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 majority in the House of Representatives.  General McClellan was a Democrat, and, since his removal from command, they proclaimed him a martyr to this policy, and were grooming him to be their coming presidential candidate.

The passage of the conscription law afforded them a new pretext to assail the administration; and Democratic members of both Houses of Congress denounced it with extravagant partizan bitterness as a violation of the Constitution, and subversive of popular liberty.  In the mouths of vindictive cross-roads demagogues, and in the columns of irresponsible newspapers that supply the political reading among the more reckless elements of city populations, the extravagant language of Democratic leaders degenerated in many instances into unrestrained abuse and accusation.  Yet, considering that this was the first conscription law ever enacted in the United States, considering the multitude of questions and difficulties attending its application, considering that the necessity of its enforcement was, in the nature of things, unwelcome to the friends of the government, and, as naturally, excited all the enmity and cunning of its foes to impede, thwart, and evade it, the law was carried out with a remarkably small proportion of delay, obstruction, or resulting violence.

Among a considerable number of individual violations of the act, in which prompt punishment prevented a repetition, only two prominent incidents arose which had what may be called a national significance.  In the State of New York the partial political reaction of 1862 had caused the election of Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, as governor.  A man of high character and great ability, he, nevertheless, permitted his partizan feeling to warp and color his executive functions to a dangerous extent.  The spirit of his antagonism is shown in a phrase of his fourth-of-July oration: