Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers

John M. Sacher

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807176559
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award
Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize In April 1862, the Confederacy faced a dire military situation. Its forces were badly outnumbered, the Union army was threatening on all sides, and the twelve-month enlistment period for original volunteers would soon expire. In response to these circumstances, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. This initiative touched off a struggle for healthy white male bodies—both for the army and on the home front, where they oversaw enslaved laborers and helped produce food and supplies for the front lines—that lasted till the end of the war. John M. Sacher's history of Confederate conscription serves as the first comprehensive examination of the topic in nearly one hundred years, providing fresh insights into and drawing new conclusions about the southern draft program. Often summarily dismissed as a detested policy that violated states' rights and forced nonslaveholders to fight for planters, the conscription law elicited strong responses from southerners wanting to devise the best way to guarantee what they perceived as shared sacrifice. Most who bristled at the compulsory draft did so believing it did not align with their vision of the Confederacy. As Sacher reveals, white southerners' desire to protect their families, support their communities, and ensure the continuation of slavery shaped their reaction to conscription. For three years, Confederates tried to achieve victory on the battlefield while simultaneously promoting their vision of individual liberty for whites and states' rights. While they failed in that quest, Sacher demonstrates that southerners' response to the 1862 conscription law did not determine their commitment to the Confederate cause. Instead, the implementation of the draft spurred a debate about sacrifice—both physical and ideological—as the Confederacy's insatiable demand for soldiers only grew in the face of a grueling war.

CHAPTER 1

The Confederacy
Adopts Conscription, April 1862

On March 28, 1862, Confederate president Jefferson Davis sent a brief but urgent message to Congress proposing a solution to the vexing problem of raising troops for the Confederacy. Approaching the anniversary of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter, and eight months after the Battle of Bull Run, the reality of war had dispelled any hopes that it would be short. A year earlier, Davis had expressed the seemingly simple wish that the Confederacy just wanted to be “let alone.” Abraham Lincoln and the Union army, however, had not cooperated with that plan.

As Davis penned his letter to Congress, southerners, pressed from all sides, recognized the military’s imperative need for more soldiers. Union General George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, soon to grow to more than 100,000 men, camped on the Virginia Peninsula, less than seventy miles away from Davis’s office in Richmond. In the western theater, the Union posed a similar threat, with as many as 75,000 men marching south toward the key railroad junction of Corinth, Mississippi. In the Gulf of Mexico, Admiral David Farragut’s navy sat poised at the mouth of the Mississippi River menacing a lightly defended New Orleans—the South’s largest city.1

The size and status of its own army compounded the Confederacy’s military problems. From the outset of the conflict, the Confederacy faced an uphill struggle, with the Union having a much larger pool of potential soldiers. According to the 1860 census, the Confederate states possessed 1,064,193 white men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, while the Union states contained 4,559,872. Adjustments for border state men who fought for the Confederacy reduced the Union advantage, but it still most likely exceeded 3.5 to 1. Therefore, President Davis needed to ensure that as many of the South’s military-age men as possible entered the army.

In March 1862, he sought both to add to the 300,000 men currently in uniform and to address the fact that many of the Confederate soldiers who had enlisted in the spring and summer of 1861 had signed up for only a single year of service. Within a few months, the outnumbered Confederacy stood to lose the majority of its soldiers. These soldiers had enlisted under a confusing, and sometimes contradictory, hodgepodge of national and state laws, which further complicated administering the army. The most recent policy had called for the states to furnish quotas of soldiers but left the method of satisfying these quotas up to each state government, with some using volunteering, some employing bounties, some using a draft, and some combining these methods.2

Irritated by these frequent alterations in Confederate policy, the conflicts between state and federal laws, and the lack of uniformity in recruiting policies, President Davis’s short message proposed a straightforward solution: the passage of an act declaring that all white southern men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five should be enrolled in the army. Davis contended that conscription would be equitable in that it would ensure “that the burdens should not fall exclusively on the most ardent and patriotic” men who had volunteered and willingly left their communities and families during the conflict’s first year. It now would force men who had remained at home to do their share and join their countrymen in the army. In his proposal, the president matter-of-factly brushed aside any potential objections, asserting that “the right of the State to demand, and the duty of each citizen to render, military service, need only to be stated to be admitted.”3

Less than three weeks after receiving Davis’s request, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. The April 16 law heeded Davis’s suggestion, conscripting all white men from the ages of eighteen to thirty-five, though it allowed for an eligible man to provide a substitute in his place. In order to enforce this policy and to maintain civilian control over the process, Congress assigned this task to the War Department rather than to the army. As a concession to the rights of the states, it specified that men could only be conscripted in their state of residence and that they would serve in state units. The act not only compelled men to join the army but also required those already serving to remain there, extending the service of soldiers of conscription age from twelve months to three years or the duration of the war, whichever came first. In other words, Confederate volunteers, who believed that they would be discharged and allowed to return to their homes in May, June, or July, now found themselves forced to remain in the army, generally denied even a furlough to visit their families.4

The Wilmington Daily Journal immediately proclaimed the conscription bill “beyond question, the most important measure that has ever passed the Confederate Congress.” Indeed, conscription raised a series of hard and fundamental questions about what the Confederacy stood for and what it meant to be a loyal Confederate. These questions included: Why had volunteering failed to provide a sufficient army? Could national conscription be reconciled with the Confederate doctrine of states’ rights? Would southerners see the measure as a challenge to their notions of individual liberty? How would the Confederacy balance the needs of home and the battlefronts? What did loyalty to one’s nation mean? Did the need for more troops trump all these concerns?5

In the short run, most Confederates believed that they needed a stronger army to win the war, and they were willing to accept conscription’s temporary intrusion on their liberty if it led to victory. A year of conflict had demonstrated that Confederate leaders felt that other recruiting methods—particularly twelve-month enlistments—had not worked. While recognizing conscription’s necessity, southerners remained wary of an act that threatened their liberty and that caused suffering on the home front. They would spend the next three years wrestling with these questions, and their answers reveal the complexity in assessing Confederate loyalty. Southerners possessed multiple loyalties, including to family, community, state, and nation, and their attitudes toward conscription depended on their calculation of the relative importance of these competing fealties—a view that could change over time.

A year earlier, when the Confederacy initially called for soldiers, no one had seriously considered conscription, as the number of southern volunteers exceeded the army’s demand for troops. Young southern men rushed to the standard, fearful that delay could mean that they might miss the war entirely. They hoped to enlist, fight in one great battle, and return home as heroes. When President Davis spoke at the Spotswood Hotel upon his arrival in Richmond on June 1, 1861, great cheers met his claim “There is not one true son of the South who is not ready to shoulder his musket to bleed, to die or to conquer in the cause of liberty here.” A Louisianan described her brother as “wild to be off to Virginia” as he “fear[ed] that the fighting will be over before he can get there.” An Alabaman predicted “we are going to kill the last yankey [sic]” within a year, and he would “whip 25 myself.” In 1861, many others shared their rage militaire. The new nation lacked supplies not fighters. A few weeks after Davis’s speech, a war department official worried that the Confederate army could not equip all of these volunteers, and a month later a report from the secretary of war admitted that the army had turned away men because it lacked the means to arm them. With more weapons, the secretary optimistically predicted, he could add as many as 200,000 soldiers in two months.6

When the Confederate victory at Bull Run in July 1861 did not end the war as swiftly as had been hoped, volunteering slowed. With soldiers having “seen the elephant”—their phrase for experiencing combat—and having witnessed friends wounded or killed, army life lost some of its appeal. The Union had not conceded, and the idea of a quick triumph followed by a return home to accolades proved to be a mirage. Most soldiers spent the rest of 1861 in military camps, often bored, sometimes cold, and frequently ill. They also resented military discipline, which challenged their ideas of liberty. Having enlisted for excitement and glory, they had not dreamed of a life characterized by monotonous drilling in a muddy Virginia camp, shivering through the night, and suffering from dysentery. Letters from these soldiers, rather than calling on their fellow southerners to enlist, now often advised the opposite: “Don’t never volunteer.” A Louisianan complained to his mother that army life was “not what it is cracked up to be,” and a Mississippi soldier concurred. He cautioned his father, “Please stay at home” as a “soldiers’ life is the dirtiest meanest life in the world.”7

Three soldiers in Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley army articulated these same concerns. In January 1862, one carped to his mother, “The romance of the thing is entirely worn off, not only with myself but with the whole army.” Complaining to his fiancée of the hardships that he had suffered, which included marching, fighting, and watching soldiers suffer from disease, a second soldier avowed that he would not reenlist but would come home until he was drafted. A third declared, “If I live this twelve months out, I intend to try mighty hard to keep out of [the army]. . . . I don’t think I could stand it for another year.”8

As they pointed out, fortunately for disgruntled soldiers but not for the army, their departure was in sight. This initial group of volunteers did not intend to be long-term professional soldiers and had enlisted only for twelve months. Many of them were farmers who had families at home that depended on their labor both for financial support and for food. Their parents, wives, and children could survive a short enlistment, but a long-term absence would be devastating. Even early in the war, the army preferred men to enlist for more than a year, but a shortage of resources led them to compromise on this matter. If units equipped themselves, they could enlist for just a single year. If they relied on the Confederacy to supply them, they had to enlist for three years.

