Draft Exemptions in the Civil War

It is election time, and once again both political parties are dragging skeletons out of the “Anxiety Closet” to scare voters in the attempt to corral a few votes without actually working for them.  While such actions should (in a civilized world) immediately disqualify the candidate for office—if not temporarily suspend the legal sanctions against political assassination—the practice has become the norm.  One of the worst such periodic lies is the regular attempt to frighten young voters with the specter of a reinstated military draft, even though this country hasn’t drafted anyone in just months short of half a century.

I suppose that if we canvassed the entire country, we might find a handful of crackpots from both parties that support restarting the draft, even though these politicians tend to be the kind of loons that couldn’t organize a weekend kegger at a fraternity.  All of the branches of the military are deadest against reinstating the draft, both political parties are against the idea, and nationally, the idea polls slightly lower than flaming rectal cancer.  

It there were even a remote chance of restarting the draft, Congress would have updated the Selective Service System already.  Within 30 days of turning 18, men are required to register with the government, but those records are so messed up that it might take more than a full year to update the data to the point where it could be used.  Newly-arrived immigrants under the age of 25 are also required to register—something I doubt that many know.  And long before such a draft could start, Congress would probably have to finally decide whether women are required to register. (Assuming our politicians can finally figure out what a woman is, of course.  Besides, does a transgendered man have to register?  Does a transgendered female have to notify the Service about a change in status?)

More than enough ink has been spilled about the unpopularity of the draft during the Vietnam War, and I have no desire to rehash that mess, but you might be interested to learn that the draft has never been popular with Americans, not even during one of our country’s most heated and partisan conflicts, the Civil War.

On March 3, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into law our nation’s very first conscription law, the Enrollment Act of 1863.  All “able bodied men” between the ages of twenty and forty-five were 

“liable to perform military duty in the service of the United States when called out by the President for that purpose.”  The law included citizens and immigrants who expected to become citizens but stipulated that married men over the age of thirty-five were to be called up last.  There was a long list of exemptions:  African Americans, government officials, the only son of a widow, and the only son of elderly dependents were exempt.

Note.  There was a conscription act during the War of 1812, but the war ended before the act became effective.  And laws were passed during the American Revolution requiring able bodied men to purchase a firearm, but that was so that men could join the state militias.  It was not until the Civil War that a national government—either the United States or the Confederacy—conscripted anyone.

The exemptions above were to be expected, but there were some strange provisions, too.  If two members of a family were already serving, the family could select two other exempt members.  If elderly parents had two or more sons, the parents could select which son had to serve, and which son got to remain safe at home.  A single father of a young son could apply for exemption.

If all else failed, an eligible male who really didn’t want to go off to war could come up with a substitute to go in his place.  Failing that, he could pay the Secretary of War $300 (the equivalent of $6500 today) for a substitute to be found and paid, while some men—hired directly by the man who had been called up—were paid much more.  This last option was popular with wealthy businessmen like Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the father of Teddy Roosevelt.  Some have theorized that Teddy’s embarrassment at his father’s failure to wear a uniform in the war helped shape the future president’s character.  It may also explain why young Teddy, who was only three when the war began, insisted on wearing a tiny version of a Union uniform throughout most of the war.

There was no regular or widely used form of identification at the time, so unscrupulous men could sign on to substitute, be paid the bounty and almost immediately desert.  If they traveled to a new town, they could safely perform the same stunt multiple times, making a good living.  Such men were called ‘bounty jumpers’.  

Opposition to the draft among the poor led to demonstrations and occasional riots, but in total 777,829 were called up.  Either due to hiring substitutes or simply failing to report, only 46,347 of those conscripted men actually served in the Northern Army.  The rest—the vast majority of those who had been called up—never showed up and were never arrested.  Still, resentment about the draft was so intense that a popular contemporary song was parodied.

We're coming, ancient Abraham, several hundred strong

We hadn't no 300 dollars and so we come along

We hadn't no rich parents to pony up the tin

So we went unto the provost and there were mustered in.

The opposition to the draft, coupled with the New York Draft Riots of July 13-16, 1863, in which over 100 died and 2000 were injured, prompted Congress to amend the draft act in 1864 so that a payment of $300 only provided an exemption for a single year.

