een set up beforehand in time of
peace. Compulsion only came into force in default of sufficient
volunteers from any district to provide its required number of the troops
wanted. When it came into force the "drafts" of conscripts were chosen
by lot from among those enrolled as liable for service. But there was a
way of escape from actual service. It seems, from what Lincoln wrote, to
have been looked upon as a time-honoured principle, established by
precedent in all countries, that the man on whom the lot fell might
provide a substitute if he could. The market price of a substitute (a
commodity for the provision of which a class of "substitute brokers" came
into being) proved to be about 1,000 dollars. Business or professional
men, who felt they could not be spared from home but wished to act
patriotically, did buy substitutes; but they need not have done so, for
the law contained a provision intended, as Lincoln recorded, to safeguard
poorer men against such a rise in prices. They could escape by paying
300 dollars, or 60 pounds, not, in the then state of wages, an
extravagant penalty upon an able-bodied man. The sums paid under this
provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.

Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to
voluntary enlistment. The volunteer received, as the conscript did not,
a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities,
when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling
their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government
bounty. It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered
country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were
plenty of abuses. Substitute brokers provided the wrong article;
ingenious rascals invented the trade of "bounty-jumping," and would
enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for another bounty, and so on
indefinitely; and the number of men enrolled who were afterwards
unaccounted for was large. There was of course also grumbling of
localities at the quotas assigned to them, though no pains were spared to
assign them fairly. There was some opposition to the working of the law
after it was passed, but it was, not general, but partly the opposition
of rowdies in degraded neighbourhoods, partly factitious political
opposition, and partly seditious and openly friendly to the South. In
general the country accepted the law as a manifest mi