By this time, the Confederate war effort was in decline. Federal forces were closing in on Richmond, New Orleans, and vital points along the Mississippi River and Atlantic coast. The Confederates had just lost thousands of men in the largest battle ever fought in America up to that time, and many men who had enlisted in the Confederate army for 12 months when the war started were about to go home.
All these factors led to a growing call for conscription, a topic which had been intensely debated in the Confederate Congress. Opponents argued that it violated the same civil liberties that southerners had seceded to uphold. Some claimed that forcing men into the army showed weakness because it indicated that volunteerism alone was no longer enough to maintain the war effort.
Supporters invoked the same arguments they had rejected when northerners made them before the war, citing the constitutional powers of Congress “to raise and support armies” and “provide for the common defense,” as well as to make laws “necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” They also contended that conscription would provide the military with the manpower desperately needed to secure Confederate independence.
Ultimately, new Secretary of War George W. Randolph persuaded enough congressmen to approve the bill, and then he persuaded President Jefferson Davis to sign it into law. Under the law “to Further Provide for the Public Defense,” the Confederacy took the first and most expansive step toward centralizing state and national armies.
Under this law, all able-bodied white males between the ages of 18 to 35 were eligible to be drafted into the army to serve either three years or less if the war ended sooner. Soldiers preparing to return home after serving 12 months were now told they had to stay on for another two years or the war’s end, whichever came first. The three total years of service began on the soldiers’ original enlistment dates. Davis initially resisted extending one-year enlistments to three years, but he finally resolved that it was a necessary measure.
The Adjutant and Inspector General’s Office would enforce this new law. State officials would administer the draft, and draftees would be allowed to elect their own company, battalion, and regimental officers. The number of draftees would be proportional to the number of residents in each state and county. A regular recruiting system was also introduced to counter battlefield losses with continuous recruitment. The law decreed that the Confederate government, not the states, would be responsible for reorganizing and structuring the national army.
Politicians hopeful that the prospect of a draft would stimulate more volunteerism added a provision giving draftees 30 days to volunteer instead. Men could also pay a $500 commutation fee to evade the draft. This clause applied to pacifists such as Quakers and Mennonites; it also aimed to enable skilled laborers and the wealthy to continue serving the Confederacy in noncombatant roles.
Another provision allowed for men to hire substitutes to serve in their place from “persons not liable for duty,” usually those outside the specified age range or foreigners. The substitute clause was based on the English tradition of assuming that those who could afford to hire a substitute could be more useful to the war effort outside the army. “Substitute brokers” became a lucrative profession as a result. This provision caused such widespread resentment among those who could not afford to hire a substitute that it was eventually repealed.
The original Conscription Act offered no exemptions from the draft other than commutation or substitution. Realizing that this could deplete the southern workforce, Congress enacted an amendment five days later that created a “class exemption” system which those working in selected occupations and professions would be exempted from military service. This included government workers, war industry laborers (i.e., those working in textiles, mines, foundries, etc.), river ferrymen and pilots, telegraph operators, hospital employees, apothecaries, printers, clergymen, and educators.
The War Department was given authority to add other jobs to the exemption list as needed, as well as to subsidize industries vital to the war effort, such as iron foundries and mines. In this way, exemption was a tool used by the Confederate government to encourage the flourishment of some industries at the expense of others deemed non-essential.
These exemptions invited fraud, as many new schools quickly opened, along with pharmacies that featured “a few empty jars, a cheap assortment of combs and brushes, a few bottles of ‘hairdye’ and ‘wizard oil’ and other Yankee nostrums.”
Men who owned 20 or more slaves were also exempted from the draft so they could maintain supervision of farm production and guard against potential slave uprisings. This became known as the “Twenty Negro Law.” It only applied to states that had laws requiring white men to oversee and police their slaves. Many criticized this provision as favoring plantation owners.
Governors Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina were among the most virulent critics of the Conscription Act. Brown declared that no “act of the Government of the United States prior to the secession of Georgia struck a blow at constitutional liberty… as has been struck by the conscription act… at one fell swoop, (the act) strikes down the sovereignty of the States, tramples upon the constitutional rights and personal liberty of the citizens, and arms the President with imperial power.”
It was not surprising that Georgia and North Carolina accounted for 92 percent of all exempted government workers in the Confederacy. Even Davis’s own vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, became an outspoken opponent of this measure.
Many who supported the Conscription Act blamed Davis for making it necessary because of his strategy to stay on the defensive and protect multiple static points at once. Davis countered that “without military stores, without the workshops to create them, without the power to import them, necessity not choice has compelled us to occupy strong positions and everywhere to confront the enemy without reserves.”
The Confederate press generally supported the new law but did not hesitate to expose its weaknesses. Despite resentment to government coercion, many saw this as necessary to meet the wartime emergency. The law affected nearly every Confederate family in some way, even though nearly half of those drafted never served.
Bibliography
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