ABUNDANT DISQUALIFICATION.
“Ugh! How d’you make out that you are exempt, eh?”
“I’m over age, I am a Negro, a Minister, a Cripple, a British Subject, and an Habitual Drunkard.”
Don’t Matter
From the Richmond Daily Dispatch August 12, 1862:
Doctors’ certificates of no avail.
The Albany Evening Journal says:
We are requested by the Surgeon General to state, “that doctors’ certificates of disability will be of no earthly avail except for mere State service.–Under the order from the War Department, everybody within certain ages — without reference to his physical condition — will be subject to draft. If after they have been drafted they are found to be disabled, they will be exempted. People, therefore, who run to their physicians to get certificates of physical unfitness to ‘shoulder arms,’ waste their time and breath in vain.”
The American Civil War does a great job clearing up some of my confusion about Union recruiting in 1862. To supplement the early July call for 300,000 three-year volunteers, the Lincoln administration issued an order on August 4, 1862 that called for a draft of 300,000 more men for nine months. (This order seems to have flowed from a law President Lincoln signed into law on July 17th). You can read the August 4th order at Son of the South. The article at The American Civil War says that the draft law was meant to encourage volunteering. In addition to men trying to get exempted by doctor’s note, other responses to the summer’s demand for more soldiers included taking trips to Canada and self-mutilation. Having a finger cut off or your teeth knocked out would make a (possibly bogus) note unnecessary.
THE DRAFT. “Och! bald luck to it thin. I’ve got drafted, and niver a cint for it; and tin days ago I might have volunteered, and got me Ninety Dollars just as aisy as snap yer fingers.”
These cartoons from Harper’s Weekly are hosted at Son of the South.
