Chapter 20. Fire in the Rear

I

Despite his preoccupation with military matters, Lincoln told Charles Sumner in January 1863 that he feared " 'the fire in the rear'—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances."¹ The president had ample grounds for concern. The peace faction of the Democratic party grew stronger with each setback of Union armies. And the enactment of a conscription law in March 1863 gave the antiwar movement additional stimulus.

By 1863 Clement L. Vallandigham had emerged as leader of the Peace Democrats. Only forty-two years old, the handsome Ohio congressman had cut his political eyeteeth on the Jeffersonian philosophy of limited government. "It is the desire of my heart," he declared soon after the outbreak of war, "to restore the Union, the Federal Union as it was forty years ago." To this desire Vallandigham added sympathy for the South produced by descent from a Virginia family and marriage to the daughter of a Maryland planter. Although Ohio Republicans had gerrymandered him into defeat in the 1862 election, Vallandigham went out with a bang rather than a whimper. In a farewell speech to the House on January 14, 1863, and a subsequent tour from New Jersey

1. Sumner to Francis Lieber, Jan. 17, 1863, in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston, 1877–93), IV, 114.

to Ohio, he set forth his indictment of the war and his proposals for peace.²

Vallandigham professed himself a better unionist than the Republicans whose fanaticism had provoked this ruinous war. These same Republicans, he continued, were now fighting not for Union but for abolition. And what had they accomplished? "Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." The South could never be conquered; the only trophies of this war were "defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres . . . the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation . . . of freedom of the press and of speech . . . which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth for the past twenty months." What was the solution? "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. . . . Withdraw your army from the seceded States." Start negotiations for reunion. Vallandigham had no use for the "fanaticism and hypocrisy" of the objection that an armistice would preserve slavery. "I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war . . . and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power" than in Negro slavery. "In considering terms of settlement we [should] look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have on the African."³

This became the platform of Peace Democrats for the next two years. During the early months of 1863 this faction commanded the support of a large minority of the party—perhaps even a majority. A mass meeting of New York Democrats resolved that the war "against the South is illegal, being unconstitutional, and should not be sustained." And while Governor Horatio Seymour of New York promised "to make every sacrifice . . . for the preservation of this Union," he also denounced emancipation as "bloody, barbarous, revolutionary" and pledged to "maintain and defend the sovereignty" of New York against unconstitutional violations by the federal government.⁴

2. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), chaps. 1–6; quotation from p. 79.

3. Vallandigham, The Great Civil War in America (New York, 1863), a pamphlet publication of his January speech in the House, reprinted in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), II, 697–738. Quotations from pp. 706, 707, 711, 719, 732.

4. New York meeting quoted in Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1964 [1942]), 147; Seymour quoted in Nevins, War, II, 394, and in William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), 282.

In Butternut regions of the Midwest, economic grievances reinforced the cultural attitudes of people descended from southern settlers. The war had cut off their normal trade routes along the Mississippi and its tributaries, forcing them into dependence on Yankee railroads and canals feeding an east-west pattern of trade. Real and imaginary grievances against high rates and poor service on these routes exacerbated the hostility of Butternuts toward New Englanders whom they charged with controlling their destiny through manipulation of Congress as well as of the economy. "Shall we sink down as serfs to the heartless, speculative Yankees," asked an Ohio editor, "swindled by his tariffs, robbed by his taxes, skinned by his railroad monopolies?"⁵

This sense of Butternut identity with the South and hostility to the Northeast gave rise to talk among western Democrats of a "Northwest Confederacy" that would reconstruct a Union with the South, leaving New England out in the cold until she confessed the error of her ways and humbly petitioned for readmission. However bizarre such a scheme appears in retrospect, it commanded much rhetorical support during the war. "The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way," warned Vallandigham in January 1863. "If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate or profitable to your purse, will continue it . . . [be prepared for] eternal divorce between the West and the East." Though less extreme than Vallandigham, Congressman Samuel S. Cox of Ohio agreed that "the erection of the states watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries into an independent Republic is the talk of every other western man."⁶ This threat to reopen the Mississippi by a separate peace generated General McClernand's proposal to reopen it with his separate campaign against Vicksburg. The whole issue lent an urgency to Grant's efforts to capture Vicksburg and a bitter edge to criticisms of his initial failures to do so.

