Conscription, or “the draft” as it is more generally known, is the practice of compelling citizens to serve in the military. With the Civil War, the United States began a transition from the limited warfare of the past, in which a relatively small number of men were mobilized as soldiers, toward modern “total war.” A total war mobilizes the entire populace and is fought on a much broader scale. The Civil War was not a modern war in every way, but it certainly was modern in terms of its scale. In the Revolutionary War, roughly 200,000 soldiers took the field for the United States. In the War of 1812, 286,000 soldiers fought, and in the Mexican-American War a mere 79,000 soldiers participated. These numbers were dwarfed during the Civil War, when nearly 4 million men donned the uniform of either the Confederacy or the Union.
Early in the Civil War, there were more than enough volunteers on both sides to fill the ranks. This reflected the populace’s excitement over the impending conflict as well as their sense that the war would not last more than a few months. When it became clear that this was not to be the case, the number of volunteers dropped dramatically, and leaders quickly realized that they would have to do something to fulfill their armies’ manpower needs.
The Confederacy was the first to act. Most of the Con-EEDERATE army’s early volunteers signed up for one-year enlistments that expired in spring of 1862. While some of these men extended their enlistments, many others made clear their intentions to return home. In response, on April 16, 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first of three conscription acts, establishing the first national draft in American history. The first Conscription Act extended the one-year enlistments to three years or until the end of the war. To soften the blow, these veterans were to be granted 60-day furloughs before finishing their time. The act also required men between the ages of 18 and 35 who were not already in the ranks to serve for three years, although there was a grace period before the act took effect so that these individuals would have the opportunity to “volunteer.” The second Conscription Act, passed in October 1862, refined the terms of the first, most notably extending the upper end of the eligible age range from 35 to 45. The third Conscription Act, passed in February 1864, went even further, declaring the eligible age range to be 17 to 50 years.
The Union was in the same position as the Confederacy, and the Union leadership responded in a similar fashion. In August 1862, President Abraham Lincoln used the terms of the Militia Act of 1862 to require states to furnish 300,000 troops, with each state being assigned a quota based on its population. This system proved to be very inefficient, and so in March 1863 Congress passed the Enrollment Act, which was similar to the Conscription Act that
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Had been adopted by the Confederate government. The act made men between the ages of 20 and 45 liable for up to three years of service. Unlike the Confederate version, however, the Union’s Enrollment Act did not automatically draft all eligible men into the army. Instead, it set up quotas for how many soldiers each state was expected to provide. If states could meet their quota with volunteers, then no draft was held. If not, then federal officials would go from district to district within the state and set up a wheel in a public place containing the names of all eligible men in the district. At the appointed time, a draft officer would put on a blindfold and choose the required number of names from the wheel.
The draft was not received well in either the North or the South. One of the most common objections was that a draft was not within the authority of the government. President Lincoln was regularly asked to suspend the draft or to reduce state quotas. The president faced particularly vocal opposition from New York governor Horatio Seymour, who threatened to take the case to the Supreme Court. Lincoln usually managed to deflect these challenges by making minor concessions when he felt it necessary. jEFFERSON Davis faced similar objections in the South, where it was felt that the draft was not only unconstitutional but also contrary to the STATES’ RIGHTS philosophy of the Confederacy. Among the prominent critics who faced off against Davis were GOVERNORS, including JOSEPH E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina. The supreme courts of several states sustained Davis’s position.
The biggest objections to the draft laws centered on the exemption clauses contained in both the Northern and Southern acts. Union draftees were allowed to pay a $300 commutation fee, or to hire a substitute, in acknowledgement of the fact that some men had responsibilities that made military service impossible. In the Confederacy, a draftee could also hire a substitute. In addition, certain classes of men necessary on the HOMEFRONT were exempt from the Confederate draft: government employees, contractors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, millers, and so forth. The most controversial exemption was included in the second Conscription Act: The so-called Twenty-Negro Law added any slaveholder with more than nineteen slaves to the list of exempt classes. Officially, this was because these individuals were needed to keep the ECONOMY running, but many Southerners felt that the clause was included because of the large plantation owners’ political connections.
The exemption clauses gave rise to complaints on both sides that the conflict was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Scholarly studies have shown that this was not true, but the perception held by some groups was strongly felt. Resentful draftees failed to appear when called, or they deserted shortly after joining the ranks.
Engraving depicting the process of conscription in New York (1865) (Library of Congress)
Anti-draft violence was also a common phenomenon in both the North and South. The most well-known uprising was the New York City draft riots in July 1863. A mob made up mostly of poor Irishmen and women went on a two-day rampage. These Irish workers were angry not only about the draft but also about EMANCIPATION, which they opposed due their fears that freedmen would provide unwanted competition for jobs. The rioters inflicted $1.5 million in damage while killing many African-American men. The situation was finally resolved when New York City’s government came up with enough money to purchase exemptions for all of the draft spots the city was expected to fill. Eventually, incidents like the draft riots convinced leaders on both sides to eliminate some of the exemptions. In 1863 the Southern Congress disallowed any further hiring of substitutes. In 1864 President Lincoln and the Northern Congress did away with the $300 exemption.
If judged by the number of soldiers added to the ranks, the draft was not very successful in either the North or the South. There are no reliable numbers for the South, but the statistical story of the North is probably representative of what happened on both sides. Of the 776,000 men drafted,
161,000 failed to report, and another 391,000 had to be sent home due to disability or because being drafted would be an undue hardship on their families. Of the remaining 207,000 men, 87,000 paid the commutation fee and another 74,000 furnished substitutes. Only 46,000 men, less than 7 percent of the total drafted, actually went into the army. If the substitutes are taken into account, then drafting accounted for the addition of a total of 120,000 men to the UNION ARMY, only about 4 percent of the total number of Yankee soldiers. And since draftees tended to be poor soldiers, their impact was likely even less substantial than their modest numbers would suggest.
The purpose of the draft was not to force men to fight. Instead, the goal was to motivate able-bodied men to volunteer on their own. At roughly the same time the Conscription and Enrollment Acts were passed, the respective governments set up incentive programs for new volunteers. Men were given cash bounties of as much as $1,000 or more and granted other concessions designed to ease their service in the army. If a man was drafted, however, all benefits for enlisting were forfeit, and he was forever branded with the stigma of having been forced to fight rather than volunteering. It is impossible to say exactly how many men were motivated to enlist or to reenlist by the combination of negative and positive reinforcement.
Once again, there are no reliable statistics for the Confederacy, but in the Union more than 750,000 men volunteered to join the ranks in the years after the passage of the Enrollment Act. If even a modest percentage of those men joined out of fear of being drafted, then the draft has to be considered at least a qualified success.
Further reading: James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991); Albert Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Hillary House, 1963); Eugene Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).
—Christopher Bates
World History
