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Article Excerpt
Why was Hugh Boyle the only one? Of the more than 15,000 New Yorkers living in the teeming Five Points slum, this sandy-haired, blue-eyed, twenty-seven-year-old laborer was the only one forced into the army as a result of the Civil War draft. Anyone familiar with either the conscription law or its reputation among New York's Irish immigrants should find this fact surprising. Few Five Pointers could afford the $300 commutation fee that exempted one from the conscription. As a result, impoverished immigrants such as those who dominated Five Points thought that the onus of conscription would fall disproportionately on their shoulders. They believed that "the draft was an unfair one," reported the New York Herald, "inasmuch as the rich could avoid it by paying $300, while the poor man, who was without 'the greenbacks,' was compelled to go to the war." (1) But the draft rolls from New York seem to suggest a different story. Perhaps the draft did not create a "poor man's fight" after all. Only a systematic study of immigrants in the Union draft could determine if the conscription had forced many immigrants into uniform, or if, instead, immigrants had found some way to avoid service despite their relatively modest economic circumstances.
One might imagine, given the voluminous historiography of the American Civil War, that the subject of immigrants in the Northern draft would have been thoroughly examined already. But in fact no satisfying study of the subject has ever been published. The few works that specifically survey the role of immigrants in the Civil War barely mention the draft, focusing instead on the heroics of foreign-born volunteers. The two book-length studies of the Northern draft, by Eugene Murdock and James W. Geary, devote very little attention to immigrants, concentrating instead on the conscription's many procedural problems and controversies. (2) Bell Wiley and James McPherson have both published careful analyses of who fought for the North, but because their figures lump draftees together with volunteers, their statistics tell us only that immigrants were not overrepresented in the army as a whole, and leave the question of the newcomers' treatment in the draft unresolved. The drama of Civil War draft rioting continues to attract interest from a wide range of scholars, but none of them has determined whether the rioters' fear that they would be disproportionately affected by the draft actually proved to be true. (3)
Lax record keeping made the undertaking difficult. Draft officials nationwide were supposed to maintain identical records, indicating the name, age, height, eye and hair color, occupation, and birthplace of each draftee. Provost officers were also expected to record the ultimate disposition of each conscript--whether he was exempted for medical or other reasons, paid the $300 commutation fee, hired a substitute, or was "held to service." But most draft officers left important portions of the ledgers blank. Some recorded most of the information but failed to note nativity, the crucial variable for this study (this was the case for most of New York City, for example). Even the fairly complete draft books do not typically indicate the nativity of those who "failed to report" (the official term for those who did not appear at a draft office after their name was drawn). Because it appears that immigrants failed to report at a higher rate than natives, ledgers lacking nativity information on draft dodgers are far less valuable than those that contain this data. Finally, the army's record keeping grew worse as the war progressed. A draft officer who kept good records during the first draft (which took place in most areas in the summer of 1863) usually recorded far less information concerning those drafted in later conscriptions. Consequently, this study focuses on the conscription of 1863, although it also includes data from cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee, whose first drafts were conducted in 1864. (4)
The pattern that emerges from this data is unmistakable: immigrants were not disproportionately forced into the army as a result of the draft. In most instances, in fact, immigrants were underrepresented in the ranks of those held to service. From Maine and New Hampshire to Ohio and Illinois, immigrants in the nation's major and mid-size cities were almost always less likely than natives to serve in the army as a result of the draft. The Irish, the most economically disadvantaged of the major immigrant groups of the period, are especially underrepresented, but other immigrant groups are lacking in the ranks of the conscripted as well, though in a few places in 1864 Germans entered the army as a result of the draft at a higher rate than either the Irish or the native-born. If one considers all those forced to contribute to the war effort as a result of the draft, by combining those forced to serve with those who hired substitutes or paid the commutation fee, then immigrants lag even further behind natives in their contributions. This study indicates that one group does appear to have been disproportionately forced into service as a result of the draft--native-born laborers, especially those residing in rural areas. Their outsized contribution to the Union cause has not previously been adequately recognized.