An important law passed by Congress in February 1863 intensified the alienation of western Democrats: the National Banking Act. This measure owed much to Secretary of the Treasury Chase's desire to augment

5. Columbus Crisis, Jan. 21, 1863, quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 125. For the regional economic bases of copperheadism, see Frank L. Klement, "Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism," Historian, 14 (1951), 27–44, and Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960).

6. Vallandigham, The Great Civil War, in Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets, 724, 729–30; Cox, "Puritanism in Politics," in Cox, Eight Years in Congress (New York, 1865), 283.

the market for war bonds; it owed even more to the Whiggish Republican desire to rationalize the decentralized, unstable structure of state banks and to create a uniform banknote currency. Treasury notes (greenbacks) provided a national currency, but they circulated alongside several hundred types of banknotes of varying degrees of soundness. No effective national regulation of banking had existed since the Jacksonian era. A nation "which leaves the power to regulate its currency to the legislation of thirty-four different states abandons one of the essential attributes of sovereignty," said Representative Samuel Hooper of Massachusetts. "The policy of this country," added Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Sherman, "ought to be to make everything national as far as possible; to nationalize our country so that we shall love our country."⁷

On February 25, 1863, the National Banking Act became law with the affirmative votes of 78 percent of the Republicans overcoming the negative votes of 91 percent of the Democrats. As supplemented by additional legislation the next year, this law authorized the granting of federal charters to banks that met certain standards, required them to purchase U. S. bonds in an amount equal to one-third of their capital, and permitted them to issue banknotes equal to 90 percent of the value of such bonds. Not until Congress drove state banknotes out of circulation with a 10 percent tax levied on them in 1865 did most state banks convert to federal charters. But the 1863 law laid the groundwork for the banking system that prevailed for a half-century after the war. Not surprisingly, Jacksonian Democrats in the Old Northwest denounced "this monstrous Bank Bill" as new evidence of the wartime conspiracy by "the money monopoly of New England" to "destroy the fixed institutions of the States, and to build up a central moneyed despotism."⁸

The years of real passion on the bank issue, however, belonged to the 1830s and 1890s. In 1863, hostility to emancipation was the principal fuel that fired antiwar Democrats. On this issue, also, New England was the main enemy. The "Constitution-breaking, law-defying, negro-loving Phariseeism of New England" had caused the war, said Samuel S. Cox. "In the name of God," cried a former governor of Illinois in December 1862, "no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism." An Ohio editor branded Lincoln a "half-witted usurper" and his Emancipation

7. Quotations from Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, 1970), 314, 326–27.

8. Klement, "Economic Aspects of Middle Western Copperheadism," loc. cit., 39–40.

Proclamation "monstrous, impudent, and heinous . . . insulting to God as to man, for it declares those 'equal' whom God created unequal."⁹

Did such rhetoric fall within the rights of free speech and a free press? A case can be made that it stimulated desertion from the army and resistance to the war effort. Democratic newspapers that circulated among soldiers contained many editorials proclaiming the illegality of an anti-slavery war. "You perceive that it is to emancipate slaves . . . that you are used as soldiers," declared the Dubuque Herald. "Are you, as soldiers, bound by patriotism, duty or loyalty to fight in such a cause?" Newspapers printed many alleged letters written by family members at home to soldiers in the army. "I am sorry you are engaged in this . . . unholy, unconstitutional and hellish war," a father supposedly wrote to his son, "which has no other purpose but to free the negroes and enslave the whites." Another letter advised an Illinois soldier "to come home, if you have to desert, you will be protected—the people are so enraged that you need not be alarmed if you hear of the whole of our Northwest killing off the abolitionists."¹⁰ Such propaganda had its intended effect. So many members of two southern Illinois regiments deserted "rather than help free the slaves" that General Grant had to disband the regiments. Soldiers from several other regiments allowed themselves to be captured so they could be paroled and sent home.¹¹

