Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (121 page)

21
. Criticisms of commutation led to its repeal in 1864—except for conscientious objectors—so that with this minor exception the commutation option did not apply to the last two drafts of July and December 1864.

22
. This and the following paragraphs are based on several studies, especially Fred A. Shannon,
The Organization and Administration of the Union Army
, 1861–1865, 2 vols. (Cleveland, 1928), I, 195–323, II, 11–260; Eugene C. Murdock,
Patriotism Limited
1862–1865:
The Civil War Draft and the Bounty System
(Kent, Ohio, 1967); Murdock,
One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North
(Madison, 1971); and Peter Levine, "Draft Evasion in the North during the Civil War, 1863–1865,"
JAH
, 67 (1981), 816–34. Nearly all draftees were under 30 years of age, for older men generally were able to claim exemption for cause or to pay for commutation or a substitute.

There were numerous opportunities for fraud, error, and injustice in this cumbersome and confusing process. The enrollment of men eligible for the draft was only as good as the officials who carried it out—and some of them were venal or incompetent. Enrollers probably missed even more of the floating population than census takers missed. On the other hand, some officials padded their rolls with fictitious names in order to draw their pay without doing the hard work of canvassing door to door. Timid enrollers feared to venture into Butternut counties of the Midwest, coal-mining districts of Pennsylvania, tough neighborhoods in New York, and other areas hostile to the draft and to the war. Many men "skedaddled" to avoid enrollment. Consequently some districts were under-enrolled while others had padded lists, with resulting inequities in quotas. Governors and congressmen brought pressure for adjustment of quotas, and some districts had to be re-enrolled. Governor Seymour of New York (a Democrat) accused the administration of padding the enrollment in Democratic districts to increase their quotas. Although discrepancies between Democratic and Republican districts did sometimes occur, the usual reason was not a Republican plot but rather a smaller previous enlistment from Democratic districts, leaving a larger quota to be conscripted.

Numerous openings for fraud also existed after enrollment was completed and men whose names had been drawn were called for examination. Surgeons could be bribed, false affidavits claiming dependent support could be filed, and other kinds of under-the-table influence could be exerted. Some potential draftees feigned insanity or disease. Others practiced self-mutilation. Some naturalized citizens claimed to be aliens.

In the South, the privilege of hiring a substitute had produced the bitter slogan of "rich man's war and poor man's fight." In the North, commutation was even more unpopular than substitution. "Three Hundred Dollars or Your Life" blazoned the headlines in Democratic newspapers. A parody of a popular recruiting song made the rounds: "We Are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Dollars More."
²³
The price of commutation amounted to almost a year's wages for an unskilled laborer. "
The rich are exempt!
" proclaimed an Iowa editor.

23
. Basil L. Lee,
Discontent in New York City
1861–1865 (Washington, 1943), 90; Foote,
Civil War
, II, 151.

"Did you ever know aristocratic legislation to so directly point out the poor man as inferior to the rich?" On the face of it, the privileges of commutation and substitution did seem to make the conscription act, in the words of a modern historian, "one of the worst pieces of class legislation ever passed by the United States Congress."
²⁴

But a closer examination challenges this conclusion. Substitution was hallowed by tradition, having existed in European countries (even in France during the
levée en masse
), in American states during the Revolution, in the militia, and in the Confederacy. The Republican architects of the draft law inserted commutation as a means of putting a cap on the price of substitutes. In the South the cost of a substitute had already soared above $1,000. The commutation alternative in the North would prevent the price of a substitute going much higher than $300. Republicans saw this as a way of bringing exemption within reach of the working class instead of discriminating against them.

Of course a draft without either substitution or commutation would have been more equitable. But substitution was so deeply rooted in precedent as to be viewed as a right. Civil War experience changed this perception, and after twenty months of such experience the Confederacy repealed substitution in December 1863. But the North retained it through all four of its draft calls (also a period of about twenty months). Commutation remained an alternative in the first two Union drafts (summer 1863 and spring 1864). In these drafts it worked as Republicans said it would. Studies of conscription in New York and Ohio have found virtually no correlation between wealth and commutation. Districts in New York with low per capita wealth had about the same percentage of men who paid commutation (or hired substitutes) as those with higher wealth. In four Ohio districts—two rural and two urban—the proportion of unskilled laborers who commuted was 18 percent, compared with 22 percent for skilled laborers, 21 percent for merchants, bankers, manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, and clerks, and 47 percent for farmers and farm laborers. Since skilled and unskilled laborers had the highest percentage of "failure to report" when their names were drawn, it appears that at least in Ohio the laborers and farmers were
more
likely than men in white-collar jobs to avoid the draft. In this respect it does not seem to have been especially a poor man's fight.
²⁵

24
. Robert E. Sterling, "Civil War Draft Resistance in the Middle West," Ph.D. dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1974, pp. 167, 150.