The Confederacy, with a smaller population than the North, started the war by offering enlistments of only twelve months, in accordance with the general belief on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line that hostilities would be over within a year.  Then, in April of 1862–just as those enlistments were coming to a close—the Confederate government passed a law that made any white male between eighteen and thirty-five liable to three years of military service.  While the law originally stated that a substitute could be hired, the law was so heavily criticized that the law was amended later the same year.

The first amendment abolished the hiring of substitutes while the second added the Twenty Negro Law, meaning that any plantation owner was allowed one family exemption for each 20 slaves he owned.  This effectively exempted the large plantation owners and their sons.  Studies of Confederate enlistment rolls and census data for the period shows that voluntary service for the war in the south was directly linked to prosperity.  Those who were too poor to own slaves were less likely to either volunteer or to accept conscription.  

As in the North, the conscription law was almost unenforceable.  Many called up men simply refused to serve, and in some cases resisted violently.  In the later years of the war, as the Confederacy became desperate for more soldiers, some southern counties succeeded from the Confederacy, declaring their loyalty to the United States.

In both the North and the South, the unfairness of the draft laws led to the popular conclusion that it was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”   

Beware the Greeks Bearing Gifts

The actual quote is, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

A better translation would be, “I fear the Danaans (Greeks) even when they bear gifts.”  The line is usually attributed to Homer’s Iliad, but is actually from the Aeneid, a poem written by Virgil, roughly 1200 years after the Battle of Troy.  In Virgil’s version of the battle, the Trojan priest, Laocoön, warns his countrymen not to accept the gift of the wooden horse and emphasizes his point by throwing a spear that pierces the side of the horse.  A Greek soldier hiding within is wounded and his loud groan would have alerted the Trojans but for the intervention of the Gods.

Had not the Gods already decided that Troy should be destroyed, the Trojans would have realized that the giant wheeled statue contained soldiers and they would have never dragged the gift inside their city.  In fact, the statue would have probably been set on fire.

In the weeks following the surrender of Germany in World War II, the Soviet Union was still publicly appreciative of the support of the United States during the war.  While there is no doubt that the Russian Army had done more than its share of the fighting during the war against Nazi Germany, there is also no doubt that without the incredible logistical support the United States had provided, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.  While postwar tensions between the two countries were already slowly escalating into what would be called the Cold War in 1947, in 1945, the relationship was still mostly cordial. 

On August 4, 1945, three months after VE Day and still four weeks short of the surrender of Japan, a delegation from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization brought a gift to the American ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, at the American embassy in Moscow.  The Pioneers were a state-sponsored organization for youths between the ages of 9 and 14, modeled after the Boy Scouts in the West, but with a heavy dose of political and economic indoctrination added.  (Before you make jokes about the Pioneers, I would point out that thousands of these young boys and girls died fighting the Nazis.)

The gift (left) was an exquisitely carved plaque of the Great Seal of the United States.  If you want a closer look at the seal, look at the reverse side of a one-dollar bill.  The seal has two sides; the obverse side is the coat of arms depicting the eagle clasping both arrows and oak leaves, while the reverse shows the base of a pyramid topped by the Eye of Providence.

Ambassador Harriman was so pleased with the “gift of friendship” that he hung it in his study at the ambassador’s residence.  It hung there for seven years.  Those young pioneers, of course, had not made the plaque:  it was a creation of the NKVD, one of the predecessors of the Russian KGB.  The scientist who actually created the device was Léon Theremin, the inventor of the Theremin Instrument.  (If you don’t know the instrument, it is responsible for the spooky and slightly annoying music in the Midsomer Murders theme song.)

In 1952, a radio operator in the British Embassy was surprised to hear a conversation between the British air attaché and the American ambassador on his radio set.  At the time, he was idly tuning in on different frequencies, when he suddenly heard English at 1800 MHz.  

The mystery was how a relatively small listening device could continue to operate for years after it was placed on the wall directly behind the ambassador’s desk and why it had never been discovered during the numerous sweeps of the office with equipment that would detect any transmitted signal.  It took weeks and the joint cooperation of both the English and American intelligence agencies (along with a technician from the Marconi Company), but eventually, this led to identification of what became known as The Great Seal Bug or The Thing.