Equally serious were the actions of the newly elected Democratic legislatures of Indiana and Illinois. The lower houses in both states passed resolutions calling for an armistice and a peace conference. Both lower houses also demanded retraction of the "wicked, inhuman and unholy" Emancipation Proclamation as the price for continued state support of the war. When the two legislatures began work on bills to take control of state troops away from the Republican governors (elected in 1860), these governors decided to act. With the acquiescence of the Lincoln administration, Richard Yates of Illinois used an obscure clause of the state constitution to prorogue the legislature in June 1863. Though a

9. Cox, "Puritanism in Politics," Eight Years in Congress, 283; John Reynolds quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 115; Samuel Medary quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro during the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 77.

10. Quotations from Gray, Hidden Civil War, 122, 133.

11. Nevins, War, II, 290; Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), 246; O.R., Ser. II, Vol. 5, p.

state court found that he had exceeded his authority, the court could not itself order the legislature back into session. Indiana's iron-willed Oliver P. Morton simply persuaded Republican legislators to absent themselves, thereby forcing the legislature into adjournment for lack of a quorum. For the next two years Morton ran the state without a legislature—and without the usual appropriations. He borrowed from banks and businesses, levied contributions on Republican counties, and drew $250,000 from a special service fund in the War Department—all quite extralegal, if not illegal. But Republicans everywhere endorsed the principle of Morton's action: the Constitution must be stretched in order to save constitutional government from destruction by rebellion.¹²

This reasoning buttressed Lincoln's policy in the most celebrated civil liberties case of the war—the military arrest and conviction of Vallandigham for disloyalty. Vallandigham was hardly a selfless martyr in this case; on the contrary, he courted arrest in order to advance his languishing candidacy for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Ohio. He found an unwitting ally in General Burnside, whose political judgment proved no more subtle than his military judgment at Fredericks-burg. Appointed commander of the Department of the Ohio (embracing states bordering that river) after transfer from the Army of the Potomac, Burnside decided to come down hard on the copperheads. In April 1863 he issued a general order declaring that any person committing "expressed or implied" treason would be subject to trial by a military court and punishment by death or banishment.¹³ What constituted implied treason Burnside did not say, but the country would soon find out.

Vallandigham recognized this order as his opportunity. With plenty of advance publicity to ensure that Burnside's agents would be on hand, he spoke at a rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, on May 1. His address was a rehash of standard antiwar themes. As recorded by Burnside's staff officer, Vallandigham denounced this "wicked, cruel and unnecessary war" waged "for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism . . . a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites." This was enough for Burnside. He sent a squad of soldiers to arrest Vallandigham at his home in Dayton. In a manner that lent credence to accusations of despotism, soldiers broke down the door in the middle of the night and hustled Vallandigham away leaving behind his hysterical wife and a terrified sister-in-law. While his supporters

12. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors, 311–18; Nevins, War, II, 391–93.

13. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 23, pt. 2, p. 237.

rioted and burned down the office of Dayton's Republican newspaper, a military commission met in Cincinnati on May 6 and convicted Vallandigham "of having expressed sympathy" for the enemy and having uttered "disloyal sentiments and opinions, with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the Government [to suppress] an unlawful rebellion."¹⁴ Unwilling to go so far as to put Vallandigham before a firing squad, the commission recommended his imprisonment for the war's duration, and Burnside so ordered. Vallandigham filed for a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied by a federal judge who pointed out that Lincoln had suspended the writ in such cases.

