Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

Furthermore, although the Constitution specifies that only Congress can declare war and raise an army, Lincoln did so entirely on his own authority.

The Northern states were given an opportunity to fill a specified quota with volunteers before conscription began. To meet these quotas and to avoid the draft, every state, township, and county developed an elaborate bounty system. By 1864, there were 1. Catton and Ketchum, p. 252.

2. Congress later ratified Lincoln's actions, but, by that time, it had little choice.

The War was underway.

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many areas where a man could receive more than $1,000—

equivalent to over $50,000 today—just for joining the army. A person of wealth could avoid the draft simply by paying a commutation fee or by hiring someone else to serve in his place.

In the South, the government was even more bold in its

approach to conscription. Despite its cherished views on states'

rights, the Confederacy immediately gathered into Richmond many of the powers and prerogatives of a centralized, national government. In 1862 it passed a conscription law which placed exclusive control over every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five into the hands of the Confederate President. As in the North, there were important loopholes. The owner or overseer of twenty slaves, for example, could not be called into military service.1 In all fairness, it must be noted that many did not take advantage of this exclusion. In contrast to the North, soldiers perceived that they were fighting for the defense of their families, homes, and property rather than for an abstract cause or for a cash bounty.

REBELLION IN THE NORTH

When conscription was initiated by Lincoln in 1863, people in the North were outraged. In New York's Madison Square,

thousands of protesters marched in torch parades and attended anti-Lincoln rallies. Historian James Horan describes the mood:

'When caricatures of the President were lifted above the speaker's stand, hisses rose to fill the night with the noise of a million angry bees.' Federal troops eventually had to be called in to put down antidraft riots in Ohio and Illinois. In New York City, when the first names of the draft were published in the papers on July 12, mobs stormed the draft offices and set fire to buildings. The riots continued for four days and were suppressed only when the federal Army of the Potomac was ordered to fire into the crowds.

Over a thousand civilians were killed or wounded.3

After the passage of many years, it is easy to forget that Lincoln had an insurrection on his hands in the North as well as in the South. The shooting of a thousand civilians by soldiers of their own 1. Catton and Ketchum, pp. 484-85.

2. James D. Horan, Confederate Agent: A Discovery in History (New York: Crown, 1954), p. 209.

3. Catton and Ketchum, pp. 486,511.

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government is a tragedy of mammoth proportions and it tells much about the desperate state of the Union at that time. To control that insurrection, Lincoln ignored the Constitution once again by suspending the right of habeas corpus, which made it possible for the government to imprison its critics without formal charges and without trial. Thus, under the banner of opposing slavery, American citizens in the North, not only were killed on the streets of their own cities, they were put into military combat against their will and thrown into prison without due process of law. In other words, free men were enslaved so that slaves could be made free.

Even if the pretended crusade had been genuine, it was a bad exchange.

How to get people to pay for the war was handled in a similar fashion. If the Constitution could be pushed aside on the issue of personal rights and of war itself, it certainly would not stand in the way of mere funding.

It has often been said that truth is the first casualty in war. To which we should add: money is the second. During the fiscal year ending in 1861, expenses of the federal government had been $67 million. After the first year of armed conflict they were $475 million and, by 1865, had risen to one billion, three- hundred million dollars. On the income side of the ledger, taxes covered only about eleven per cent of that figure. By the end of the war, the deficit had risen to $2.61 billion. That money had to come from somewhere.

INCOME TAXES AND WAR BONDS

The nation's first experiment with the income tax was tried at this time; another violation of the Constitution. By today's standards it was a small bite, but it was still an extremely unpopular measure, and Congress knew that any additional taxes would further fan the flames of rebellion.

Previously, the traditional source of funding in time of war had been the banks which simply created money under the pretense of loaning it. But that method had been severely hampered by the demise of the Bank of the United States. The state banks were anxious to step into that role; but, by this time, most of them had already defaulted in their promise to pay in specie and were in no position to manufacture further money, at least not money which the public would be willing to accept.

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American banks may have been unable to supply adequate

loans, but the Rothschild consortium in Britain was both able and willing. It was during this time that the Rothschilds were consolidating their new industrial holdings in the United States through their agent, August Belmont. Derek Wilson tells us: 'They owned or had major shareholdings in Central American ironworks, North