet as the various division commanders passed. It was not until three in the afternoon that the last battery of artillery rumbled past.