Question/Problem 5: What did Abraham Lincoln do to preserve the Union?

As the war approached its third year, Lincoln and his Republican colleagues conceded that another severe step was necessary to raise desperately needed manpower. While blacks were now joining up, Union forces on all fronts still suffered from shortages of white combat troops. So in March 1863, the government produced yet another controversial measure a Union draft. In theory, the conscript law was supposed to stimulate volunteering, though anybody who had the money could hire a substitute or buy a three-hundred-dollar exemption and still avoid the army. Nevertheless, Lincoln and Stanton saw to it that conscription was rigorously enforced, giving Stanton's ubiquitous provost marshals sweeping powers to enroll and conscript men in all corners of the Union.

There was a reason for this beyond getting the manpower. Both Lincoln and his Secretary of War hoped that enforcing the draft would win back the loyalty of soldiers already in the field would demonstrate that the government intended to haul in reinforcements and stand behind its armies regardless of how unpopular the war became back home.

And back home, antiwar discontent was boiling. As though emancipation were not horrible enough, cried disaffected Northerners, white men would now be dragooned into fighting a war for slave liberation and dying in Lincoln's bungling armies. In the spring, dissident Democrats launched a broad 'Peace Movement' to stop the war and bring the boys home. In all directions, Peace Democrats inveighed against Lincoln's tyrannies-- the military arrests, the draft, and above all the emancipation proclamation-- and exhorted the Northern people to end the butchery before Lincoln converted the country into a dictatorship.