Читать книгу The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement In Industry, Education and Civic Life - Allison Chisolm - Страница 28

The Morgan family had been in Philadelphia less than a year before the April 13, 1861 attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina marked the onset of the Civil War. Emotions ran high in the days that followed. If a business did not have an American flag in their window, crowds would gather and demand they produce one. As nearly every business displayed their patriotism, those without flags stood out. With fifth floor offices, Morgan Brothers were not likely to have had to face down a mob. By the end of that first week, city representatives called on Philadelphians to channel their patriotic energies into forming 100-man companies for home service.

For the next three months, most businesses closed by 4 p.m., or 3 p.m. on Saturdays, to permit their employees, new recruits for the Home Guard, to attend training. Currency changed its look, too. The federal government, unable to cover new debts incurred for war supplies and equipment, issued paper money, known familiarly as “greenbacks” in 1861 and 1862.

So many Philadelphians volunteered to serve the Union, city residents filled most of 50 infantry and cavalry regiments, with nearly 100,000 volunteering for military duty by the end of the war. No local draft was required until July 1863, in the aftermath of the bloody battlefields at Gettysburg, when volunteer numbers declined as a result of a mandatory six-month service “or until the end of the present emergency.” The date was left to federal officials to determine, creating an unwelcome degree of uncertainty for would-be volunteers.

Morgan and his brother would have been exempt from military service due to their occupation as manufacturers. But Morgan wanted to serve in some way, and requested an appointment to the New England Soldiers’ Relief Association. Established in July 1862 for “the purpose of visiting hospitals with a view to assist, by money or other means, soldiers from the New England States,” the Association requested from each hospital director that its volunteer members “will be permitted to have access to the wards for that purpose, if in your opinion it would not be injurious to the sick men.”