By the conclusion of 1861, Confederate leaders attended to the twin problems of declining volunteerism and the probability of losing much of the army in the late spring and early summer of 1862. In a November report to Congress, recently appointed Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin listed fourteen problems with the army. In this list, he singled out “the radical vices of a system of short enlistments” as the most important subject that Congress needed to address. In doing so, he reminded Congress that these twelve-month men did not really even serve as fighting soldiers for a whole year. According to his calculations, after deducting time for instruction, transportation, recovery from camp diseases, and winter encampment, their actual effectiveness as combat soldiers rarely exceeded three months. In order to overcome this challenge, Benjamin recommended that Congress offer bounties and furloughs to current troops to entice them to reenlist for the duration of the war.9

In December 1861, General Robert E. Lee, serving as commander of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, assessed the Confederate army’s prospects there. He shared Benjamin’s fears and came to the identical conclusion: “the troops should be organized for the war.” In suggesting this method, Lee, who three months later helped author Davis’s conscription plan, pointed out that transitioning men in and out of the army during peacetime was wasteful enough but that in wartime it could “prove highly disastrous.” Looking toward the new year, he “tremble[d] to think of the consequences that may befall us next spring when all of our twelve-months’ men may claim their discharge.” Other Confederates also recognized the impending problem. An officer serving in Virginia “fear[ed] the consequences of the looming departure of the twelve-month men.” He termed it “a very serious matter,” since “no feasible plan as yet has been proposed to induce them to re-enlist.” Another soldier agreed that the current system caused “great injury,” for it sent troops home “just as they are getting well drilled.” In sum, these men concurred that an army based on an ever-rotating merry-go-round of twelve-month volunteers would never produce enough seasoned soldiers to defeat the Union army.10

In a prominent November 1861 editorial, described as having “the odor of official inspiration,” John Daniel, the editor of the influential Richmond Examiner, proposed a drastic yet simple plan for solving this conundrum: a military draft. Daniel pointed out that the enemy would put 500,000 men in the field for the summer 1862 campaign. He maintained that the time for “half measures” had passed, as a force of volunteers, especially volunteers whose enlistments would expire by the middle of the summer, would lose a conflict against “an army under the iron rule of enforced enlistment and regular discipline.” He called for a draft, albeit one done by the states rather than the federal government. In his plan, the government would demand a quota of men from each state, which in turn would demand a number from each county. Men would be selected by drawing lots, with those drawn entering the army, providing a substitute, or paying a fee to avoid service. In the editor’s opinion, not only would this method supply an army capable of defeating the enemy but also it was the “only system that is really just to all classes of the population,” as everyone stood an equal chance of being drafted.11

Despite this call for a draft, in December 1861, the Confederate Congress still preferred to rely on incentives rather than compulsion. To encourage twelve-month men to reenlist for the war, it passed legislation providing each reenlistee with $50 and a sixty-day furlough. In the short run, this “bounty and furlough act” weakened rather than strengthened the army. Units immediately lost men who eagerly departed the army on their two-month furloughs, and when these soldiers returned, they did not necessarily return to the same companies. The act also stipulated that men who reenlisted could form new units and elect their own officers, thereby further depleting the units in the field.

Reflecting on this policy a year later, the secretary of war stressed the harmful impact that it had on the efficiency of the army, with men joining units that only existed on paper or that could not quickly be made fighting ready. Citing these problems, a leading scholar on the draft posited that the measure should have been called “an act to disorganize and dissolve the provisional army.” Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman went even further in his criticism, claiming, “A worse law could hardly have been imposed on the South by the enemy.”12

The numbers bear out these negative appraisals. Despite pleadings and inducements, the plan neither increased the army’s size nor resulted in an army of men enrolled for the duration of the war. In February 1862, according to Secretary of War Benjamin’s figures, the army only had 92,275 troops enlisted for the war, with an additional 240,475 enrolled for twelve months. Thus, if nothing changed, the Union army’s projected 5 or 6 to 1 manpower advantage might end the war by the middle of the summer. Moreover, in that same month, President Davis’s message to the newly seated first Congress blamed recent Confederate reverses, including those at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in Tennessee, on the “evil” of short-term enlistments. Congress had already decided that the failure of carrots demanded the use of sticks. It passed a bill allowing the president to require that each state provide up to 6 perc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 The Confederacy Adopts Conscription, April 1862
• CHAPTER 2 The First Efforts to Manage Conscription, April–August 1862
• CHAPTER 3 Revising Conscription, August–December 1862
• CHAPTER 4 The Herculean Task Facing Enrolling Officers
• CHAPTER 5 Confederate Conscription Policy in 1863
• CHAPTER 6 The Iron Goes Deep: Conscription Policy in 1864
• CHAPTER 7 The Collapse of Conscription and the Confederacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index