Ringleaders in every insubordination and every vice they assumed a dégagé, or air of superiority, and fleeced their verdant companions of the very clothes they wore; while they made the impure air of the camps more foul with ribald jest and profane song.
A single glance segregated this element from the quiet country conscripts. The latter were generally gloomy, thinking of the field untilled and the wife and little ones, perhaps, unfed. When they drank "new dip" it was to drown thought, for the fumes of every stew-pan brought back shadowy memories of home and comfort; and when they slept on the damp ground—wrapped in the chance rug, or worn scrap of carpet charity had bestowed—a sad procession marched through their dreams, and sorrowful and starving figures beckoned them from mountain side and hamlet.
Great misery and destitution followed the conscription. Large numbers of men, called from their fields just as they were most needed, cut down greatly the supplies of grain. Almost all who remained at home bought their exemption by giving so large a portion of their product to Government as to reduce civil supplies still more; and these two facts so enhanced the price of food—and so reduced the value of money—that the poorer classes rapidly became destitute of all but the barest means of life. Whether this was the result of inevitable circumstance, or the offspring of mismanagement, in no way affects the fact. Food became very hard to procure even at high prices; and the money to get it was daily more and more monopolized by a grasping few.
The Confederate soldier now had a double share of toil and torture. When the smoke of the fight rolled away, and with it the sustaining glow of battle, thought bore him but grim companionship at the camp fireside; for he saw famine stalk gaunt and pale through what had been his home.
When tidings of want and misery came, he strove to bear them. When he heard of burning and outrage—where naught was left to plunder—who may wonder that he sometimes fled from duty to his country, to that duty more sacred to him of saving his wife and children!
Who does not wonder, rather, in reading the history of those frightful days, that desertions were so few—that untutored human nature could hide in its depths such constancy and devotion to principle!
But, great as were the privation and the suffering caused by the first conscription, they were still to be increased. Through those twin abortions of legislation, the substitute and exemption bills, the results of the first law proved inadequate to fill the gaps of the fatal fights of the summer.
Detail and substitute had done their work, as thoroughly as had the shells of Malvern Hill, the bullets of Sharpsburg, or the raw corn of the retreat to the river.
More men were wanted! At whatever cost in territory, or in suffering, more men must be had. And on the 27th September, Congress passed an act extending the age of conscription from 18 to 45 years. But the exemption and substitute laws remained as effective as ever. True, some feeble moves were made toward narrowing the limits of the former; but while it stood a law in any form, enough could be found to read it in any way. The extension law, while it still further drained the almost exhausted country—and left in its track deeper suffering and destitution, that brought famine from a comparative term into an actual verity—still left in the cities an able-bodied and numerous class; who, if not actually useless, were far more so than the food-producing countrymen sent to the front to take their places.
Yet so blind was the Congress—so impervious to the sharpest teachings of necessity and so deaf to the voice of common sense and reason, that unceasingly upbraided it—that this state of things continued more than a year from the passage of the extension act.