Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

and drafting of soldiers. It did not turn out to be that easy. The formula for establishing state quotas was complex and unclear, various categories of exemptions from the draft were fuzzy, and above all, draftees were permitted to hire substitutes, in what amounted to a personalized bounty system. In Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the county quota for draftees was set at 1,800 men, local notables passed the hat to raise a local bounty fund that they hoped would entice volunteers to fill up the county quota; another three hundred draftees, such as Samuel Pennypacker, hired a substitute. “My grandfather… paid $300 for a substitute in Norristown who was only too willing to go to the front in my stead. I do not know of his name or his fate.” 89

The need for men in this war was insatiable, and so in March 1863 Congress passed an Enrollment Act that bypassed the state governments entirely and created a series of federal enrollment boards that would take responsibility for satisfying the federally assigned state quotas. Each congressional district was expected to establish an enrollment board of three members, headed by a provost marshal, which would draw up a roll of all eligible males within their district. Despite the anger and anxieties that enrollment touched off, enrollment did not necessarily mean conscription. Although each congressional district was issued a quota of volunteers to recruit for each draft call, men would be drafted only from those districts that otherwise failed to meet that quota through volunteering. Districts that could provide sufficient volunteers, or bounties high enough to lure volunteers, would not need to draft anyone, and in the end only seven Northern states would be subject to all four of the draft calls issued under the Enrollment Act.90

Even conscription itself did not necessarily translate into war service. Of the 292,000 names that were drawn from the enrollment lists for the first draft call in 1863, less than 10,000 actually wound up in uniform. Most of the rest were released for disability or on claims to exemption, while another 26,000 hired substitutes (among the hirers being a future president of the United States, Grover Cleveland). Over 50,000 Northerners escaped service by another provision in the Enrollment Act known as “commutation,” which allowed draftees to pay $300 as an exemption fee to escape the draft. Immigrants proved to be equally adept at avoiding conscription: far more entered the army as substitutes, taking the chance of battles and disease in exchange for the benefits of hiring themselves out as soldiers. Even when subsequent draft calls in 1864 and 1865 are added to these figures, no more than 47,000 men were actually conscripted into the Union armies.91

Yet despite the loopholes and commutation provisions, the idea of a compulsory military draft was still a strong dose for Americans to swallow, especially since after 1863 conscription now meant fighting in a war to free black slaves. Moreover, the commutation fee cast the ugly specter of class conflict over the draft: a wealthy man might have no difficulty coming up with the $300 commutation fee or finding and hiring a substitute, but a workingman was looking at what might be an economic wall too high to scale, while the availability of substitutes grew scarcer with each passing month. That, together with the inherently repulsive notion that in a democracy someone could hire a substitute to get shot in his place, was calculated to provoke the bloodiest sort of response among the poor. Anti-draft disturbances erupted within days of the implementation of the Enrollment Act and a new draft call.

The worst incidents of anti-draft violence erupted in New York City in midsummer 1863, two days after the first draft of names was drawn in the 9th Congressional District. Almost from the beginning of the war, New York City had been a hotbed of labor unrest: as men marched off to war and as war contracts sent manufacturing production soaring, New York workingmen found that labor was suddenly at a premium, and they did not hesitate to use the situation to bargain and strike for higher wages. Rumors that the government would use prisoners of war and even South Carolina “contrabands” to break strikes against war-related business had already inflamed working-class tempers when the Enrollment Act became public in the spring of 1863. The terms of the act looked like nothing so much as an attempt to draw workingmen out of this highly attractive labor market and send them into battle so that more blacks could be free to compete for wages and break up strikes—all the while offering a $300 commutation fee for factory owners and their sons.

On July 13, angry crowds of workingmen erupted. For four days, mobs of whites attacked and burned the homes of Republican politicians, tried to demolish Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and lynched any African Americans they happened to lay their hands on, in addition to burning the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Dr. John Thayer, a chemist who worked in the U.S. Assay Office in Wall Street, saw “the whole road way & sidewalks filled with rough fellows (& some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telegraph poles & setting fire to buildings.”

The furious, bareheaded & coatless men assembled under our windows & shouted for Jeff Davis!… Towards evening the mob, furious as demons, went yelling over to the Colored-Orphan Asylum in 5th Avenue… & rolling a barrel of kerosine in it, the whole structure was soon in a blaze, & is now a smoking ruin. What has become of the 300 innocent orphans I could not learn. … Before this fire was extinguished, or rather burnt out, for the wicked wretches who caused it would not permit the engines to be used, the northern sky was brilliantly illuminated, probably by the burning of the Aged Colored-Woman’s Home in 65th Street. … A friend… had seen a poor negro hung an hour or two before. The man had, in