25
. James W. Geary, "Civil War Conscription in the North: A Historiographical Review,
CWH
(1986), 208–28; Eugene C. Murdock, "Was It a 'Poor Man's Fight'?"
CWH
, 10 (1964), 241–45; Murdock,
Patriotism Limited
, 211–15; Hugh C. Earnhart, "Commutation: Democratic or Undemocratic?"
CWH
, 12 (1966), 132–42; Levine, "Draft Evasion,"
loc. cit.
, 820–29.

Yet the outcry against "blood money" prompted Congress to repeal commutation in July 1864, despite warnings by some Republicans that this would drive the price of substitutes beyond the reach of the poor. The warning proved to be only partly true. The proportion of laborers and farmers who bought their way out of the last two drafts declined by half after the abolition of commutation. But the percentage of exemptions purchased by white-collar and professional classes also declined by almost half. And in the four drafts taken together the poor seem to have suffered little comparative disadvantage. In New York City districts with the highest concentration of Irish immigrants, 98 percent of the men not otherwise exempted paid commutation or hired substitutes. The following table provides a detailed occupational breakdown of men whose names were drawn in four sample Ohio districts:
²⁶

How could laborers come up with the price of commutation or a substitute? Few of them did, out of their own pockets. But numerous cities and counties appropriated funds raised by property taxes to pay the $300 for those who could not afford it. Tammany Hall ward committees collected money to hire substitutes for draftees, and political machines elsewhere followed suit. Several factories and businesses and railroads bought exemptions for drafted workers with funds contributed by employers and by a 10 percent levy on wages. Draft insurance societies sprang up everywhere to offer a $300 policy for premiums of a few dollars a month. In this manner more than three-quarters of all draftees

26
. Calculated from the raw data presented in Earnhart, "Commutation,"
loc. cit.
, 138–42.

who reported to the provost marshal's office and were not exempted for cause were able to buy their way out of serving.

What kind of conscription was this, in which only 7 percent of the men whose names were drawn actually served? The answer: it was not conscription at all, but a clumsy carrot and stick device to stimulate volunteering. The stick was the threat of being drafted and the carrot was a bounty for volunteering. In the end this method worked, for while only 46,000 drafted men served and another 74,000 provided substitutes, some 800,000 men enlisted or re-enlisted voluntarily during the two years after passage of the conscription act. While the social and economic cost of this process was high, Americans seemed willing to pay the price because compulsory service was contrary to the country's values and traditions. Alexis de Tocqueville's words a generation earlier were still relevant in 1863: "In America conscription is unknown and men are induced to enlist by bounties. The notions and habits of the people . . . are so opposed to compulsory recruitment that I do not think it can ever be sanctioned by their laws."
²⁷

Yet in the end, bounty-stimulated volunteering came to seem an even greater evil than the draft. Implicit bounties began in the first days of the war, when soldiers' aid societies raised money to help support the families of men who gave up their jobs to go off to war. States, counties, and municipalities also appropriated funds for this purpose. These patriotic subsidies aroused no controversy. In the summer of 1862, however, several northern localities found it necessary to pay explicit bounties in order to fill quotas under Lincoln's two calls for troops. A year later the shock of the first draft enrollment and lottery, which provoked bitter resistance in many areas, caused communities to resolve to fill future quotas by any means possible to avoid a draft. Lincoln's three calls for troops in 1864 produced a bidding war to buy volunteers. Private associations raised money for bounties. Cities and counties competed for recruits. The federal government got into the act in October 1863 with a $300 bounty (financed by the $300 commutation fee) for volunteers and re-enlistees.

The half-billion dollars paid in bounties by the North represented something of a transfer of wealth from rich to poor—an ironic counterpoint to the theme of rich man's war/poor man's fight. By 1864 a canny recruit could pyramid local, regional, and national bounties into grants

27
. Quoted in Adrian Cook,
The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of
1863 (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 48.