The listening device had no battery or other power source and did not transmit on its own.  It was mostly a thin membrane stretched over a frame that acted as a microphone, which was connected to an antenna.  If a radio wave was transmitted at the device, sound waves vibrating the membrane would slightly vary the frequency of the radio signal the device was receiving and passively re-transmitting.  I’ve dumbed that down a lot, but what the Russians had done was create what was functionally the first working version of the RFID chip.  

Unless a radio wave of the precise frequency was hitting the device, it had absolutely no electronic fingerprint.  The best electronics available could (and regularly did) sweep the room looking for bugs and never find it, because it was almost impossible to detect—as evidenced by the fact that the NKVD listened in on the conversations of four different ambassadors during the seven years that the plaque hung on the wall of the official residence.  

The United States did not publicly reveal the existence of the bug for years, though we have to wonder why.  The Russians obviously knew it was there and when it stopped working.  The British knew.  We knew.  And if that many people were aware of the security breach, it means that it was probable that the intelligence agencies of every nation on the planet knew.  Everyone knew but the American taxpayers.

It wasn’t until the 1960 visit by Nikita Khrushchev to the United Nations following the embarrassment of the Russians shooting down an American spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers (the same visit during which the Russian Premier banged his shoe on the podium while promising to bury the United States) that the American ambassador to the USSR, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., displayed The Thing as he denounced Russian espionage.  The presentation was recorded, and you can watch it here.

I wish I could tell you that this type of device can no longer be used because modern security techniques immediately made its technology obsolete.  Unfortunately not: what really happened is that the United States, England, and Australia developed better versions of the bug almost immediately.  For all I know, the NSA has one in my home.  And in yours.

Trusting the Greeks may have been stupid, but the few surviving Trojans could at least pin the blame on the Greek Gods.  The United States Department of State accepted a Russian gift that compromised our national security for years, but almost 80 years later, still has not told us whom we should blame.

The Constitutionnel Crises

Chile is having a constitutional crisis.  After a long period of demonstrations and popular unrest, the country held an election to determine whether a new constitution should be drafted.  The provision passed overwhelmingly with 78% of voters desiring a complete rewrite of the constitution, and new delegates were selected to draft a proposed document.

Chile worked really hard to make sure that the delegates included as diverse a group as possible, and while this was a laudable goal, it also meant that many of the delegates, particularly those from areas not presently represented in politics, had no experience in political negotiation or in drafting legislation.

After many months of work, an astoundingly lengthy ‘woke’ document that at best could be described as utopian.  Some of the 388 articles are a little hard to understand, such as the provision promising rights to “neurodiversity” and “digital disconnection”.  The number of new social programs mandated by the document meant tax increases were unavoidable.  

Perhaps it was a fear that increased taxes might jeopardize the country’s recent economic prosperity or, perhaps, it was the displeasure of religious conservatives over the guaranteed right to an abortion, but for some reason, 62% of the Chilean voters rejected the new draft.  As I write this, the Chilean government is considering throwing out the proposed draft and starting over.

The immediate fear is that the protests will restart, further dividing the country and making future compromises impossible.  Polarization of political parties that creates divisions wide enough to lead to violent demonstrations and the rise of antiestablishment leaders is the norm for Latin American (See  the recent examples of both Brazil and Bolivia).  

Naturally, there is a precedent in Latin American history.

Most Americans, at least those without a degree in education, can name at least a couple of battles in the American Civil War and can tell you roughly when it was fought.  If you ask them about the Mexican Revolution, the average American has no clue, even though Mexico’s civil war was more recent, fought in large part right on the U.S/Mexican border, and the incredible violence left more than twice as many casualties.  

At times, the residents of El Paso, Texas could watch the battles across the river in Juarez from atop downtown buildings.  (And occasionally the combatants grew angry at the Gringos treating their struggles as a spectator sport and turned their guns toward the ‘audience’.)  And in 1915, Pancho Villa and his army crossed the border and attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico—the first such attack of a foreign army on American soil since the British burned the White House and attacked Fort McHenry a century earlier. It was also the last such attack until the 9/11 attacks, almost a century later.

