Professions in the war

[Biscoitos]

Would a soldier enlist specifically for this job or would it be a secondary duty to being a soldier?

I am under the impression that in the Confederate armies, it would normally be secondary duty.

Perhaps in both armies, men with experience in printing might have been somewhat more likely to be picked as officers' aides.
They would have been able to spell, use proper grammar, write coherent sentences, understand correct punctuation, etc., better than the average soldier.

 

[American87]

Would a soldier enlist specifically for this job or would it be a secondary duty to being a soldier?

If they weren't making enough soldiers out of printers, they certainly had to make printers out of soldiers.

 

[American87]

I am under the impression that in the Confederate armies, it would normally be secondary duty.

Perhaps in both armies, men with experience in printing might have been somewhat more likely to be picked as officers' aides.
They would have been able to spell, use proper grammar, write coherent sentences, understand correct punctuation, etc., better than the average soldier.

Do you think Confederate armies had less need for printing orders?

Officers aides were NCOs, so their military skill automatically gave them a promotion.

 

[major bill]

Was part of the ratio of who served in part determined by what civilian skills were needed to help support the war effort?

 

[JeffFromSyracuse]

Was part of the ratio of who served in part determined by what civilian skills were needed to help support the war effort?

The thing to remember here is that enlistments were based on getting troops into the ranks and nothing more. There were no support battalions or designated supply units. Regiments had what they had and needed to adapt to make the best of it. Take the regiment I'm studying for example. Of the 940 men who initially enlisted, here are instances I've found of a civilian profession influencing wartime postings:

Commissary Sergeant - Pre-War Butcher
Chaplain - Pre-War Minister
Surgeon / Assistant Surgeon - Doctors (Meanwhile, a dentist served as an NCO then a Lieutenant)
Division Aide (Commissary of Muster) - Pre-War Store Clerk
Hospital Steward - Pre-War Druggist

There were a few men in the regiment who worked as bakers, and a couple of men who worked in carriage / harness making before the war. Because these were not official positions, it's hard to get a sense of whether or not these were skills that were used in the service.

Even so, even generously extrapolating from my small sample, it's hard to see how the ratio could be more than 1:60. It's just not how the army was structured back then.

 

[American87]

^^^Exactly. If we're asking, "Did the Union or Confederate armies deliberately seek to recruit people from certain occupations?" the answer is no, unless it was done at a micro level by the recruiting agents.

Most soldiers on both sides were either drafted or volunteers, and both sides were trying to fill their ranks with as many people as possible. There were also substitutes in the North. It was a matter of first-come-first-serve, and trying to get as many people to enlist as possible.

 

[Grant's Tomb]

Jubal Anderson Early was a lawyer, Lee's Bad Old Man though he was.

According to Wikipedia he practiced inheritance, slave, and divorce cases, so he seems to have practiced civil law.

So was John B. Gordon. Also he and his father invested in a series of coal mines in Tennessee and Georgia.

 

[Grant's Tomb]

In episode two of the Ken Burns documentary, Garrison Keillor doing the voiceover of a regimental chaplain summarizes what occupations the men in his regiment come from. "Almost every known trade, profession, or calling has its representatives in our regiment, tailors, carpenters, masons, and plasterers, moulders and glassblowers, puddlers and rollers, machinists and architects, printers, bookbinders, and publishers, gentlemen of leisure, politicians, merchants, legislators, judges, lawyers, doctors, preachers. Some malicious fellow might ask the privilege completing the catalogue by naming jailbirds, idlers, loafers, drunkards, and gamblers, but we beg his pardon and refuse the license."

 

[Grant's Tomb]

Elisha Hunt Rhodes was a harness-maker's clerk when he enlisted in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers

 

[Grant's Tomb]

In the introduction to chapter 2 of the Illustrated Confederate Reader, a typical soldier in the Confederate army was between the ages of eighteen to twenty-nine years old although his ranks included the middle-aged and even old men. It describes them to be most likely a farmer, but not a planter. Other men in the ranks are listed as being teachers, laborers, artisans, politicians, lawyers, clerks, mechanics, merchants, and members of most nineteenth-century American professions. It says that an estimated two thirds of the Confederate soldier's ranks were filled by men of the soil-traditional Southern farmers.