Four Years in Rebel Capitals / An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death

by T. C. De Leon

It provided for the separate enrollment of each state under a "Commandant of Conscripts;" and for collecting new levies at proper points in "Camps of Instruction," under competent officers, that recruits might go to the army prepared in drill and knowledge of camp life for immediate service.

But, the Conscription Act, like all other congressional measures, was saddled with a companion, "Bill of Exemptions." This—while so loosely constructed as almost to nullify all good effect of the law—opened the door to constant clashing of personal and public interests, and to great abuses of the privilege.

It would, of course, have been folly to draw every able-bodied male from districts already so drained of effective population as to have become almost non-producing. Such a course would have put thousands of additional mouths into the ranks, and still further have reduced the straitened means for feeding them. And it would have been equally suicidal to draw from forge and from lathe, those skilled artisans who were day and night laboring to put weapons in the hands of those sent to wield them.

But the "Bill of Exemptions" left possible both of these things, at the same time that it failed to restrain abuses of privileges in certain high quarters. The matter of "details" was, of course, essential; and it was only to be supposed that generals in the field could best judge the value of a man in another position than the front.

But the most objectionable feature to the army was the "Substitute Law," which allowed any one able to buy a man, not subject to the action of conscription, to send him to be shot at in his place. Soldiers who had endured all perils and trials of the war, naturally felt that if they were retained in positions they objected to, those who had been comfortably at home—and in many instances coining that very necessity into fortunes—should be forced at the eleventh hour to come and defend themselves and their possessions. Besides, the class of men who were willing to sell themselves as substitutes were of the very lowest order. All citizens of the South were liable to conscription; and the "exempts" open to purchase, were either strange adventurers, or men over and under age, who—argued the soldiers—if fit for service should come of their own free will.

Veteran troops had a low enough opinion of the "conscript" as a genus; but they failed not to evince, by means more prompt than courteous, their thorough contempt for the "substitute."

These causes produced much discontent, where men would cheerfully have acquiesced in a law essential to the preservation of the fabric they had reared and cemented with their blood. To quell this feeling, a reorganization of the army was effected. A certain time was allowed for any liable man to volunteer and choose his branch of the service and, if practicable, his regiment; and so great was the dread of incurring the odium of conscription, that the skeleton veteran regiments rapidly filled up to a point of efficiency. They were then allowed to choose their own officers by election; and, though this lost to the service many valuable men who had become unpopular, still the army was better satisfied within itself.

The refilled regiments were re-brigaded by states when practicable, a general from a different state being sometimes placed in command; and the whole army was divided into corps, of three divisions each, commanded by a lieutenant-general.

Whatever the weakness of its construction—and the abuses of the exemption and detail power in carrying it out—there can be little doubt that the conscription at this time saved the country from speedy and certain conquest; and credit should be given to the few active workers in the congressional hive who shamed the drones into its passage.

Had the men whose term expired been once permitted to go home, they could never again have been collected; the army would have dwindled into a corporal's guard here and there; the masses the North was pouring down on all sides would have swept the futile resistance before it; and the contest, if kept up at all, would have degenerated into a guerrilla warfare of personal hatred and vengeance, without a semblance of confederation, or nationality.