In response to a reader's comment yesterday, here's a summary of how a gentleman could hire a substitute during the Civil War. It is borrowed with permission from "Articles Exploring the Civil War." When
the Civil War began, there was no shortage of able bodied men who
volunteered for service in both the U.S. Army and the Confederate Army.
Eager to show their patriotism, convinced that their cause would be
victorious in a matter of months at the most, men gathered in cities
and towns throughout America to form volunteer regiments, clamoring to
assist in the war effort. However, by late 1862 and early 1863, the patriotic fervor that had
characterized the war effort early on was wearing thin in both the
Confederacy and the United States, and finding men to replenish the
armies of both nations was becoming difficult. Those who wanted to serve
were already engaged; those who did not had either refused to serve,
or, having volunteered and found the experience to be much more arduous
than it seemed at first, had deserted or refused to re-enlist. This
necessitated instituting a draft to choose men for service, and, in
both the North and the South, the practice of hiring substitutes to
serve in the place of those who were called and did not want to serve. Long before the United States began the draft process, the Confederate Congress had allowed men to forgo service in
the Confederate Army if they met certain occupational criteria –
criteria that mostly exempted owners of large plantations or other
enterprises, leading to the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”
to describe the Confederate war effort. Southern men who did not meet
exemption criteria but whom were otherwise able to fight often hired
substitutes to serve for them. Yet by 1863, exemptions were outlawed in
the Confederacy, where men willing to fight were becoming too scarce
to exempt from service. This practice was just beginning, however, its
travel north. When the draft laws – known as the Enrollment Act – were first
placed on the books in the United States in 1863, they allowed for two
methods for avoiding the draft – substitution or commutation. A man who
found his name called in the draft lotteries that chose men for
mandatory service could either pay a commutation fee of $300, which
exempted him from service during this draft lottery, but not
necessarily for future draft lotteries, or he could provide a
substitute, which would exempt him from service throughout the duration
of the war. With the Enrollment Act, the Civil War truly began to be known as a
rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight throughout the entire nation. The
$300 commutation fee was an enormous sum of money for most city
laborers or rural farmers, and the cost of hiring a substitute was even
higher, often reaching $1000 or more. In small towns where the potential loss of their entire population
of able-bodied men became an imminent possibility, taxes and other
means were raised in order to pay commutation fees, and, as commutation
was outlawed, substitutes. These “bounties,” as the fees were called,
would pay substitutes in lieu of townsmen. The practice of hiring substitutes for military service took hold
quickly in the North, becoming much more widespread than it had ever
been in the South. For one thing, there was a much larger pool of men to
draw from; immigrants that flowed into the ports of the North, even in
a time of war, provided a large number of the substitutes hired by
those who did not wish to serve. As the duration of the war lengthened,
African-American soldiers, who’d thus far been only nominally accepted
by the U.S. Army as viable soldiers, also became part of the pool of
potential substitutes; many of the recruitment posters from the time
explicitly solicit African-Americans for substitution. Although the hiring of substitutes seems mercenary, and in many
cases, resulted in the desertion of the substitute, many who went to
war as hired men went because they were unable to enlist through the
regular channels. This included the recent immigrants who were anxious
to fight for their new country, and, importantly, the African-Americans
who found going to war as substitutes the only way to fight for their
freedom. For these men, the war was indeed a “rich man’s war and a poor
man’s fight,” but from the perspective that poor men were more willing
to fight for the possibilities they saw in their country. |
