In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

35 Chapter 5 Columbia County and the Draft, January–July 1864 The problems associated with the advent of the draft and the creation of the Provost Marshal Bureau often created chaos. Employees of the bureau questioned regulations and sometimes suggested better ways to deal with recurring problems that resulted from enrolling unwilling adult males in the North. General Fry was constantly speaking with congressmen who brought complaints from their constituents about the draft and the way the bureau handled its business. Working with both Congress and the War Department, Fry continually struggled to improve the bureau’s operations. Throughout 1863, General Fry’s office issued a number of revised regulations for the assistant provost marshals to follow. In early June, new regulations specified that each district could have a deputy provost marshal for each county in the district, excepting the county in which headquarters was located. Each provost marshal could also appoint up to four special agents who were given the task of hunting down and arresting deserters. Each deserter apprehended and brought to the district provost marshal was worth a five-dollar reward to be paid once the provost marshal ascertained that the person arrested was indeed a deserter. The reward amount was increased to thirty dollars on September 21. On July 1, General Fry informed the entire bureau that in the opinion of a solicitor for the War Department, if a state court issued a writ of habeas corpus and served it on the local provost marshal while he had a prisoner under his jurisdiction who had not yet been transferred to the nearest military post, then the local provost marshal should comply with the writ and inform the court of the authority under which the prisoner was being held. Because federal law trumped state law, the state court could then proceed no further. On September 15, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the country, in effect giving provost marshals the authority to ignore any habeas corpus requests by any state courts.1 36 The Fishing Creek Confederacy When the Thirty-Eighth Congress convened on December 7, 1863, the subject of the draft came up quite quickly. Congressmen had been bombarded with both criticisms and suggestions to better the system, and thus the new Congress decided that the system needed to be changed. The Republicans controlled both sides of Congress (Senate: 34 Republicans, 12 Democrats, and 3 Unionists; House: 103 Republicans, 74 Democrats, and 6 Unionists) but there was no unity on what to do. Indiana Senator Henry S. Lane, a Republican, began the action on the draft by introducing a bill to repeal the $300 commutation fee. He reasoned that the draft was intended as a military measure to recruit men, not raise money. “[I]f we could print soldiers as fast as we can print greenbacks,”he said, then the commutation fee could be kept. Otherwise, Lane said, repeal commutation.2 As a result of continued debate about the draft, Congress passed two major amendments to the March 1863 draft law. President Lincoln signed the first into law on February 24, 1864. The president was authorized to call into service an unlimited number of men. Those who paid commutation would be exempt from future drafts for only one year. Exemptions were severely reduced, and other sections of the original law were tightened to ensure that more men would be eligible for the draft. The quota system was revised a bit in an attempt to ensure more favorable terms for local areas rather than focusing on a district-wide basis. This law specified the penalties to be applied for those who resisted the draft as well as for those who “shall incite, counsel, encourage, or who shall conspire or confederate with any other person or persons forcibly to resist or oppose any such enrollment, or who shall aid or assist, or take any part in any forcible resistance or opposition thereto, or who shall assault, obstruct, hinder, impede, or threaten any officer or other person employed in making, or in aiding to make, such enrollment.” This law also mandated that African American males were eligible for the draft, as were aliens residing in the United States. While the February 1864 law did not repeal commutation, it did tighten other sections of the law in an attempt to draft more men rather than raise more money via commutation.3 The second congressional revision to the draft law occurred because of the heavy casualties during General...

Share