nlisted to form the first national army under the laws of
Congress passed in August, 1861; nearly half a million more volunteers
came forward under the tender of the governors of free States and the
President's call of July, 1862, to repair the failure of McClellan's
Peninsula campaign. Several minor calls for shorter terms of enlistment,
aggregating more than forty thousand, are here omitted for brevity's
sake. Had the Western victories continued, had the Mississippi been
opened, had the Army of the Potomac been more fortunate, volunteering
would doubtless have continued at quite or nearly the same rate. But
with success delayed, with campaigns thwarted, with public sentiment
despondent, armies ceased to fill. An emergency call for three hundred
thousand nine months' men, issued on August 4, 1862, produced a total of
only eighty-six thousand eight hundred and sixty; and an attempt to
supply these in some of the States by a draft under State laws
demonstrated that mere local statutes and machinery for that form of
military recruitment were defective and totally inadequate.

With the beginning of the third year of the war, more energetic measures
to fill the armies were seen to be necessary; and after very hot and
acrimonious debate for about a month, Congress, on March 3, 1863, passed
a national conscription law, under which all male citizens between the
ages of twenty and forty-five were enrolled to constitute the national
forces, and the President was authorized to call them into service by
draft as occasion might require. The law authorized the appointment of a
provost-marshal-general, and under him a provost-marshal, a
commissioner, and a surgeon, to constitute a board of enrollment in each
congressional district; who, with necessary deputies, were required to
carry out the law by national authority, under the supervision of the
provost-marshal-general.

For more than a year past, the Democratic leaders in the Northern States
had assumed an attitude of violent partizanship against the
administration, their hostility taking mainly the form of stubborn
opposition to the antislavery enactments of Congress and the
emancipation measures of the President. They charged with loud
denunciation that he was converting the maintenance of the Union into a
war for abolition, and with this and other clamors had gained
considerable successes in the autumn congressional elections of 1862,
though not enough to break the Republican m