Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion—the bayonet or the revolver—to force someone else to defend us.”
Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” And yet, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is,
. . .seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and to place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.
This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the United Kingdom is reconsidering conscription due to what the UK government sees as escalating hostilities with Russia.
Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organisations has launched a petition demanding the Government rule out military conscription, or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. . . There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War 3 have fuelled renewed discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.
For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that the war is just, and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s war.
On July 11, 1863 the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in American history. The office of the provost marshal—charged with enforcing the draft—was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. . . . Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Americans fled New York.
This attempt to corral New Yorkers into the war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically-driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South—surely a just cause! But very few were convinced. John M. Taylor observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863,
Wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “that without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate what citizens will fight and what will only talk.’”
The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a humanitarian edict.
Further, the Proclamation did not apply to the five slave states fighting on the Union side—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—nor did it free slaves in parts of the South that had already been brought under federal control. For example, Tennessee and parts of Louisiana—New Orleans and Union-held parishes—were excluded from the Proclamation.
Far from the Emancipation Proclamation persuading the rioters that Lincoln’s cause was just, they saw emancipation as a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic circumstances. They turned their ire against the authorities and Lincoln’s friend Horace Greeley, but also against the black population who were not to blame for Lincoln’s stratagem.
The long term damage to New York’s black population was significant: In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s black population plummeted by more than 20 percent, to below 10,000 (the lowest number since the 1820s), as blacks fled the city in droves.
It is often observed that warmakers do not personally tend to show up to fight in their own wars. This gives them further incentive to rely on conscription. Many New Yorkers were against the war in the first place, but, in total numbers, far more of them ended up fighting in the war compared to the abolitionists of Massachusetts who had backed the war from the beginning. Professor Clyde Wilson observes that,
Historians have often noted that, generally speaking, the best generals and soldiers in the “Union” armies were not supporters of the Republican Party or the Lincoln administration. Republicans and especially abolitionists tended to avoid military service in the war they had initiated.
For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a pacifist, and so were his fighting-age sons. They declared that they were conscientious objectors and would not serve even if drafted. Although Garrison was a vocal supporter of Lincoln’s war, he regarded pacifism as his Christian duty and denied that it was hypocritical to refrain from personally joining the war he publicly supported.
One of Garrison’s sons did acquiesce to serve if drafted. He was eventually offered an officer’s commission, which, coincidentally, worked out as an opportunity for him to burnish his racially-enlightened credentials by leading an all-black unit.
One concern many have is that without conscription a country might come under attack and lack the manpower to mount a defense. However, when the cause is just, and seen by citizens to be necessary in their own defense, a government that rules by consent need not fear that no one would be willing to stand defense. In this context, fighting defense of hearth and home, Ludwig von Mises saw conscription as justified. This justification would not apply to an aggressive war.
In “Did the South Have to Fight,” Thomas Fleming observes that, “Many Southerners resented conscription not because they were unwilling to fight but because they wanted the honor of fighting as volunteers.” They saw the cause for which they fought as one for the defense of the South, not just for the selfish interests of a few warmakers.
The case is entirely different when an unpopular government already knows that many people do not trust its motives and would therefore be unwilling to fight its wars. In the UK, the Daily Express reports:
A YouGov survey of 3,044 people found 38% of under-40s would refuse to serve if a new world war broke out, while 30% said they would refuse even in the event of an imminent invasion of the UK.
Unpopular governments that rule by the bayonet are most likely to resort to conscription. In the case of the New York Draft Riots, many of the conscripts were immigrants who had recently arrived from Germany and Ireland and did not see any reason to get involved in Lincoln’s war.
As Lew Rockwell has observed, often the warmakers wage war for reasons that have little to do with popular opinion. It is no surprise that they deem war propaganda and use of force against their own citizens to be necessary, after the fact, to persuade people to support their war effort. As Rockwell counsels,
The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the US government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans. It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.
