SPIRITED OUT OF THE RANKS

Dispatched to locate his commanding officer, the enlisted soldier went to the St. Nicholas, a luxurious 600-room, six-story hotel spanning a block of Broadway in Lower Manhattan. There he found the officer, Lieutenant Charles H. Ogle, sick in bed. The date was October 12, 1860, and Ogle had been absent without leave for 10 days from his post at a New York recruiting depot. In the interim his unsupervised subordinates had enlisted more than two-dozen men into the mounted service. In time the recruits would depart to attend training at Carlisle Barracks, the lieutenant never having laid eyes on them. Ogle would pay a price for his dereliction of duty. And while no one appears to have formally spelled out the cause, there was no question alcohol had lubricated the privileged officer’s fall from grace.

Ruination by drink is a timeworn tale. In all ranks of the mid-19th century U.S. Army—or, for that matter, any army in history—the problem was all too common. “Experience teaches us that drunkenness is the prolific source of most of the serious offenses committed in the military state,” Captain Stephen Vincent Benét (grandfather of the namesake poet) wrote in his 1862 , “and the only way of eradicating the evil is by not overlooking the cause in punishing the crime.” In Lieutenant Ogle’s case, an 1860 daguerreotype (see opposite page) hints at his inclination toward hard liquor. In the image the wayward first lieutenant is seated at a small table, pouring a drink for an unidentified first sergeant comically garbed in a decidedly nonregulation quasi stovepipe hat. While officers and noncoms were known to informally