Measures for a "Speedy Conclusion": A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism

The traditional story of northern conscription during the Civil War is a familiar one to scholars and casual readers alike. In this narrative, the states, and particularly governors, maintained control of military recruitment early in the war. Significant Republican losses in both governors' mansions and state legislatures in the November 1862 elections, however, made Republican leaders in Washington wary of leaving the responsibility of raising armies to their political opponents.¹ These federal politicians had already begun to implement legislation that strengthened the federal government at the expense of the states in the areas of banking and property rights.² The 37th Congress extended these nationalizing tendencies to the military arena through a national conscription act—officially called the Enrollment Act of March 1863.³ By the summer of 1863, the federal government imposed the draft on weakened state and local governments without their help or consent. Yet, the northern public met Congress's conscription act with widespread disapproval, culminating in the weeklong New York City draft riots of July 1863. In effect, the riots symbolized a last public stand against a centralized government.⁴ After Appomattox, as a result of conscription and other wartime policies, the United States finally became a modern, centralized country.⁵

This story is now outdated. A reexamination of the path toward national conscription on the national and state levels demonstrates that scholars have tended to overstate the extent to which the federal government exerted its will over allegedly feeble state governments. Ultimately, not only was the draft enacted with the general compliance of the states, the policy was often proposed, encouraged, and sanctioned by state and local leaders. Using New York as a window into the Civil War relationship between state and national governments, this essay will demonstrate that Lincoln and Congress pursued a conscription policy that state and local representatives had long been considering and promoting.⁶ To these New York officials, a rigorous prosecution of the war in 1862 and 1863 demanded a draft, whether it should originate from state governments or from the U.S. Congress.

This new understanding of conscription contributes to what appears to be a significant paradigm shift in the study of federalism and the Civil War era. While older histories have argued that the war provided the federal government with an opportunity to permanently seize power from the states, recent work on party politics, confiscation, and recruitment by scholars such as Mark Neely, Adam I. P. Smith, Silvana Siddali, and William Blair illustrate a more nuanced relationship among local, state, and federal officials as well as the northern public.⁷ As these historians show, the federal government relied on cooperation, conversation, and even advice from party members closer to the ground. A new analysis of northern conscription will further emphasize the complex nature of Civil War federalism.

This essay revises the traditional story of Civil War conscription in three ways. First, while most scholars have focused either on federal policymaking or the state response, I examine both levels of government and how they interact.⁸ The number of letters, directed editorials, telegrams, and visits among federal, state, and local officials illustrates just how important vertical political relationships were to determining war policy and conscription in particular. These state and local leaders were often able to influence or alter legislation and executive department orders.⁹ Some even provided advice that would prove essential to Union strategy.¹⁰ Furthermore, in the tense atmosphere of Civil War politics, state and local officials often looked to the federal government to propose and enforce somewhat unpopular and politically dangerous measures, like conscription.

The relationship between state and federal officials is more complex in the context of divided government. After the 1862 elections, many states found themselves with one branch controlled by Democrats and the other in the hands of Republicans. In the case of New York, Democrat Horatio Seymour—the new governor in the spring of 1863—strongly opposed conscription and has often been historians' focus in portraying a reluctant or resistant state...