Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher

Confederate conscription forced residents of the Civil War South to reckon with a number of complicated, even vexatious, questions: Did centralized national military service imperil states’ rights? Did compelling such service chip away at the much-vaunted ideal of white male liberty? Most importantly for the outmanned Confederacy’s fight for independence, how could the needs of the army be met without ignoring or neglecting the needs of the home front? In this new book—the first extensive analysis of the policy since Albert Burton Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924)—Sacher insightfully charts the evolution of conscription, demonstrating how reality failed to live up to the discordant expectations that people had about the policy. Conscription ultimately could not harmonize states’ rights with the centralized power that the system demanded; it could not be enforced in a highly efficient way that was sensitive to the idiosyncratic needs of different families...