Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (123 page)

Untrained in riot control, New York's police fought the mobs courageously but with only partial success on July 13 and 14. Army officers desperately scraped together a few hundred troops to help. The War Department rushed several regiments from Pennsylvania to New York, where on July 15 and 16 they poured volleys into the ranks of rioters with the same deadly effect they had produced against rebels at Gettysburg two weeks earlier. By July 17 an uneasy peace returned to the shattered city. Determined to carry out the draft in New York lest successful resistance there spawn imitation elsewhere, the government built

37
. Exaggerated contemporary estimates of more than a thousand persons killed found their way into popular histories of the riot. But the careful research of Adrian Cook has established that only 105 people were definitely killed, and another dozen or so deaths may have been linked to the rioting. Eleven of those killed were black victims of the mob, eight were soldiers, and two were policemen; the rest were rioters. Cook,
Armies of the Streets
, 193–94, 310n.

38
.
Ibid.
, passim, esp. 117, 195–96.

up troop strength in Manhattan to 20,000 men who enforced calm during the resumption of drafting on August 19. By then the city council had appropriated funds to pay the commutation fees of drafted men—including, no doubt, some of the rioters.

II

The specter of class conflict also haunted the South. As in the North, conscription worsened the friction. Manpower needs had forced the Confederate Congress in September 1862 to raise the upper age limit from thirty-five to forty-five. This made the heads of many poor families suddenly subject to the draft at a time when that summer's drought had devastated food crops. And Congress added insult to injury by a provision to exempt one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves.

This controversial exemption was the result of pressure from planter families. The South had gone to war, among other reasons, to defend slavery. But if all white men on plantations went into the army, discipline would erode, slaves would continue to run off to the swamps or to the Yankees, and slavery itself would crumble away. The South was also fighting to preserve a certain vision of womanhood. To leave white women alone on plantations to cope with large numbers of slaves was hardly compatible with this vision. A letter from an Alabama woman to the governor in September 1862 bespoke a situation that seemed to call for action. "I have no brother
no one
on whom I can call for aid," she wrote. "I am living
alone
now, with only my child a little girl of 2 years old. I am now surrounded on all sides by plantations of negroes—many of them have not a white [man] on them. I am now begging you will not you in kindness to a poor unprotected woman and child give me the power of having my overseer recalled." The Confederacy also needed the food and fiber raised on plantations, and southerners believed that without overseers the slaves would raise nothing. Planters insisted that the exemption of overseers was at least as important to the war effort as the exemption of teachers or apothecaries. In October 1862 Congress concurred, though not without objections by some senators against this legislation "in favour of slave labour against white labour."
³⁹

By granting a special privilege to a class constituting only 5 percent

39
. Quotations from Armstead Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage: Slavery's Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865," unpublished ms,
chap. 5
, pp. 15, 27.

of the white population, the "Twenty-Negro Law" became as unpopular in the South as commutation in the North. Although only four or five thousand planters or overseers obtained exemptions under the law—representing about 15 percent of the eligible plantations and 3 percent of the men exempted for all causes—the symbolism of the law was powerful. Many of the men who deserted from Confederate armies during the winter of 1862–63 agreed with a Mississippi farmer who went AWOL because he "did not propose to fight for the rich men while they were at home having a good time." Alarmed by what he heard on a trip home from Richmond, Mississippi's Senator James Phelan wrote to his friend Jefferson Davis on December 9: "Never did a law meet with more universal odium. . . . Its influence upon the poor is calamitous. . . . It has aroused a spirit of rebellion in some places, I am informed, and bodies of men have banded together to resist; whilst in the army it is said it only needs some daring men to raise the standard to develop a revolt."
⁴⁰

Such protests made limited headway against planter influence. Congress modified but never repealed the twenty-Negro exemption, which remained a divisive issue for the rest of the war. One modification in May 1863 required planters to pay $500 for the privilege; another in February 1864 reduced the number of slaves to fifteen but specified that exempted plantations must sell to the government at fixed cost 200 pounds of meat per slave, part of it for the families of needy soldiers. As this requirement suggests, hunger was a serious factor in the disaffection of yeoman and laboring classes. Despite the conversion of much acreage from cotton to food crops in 1862, the drought and the breakdown of southern transportation—not to mention Union conquest of prime agricultural regions—led to severe food shortages the following winter. The quickening pace of inflation also drove the price of food, even when available, beyond the reach of many. Having doubled in the latter half of 1862, the price index doubled again in the first half of 1863. In Richmond, War Department clerk John Jones saw his salary fall farther and farther behind the cost of living until in March 1863 "the shadow of the gaunt form of famine is upon us." Jones had lost twenty pounds

40
. Quotations from Bell Irvin Wiley,
Southern Negroes
1861–1865 (New Haven, 1938), 4911., and
O.R.
, Ser. I, Vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 790. For statistics on draft exemptions, see Albert B. Moore,
Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy
(New York, 1924), 107–08.

