“It all added up to war-weariness. At the polls the voters cast votes, when they were permitted a free choice, against the radical program of emancipation and confiscation. At the recruiting stations, by failing to enlist, the war-weary people cast an even more effective vote. Against this wave of negation the governors had no weapon they dared to use. Political considerations prevented them from coercing the people, and their reluctance to exercise power enabled Lincoln and the national government to step into the breach. The nation government asserted and maintained the power to conscript men for their armies, and the state executives yielded to or co-operated with the Washington authorities. Eventually states' rights, weakened by war-weariness and rendered inarticulate by politics, died of attrition.” (Page 274.)
“In Ohio, Tod [David Tod Gvernor of Ohio] was alarmed over the number of desertions and asked Lincoln to issue a proclamation granting amnesty to those who returned to their regiments in thirty days, and threatening punishment to those who remained in flight. Kirkwood [Samuel Kirkwood Governor of Iowa] was so alarmed he wanted arms for loyal citizens to protect themselves from deserter bands., while Morton's [Oliver P. Morton Governor of Indiana] provost marshal general told the War Department that “Southern Indiana is ripe for revolution... The Government does not recognize... the peril. The sooner the draft comes the better.”
The alarm over the desertion problem was reflected in Congress, when in February, Massachusett senator Wilson introduced a bill for national conscription. For a couple of weeks the House and senate debated the measure, but they hurried their discussion in the full knowledge that the next Congress, product of the 1862 upheaval, would not adopt a national draft. Even so Democrats and border-state men rallied to oppose this new, un-American assault on states' rights and individual liberties. When A.B. Olin of New York, sponsoring the measure in the House, declared that the government should not petition the state governments for the “boon” of troops, the Democrats objected. When Olin asserted that the idea of calling on the governors for troops was born of the “accursed doctrine of States rights, State sovereignty, which has been chiefly in bringing upon the Republic our present calamity,” the Democrats countered with excoriations of national concentration. This would, in Democratic eyes, establish an irresponsible despotism. Democrats declared that desertions were increasing and recruiting was at a standstill because the Republicans endorsed tyranny; Republicans found the cause in the Democrats' advocacy of treason.” (Pages 290-291)
William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln And The War Governors.