It is not clear how far the Southern people displayed their warlike temper by a sustained flow of voluntary enlistment; but their Congress showed the utmost promptitude in granting every necessary power to their President, and on April 16, 1862, a sweeping measure of compulsory service was passed.  The President of the Confederacy could call into the service any white resident in the South between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, with certain statutory exemptions.  There was, of course, trouble about the difficult question of exemptions, and under conflicting pressure the Confederate Congress made and unmade various laws about them.  After a time all statutory exemptions were done away, and it was left entirely in the discretion of the Southern President to say what men were required in various departments of civil life.  The liability to serve was extended in September, 1862, to all between eighteen and forty-five, and finally in February, 1864, to all between seventeen and fifty.  The rigorous conscription which necessity required could not be worked without much complaint.  There was a party disposed to regard the law as unconstitutional.  The existence of sovereign States within the Confederacy was very likely an obstacle to the local and largely voluntary organisation for deciding claims which can exist in a unified country.  A Government so hard driven must, even if liberally minded, have enforced the law with much actual hardship.  A belief in the ruthlessness of the Southern conscription penetrated to the North.  If was probably exaggerated from the temptation to suppose that secession was the work of a tyranny and not of the Southern people.  Desertion and failure of the Conscription Law became common in the course of 1864, but this would seem to have been due not so much to resentment at the system as to the actual loss of a large part of the South, and the spread of a perception that the war was now hopelessly lost.  In the last extremities of the Confederate Government the power of compulsion of course completely broke down.  But, upon the surface at least, it seems plain that what has been called the military despotism of Jefferson Davis rested upon the determination rather than upon the submissiveness of the people.

In the North, where there was double the population to draw upon, the need for compulsion was not likely to be felt as soon.  The various influences which would later depress enlistment had hardly begun to assert themselves, when the Government, as if to aggravate them in advance, committed a blunder which has never been surpassed in its own line.  On April 3, 1862, recruiting was stopped dead; the central recruiting office at Washington was closed and its staff dispersed.  Many writers agree in charging this error against Stanton.  He must have been the prime author of it, but this does not exonerate Lincoln.  It was no departmental matter, but a matter of supreme policy.  Lincoln’s knowledge of human nature