These proceedings produced cries of outrage from Democrats and murmurings of anxiety from many Republicans. The most important protest came from a meeting of War Democrats in Albany, who pointedly asked whether the government was trying to suppress rebellion in the South or "to destroy free institutions in the North." The Vallandigham case did indeed raise troubling constitutional questions. Could a speech be treason? Could a military court try a civilian? Did a general, or for that matter a president, have the power to impose martial law or suspend habeas corpus in an area distant from military operations where the civil courts were functioning?¹⁵

These questions went to the heart of the administration's policy for dealing with the fire in the rear. Lincoln would have preferred not to have had the issue raised in this particular manner. He was embarrassed by Burnside's arrest of Vallandigham, about which the president learned from the newspapers. Presented with a fait accompli, Lincoln decided that more damage would be done by repudiating Burnside than by upholding him. But in an attempt to minimize the political consequences, Lincoln commuted Vallandigham's sentence from imprisonment to banishment. On May 25 Union cavalry escorted the Ohioan under flag of truce to General Bragg's lines south of Murfreesboro, where the reluctant rebels accepted this uninvited guest.

Lincoln's shrewd move failed in one respect: while in exile, Vallandigham rode to the gubernatorial nomination on a wave of sympathy from Ohio Democrats. After traveling through the Confederacy to Wilmington, he boarded a blockade-runner for Canada and made his way to the border city of Windsor, from which he conducted his campaign

14. Ibid., Ser. II, Vol. 5, pp. 633–46.

15. The Albany resolutions are published in Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets, II, 740–45.

for governor. Before leaving the South, he spoke with several Confederate congressmen and army officers. He made clear to them his commitment to reunion through an armistice and negotiations. Southerners replied that they would accept peace only on the basis of independence. If Vallandigham thought the Union could be restored by compromise, they declared, he was "badly deluded." In a confidential interview with a Confederate agent, Vallandigham said that if the South "can only hold out this year . . . the peace party of the North would sweep the Lincoln dynasty out of existence." Vallandigham clung to his hope for eventual reunion, but left this agent with the impression that if the South refused to come back "then possibly he is in favor of recognizing our independence."¹⁶

It was on these principles—minus the "possible" recognition of southern independence—that Vallandigham conducted his strange campaign-in-exile for governor. Long before voters went to the Ohio polls in October, however, an upturn of Union military fortunes would undermine his peace platform. In the meantime Lincoln sought to defuse the civil liberties issue with two public replies to Democratic critics. He rejected the charge that Vallandigham had been arrested "for no other reason than words addressed to a public meeting." Rather it was "because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops [and] to encourage desertions. . . . He was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends." The president than asked a rhetorical question that turned out to be the most powerful—and famous—part of his argument. "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy." This "giant rebellion" reached into the North itself, Lincoln continued, where "under cover of 'liberty of speech,' 'liberty of the press,' and Habeas corpus,' [the rebels] hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause." Thus the whole country was a war zone and military arrests in areas far from the fighting front were justified. Civil courts were "utterly incompetent" to deal with such a massive threat to the nation's life. This was precisely the contingency that framers of the

16. Klement, The Limits of Dissent, 209–11; Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 229–30, summarizing a memorandum of the interview written by agent Robert Ould. The memorandum itself has been lost.

Constitution foresaw when they authorized suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion. With a homely but effective metaphor, Lincoln affirmed that he could no more believe that the necessary curtailment of civil liberties in wartime would establish precedents fatal to liberty in peacetime "than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life."¹⁷

Lincoln's two letters on civil liberties were published far and wide by the newly established Union League and Loyal Publication Society. Believing that the copperheads were organized in vast secret societies such as the Knights of the Golden Circle and Order of American Knights, unionists felt impelled to fight back with their own societies. Founded by businessmen and professional men of substance and influence, the Union Leagues, Loyal Leagues and their publication boards achieved much greater power than the Democratic secret societies, whose supposed legions existed more in the fevered imaginations of Republicans than in fact. The Union Leagues became in effect an auxiliary of the Republican party, which began to call itself the Union party in several states—thereby implying that the opposition was a dis-union party.¹⁸

The first successes of this counterattack against Democratic defeatism came in New Hampshire and Connecticut. These states held gubernatorial elections in the spring. The results in 1863 were closely watched elsewhere as a portent. In both states the Democrats nominated peace men of the Vallandigham stripe, hoping to cash in on voter disillusionment with the war. Republicans and Union Leagues mobilized to stem the apparent Democratic tide. The War Department helped by granting well-timed furloughs to soldiers who were expected to go home and vote