The Mexican Revolution started in 1911 and created the constitution that Mexico still uses today.  (Historians are still arguing about when the revolution actually started and stopped, but it is my blog and I’m going to say it started with the ouster of Porfirio Diaz and ended with the election of Lazaro Cardenas, so the revolution started in 1911 and ended in 1934.) 

Prior to the Revolution, President Porfirio Diaz had used the Constitution of 1857 to rule as a dictator.  The constitution gave him the rights to fire judges, and to replace governors and elected leaders with flunkies of his own choosing.  Without a judicial system capable of checking his power, Diaz assassinated his enemies, stole whatever he desired, and pretty much ignored his people (many of whom lived lives so desperate they would have been better off living during the time of the Aztecs).  

After multiple revolutionary armies rose up in opposition to the 80-year-old dictator’s fraudulent election, Diaz absconded to Paris along with most of the Mexican treasury.  There was a universal recognition that a new constitution was needed, so a constitutional convention was called in Aguascaliente with each army sending one delegate for every 1000 soldiers in the field.  

When the convention convened in 1914, the delegates found they could agree on absolutely nothing.  Considering that none of the varied armies had cooperated with each other during the fighting, this was hardly surprising, and the qualities that made good revolutionary soldiers weren’t…. Well, after a few days of delegates screaming at each other, Pancho Villa suggested to General Carranza that the convention would proceed more smoothly if the two of them would just go outside and commit suicide.

Needless to say, the convention closed without a constitution.  Instead, the armies went back into the field and kept fighting, but since Diaz was in Paris counting his money and drinking champagne, the armies fought each other.

Three years later, Villa’s army had been defeated and Carranza called a new convention.  Having learned from his mistakes, the new delegates at a convention in Queretaro were only 30% soldiers, the rest were predominately college educated, lots of doctors, lawyers, and professional men.  These were selected in the belief they could be controlled and would produce the kind of constitution the general wanted—a newer version of the 1857 constitution that would allow Carranza to simply replace Diaz.  

Of course, Carranza was wrong:  the delegates ignored the general and actually produced a constitution that (for the most part) gave the Mexican people what they needed.  The Constitution provided for states, territories and a federal district.  Presidents were not eligible for reelection.  The state preserved all property rights, forbade ownership of land by foreigners and all but outlawed the Catholic Church.

Public worship was outlawed, the construction of new church buildings was restricted by the state, the church was forbidden to engage in education, and even wearing clerical garb was prohibited.  

 

Carranza hated the new constitution, but he was desperate to be elected, so he held his nose and accepted it—and he was rewarded by being elected in a landslide.   Once elected, Carranza just decided to ignore the laws and do what he wanted because the judiciary lacked the strength to enforce the constitution and stop him.  In Mexico, this is known as of Obedezco pero no cumplo.  Loosely translated, this means, ‘I recognize your authority and obey, but I do not comply.’

Naturally, the revolution in Mexico continued with violent fighting, but—eventually—someone had the very good sense to shoot Carranza, who was attempting to flee to Paris and take with him what was left of the Mexican treasury.

Chile has, like Carranza, rejected the most recent constitution.  Let us hope that they quickly draft a new draft which includes provisions for a strong judiciary.  

Everyone At Any Time Is Just Like Us

For years, I told my history classes that if we understood the people we were studying and knew their circumstances, as well as the culture and society in which they lived, we would discover that they were just like us.  If we had lived in their time and in their societies, we would realize that our lives would have been very similar to theirs and, perhaps, we might even have made the same mistakes they did.

That viewpoint today is increasingly coming under fire.

Last month, the president of the American Historical Association wrote a very brief column in the association publication echoing a warning from one of his predecessors—a warning that today’s historians should avoid the dangers of presentism.   By this, he was referring to two recent trends:  first, he decries the rising trend of historians’ concentrating on the modern era and all but abandoning classical history.

Not only are there fewer graduate students concentrating their studies in the pre-modern era, but universities’ courses in the field are becoming increasingly scarce, with retiring faculty who teach in this field rarely being replaced.  (Of course, sometimes the rarity of such classes is perfectly justified.  I remember when Professor Maleficent put up posters hoping to convince students to take her class on Roman History.  Unfortunately, so few students signed up for the class that the Enema U administrators cancelled it.  Perhaps, the dearth of students might also have been because the professor had advertised her Roman history class using a photo of Brad Pitt as Achilles from the movie Troy.)

