Letter on the poor people situation
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NEW-YORK, Wednesday, July 15, 1863.
To the Editor of the New-York Times:
I wish to thank you for the position you have taken with regard to the law for the draft and the present resistance to it. I am a poor man, entirely dependent upon my earnings for my living and that of my wife and two small children. And more, though never rich, or anything like it, I have been made as poor as I am partly by the legitimate consequences of this war, and partly by the bad conduct of a Government contractor. Yet if I am drafted I shall serve, and with heartiness and faithfulness, for two reasons. First, I have not $300 to give the Government in place of my personal service. Second, I feel that the Republic has a supreme claim upon the lives, the fortunes, nay the very happiness of all her sons in a time like this. If to preserve her I and mine must suffer, we must suffer. That is the sacrifice we owe our country.
I hear many men around me complaining of the injustice of the draft, and saving that "it is'nt a fair shake that rich men who wouldn't mind paying $300 should be exempt and poor men who cannot pay it be forced to go." I know that most of these men have had this notion put into their heads by designing demagogues, who use them for their own purposes. The law seems to me to be made for the benefit of men like me, by keeping the price of a substitute at the lowest possible figure. For if I had not a spark of patriotism and meant to shirk my duty to my country, or if my case was one of extreme hardship, I suppose that I might borrow $300 and so get off. But if this $200 clause had not been in the law, the price of substitutes would be put up by skulking rich men to such a figure that one would be utterly beyond my reach. Armies cannot be made without men; some one must go, and $300 is certainly the smallest sum which could be fixed as an equivalent for personal service.