Abraham LincolnCharnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron
History
Abraham Lincoln
Charnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.
Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to
voluntary enlistment. The volunteer received, as the conscript did not,
a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities,
when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling
their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government
bounty. It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered
country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were
plenty of abuses. Substitute brokers provided the wrong article;
ingenious rascals invented the trade of "bounty-jumping," and would
enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for another bounty, and so on
indefinitely; and the number of men enrolled who were afterwards
unaccounted for was large. There was of course also grumbling of
localities at the quotas assigned to them, though no pains were spared to
assign them fairly. There was some opposition to the working of the law
after it was passed, but it was, not general, but partly the opposition
of rowdies in degraded neighbourhoods, partly factitious political
opposition, and partly seditious and openly friendly to the South. In
general the country accepted the law as a manifest military necessity.
The spirit and manner of its acceptance may be judged from the results of
any of the calls for troops under this law. For example, in December,
1864, towards the end of the war, 211,752 men were brought up to the
colours; of these it seems that 194,715 were ordinary volunteers, 10,192
were substitutes provided by conscripts, and only 6,845 were actually
compelled men. It is perhaps more significant still that among those who
did not serve there were only 460 who paid the 300-dollar penalty, as
against the 10,192 who must have paid at least three times that sum for
substitutes. Behind the men who had been called up by the end of the war
the North had, enrolled and ready to be called, over two million men.
The North had not to suffer as the South suffered, but unquestionably in
this matter it rose to the occasion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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