Men on the Home Front

During the American Civil War popular conceptions of manhood and honor dictated that men volunteer to serve their country. Not all men, however, could or would serve in the military during the conflict. Some men joined the army for short periods of time, but avoided long-term enlistment. Many civilian men in the Union and the Confederacy performed important tasks, such as running the government, providing home defense, and operating essential wartime industries. Other civilian men objected to the war and refused to fight or simply believed that protecting their homes and providing for their families were more important.

Businessmen who stayed home during the war risked having their neighbors brand them as profiteers, but some occupations were considered too important for men to leave vacant. Many businessmen and merchants supported the war effort through community leadership and financial donations. Prominent businessmen donated to relief funds that benefited soldiers' families and donated money to provide bounties to encourage men to enlist. The United States Sanitary Commission, a northern civilian organization formed to benefit the physical and moral well-being of soldiers, was organized and staffed by civilian men, although women did most of the fund raising. The officers of the Commission included Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows, New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, and well-known architect Frederick Law Olmstead (1822-1903). Shortly after the war, northern writer Frank B. Goodrich, quoted by James Marten in his 2003 book Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front, defended those who profited from staying home by alluding to "the records of money given, not money earned; a labor of love, not of labor for hire and salary; of self-assessment, of tribute rendered always willingly, often unasked" (p. 135). It cannot be denied, however, that some northern men avoided military service because there was more money to be made on the home front through speculation or illicit trade with the South.

In the Confederacy industry and agriculture were doubly essential, considering the reality of fighting the war and establishing a new nation at the same time. Joseph Reid Anderson, proprietor of the important Tre-degar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, resigned his commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army in 1862. In his letter of resignation, dated July 14, 1862, and reproduced on the Web site Civil War Richmond Anderson cited several pressing issues at his factory and stated that, "Since these changes have occurred I cannot doubt as to where I can render most service to the Country." Anderson spent the rest of the war working for the Confederate Ordnance Department in Richmond, where he could oversee his business. The government also considered plantations essential to the wartime economy and therefore exempted from the draft men who owned at least twenty slaves. This exemption was later expanded to also cover men who owned between fourteen and nineteen slaves, but working-class southerners, who still would not qualify, resented this distinction. Henry Steele Commager relays in his 2000 edited work The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents how John Beauchamp, a clerk for the war department in Richmond, remarked that "the avarice and cupidity of the men at home could only be excelled by the ravenous wolves, and most of our sufferings are fully deserved" (p. 501).

Men who stayed home often considered their responsibility to their families more important than joining the army, but these men were not necessarily opposed to the war effort. Men on the home front formed militias and drilled regularly in order to defend their homes from the enemy. There were several occasions in the North and South where civilians' preparedness was tested. In July 1863, Confederate cavalry led by General John Hunt Morgan raided through Indiana and Ohio and were met by militia who skirmished with the Confederates. In southern Indiana the rebels were opposed by the state military organization, the Indiana Legion, which was composed of men of military age who protected their rural border communities while continuing to labor on farms and in workshops. During the crisis, however, all available men were needed, and Indiana's governor, Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton (1823-1877), declared "that all able-bodied white male citizens will form themselves into companies, and arm themselves with such arms as they can procure," as Flora E. Simmons recorded in her 1863 book A Complete Account of the John Morgan Raid through Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, in July, 1863 (p. 16). White men in the Confederacy also answered the call to fight the enemy when needed. On June 9, 1864, about 2,500 hastily formed militia, composed of those too young or old for military service, held off approximately 4,500 Union cavalry outside Petersburg, Virginia. Residents later dubbed the engagement, which caused the Union army to begin a lengthy and costly siege of the city, the "Battle of Old Men and Boys." Black male civilians were willing to volunteer to protect their homes, but in 1862, when Cincinnati, Ohio, was endangered by Confederate troops, city authorities only allowed black citizens to dig trenches and build earthworks.

Both the Union and Confederate drafts often forced military-age men to serve unless they could provide a substitute. The Confederacy began to conscript men in 1862, and the Union followed suit the following year. The draft did not necessarily mean that civilian men were forced to leave their communities. Wealthy men could afford to hire a substitute, and in the North, draftees could pay a $300 commutation fee to avoid conscription. This infuriated workers who could not pay the fee. As noted by editor Michael Perman in his 1998 book Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays, a New Jersey official wrote to Secretary of State William Seward on July 18, 1863, reporting that "the minds of the poor, even of Republicans, are terribly inflamed by the S300 clause in the enrolling act" (p. 192). Some civilian men resisted the draft, refusing to serve. This was especially common in the Confederacy during the last two years of the war. Jones County, Mississippi, became a center for local resistance to conscription and a refuge for deserters to such an extent that it became known as "The Free State of Jones." A strong sense of duty to family and community caused men in both the North and the South to avoid military service or to leave before their term had ended.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Joseph R. to General S. Cooper. Richmond, VA. July 14, 1862. Civil War Richmond. Available from http://www.mdgorman.com/.

Bynum, Victoria E. The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Cashin, Joan E., ed. The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Commager, Henry Steele, ed. The Civil War Archive: The History of the Civil War in Documents. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2000.

Marten, James. Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front. Santa Barbara, CA: ABI-CLIO, 2003.

Perman, Michael, ed. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction: Documents and Essays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Simmons, Flora E. A Complete Account of the John Morgan Raid through Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, in July, 1863. [Louisville, Ky.]: F.E. Simmons, 1863. Sources in U.S. History Online: Civil War. Gale. Available from http://galenet.galegroup.com/.

Stephen Rockenbach