"A Very Disagreeable Business": Confederate Conscription in Louisiana
In October 1862, Robert Carter, a wealthy planter living in Concordia Parish, in the fertile cotton-growing delta along the Mississippi River in northeast Louisiana, faced conscription into the Confederate army. Rather than enter the service, Carter, whose family owned two plantations and 194 slaves, contracted with Frederick W. Scheuber to serve as his substitute. As a German, Scheuber was not subject to Confederate conscription and therefore could serve in someone else's place. Carter possessed both the motives and the means to avoid military service. In addition to wanting to escape the dangers inherent in life in the army, Carter possibly feared both losing control of his slaves and exposing his family to the enemy, especially with the Union army, as part of its attack on Vicksburg, less than fifty miles north of his home. With Carter's wealth exceeding $120,000, his agreement to pay Scheuber $2,500 at the end of the war and to provide Scheuber's wife with $20.83 per month (10 percent per year) until that time would not prove an insurmountable financial burden. Although Scheuber may have needed the money, he did not live to see the end of the war, perishing at Berwick Bay in April 1863, less than one year after signing his contract with Carter. During Scheuber's time of service, Carter paid the money to three of the German's female relatives, but it remains unclear whether he paid the full amount upon Scheuber's death.1 [End Page 141]
The story of men such as Robert Carter and Frederick Scheuber illustrates the dramatic impact of Confederate conscription on Southerners and the effect that variables such as wealth, ethnicity, and the proximity of the Union army played in their decisions regarding the draft. From the beginning of the Civil War, Confederate leaders recognized that fighting a nation with superior manpower necessitated mobilizing as great a percentage of the South's white male population as possible. For the first year of the conflict, the Confederacy relied on one-year volunteers. It became quickly apparent, however, that the army needed more men and that it needed them to fight for more than a single year. Thus, in April 1862, as many of the original volunteers' enlistments were set to expire, the Confederate Congress passed, and President Jefferson Davis signed, a national conscription act. This measure lengthened volunteers' enlistments from one year to the duration of the war and called for a draft of all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five.2
Historians who take aim at Confederate conscription face a moving target. First, Congress modified conscription policy several times, and thus the reactions it engendered changed as well. The age range expanded, and Congress repeatedly altered the exemption policy. Among the most significant of these adjustments were the addition of an exemption for owners of twenty slaves in October 1862 and ending substitution in January 1864. Second, a variety of factors, including wealth, ethnicity, and gender, could shape one's attitude toward the policy and toward those who resisted it. Third, Southerners' impressions of the measure varied based on where they lived, particularly on their family's proximity to the Union army. An area safely within Confederate lines might accept conscription, but if later that home front faced Union occupation or simply lost the protection of the Confederate army, men might be much less willing to leave their families to fight. In order to assess the impact of all of these variables and gain a fuller understanding of conscription, one can focus on the measure's impact on the individual states of the Confederacy. Historians have examined conscription policy in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere, but no one has made a thorough examination of conscription in Louisiana.3 [End Page 142]
In some respects, conscription in Louisiana paralleled that in other Southern states: Louisiana's governors, both Thomas Overton...
