sacher2007

@Article{ sacher2007,
	author = {John M. Sacher},
	title = {'{A} Very Disagreeable Business': {C}onfederate Conscription in {L}ouisiana},
	journal = {Civil War History},
	volume = 53,
	number = 2,
	month = {June},
	pages = {141-169},
	year = 2007,
}

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwh/summary/v053/53.2sacher.html

p. 146: Notes one diehard Confederate loyalist who described those who went to the Union lines to avoid conscription as “white contrabands.”

Sacher notes that many of those who initially sought to throw themselves on the Union for protection ironically found themselves subject to drafting by the Union army: “In the Lafourche region, the Union army required military-age men to take an oath of allegiance in order to avoid arrest and to keep their property. Many took this oath out of convenience rather than sincerity. Starting in 1863, the U.S. army began to draft these ostensibly ‘loyal’ citizens, and in response an ‘underground railroad’ emerged to help these men escape to Confederate lines” (146-147).¹

p. 151 quotes a former slave who described her master in Alexandria, Louisiana, as a draft dodger with no loyalties to either side: he “wasn’t in favor of the Confederates or the Yankees … he was in favor of himself.”²

Sacher notes that one of the major causes for Louisianans’ protests against conscription was their worry that it “threatened control of Louisiana’s slaves” (155), which led to the enactment of the “twenty negroes” law. But this change in turn aroused the ire of lower-class civilians who decried the “fat saucy extortioners and speculators who have been striving to make fortunes … not caring if the widowed wives and orphaned children of the soldier perished for want of food,” to quote one contemporary letter (167). One enrolling officer in 1864 “declared that any planter who attempted to flee to Texas with his slaves would have his detail revoked and his wagons and horses impressed into the army” (167).

Another way to assuage public anger was to “detail” exempted men “to serve as farmers or physicians for their community or simply to take care of needy families … In other cases, slave owners who received details as overseers or because of the twenty-slave exemption were required to sell a certain amount of their crop at a fixed rate to the poor or to soldiers’ families or risk a loss of their exemption” (168).