“Approximately two-thirds of the North’s white men of military age who could have served never did.”
By Paul Taylor
CIVIL WAR history is filled with images of the tearful yet dutiful northern wife bidding her husband off to war as well as countless young men running headlong to their local recruiting office. While such scenes were certainly the case in April and May, 1861, that rush to “put down treason” was hardly the reality in the months and years to follow, especially once the Lincoln administration began calling for men to serve up to three years rather than the initial volunteers’ 90-day term. Approximately two-thirds of the North’s white men of military age who could have served never did; the bulk of those quietly having no desire or intention of going anywhere near Confederate musketry.
Only 15 months later in summer 1862, enlistments had slowed so precipitously that the federal government was compelled to threaten conscription in order to refill the army’s ranks. Many were against the war’s rationales or realized that volunteering would have a deleterious effect on their farms, businesses, jobs, schooling or families’ welfare. Others may have been sympathetic to the South’s grievances or were indifferent to the war’s aims or simply wanting to be left alone. Many citizens, as in all times, viewed their primary loyalty to their families’ welfare, not a distant national government.
“One needs all the patience of which a man was ever possessed to keep his temper and listen to all the excuses of able-bodied young men who are asked to enlist,” complained Lieutenant Sheldon Colton to his brother in 1861. Others may have known in their hearts that they were simply cowards, commonly known then as “poltroons.”
The recruiting shortfall prompted Congress to pass conscription laws in August 1862 and then a more formalized national system in March 1863. For the first time ever, the federal government could force men into the army, quite literally at the point of the bayonet. If not enough men from any given town or district volunteered, then Union provost marshals (a forerunner of the modern military police) would conduct a special draft to decide which men would be conscripted into the army. Towns and states responded by offering “bounties” – significant cash payments to men who enlisted – as the “carrot” spurring them to voluntarily enlist rather than face the embarrassing “stick” of having been drafted with no bounty paid out. In a typical scenario, Pvt. George Patch told his parents that half of the men he knew who recently enlisted had done so because they were afraid of being drafted and then having to bear that stigma.
As summer 1862 rolled into fall, the carrot and stick process seemed to be working. Men who may not have enlisted before now began to volunteer by the tens of thousands so that they could collect the lucrative bounty payments and avoid the public disgrace of having been conscripted.
In the post-war years, the North chose to remember those men who enlisted in the summer of 1862 as the second great wave of patriotic outpouring. The massive amount of bounty money that had to be paid by municipalities to buy those enlistments was generally ignored. In his post-war memoir, William Lapham disparaged those mercenaries who had to be bought or hired. “People tried to make themselves believe that this was patriotism,” Lapham wrote, “but it was really an act of cowardice and resorted to only to prevent conscription.”
Draft avoidance was initially quite legal and resulted in some of the deepest home front polarization throughout the war.
First, any drafted man could avoid service simply by paying a $300 fee to the federal government through what was known as the “Commutation Clause.” Only days after the 1863 law went into effect, one man who already had his money in hand was quoted as saying he “would rather pay $1,000 than be shot at one round.” Nevertheless, $300 was a huge sum of money for the time and was roughly equivalent to the annual wages of a man performing unskilled manual labor. Many felt the clause discriminated against the working classes and quickly gave rise to the belief that the conflict was “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”
The law also allowed for a draft-exempt white man, such as a foreign alien or a man older than age 45 or younger than age 20, to offer himself as a drafted man’s substitute for an agreed-upon fee that in most cases was quite hefty. Yet the most desirable means of avoiding service was to acquire a permanent medical exemption, which a man could obtain if he could “prove” that he possessed an illness or disability that prohibited him from properly performing military duties. Throughout the North, men who seemed perfectly healthy to their neighbors before the draft were now feigning deafness or blindness, or had contracted internal afflictions such as rheumatism or hernias.
The 1863 call for 300,000 men and its results revealed just how desperate the North’s draft-eligible population was to avoid military service. If the real intent of the draft was to first gain more men through enlistment, then the results were almost comical. Of the 292,441 names drawn in the 1863 draft, 52,288 paid the $300 commutation fee while 164,395 (56 percent) obtained exemptions for purported physical maladies. Another 26,002 drafted men furnished substitutes. Only 9,881 drafted men directly entered the army straightaway; a ratio of only one in 30. Meanwhile, 39,415 disregarded the law entirely by failing to report to the enrollment offices after their names were drawn.
Countless soldiers who had eagerly enlisted into the Union army also learned in due course that their loyalty to the uniform did not equate to a taste for military life. Most men served honorably, nevertheless tens of thousands opted to desert. Many did so not because of battlefield cowardice but because they believed their families were suffering in their absence.
“No blame was attached to anyone who was smart enough to get away,” wrote a soldier in the 4th Rhode Island Infantry because their culture’s ethos acknowledged that a man’s tangible responsibilities to his family and the local community took precedence over any theoretical national duty.
Scores of men who had no desire to don a blue uniform sought refuge by fleeing into Canada. Over 90,000 such “skedaddlers” slipped over the border during the last two years of the war. The flood was so intense that in 1863 to 64, Canadian farmers could find all the laborers they needed for their fields by offering only food and shelter. In so doing, these men became the nation’s first “draft dodgers,” a term later popularized during the 20 century’s contentious Vietnam War era.
The final aggregate tally of conscription numbers was telling and revealed the depth of Northern war-avoidance sentiment. Of the more than 776,000 men eventually drafted by the federal government between July 1863 and April 1865, a mere six percent were actually held to service. More than 160,000 men – or roughly 21 percent of those drafted – simply refused to report to their draft boards for examination, making them deserters by choice and law. The remainder paid the commutation fee, hired a substitute, or gained some manner of medical exemption.
Their reasons were varied and ranged from the perceived primacy of familial obligations trumping any manner of national duty to a philosophical disagreement over the war’s deeper questions. Perhaps much of that was simply human nature. In that regard, we may ask ourselves if the Civil War’s local versus national loyalty debates ever really ended. Or as we saw with the Vietnam War and other American conflicts, do they still rear their head from time to time in a different form? When it comes to American war and its inevitable strains of avoidance and dissent, Shakespeare’s famous phrase “what’s past is prologue” rings true.
Paul Taylor is an award-winning author of nine books on the American Civil War including his most recent ‘Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North. He spent his career in the financial services industry and now lives in southeast Michigan.
