We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS83 "Let us be kind" (236). There are elements of sarcasm and mockery in his dismissal of Southern arguments, and the clever characterizations of some of the study's leading figures seem out of place in a work of serious scholarship. Thomas Jefferson is "America's most famous procrastinator " (136); Andrew Jackson is a "race-obsessed authoritarian" (262) and a "despot struggling with democracy" (291); Martin Van Buren is a "squirt of a too-clever magician" (339); John C. Calhoun is an "egghead beyond everyman" (265). Not only is Howell Cobb always "Fatty Cobb," but also Abel Upshur's "heavy-handed scorn for democratic pois" is attributed to "a heavy-weight of a body" (389). Robert W. Johannsen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War. By James W. Geary. (DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. xii, 257. $32.00.) Despite the significance of the Civil War draft, historians have given it little attention until recently. In 1971, Eugene Murdock's One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North, with its detailed analysis of conscription, commutation, substitution, and bounty brokers and jumpers , supplanted Fred Shannon's treatment of these subjects, which had stood unrivalled for almost fifty years. Hardly had Murdock's book been published when a spate of new articles on the draft and related issues began to appear. These works raised anew questions concerning the fairness of the nation's first experiment with coerced service and its relation to wartime dissent. There was a need for a book that would synthesize this recent work and would also discuss the evolution of the draft in its broad military, social, and political contexts, something which neither Shannon nor Murdock had effectively done. James W. Geary of Kent State University has ably fulfilled both these requirements in his new study, We Need Men. Geary, whose doctoral dissertation analyzed the legislative history of the conscription act, also has written several articles on the subject and has compiled the section on manpower mobilization for a bibliography on the Civil War and the North edited by Murdock. Hence he certainly possesses the qualifications necessary to write this volume. Geary has distilled his knowledge of the Civil War draft into 174 pages of text, far fewer than either Shannon or Murdock. For detailed workings of state and federal recruitment machinery and practices, readers should still consult these older works. What Geary has given us is the best analytical study of the draft. He skillfully evaluates the various influences that shaped its evolution and discusses its impact upon Northerners. He demonstrates that since national conscription was a revolutionary concept 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY in nineteenth-century America, Congress implemented it gradually, favoring a pragmatic, short-term process that would raise men in a manner least objectionable to existing political and economic interests. Geary concludes that the resulting enrollment act and its amendments accomplished this goal. The Union initially relied upon volunteers to fill its armies, and one of Geary's most useful achievements is to review the factors that both promoted and hindered recruitment over the course of the war. As voluntarism waned in 1862, Congress had to turn to other expedients, and in 1863 it instituted the draft. By that time, however, governments at all levels also had begun to employ bounties to stimulate recruiting. Thus conscription never replaced recruiting; instead it proceeded in tandem with it. White volunteers attracted by bounties continued to provide most of the troops, and in the last two years of the war significant numbers of blacks enlisted as well, hence reducing the need for drafting. Geary estimates that if a citizen's name was drawn in the draft, he stood only one chance in four of being held to service (since many refused to report, or were given exemptions); at that point, he could buy a substitute or pay a commutation fee to escape the draft. As a result of these various factors, only 1 percent of white males of military age in the North were actually drafted. Although resistance to conscription quickly emerged, by the end of 1863 most Northerners had made their peace with the new measure...