"Overseer Exemption" Application

lelliott19

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Source: Fold3 Confederate Miscellaneous
Presumably an application to be exempted from CS service as a result of the newly enacted law. I have more questions than answers.

Has anyone ever seen a completed one of these? Who was Brigadier General J. S. Roane? Does anyone know where this application might have been in use? Were there different ones for different locales?

Who approved them? Or were they automatically accepted? What does that part mean where its says, ".....that there is no more Cotton planted than the law allows." Assuming there were limits - the same everywhere or different in different states?

Thanks in advance for any additional info.
 
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View attachment 196778 Presumably an application to be exempted from CS service as a result of the newly enacted law. I have more questions than answers.

Has anyone ever seen a completed one of these? Who was Brigadier General J. S. Roane? Does anyone know where this application might have been in use? Were there different ones for different locales?

Who approved them? Or were they automatically accepted? What does that part mean where its says, ".....that there is no more Cotton planted than the law allows." Assuming there were limits - the same everywhere or different in different states?

Thanks in advance for any additional info.
John S. Roane was appointed BG in Spring of '62 from Arkansas. All of his NA records show him in Arkansas, mostly in Little Rock. He was paroled in Shreveport at the War's end.
 
Thanks @DaveBrt and @GELongstreet appreciate the info on Roane.

This 2017 Washington & Lee University Honors Thesis will go a long way in answering most of your very good questions. (Especially see pages 33 - 35.) https://repository.wlu.edu/bitstrea..._Hurst_theses_2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Thanks for your reply and the provided link. I was aware of the exemption law enacted October 11, 1862 but I thought it was enacted by the Confederate Congress and was in force in all the seceded states? Interestingly, the linked thesis seems to indicate that it was created and enacted by BG TC Hindman prior to its passage by the Confederate Congress? That is something I had never heard before.

Do you know if different application forms were in use in various locales? Or was this one in the OP pretty standard across the board? Have you ever seen a completed form similar to the one in the OP? Thanks again for the additional info.
 
This 2017 Washington & Lee University Honors Thesis will go a long way in answering most of your very good questions. (Especially see pages 33 - 35.)

https://repository.wlu.edu/bitstrea..._Hurst_theses_2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Thanks for this. I read the portion you flagged.

However, the Thesis seems to contradict itself. It says on page 35:

"Hindman included a long list of groups exempt from conscription. These included civic officials,
religious ministers, teachers, mailmen, nurses, and members of other essential professions.36
Hindman did, however, add to this list. The most significant example was the exemption of certain
people engaged in the production of wool, cotton, war materiel, salt, leather, and bread, as well as
the exemption of “overseers upon plantations owned by widows or minors, or by officers or
soldiers in the Confederate service, when there is no other white male person on such plantation
capable of managing the same,” given that these plantations were involved in the production of
grain.37
"

Then, it says:

"However, the exemption of overseers and producers of cotton could also be interpreted as an attempt to protect the planter class from conscription."

Let's look again at the quote, above:

“overseers upon plantations owned by widows or minors, or by officers or
soldiers in the Confederate service, when there is no other white male person on such plantation
capable of managing the same,”

I don't get how exempting overseers from conscription where there were no white males available protected the "planter class" from conscription. They had to have already been in the Army for a home front overseer to be exempted.

Thanks, @lelliott19 , for posting this. It's a first on me.
 
Thanks @DaveBrt and @GELongstreet appreciate the info on Roane.


Thanks for your reply and the provided link. I was aware of the exemption law enacted October 11, 1862 but I thought it was enacted by the Confederate Congress and was in force in all the seceded states? Interestingly, the linked thesis seems to indicate that it was created and enacted by BG TC Hindman prior to its passage by the Confederate Congress? That is something I had never heard before.

Do you know if different application forms were in use in various locales? Or was this one in the OP pretty standard across the board? Have you ever seen a completed form similar to the one in the OP? Thanks again for the additional info.

Hindman issued his General Order No. 2 on June 2, 1862. The Order addressed several Arkansas military issues among which was the exemption of certain Arkansas men from conscription. I surmise that Hindman included much if not all the language of the Confederacy's national conscription act adopted (this is previous to the Hindman issuance) by the Confederate Provisional Congress on April 16, 1862 and added to by a follow-up exemption amendment of April 21, 1862. However Hindman in his June General Order No.2 obviously intended and went well beyond then existing Confederate law and added the exemption of overseers of slaves of widows or soldiers etc and producers of cotton.

The first time the Confederate Congress addressed the overseer question directly is in the fall of 1862 when it enacted on October 2, 1862 the controversial provision exempting certain overseers -----those on a plantation who oversaw 20 or more slaves.

The article below explains the Confederate conscription laws. Importantly, it discusses how state courts and national courts had concurrent authority as to exemptions and conscriptions and often differed in its decision-making over these two notoriously troublesome issues.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/11/civil-war-conscription-laws/

I'll do a little more digging and get back to you on what confederate exemption forms such as Roane's Arkansas exemption form might have been issued. I haven't seen one before blank or filled in, but I'm guessing other such forms were probably used.
 
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I'll do a little more digging and get back to you on what confederate exemption forms such as Roane's Arkansas exemption form might have been issued. I haven't seen one before blank or filled in, but I'm guessing other such forms were probably used.
Thanks so much! I would be interested to see a filled in one. And thank you very much for providing the timeline - very helpful and interesting. I had read about the exemption law before but never realized it was enacted anywhere previously - before it was enacted by the Confederate Congress.
 
This 2017 Washington & Lee University Honors Thesis will go a long way in answering most of your very good questions. (Especially see pages 33 - 35.)

https://repository.wlu.edu/bitstrea..._Hurst_theses_2017.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The essay is well-written and researched. I grew up in Arkansas and had read of his draconian regime in high school. His loss at Prairie Grove had a lot to do with his downfall. Some authors thought he should have counter-attacked late in the day, but who knows?
I also knew there was a lot of guerrilla activity in the state, an indirect ancestor having served under Fagan in Eastern Arkansas. A friend at work also let me read the account of two teens from Texas, one of whom was my friend's g-grandfather. The boys traveled from Texas through Indian Territory to the Fort Smith area and had many adventures along the way. The older boy was conscripted into the 2nd Kansas (US) and later deserted, according to records I found online. It's quite a story, and I've posted parts of it on this website. The younger of the two fell in with some guerrillas on his way home and was taken through their lines back into Texas.
 
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