Draft Wheel—Twelfth District, Ohio.
BOARD OF ENROLLMENT:
CAPT. GEO. W. ROBY, Provost Marshal.
A. KAGY, Commissioner of Enrollment.
DR. N. E. JONES, Surgeon Board of Enrollment.
The race was tried and showed the better predictions true. Slavery had woven prejudices around the name and color, until the government, under Lincoln, Stanton, Chase, and a Congress of loyal states, could find no place or mustering officer (previous to the operation of the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau), short of Massachusetts, that could make the man of color ready to obey orders and use a gun. Nothing in history gives a clearer view of the height and depth of the degrading influences of the institution upon those who were free than the treatment of the loyal colored man and citizen during the efforts of the government to save the Union. Through fear or cowardice his proffered aid was rejected at government recruiting offices, while Massachusetts was procuring colored credit from the loyal states at unusually small bounties.
It may have been so ordered; the diet may have contained enough meat to offend. Still, the colored troops got to the front before the war was over, and did much in reinforcing the wasting armies and lifting anxious sub-districts out of the draft, as well as covering their race with glory by their bravery and efficiency.
Persons placed in the service by means of the draft-wheel generally procured substitutes—persons not liable to draft—aliens and under-age individuals, who, for three years’ service or during the war, commanded one thousand dollars, while the bounty for enlistments of those liable to draft varied from three to five hundred dollars. During the war much of the territory of Ohio was unimproved woods, though thickly settled with cabin civilization. These new settlements were made by the descendants of original Squirrel Hunters—persons born in the state, and with this legacy generally established homes in new counties, in the woods, with like primitive beginnings to those of their ancestors. At the announcement of secession they were ready to serve their country, and it was from these newer and poorer sections that Ohio obtained her volunteers—from a hardy and efficient class of young men, accustomed to active life and the use of the gun.
The recruits from Ohio were chiefly volunteer enlistments. This was manifestly so in the Twelfth district, in which the author was personally and officially interested. The district was composed of Ross, Pickaway, Fairfield, Hocking, Perry, and Pike counties, embracing sixty miles in length of the fertile Scioto valley, containing in 1860 one hundred and thirty-nine thousand four hundred and fifty-six inhabitants, with a corrected enrollment of eighteen thousand three hundred and seventy-one persons liable to military service. Of this enrollment, thirteen thousand six hundred and twenty-eight were farmers, and the remaining four thousand seven hundred and forty-three comprised persons of other occupations.
Taking this district as an average of the other districts in the state, it shows the volunteers sent to the front from Ohio were chiefly young men born in the state—hardy and well-developed Squirrel Hunters. Of seventeen hundred and fifty-five volunteers forwarded by this district, from July 4, 1864, to April 30, 1865, one thousand, two hundred and twenty-nine were Ohio boys, with an average of 23.77 years—the remaining five hundred and twenty-six were from twenty-four states and fifteen foreign countries, with an average of 27.13 years. Notwithstanding the more favorable age of the latter group for physical development, the measurements stand decidedly in favor of the Ohio born, and if adding to the latter the nine hundred and eighty-seven drafted men, natives of Ohio, the favorable difference becomes still more apparent.
The Provost-Marshal General, in his report to the War Department, states there was not a single district in all the loyal states in which the board of enrollment was free from the annoyance of evil disposed persons hostile to the Government, who were ever ready and willing to embarrass its operation by stimulating resistance to the draft or discouraging enlistments. It was when the disloyal element experienced the firmness and earnestness of the boards, and felt the power behind them for the enforcement of the law, that they became co-laborers and most successful recruiting agents. This was exceedingly gratifying to the Government, and caused the Provost-Marshal General to say to the Secretary of War: “I am confident there is no class of public servants to whom the country is more indebted for valuable services rendered than the District Provost-Marshals and their associates, comprising the Boards of Enrollment, by whose efforts the army of the Union, which suppressed the Rebellion, was mainly recruited.” Still, Hon. Hoke Smith, ex-Rebel and Secretary of the Interior, published the information that these recruiting officers are not pensionable under the disability act of Congress, June 27, 1890, for the reason “these officers were not in the war,” and so says the present Commissioner of Pensions, Hon. Henry Clay Evens. Autocratic decisions are sometimes quite at variance with sound sense as well as suggestive of one of ex-President Lincoln’s best stories.