The coming of civil war brought with it a great test that would challenge both the United States' and the Confederacy's sense of national unity and patriotism. Up until this time, the people of the United States thought themselves to be more citizens of their respective states than the country itself, and the pervasiveness of this sense of state pride would continue through the War, particularly in the South. The test of this sense of state belonging came in the form of conscription, or the draft.
As the War broke out, neither side had great difficulty raising troops. The day after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln , who had a mere 15,000 of regular army troops, called 75,000 state militia into active federal service for a period of 90 days to put down the rebellion. On May 3, he called for 42,000 three-year volunteers and increased recruitment into both the regular army and the navy (McPherson, 1992). The states and their citizens, who were left with the responsibility of recruitment, were quick to respond to the call. And following the Union defeat at First Manassas in July 1861, "a call for volunteers yielded 91,000 men in 18 days; by November the Army had already exceeded its authorized strength of 500,000" (Jackson, 1985, p. 87).
The South saw similar enthusiasm behind recruitment. As in the North, localities and states took the recruiting initiative, and the Confederate Army quickly reached a point where there were volunteers than could be equipped. According to McPherson (1992), the Confederacy had almost 2/3 as many men under arms as the Union by July 1861, even though the South's manpower pool was about 1/3 as large (p. 171). Moreover, as the wave of war fever hit both sides, finding men to fight it was not too arduous a task.
But the war certainly went on much longer than most had dreamed. In 1861, only a few people, like William T. Sherman who compared Lincoln's early recruitment efforts to attempting to put out the flames of a burning house with a squirt gun, believed the War would last well past the fall of 1861. And it was this faith in a 90-day war that fueled the fire of recruitment activity early on. As months went by and casualty rates soared, however, the promise of an early end faded quickly, and the people on both sides began to have different feelings about the War itself and war in general.