17. CWL, VI, 260–69, 300—06. Vallandigham's attorneys appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that the military trial of a civilian in a non-war zone where civil courts were functioning was unconstitutional. The Court ducked this issue in 1864, claiming no appellate jurisdiction over the proceedings of a military court. But in 1866, after the wartime emergency was over, the Supreme Court ruled that a similar military trial in 1864 of an Indiana copperhead-named Lambdin Milligan was unconstitutional.

18. For a brief history of the Union Leagues and similar societies, and a broad sample of their publications, see Freidel, Union Pamphlets. Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984), compares the membership and purposes of these various organizations.

Republican. These efforts succeeded—but just barely. The Republican candidate in Connecticut won with 52 percent of the vote. In New Hampshire the presence of a War Democratic third party prevented any candidate from winning a majority and threw the election into the Republican legislature, which elected their man.¹⁹

A prime issue in both elections was the draft, enacted by Congress on March 3, 1863. Democrats added conscription to emancipation and military arrests in their catalogue of Republican sins. The Enrollment Act of 1863 was designed mainly as a device to stimulate volunteering by the threat of a draft. As such it worked, but with such inefficiency, corruption, and perceived injustice that it became one of the most divisive issues of the war and served as a model of how not to conduct a draft in future wars.

By the beginning of 1863 recruitment in the North arrived at the same impasse it had reached in the South a year earlier. The men likely to enlist for patriotic reasons or adventure or peer-group pressure were already in the army. War weariness and the grim realities of army life discouraged further volunteering. The booming war economy had shrunk the number of unemployed men to the vanishing point. The still tentative enlistment of black soldiers could scarcely begin to replace losses from disease and combat and desertion during the previous six months. Like the Confederacy in early 1862, the Union army in 1863 faced a serious manpower loss through expiration of enlistments: 38 two-year regiments raised in 1861, and 92 nine-month militia regiments organized in 1862 were due to go home during the spring and summer of 1863. This prompted Congress to act.

In its nationalizing tendencies the resulting law was similar to the recently passed Banking Act. State governors had taken the lead in the organization of volunteer regiments in 1861–62. The draft was a national process. Congress authorized a Provost Marshals Bureau in the War Department to enforce conscription. This Bureau sent to each congressional district a number of provost marshals whose first task was to enroll every male citizen and immigrant who had filed for citizenship aged twenty to forty-five.²⁰ This became the basis for each district's quota

19. Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats (Rutherford, N.J., 1975), 231–36; John Niven, Connecticut for the Union: The Role of the State in the Civil War (New Haven, 1965), 305–8.

20. Men eligible for the draft were divided into two classes. Class 1 included all single men and married men aged 20 to 35. Class 2 included married men over 35. Men from class 2 would not be drafted until class 1 had been exhausted. In practice, that meant virtually never.

in the four calls for new troops that Lincoln issued after passage of the conscription act in March 1863. In the first draft (July 1863), provost marshals called up 20 percent of the enrollees, chosen by lot in each district. In the three drafts of 1864, the War Department assigned each district a quota determined by its pro rata share of the number of soldiers called for by the president, after adjustment for men who had already enlisted from the district. Each district had fifty days to fill its quota with volunteers. Those that failed to do so then held a lottery draft to obtain a sufficient number of men to meet the quota.

