Rhea Cole
Major
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2019
- Location
- Murfreesboro, Tennessee
The CSA conscription story is extremely complex. Resistance to conscription in the Appalachian Mountains was fierce. Punitive expeditions were mounted by CSA conscription officials all up & down the mountains.My family on my fathers side has a similar tale. We can trace their history accurately from 1840 onwards, but that's only because some letters survive, but there's an amusing problem with them. Dutch immigrants (or Dutch descended) from the United States to Canada, some British civil servant seems to have heard their name, and written down permissions for them under a completely inaccurate one. The pre-existing "Van" got dropped from our names, and it was misspelled to make many people believe we were actually Jewish.
It makes for an... interesting attempt at research.
Part of the reason I'm curious of Confederate strengths is that, while it appears the Confederate army was large, I don't quite understand the impetus for the sudden roll of conscription acts that came in early spring 1862. If there was a sudden fear half the army was going to vanish it made sense, but if there was still going to be a vary large army left behind I was scratching my head and the new draconian conscription orders. Knowing how large the forces available to the Confederacy before all the big battles is quite helpful to me since it can give a scale of why more men were needed, and how many may have been lost in the fighting of 1862.
After the first blush voluntary enlistment in CSA regiments plummeted. Once an area of TN e.g. was lost to CSA control, local men went home. Few, if any, volunteers or draftees joined up to replace the steady hemorrhage of deserters.
The hard, cold reality is that without conscription the CSA army would have shrunk to a fraction. With mass desertion as time went on, even. Conscription could not fill the ranks.