Then, when it was almost too late for human aid to save the cause—when the enemy had not only surrounded the contracted territory on every side, but had penetrated into its very heart—the substitute bill was repealed, and every man in the land between the ages of 18 and 45, declared a Confederate soldier subject to service. Then, too, the abuses of exemption and detail, so often and so clearly pointed out, were looked into and measurably corrected.
Further than this, all boys from 16 to 18, and older men, from 45 to 60, though not conscribed, were formed into reserve "home guards;" and then General Grant wrote to Washington that the cause was won when the Rebels "robbed the cradle and the grave."
But the infantile and the moribund murmured not; and more than once a raid was turned and a sharp skirmish won, when the withered cheek of the octogenarian was next the rosy face of the beardless stripling!
Only one complaint came, and that was heard with grim amusement alike by veteran, by conscript, and by substitute.
The substitute buyers now loudly raised a wail of anguish. Plethoric ledger and overflowing till, alas! must be left; the auctioneer's hammer and the peaceful shears must alike be thrown aside, and the rusty musket grasped instead; soft beds and sweet dreams of to-morrow's profit must be replaced by red mud and the midnight long roll!
It was very bitter; and rising in their wrath, a few of these railed at the perfidy of the Government in breaking a contract; and even employed counsel to prove that in effect they were already in the field.
One ardent speculator even sought the War Department and logically proved that, having sent a substitute, who was virtually himself, and that substitute having been killed, he himself was a dead man, from whom the law could claim no service!
But the Department was now as deaf as the adder of Scripture; and the counsel, let us hope, pleaded not very earnestly. So the substitute buyers—except in the few cases where the long finger of influential patronage could even now intervene—went, as their ill-gotten dollars had gone before.
It is plainly impossible, in limits of a desultory sketch, to give even a faint outline of the conscription. Its ramifications were so great—the stress that caused it so dire, and the weaknesses and abuses that grew out of it so numerous, that a history of them were but a history of the war.
Faithfully and stringently carried out, it might have saved the South. Loosely constructed and open to abuse, it was still the most potent engine the Government had used; and while it failed of its intent, it still for the first time caused the invader to be met by anything approaching the whole strength of the country.