If a man's name was drawn in this lottery, one of several things would happen to him next—the least likely of which was induction into the army. Of the men chosen in the four drafts, more than one-fifth (161,000 of 776,000) "failed to report"—fleeing instead to the West, to Canada, or to the woods. Of those who did report to the provost marshal's office, one-eighth were sent home because of already filled quotas. Three-fifths of the remaining 522,000 were exempted for physical or mental disability or because they convinced the inducting officer that they were the sole means of support for a widow, an orphan sibling, a motherless child, or an indigent parent. Unlike the Confederate Congress, Union lawmakers allowed no occupational exemptions. But a draftee who passed the physical exam and could not claim any dependent relatives still had two options: he could hire a substitute, which exempted him from this and any future draft; or he could pay a commutation fee of $300, which exempted him from this draft but not necessarily the next one.²¹ Of the 207,000 men who were drafted, 87,000 paid the commutation fee and 74,000 furnished substitutes, leaving only 46,000 who went personally into the army. The pool of substitutes was furnished by eighteen- and nineteen-year olds and by immigrants who had not filed for citizenship, who were not liable to conscription.²²

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

Occupation	Failed to Report	Exempted for Cause	Commuted or Hired Substitute	Held to Service
Unskilled Laborer	24.9%	45.1%	24.2%	5.8%
Skilled Laborer	25.7%	43.8%	21.9%	8.6%
Farmer & Farm Laborer	16.1%	34.1%	30.9%	18.9%
Merchant, Manufacturer, Banker, Broker	22.6%	46.3%	29.1%	2.0%
Clerk	26.2%	47.7%	24.3%	1.8%
Professional	16.3%	48.5%	28.9%	6.3%

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.

of $1,000 or more. Some men could not resist the temptation to take this money, desert, assume a different name, travel to another town, and repeat the process. Several of these "bounty jumpers" got away with the practice several times. "Bounty brokers" went into business to seek the best deals for their clients—with a cut of the bounty as payment. They competed with "substitute brokers" for a share of this lucrative trade in cannon fodder. Relatively few of the bounty men or substitutes actually became cannon fodder, however, for many deserted before they ever got into action and others allowed themselves to be captured at the first contact with the enemy. Thus while the conscription-substitute-bounty system produced three-quarters of a million new men,²⁸ they did little to help win the war. This task fell mainly on the pre-bounty veterans of 1861 and 1862—who with exaggerated contempt viewed many of the bounty men and substitutes of 1864 as "off-scourings of northern slums . . . dregs of every nation . . . branded felons . . . thieves, burglars, and vagabonds."²⁹

One notorious facet of the bounty and substitute business was the crimping of immigrants. Immigration had declined sharply during the first half of the war, but picked up again in 1863 because of wartime labor shortages. Some of these immigrants came with the intention of joining the army to cash in on bounties or substitute fees. Others were virtually kidnapped into the service by unscrupulous "runners." The substantial number of immigrants in the Union army gave rise to longstanding southern myth that "the majority of Yankee soldiers were foreign hirelings."³⁰ But in fact quite the opposite was true. Immigrants were proportionally under-represented in the Union's armed services. Of some two million white soldiers and sailors, half a million had been born abroad. While immigrants therefore constituted 25 percent of the servicemen, 30 percent of the males of military age in the Union states were foreign-born. Despite the fighting reputation of the Irish Brigade, the Irish were the most under-represented group in proportion to population, followed by German Catholics. Other immigrant groups enlisted in rough proportion to their share of the population.³¹

28. More than 150,000 re-enlisting veterans also received bounties.

29. Wiley, Billy Yank, 343–44; Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 25–29.

30. Wiley, Billy Yank, 428n. 51, quoting an unnamed southern historian who made this assertion in 1951.

31. Data on the number of foreign-born soldiers in the Union army are contained in Benjamin A. Gould, Investigations in Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers (New York, 1869); in Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (Baton Rouge, 1951), esp. 581–82; in Wiley, Billy Yank, 306–15; in William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861–1865 (Albany, 1889), 62–63; and in Edward Channing, The War for Southern Independence (Vol. 6 of his History of the United States, New York, 1925), 426n. An excellent analysis of this matter in the state with the highest proportion of foreign-born men, Wisconsin, finds that while more than half of the males of military age had been born abroad, only 40 percent of the Wisconsin soldiers were foreign-born. Richard N. Current, The History of Wisconsin: The Civil War Era 1848–1873 (Madison, 1976), 306, 335.

