previous next
[479] conscription (1862) as follows, giving only fractions of the population for those States partially overrun by the enemy:

Alabama,529,164
Arkansas,324,323
Florida,78,686
Georgia,595,097
Louisiana,376,913
Mississippi,354,699
North Carolina,661,586
A fourth of Missouri,264,588
South Carolina,801,271
Two thirds of Tennessee,556,042
Texas,420,651
Half of Virginia,552,591
Total,5,015,618

This being the aggregate population, what proportion of it were males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five? By the census of 1850, the population of the United States was twenty-three millions one hundred and ninety-one thousand eight hundred and seventy-six. Of this total, seven millions forty-seven thousand nine hundred and forty-five were given as between the ages in question. Half this number would give three millions five hundred and twenty-three thousand nine hundred and seventy-two as the males between those ages; which number is fifteen per cent. of the aggregate population. This ratio applied to the white population of the Confederacy, as stated above, would give as the number that should have been produced by the first act of conscription seven hundred and fifty-two thousand three hundred and forty-two men. If we should add to this number the volunteers from that population of the States of Kentucky, Maryland, and portions of Virginia and Missouri not embraced in the basis of estimate, and the volunteers offering from ages not embraced in the prescribed figures, the aggregate soldiery of the Confederacy would reach the number of eight hundred thousand.

The conscription law of the Confederacy had since been extended to the age of forty-five; and in 1863 it was further extended, by the repeal of the clause allowing substitutions, which it was declared would add more than seventy thousand men to the army. And yet about this time the rolls of the Adjutant-General's office in Richmond showed little more than four hundred thousand men under arms; and of these, Mr. Seddon, the Confederate Secretary of War, declared that, owing to desertions and other causes, “not more than a half, never two-thirds of the soldiers were in the ranks.” When we contemplate the actual result to which the conscription

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Seddon (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1863 AD (1)
1862 AD (1)
1850 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: