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DAILY CONSTITUTIONALIST [AUGUSTA, GA], July 29, 1864, p. 2, c. 2-3
Richmond Letter. . . .
Special Correspondent of the Constitutionalist.
Richmond, July 22, 1864.
Editors Constitutionalist: . . . The conscription authorities are now, as fresh campaigns approach, in hot pursuit of more conscripts, and, though the nuisance of guards upon the streets has not been resorted to as yet, the measures taken to ferret out all delinquent military debtors to the Confederate States are most effectually stringent. In some cases this stringency, if one may say so and live, is so great as to savor strongly of oppression, and when seeing, as I have, a man past middle age, and the sole support of his own family and the bereaved households of two fallen heroes dragged off from his plough to the musket, one cannot but think that it were better to have let this man go and pounce upon some of those officials, useless and insolent, who swarm the Conscription Bureau itself as the lice did, of old, in the courts of Pharoah.
When the secret history of the war comes to be written, if ever, this chapter of conscription will not be the least interesting portion, and when reading of the immense number of flunkies and henchmen kept for the purpose of forcing arms into the hands of age, men will wonder why the myrmidons of power were not themselves sent to the fields for which they were so much better fit than the feeble remnants of manhood it was their unholy office to arrest. The paragraph too that shall treat of “Soft Places” will not be uninstructive, and perhaps add to the wonder the rest of the dreary chapter will excite. Some months ago, at a short distance from this city an old gentleman conducted, in a small factory, a branch of manufactures that, from its very nature, could not produce more than a certain amount in a given time. To all the labor necessary this individual was fully competent, but on the factory becoming a government affair, the former conductor was constituted superintendent and had assigned to him for the produce of his wares a lusty force of six stout young men, none of whom have ever yet bitten a cartridge or given one charging yell for the Southern cause. . . .
Tyrone Powers.
Vicki Betts
Richmond Letter. . . .
Special Correspondent of the Constitutionalist.
Richmond, July 22, 1864.
Editors Constitutionalist: . . . The conscription authorities are now, as fresh campaigns approach, in hot pursuit of more conscripts, and, though the nuisance of guards upon the streets has not been resorted to as yet, the measures taken to ferret out all delinquent military debtors to the Confederate States are most effectually stringent. In some cases this stringency, if one may say so and live, is so great as to savor strongly of oppression, and when seeing, as I have, a man past middle age, and the sole support of his own family and the bereaved households of two fallen heroes dragged off from his plough to the musket, one cannot but think that it were better to have let this man go and pounce upon some of those officials, useless and insolent, who swarm the Conscription Bureau itself as the lice did, of old, in the courts of Pharoah.
When the secret history of the war comes to be written, if ever, this chapter of conscription will not be the least interesting portion, and when reading of the immense number of flunkies and henchmen kept for the purpose of forcing arms into the hands of age, men will wonder why the myrmidons of power were not themselves sent to the fields for which they were so much better fit than the feeble remnants of manhood it was their unholy office to arrest. The paragraph too that shall treat of “Soft Places” will not be uninstructive, and perhaps add to the wonder the rest of the dreary chapter will excite. Some months ago, at a short distance from this city an old gentleman conducted, in a small factory, a branch of manufactures that, from its very nature, could not produce more than a certain amount in a given time. To all the labor necessary this individual was fully competent, but on the factory becoming a government affair, the former conductor was constituted superintendent and had assigned to him for the produce of his wares a lusty force of six stout young men, none of whom have ever yet bitten a cartridge or given one charging yell for the Southern cause. . . .
Tyrone Powers.
Vicki Betts