The under-representation of Catholic immigrants can be explained in part by the Democratic allegiance of these groups and their opposition to Republican war aims, especially emancipation. Some of them had not yet filed for citizenship—or claimed not to have done so—and were therefore exempt from the draft. Although this group furnished a large number of substitutes and bounty men during the final year of war—thereby achieving an inglorious visibility—they also furnished a large number of deserters and bounty jumpers. Together with Butternuts from the Ohio River valley, they likewise provided many of those who "skedaddled" to escape the draft.³² This ethnocultural pattern reinforced economic class, for Butternuts and Catholic immigrants were concentrated in the lower end of the wealth and income scale. Perhaps this confirms the theme of a "rich man's war"—for many of these people wanted no part of the war—but it modifies the "poor man's fight" notion. This modification is borne out by the following table comparing previous occupations of white Union soldiers with the occupational distribution of males in the states from which they came.³³

32. Levine, "Draft Evasion," loc. cit., 820–34; Sterling, "Midwest Draft Resistance," 251–62.

33. The data for occupations of all males in 1860 are drawn from the occupational tables in the 1860 printed census. The samples of the previous occupations of Union soldiers are from: 1) a U. S. Sanitary Commission survey of the occupations of 666,530 Union soldiers from all Union states except Maryland and Delaware; 2) Bell Wiley's sample of 13,392 white Union soldiers in 114 companies from all the free states plus Missouri. (California, Oregon, and the territories are not included in these data.) The Sanitary Commission and Wiley samples were drawn from company muster rolls and are representative of the proportion of soldiers from the various states. The Sanitary Commission data were reported in Gould, Investigations in Military and Anthropological Statistics, and the Wiley data were kindly supplied to the author by Wiley before his death. I am indebted to his generosity and to the painstaking labor of Patricia McPherson, who compiled the occupational data from the 1860 census.

Occupational Categories	Union Soldiers (U.S. Sanitary Commission Sample)	Union Soldiers (Bell Wiley Sample)	All Males (From 1860 Census)
Farmers and farm laborers	47.5%	47.8%	42.9%
Skilled laborers	25.1	25.2	24.9
Unskilled laborers	15.9	15.1	16.7
White-collar and commercial	5.1	7.8	10.0
Professional	3.2	2.9	3.5
Miscellaneous and unknown	3.2	1.2	2.0

From this table it might appear that the white-collar class was the most under-represented group in the army. But this appearance is deceptive, for the median age of soldiers at enlistment was 23.5 years while the occupational data from the census were for all adult males. Two-fifths of the soldiers were twenty-one or younger. Studies of nineteenth-century occupational mobility have shown that 10 percent or more of young men who started out as laborers subsequently moved up the occupational ladder.³⁴ If one could control for the age of soldiers, it seems likely that the only category significantly under-represented would be unskilled workers.

Even if the dichotomy rich man's war/poor man's fight lacked objective reality, it remained a powerful symbol to be manipulated by Democrats who made conscription a partisan and class issue. While 100 percent of the congressional Republicans supported the draft bill, 88 percent of the Democrats voted against it.³⁵ Scarcely any other issue except emancipation evoked such clearcut partisan division. Indeed, Democrats linked these two issues in their condemnation of the draft as

34. Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), esp. table on p. 234. This table summarizes the results of studies of occupational mobility in several cities. These studies show that an average of 15 to 20 percent of the young blue-collar workers eventually moved into white-collar jobs, while 5 to 10 percent of the young white-collar workers eventually dropped to blue-collar positions. These studies do not measure the occupational mobility of farm boys, who may have experienced a higher rate of movement into white-collar jobs.