THE DATA
Because the data in the tables below play such an important role in this study, a brief discussion of their source is in order. In the bowels of the old National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue, lining hundreds of feet of shelves in the dark, low-ceilinged stacks, sit thousands of leather-bound volumes that comprise Record Group 110, the papers of the Provost Marshal General's Bureau. Although a large portion of these records are those of the bureau's main office in Washington, the majority of the collection is comprised of ledgers maintained by the bureau's district headquarters. In March 1863, the bureau established one such office in every congressional district and in the territories as well. Each district office preserved its correspondence with Washington, kept account books detailing expenditures, and recorded the enlistment of volunteers and the pursuit of deserters and bounty jumpers. In the spring of 1863, bureau officers began recording the names of every man in each provost district presumed eligible for the draft. When the draft commenced in the summer of that year, the selected names were inscribed in ledger books, along with the information about appearance, age, nativity, and occupation. Later on, once each case had been resolved, the final status of the conscript would be recorded as well. Although their ink is fading and their bindings are disintegrating, these rich records, largely ignored by historians in the 140 years since the Civil War ended, provide the data that made this study possible.
It is also necessary to explain the organization and presentation of the figures derived from these ledgers. First, the columns of each table are arranged so that as one reads from left to right: one begins with the outcome least desirable to the government ("failed to report"), moves right through ever more desirable outcomes (exempted after reporting, paid $300 to the government for commutation, hired a substitute) until at the right one reaches the most desirable outcome for the army, a draftee who agreed to serve (i.e., was "held to service"). Second, some explanation is needed for the variations in the labeling of the far-right column in the tables. In most cases, that column is labeled "number drafted," which refers to the number of persons whose names were called to serve in the army when each draft was held. But because the ledgers for some places do not list the nativity of those who were called but failed to report, the far-right columns in the tables based on those ledger books are labeled "number reporting," to indicate the exclusion of those who failed to report. The reader needs to remember that the figures in those tables should be used to compare immigrants to non-immigrants within each locale and should not be compared directly with the other tables. Finally, because the number of immigrant and nonimmigrant draftees within a given city sometimes varied tremendously, a comparison of the raw numbers would be misleading for determining the proportion of immigrants and natives forced into the army as a result of the draft. Percentages make for a much quicker and more relevant comparison. But for those who want to know the raw numbers, it is easy to calculate. In any given row, merely multiply the percentage (converted into a decimal) by the number at the end of that row to calculate the actual number of persons who make up the percentage. In the very first row of Table 1, for example, we can determine the actual number of natives held to service in Bangor by multiplying the percentage given (6%, or .06) by the total number drafted (298) to learn that eighteen native-born Bangor residents entered the army as a result of the draft.
With this information in mind, we can begin to examine the data from the draft ledgers. The best-kept draft books contain data for every federally prescribed category, including the nativity of those who failed to report for duty. Only six of the twenty-six urban draft ledgers from 1863 consulted for this study, about 20 percent of the total, recorded every bit of the prescribed information, and the data from these records are presented in Table 1. As Table 1 shows, these ledgers suggest that immigrants were not more likely than natives to serve in the army as a result of the draft. In five of the six cities, in fact, immigrants were far less likely to be held to service than other draftees. Only in Lowell did immigrants enter the army at rates comparable to natives. It is also notable that in most instances immigrants "failed to report" significantly more often than natives, and that Irish immigrants were typically the most likely to desert rather than report when drafted. The figures do, however, corroborate the notion that immigrants were less able to hire substitutes or pay for commutation than other Americans. In most cases, immigrants were far less likely than natives to buy their way out of the draft--anywhere from two to ten times less likely. The only exception was in Harrisburg, where a large and relatively prosperous German immigrant community was either able to pay the commutation fee or hire substitutes at about the same rate as natives. Yet by more often claiming exemptions and failing to report, immigrants without the money to buy their way out of the draft were able to offset the disadvantage of their limited monetary resources. Consequently, immigrants in these cities were less likely than natives to serve in the army as a result of the draft.
Although draft ledgers that do not record the nativity of those who failed to report are less useful than those that include this data, such draft books do nonetheless enable us to compare the rate at which immigrants and natives were held to service. The draft records from these cities confirm the trends found in the complete registers. Immigrants were never overrepresented in the ranks of those held to service, and in most cases they were underrepresented. Only in Albany and Scranton were immigrants held to service at the same rate as natives, and that is because, in effect, nobody from those two cities was held to serve. In Albany, almost no one was held to service because the city bought substitutes for all who could not afford them. The only Albany resident forced into the army was an immigrant who had failed...
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