Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) has been reading Civil War memoirs by Ohio Men, like Grant:
Ohio was just far West enough to have a little wild in it, far north enough to be free of the cotton plague, but close enough to the center of gravity in DC/Philadelphia that these guys are well-connected to big power.
It was a huge world for these guys in some ways, because travel was hard before the railroads (“the cars” is what these guys call railroads) came along. But when it comes to networking, power, it was a small, downright tiny world, where all the young men of good family married each others’ sisters (Grant married his West Point roommate’s sister). The ones who hadn’t met before got to know each other at West Point, and if South Carolina hadn’t had the brilliant idea of seceding, that would’ve been that, except for the odd hotel-lobby and business-conference encounter.
But they’re all back together suddenly in 1861. They all joined up at once, mom and sis doing their best to guess what “Zouave” meant in tailoring terms. And they had to use a lot of cloth, because although men were skinny back then (they’d have split their sides if a pig like me had come onstage), they were tall and healthy, unlike the cannon fodder people expected to find wearing army uniform.
In fact, every time someone with peacetime-army experience sees the new recruits from the “best families in town” lined up in review, they’re shocked at how tall and healthy the men look. The peacetime army drew its manpower from immigrants and drunks, people who couldn’t find a job anywhere else, then beat them into submission. It made for organized marching but not a very impressive look on parade. Basic European tactics involved beating, like literally beating, a bunch of dregs into formation and sending them to intercept the first volley of another bunch of dregs in a different uniform. You didn’t need “a few good men,” you needed a lot of dregs, and the first reaction old-school army men had when they saw all these tall, healthy 19th-c. yuppies in uniform was, why are you wasting actual human beings as lead-absorbers?
One Army officer actually says that, in General Cox’s Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, when he sees the town’s leading yout’ who’ve switched from 90-day enlistments to the three-year hitch:
”Captain Gordon Granger of the regular army came to muster the re-enlisted regiments into the three years’ service, and as he stood at the right of the Fourth Ohio, looking down the line of a thousand stalwart men, all in their Garibaldi shirts (for we had not yet received our uniforms), he turned to me and exclaimed: “My God! that such men should be food for powder!”’