"and my wife and children are emaciated." Even the rats in his kitchen were so hungry that they ate bread crumbs from his daughter's hand "as tame as kittens. Perhaps we shall have to eat them!"
⁴¹

Women and children on farms suffered as much as those in cities. A farm woman in North Carolina wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance in April 1863 describing how "a crowd of we Poor wemen went to Greenesborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful of meet nor bread in my house what did they do but put us in gail in plase of giveing us aney thing to eat. . . . I have 6 little children and my husband in the armey and what am I to do?" What indeed? Some women wrote to Confederate officials pleading for the discharge of their husbands. One letter to the secretary of war insisted that the writer's husband "is not able to do your government much good and he might do his children some good and thare is no use in keeping a man thare to kill him and leave widows and poore little orphen children to suffer while the rich has aplenty to work for them."
⁴²

Such appeals availed little, so thousands of husbands discharged themselves. "There is already a heap of men gone home," wrote a Mississippi private to his wife in November 1862, "and a heap says if their familys get to suffering that they will go [too]." A month later a distressed officer in Bragg's Army of Tennessee declared that "desertions are multiplying so fast in this army that almost one-third of it is gone."
⁴³

Many of these deserters joined with draft-evaders in backcountry regions to form guerrilla bands that resisted Confederate authority and virtually ruled whole counties. Some of these "regulators" formed ties with the antiwar or unionist secret societies that sprang up in 1862 and 1863: the Peace and Constitution Society in Arkansas; the Peace Society in northern Alabama and northern Georgia; and the Heroes of America in western North Carolina and east Tennessee. The rich man's war/poor man's fight theme stimulated the growth of these societies just as it strengthened copperheads in the North. Although the southern peace societies did not achieve the visibility or influence that an established political party gave northern copperheads, they drained vitality from the

41
. Jones,
War Clerk's Diary
(Miers), 170, 243, 164.

42
. W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds.,
North Carolina Civil War Documentary
(Chapel Hill, 1980), 221; Paul D. Escott,
After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism
(Baton Rouge, 1978), 108.

43
. Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage,"
chap. 5
, pp. 38, 40.

Confederate war effort in certain regions and formed the nucleus for a significant peace movement if the war should take a turn for the worse.
⁴⁴

Was it especially a poor man's fight in the South? Probably no more than it was in the North, according to the following table based on data from seven Confederate states.
⁴⁵

From this sample it appears that, adjusted for age, both skilled and unskilled laborers were under-represented in the Confederate army while business and professional classes may have been over-represented. The most important categories in this rural society, however, were farmers and planters. Unfortunately, neither the census nor the regimental muster rolls consistently distinguished between these two classes, so it is impossible to tell whether "planters" were under-represented. The only study of this question found that in three piedmont counties of Georgia the average wealth of men who did not serve in the army was about 20 percent greater than those who did.
⁴⁶
The pattern indicated by this limited

44
. Georgia Lee Tatum,
Disloyalty in the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill, 1944).

45
. The data on Confederate soldiers are drawn from a sample of 9,057 men listed in the company rolls of regiments from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia. I am indebted to the late Bell Irvin Wiley for his generosity in supplying me these data from his research files.

46
. J. William Harris,
Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands
(Middletown, Conn., 1986), 152. Harris compiled a sample of men of military age from three Georgia counties, determined their wealth and slaveholding (or that of their families) from the manuscript returns of the 1860 census, and searched the roster of Georgia soldiers in the Confederate army to determine which men in his sample served in the army and which did not. His findings must be used with caution, however, for he found fewer than half of the men in his sample in the roster of Georgia regiments, while we know that 70 to 80 percent of southern white men of military age served in the Confederate armed forces. The wealth and slaveholding of men missing from the incomplete army records might have modified Harris's findings if they could have been identified.

sample may have been counterbalanced for the Confederacy as a whole by the greater tendency of men from its poorest upcountry regions to skedaddle, desert, or otherwise avoid Confederate service.