The government leaders in Congress brought in a Conscription Act
early in the year. The hot debates upon this issue dragged
through a month's time, and now make instructive reading for the
present generation that has watched the Great War*. The Act of
1863 was not the work of soldiers, but was literally "made in
Congress." Stanton grimly made the best of it, though he
unwaveringly condemned some of its most conspicuous provisions.
His business was to retrieve his blunder of the previous year,
and he was successful. Imperfect as it was, the Conscription
Act, with later supplementary legislation, enabled him to replace
the wastage of the Union armies and steadily to augment them. At
the close of the war, the Union had on foot a million men with an
enrolled reserve of two millions and a half, subject to call.
* The battle over conscription in England was anticipated in
America sixty-four years ago. Bagot says that the average
British point of view may be expressed thus: "What I am sayin' is
this here as I was a sayin' yesterday." The Anglo-Saxon mind is
much the same the world over. In America, today, the enemies of
effective military organization would do well to search the
arguments of their skillful predecessors in 1888, who fought to
the last ditch for a military system that would make inescapable
"peace at any price.
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