Through this blog, I hope to tell the story of the draft in the Northern states during the bloody Civil War that tore the U.S. apart during the years 1861-1865. Conscription - forced military service - was relatively unknown in America. During the Revolutionary War, individual states did, from time to time, order levies of men to fill the ranks. But the country had never had a national draft law until the Civil War.
The Civil War draft in the North is many stories. The first story are the thousands of men drafted into the Union army. Behind each name on a draft list there is a tale - wives weeping as their husband marches off, fearful parents trying to hold back tears as a son shoulders his musket and walks away, crying children as Daddy waves goodbye one last time.
These were the men of "Father Abraham's Army." Through this blog, I hope to eventually publish the name of every man - and there were thousands of men - drafted into the Union army.
There are stories, too, behind the hundreds of men appointed as provost marshals to enforce the draft, and the dozens of doctors hired to examine drafted men claiming they were unfit to serve.
Then there are the draft-dodgers and the bounty-jumpers. As many as one-fifth of the men drafted ended up dodging military service, according to estimates by draft authorities. For those living in Northern states that bordered Canada - states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and the New England states - slipping across the border was an easy way to avoid military service.
The naturalist John Muir won fame in the 1880s with his "walks across America." But Muir's first walk was in 1864 when he trekked from the family farm in Wisconsin to Canada and spent the war there, not too far from the city of Detroit, writing home to see if his name had been drawn in the county draft back home.
Draft-dodgers were called "skedaddlers." In far southern Nova Scotia, just north of the province's border with the state of Maine, draft-dodgers from Maine established a community on a strip of high ground that quickly took on the name "Skedaddle Ridge."
Others fled to the West, a vast region west of the Mississippi made up of a few states like California, half a dozen Territories, like Nevada, and boundless plains and mountains where settlers did not ask questions of strangers.
Some drafted men just took to the woods near their farms and homes. In states in what we now call the Midwest but known in the Civil War era as the Old Northwest, deserter camps sprang up in isolated areas where settlers were few and the woods thick. Local sheriffs knew of these camps, but looked the other way - that was the job of federal provost marshals, they reasoned.
All of these men - drafted soldiers, federal marshals, runaway draftees - have stories to tell, and through this blog, those stories find a voice.
The North, boastfully predicting when the war broke out that the Union would whip the South in three months, now realized the awful truth: no one knew how long the war could last.
President Lincoln was desperate. Never in the history of the young country had the government implemented a national draft. It was European princes who forced citizens to serve in armies, not the free democratic republic of the United States of America.
But Lincoln and his top advisors realized that for the Union was to survive, a national conscription law - hated though it would be - was necessary. In March 1863, Congress passed a draft law and in June, three months later, communities all across the North started drafting men for the Union army. The names of all men between the age of 20 and 45 went into a box and draft quotas based on population set for each city, village and township.
If your name was drawn, you were drafted. There were exceptions: the names of men 20 to 35 were drawn first, then the names of married men over 35. Disabled men or men with ailments making them unfit for military duty could win exemption if an Army doctor concurred.
And men with money could buy their way out of serving by paying the government $300 or hiring a substitute to take their place in the Union ranks.
The draft proved to be a horrible system. Men faked ailments to avoid service or bribed doctors to write letters saying they were unfit. Many draftees ran to the woods when a draft officer came into rural neighborhoods. Others fled to Canada or emigrated to the West where settlers on the frontier asked few questions of newcomers.
But in the end, the draft worked. Many cities offered large bounties to volunteers as a way to meet draft quotas, either paying the bounties out of public coffers or through "dues" assessed private draft organizations.
In the first draft call in June 1863, President Lincoln asked for 300,000 men. A popular song of the day echoed that call: "We are coming Father Abraham/300,000 more," the song went.
The draft itself produced few soldiers for the Union armies of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant - only two percent of the army were draftees. But prodded by the threat of a draft, over one million men went into the military, according to Eugene C. Murdock, the country's top historian on the draft.
Draft lists were nailed to the doors of courthouses, post offices and other public buildings all across the North. When new lists went up, men jostled one another to read the names. Men yelled elatedly at a list without their name; others cursed in dejection as their named stared out at them.
Behind every name on a draft list, there is a story.
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