Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher

Confederate conscription forced residents of the Civil War South to reckon with a number of complicated, even vexatious, questions: Did centralized national military service imperil states’ rights? Did compelling such service chip away at the much-vaunted ideal of white male liberty? Most importantly for the outmanned Confederacy’s fight for independence, how could the needs of the army be met without ignoring or neglecting the needs of the home front? In this new book—the first extensive analysis of the policy since Albert Burton Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924)—Sacher insightfully charts the evolution of conscription, demonstrating how reality failed to live up to the discordant expectations that people had about the policy. Conscription ultimately could not harmonize states’ rights with the centralized power that the system demanded; it could not be enforced in a highly efficient way that was sensitive to the idiosyncratic needs of different families and communities; and it could not evenly disperse the sacrifices and suffering inflicted by the war. Such circumstances do not, however, render conscription a failure for, in Sacher’s opinion, it was fundamentally trying “to solve an unsolvable problem—finding enough men both to fight and to farm without allowing for special privileges—or even the perception of special privileges” (203).A consistent theme of the book is that previous historical evaluations of the subject, especially those offered by scholars who emphasize internal dissension as key to understanding Confederate defeat, have tended problematically to read critiques of conscription as evidence of hostility toward the Confederacy. Sacher seeks to correct this error by noting the important distinction between the relatively sparse criticism of conscription in the abstract and the much more abundant criticism of how the policy and its exemption clauses were enforced. As he writes, “Conscription inspired multiple dialogues on what the Confederacy stood for, but these dialogues generally involved two sides dedicated to achieving the same end: Confederate independence” (201).Sacher presents a generally compelling and well-evidenced case for this argument across the book. Nonetheless, the people in the anti-Confederate and/or Unionist enclaves that were dotted across the wartime South, some of whom did their utmost to avoid the clutches of conscription, do not receive meaningful consideration in this work. In an endnote, Sacher claims not to be looking at resistance to the Confederacy generally, or conscription specifically, because other scholars have already told this story. Yet readers can only wonder about the extent to which the book’s portrayal of a white South by and large supportive of both the policy and the cause is a product of this omission (222, n. 4).Sacher consults a diverse array of qualitative evidence, ranging from soldiers’ letters to newspapers to more official correspondence and records (including those produced by the enrolling officers and bureaucrats responsible for administering conscription). The result is a book that covers its subject from the perspective not only of the architects of the policy but also from that of ordinary citizens, including those who pleaded and petitioned for exemption. Some of Sacher’s most adept analysis can be found when he focuses on the higher, more political end of this spectrum, such as his evaluations of Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown’s and North Carolina judge Richmond M. Pearson’s obstreperous positions on conscription. He also makes an admirable effort to incorporate quantitative analysis in parts of the book, particularly the second half of Chapter 7. This effort is commendable because, as Sacher notes and helpfully elaborates upon, official figures regarding conscription and military enlistment were typically erroneous or unreliable in some respect.Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers is an overdue attempt to revisit and re-appraise a critical facet of life in the Confederacy in a panoptic fashion. Sacher provides a careful and considered exploration of conscription as a dynamic and evolving set of laws. This book should find an appreciative audience among historians of the U.S. Civil War era and scholars involved in the broader study of modern war and society

Military service · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law