Confederate Draft Quotes

Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.

Virtually all of the former Confederate states threw out their Reconstruction-era constitutions—those that black people helped draft and which they voted to ratify—and wrote new ones that included disenfranchisement provisions, antimiscegenation provisions, and separate-but-equal Jim Crow provisions. Though “race neutral” in language, these new constitutions solidified Southern states as governed by legal segregation and discrimination.

While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. This prescient document encapsulated many features of the 1787 Constitution: a federal government with powers separated among legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and a Congress with the power to levy taxes and raise an army.

When our Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution—the successor document to the Articles of Confederation—they recognized that the proper role of government is not a nanny or Big Brother but a limited entity designed to protect the people’s natural liberties. “The Fathers rather frequently indicated that our rights were founded on the law of nature.”1 Almost uniformly, individuals like Madison, Jefferson, and Washington subscribed to the concept of the Natural Law and the inherent dignity of all persons:2 A dignity that bears with it the promise of “certain unalienable Rights, . . . among [which] are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

No State government has the right to make war, raise armies, or conclude treaties of peace. These rights," he said, were "expressly conferred upon the Confederate Government." Far from the draft being unconstitutional, he felt that "the volunteering system . . . was extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional.

The official term of the President was fixed at six instead of four years, and it was provided that he should not be eligible for reëlection. This was in accordance with the original draft of the Constitution of 1787.

However, the decisions first to draft the Articles of Confederation and then, later, to move toward a new constitution and a more centralized federal government — the key events of the 1780s — were actions that mostly benefited the elites.

That three of New York’s five delegates had been absent much of the time only added to his heavy burden. He had concluded that the country was not ready to amend the risible Articles of Confederation, because local and state politics exerted too dominant an influence. “Experience must convince us that our present establishments are utopian before we shall be ready to part with them for better,” he told Nathanael Greene. While marking time in Princeton in July, Hamilton drafted a resolution that again called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation.

such a moment, and in a scene right out of Delacroix, it might have seemed to William as though everyone were signing up and marching off, but it was not so. Of the 776,829 names called up in the three national drafts of 1863 and 1864, only 46,347 men were held for military service, or about one out of sixteen. At Harvard the percentage was higher. During the war, 1,311 Harvard men enlisted in the Union army and navy; they were decimated: 138, or 10.5 percent, were killed or died in the war. It was far worse for the 250 Harvard men who enlisted in the Confederate army and navy. Of them 64, or an appalling 25 percent, died or were killed in the war. Even

draft Confederate gunboats had proven they could easily maneuver through

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.

To be sure, the Dickinson Draft has always been a tortured document that leaned toward a state-majority confederation. And it was always clear that the vast majority of Americans did not regard the war for Independence as a movement for American nationhood, to the extent they gave the matter any thought at all.