History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2140 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Three Hundred Dollars
The idea
The Enrollment Act let a drafted man provide a substitute or pay a commutation fee of three hundred dollars to avoid service altogether. The Confederate draft of eighteen sixty-two let wealthy men hire substitutes on the same principle. Both provisions were resented by the poor of their own side, and both produced the complaint that this was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
In practice
Two governments at war with each other writing the same class privilege into their conscription laws within a year of one another.
Where people slip
This is a rare exact symmetry and it is worth the entry for that reason. The two societies described themselves as opposites, one built on free labour and the other on slavery, and when each had to compel its own citizens to die it reached for the same device. Note also what three hundred dollars was: roughly a year's wages for a labourer, which makes the commutation fee a price only one class could pay. The New York draft riots at entry 2148 begin two days after the first lottery under this act.
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