Personally, I find this trend a little baffling, since I cannot imagine focusing historical studies primarily on the recent past.  I can hardly open a can of peaches without being curious about the history of food preservation and who domesticated peach trees.  (China domesticated the peach about 7500 years ago and food canning is a byproduct of the Napoleonic wars.). 

Anyone who has worked in the humanities during the last few decades will have been uncomfortably aware that the sociologists have metastasized throughout academia, dominating practically every field.  If we study only recent events, they might as well take over the history departments as well:  then we can all learn to view all of history solely through the lens of social justice.

The second point of the AHA president is the more important:  it’s the warning against the tendency of today’s historians to view people from the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and capitalism.  Simply put, for us to be able to judge the past by today’s standards works only if we happen to be morally gifted people….And we simply aren’t.  Just as surely as we can see the shortcomings of those who lived before us—as measured by the mores of today’s society—future generations will be able to do the same to us, all while marveling at how clueless, callous, and unfeeling we are.

Presentism erects a wall preventing us from understanding the past and those who created the world that we live in.  It is far too simplistic to label everyone in the past as racist, or sexist, or elitist, or any of the other labels that are so quickly and easily applied but provide no insight into what motivated these people.  Terms like racist and fascist have been so frequently used that they no longer convey meaning, transfiguring real people into two-dimensional, cartoon stick characters.

All this judgmentalism reminds me of a man I used to be in business with many decades ago.  The man was two generations older than I, and though highly educated, he was, by many standards, not a very nice guy.  His opinions about race and equality were odious, as were his opinions of sexual equality.  By the logic of today’s political world, he would probably be labeled an extremist or a semi-fascist.

The early life of this man had been truly difficult:  he himself had come from a mixed-race home, a fact that probably helped form some of his own racial prejudices.  He grew up during the Great Depression, and though his family was poor, he had finished a couple of years of college before Pearl Harbor.  Enlisting early in the Army, he was selected for OCS and was trained as a navigator on B-17 bombers.

He arrived in England early in the war, back when it was statistically unlikely that a crew would remain intact through eight missions, much less the minimum 25 missions they were required to serve before being rotated back to the states.  As a navigator, his position was in the forward area of the bomber, just behind the plexiglass nose—the most dangerous location in the plane.  Even later in the war, the odds of a navigator’s dying on a tour of duty was 25%.  Our man was lucky, surviving all 25 missions and returning to the states.

He could have remained stateside for the rest of the war, but he soon began to crave the excitement he had experienced on those bombing runs over Germany.  He volunteered to serve as a navigator on a PBY in the Pacific Theater.  Years later, he modestly told me that his job as navigator was relatively simple, his most important responsibility being carrying a rubber hammer and a bag of golf tees.  Every time the giant flying boat made a water landing, he claimed it was his job to scramble around the hull of the plane, hammering the tees into the holes left by rivets that had popped.  I have no idea whether he actually ever hammered a golf tee into a single rivet hole, but I am absolutely sure of the difficulty of navigating across a featureless ocean without the benefit of electronic aids when the most sophisticated instruments available were a stopwatch and a poor map.

After the war, he returned to college, graduating from both the university and medical school, ultimately becoming a general surgeon.  Reenlisting, he retired as Colonel in the Air Force.  He was a hard-nosed businessman and not very likable, and occasionally he was almost impossible to be around, even for his family.  At infrequent times, he could also be kind, humorous, and understanding.

If I were to write this man’s history in more detail, what should I focus on?  Was he a product of his time?  Or simply a racist and a sexist?  Was he a war hero?  Or just an embittered old man who, despite having a successful medical career, ultimately drove his whole family away?  Just what would be the simple two or three one-word labels I should use to completely distill the lifetime of a man into something the small-minded can use to ignore all the forces that created and shaped him?

The president of the American Historical Society triggered an incredible amount of response to his column (almost all of it negative), with some labeling his comments as racist.  After many members demanded his resignation, he apologized profusely.  You can read both his original column and his apology here.  It’s up to you to figure out if he or his critics were correct.