35. CG, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., pp. 1293, 1389.

an unconstitutional means to achieve the unconstitutional end of freeing the slaves. A democratic convention in the Midwest pledged that "we will not render support to the present Administration in its wicked Abolition crusade [and] we will resist to the death all attempts to draft any of our citizens into the army." Democratic newspapers hammered at the theme that the draft would force white working men to fight for the freedom of blacks who would come north and take away their jobs. The editor of New York's leading Catholic weekly told a mass meeting that "when the President called upon them to go and carry on a war for the nigger, he would be d______d if he believed they would go." In a Fourth of July 1863 speech to Democrats in the city, Governor Seymour warned Republicans who pleaded military necessity for emancipation and conscription: "Remember this—that the bloody and treasonable doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government."³⁶

Such rhetoric inflamed smoldering tensions. Draft dodgers and mobs killed several enrollment officers during the spring and summer. Anti-Negro violence erupted in a number of cities. Nowhere was the tinder more flammable than in New York City, with its large Irish population and powerful Democratic machine. Crowded into noisome tenements in a city with the worst disease mortality and highest crime rate in the Western world, working in low-skill jobs for marginal wages, fearful of competition from black workers, hostile toward the Protestant middle and upper classes who often disdained or exploited them, the Irish were ripe for revolt against this war waged by Yankee Protestants for black freedom. Wage increases had lagged 20 percent or more behind price increases since 1861. Numerous strikes had left a bitter legacy, none more than a longshoremen's walkout in June 1863 when black stevedores under police protection took the place of striking Irishmen.

Into this setting came draft officers to begin the drawing of names on Saturday, July 11. Most of the militia and federal troops normally stationed in the city were absent in Pennsylvania pursuing Lee's army after the battle of Gettysburg. The first day's drawing went quietly enough, but on Sunday hundreds of angry men congregated in bars and vowed to attack the draft offices next morning. They made good their threat, setting off four days of escalating mob violence that terrorized the city

36. Convention quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 123; Editor James McMaster of Freeman's Journal quoted in Lee, Discontent in New York City, 239; Seymour quoted in Cook, Armies of the Streets, 53.

and left at least 105 people dead. It was the worst riot in American history.³⁷

Many of the men (and women) in the mobs indulged in indiscriminate looting and destruction. But as in most riots, the mobs singled out certain targets that were related to the underlying causes of the outbreak. Draft offices and other federal property went up in flames early in the rioting. No black person was safe. Rioters beat several, lynched a half-dozen, smashed the homes and property of scores, and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Mobs also fell upon several business establishments that employed blacks. Rioters tried to attack the offices of Republican newspapers and managed to burn out the ground floor of the Tribune while howling for Horace Greeley's blood. Several editors warded off the mob by arming their employees with rifles; Henry Raymond of the Times borrowed three recently invented Gatling guns from the army to defend his building. Rioters sacked the homes of several prominent Republicans and abolitionists. With shouts of "Down with the rich" and "There goes a $300 man" they attacked well-dressed men who were incautious enough to show themselves on the streets. These hints of class warfare were amplified by assaults on the property of reputed anti-labor employers and the destruction of street-sweeping machines and grain-loading elevators that had automated the jobs of some of the unskilled workers who made up the bulk of the rioters. Several Protestant churches and missions were burned by the mobs whose membership was at least two-thirds Irish.³⁸

Untrained in riot control, New York's police fought the mobs courageously but with only partial success on July 13 and 14. Army officers desperately scraped together a few hundred troops to help. The War Department rushed several regiments from Pennsylvania to New York, where on July 15 and 16 they poured volleys into the ranks of rioters with the same deadly effect they had produced against rebels at Gettysburg two weeks earlier. By July 17 an uneasy peace returned to the shattered city. Determined to carry out the draft in New York lest successful resistance there spawn imitation elsewhere, the government built

37. Exaggerated contemporary estimates of more than a thousand persons killed found their way into popular histories of the riot. But the careful research of Adrian Cook has established that only 105 people were definitely killed, and another dozen or so deaths may have been linked to the rioting. Eleven of those killed were black victims of the mob, eight were soldiers, and two were policemen; the rest were rioters. Cook, Armies of the Streets, 193–94, 310n.

38. Ibid., passim, esp. 117, 195–96.

up troop strength in Manhattan to 20,000 men who enforced calm during the resumption of drafting on August 19. By then the city council had appropriated funds to pay the commutation fees of drafted men—including, no doubt, some of the rioters.