Why did some Southerners complain that the Civil War was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight"? How did the Enrollment Act lead to racial tensions in the North?
In April 1861 South Carolinians started the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, a U.S. military installation located on an island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. After 34 hours of shelling, the Union troops in the fort surrendered. The Civil War had begun.
After the firing on Fort Sumter, the states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia seceded from the U.S. to join the Confederacy. Some Southern states--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware--did not secede. (The state of West Virginia was created in 1863, because many residents of the mountainous portion of northwest Virginia held few slaves and opposed secession.) These Southern states that did not secede were known as border states.
Neither side was well-prepared for the war. The U.S. Army consisted of 16,000 troops, most of whom were engaged in fighting Indians in the West. When the war began, one third of the U.S. Army's officers (most famously, Virginian Robert E. Lee) resigned to fight for the Confederacy. The Union possessed some key advantages: it held the overwhelming majority of the nation's factories, so it was better-equipped to manufacture firearms, cannons, uniforms, and other supplies. The Union also had a vastly superior railroad system and navy, which enabled it to move supplies and troops more quickly and to blockade Southern ports.
Most soldiers who served in the Civil War were volunteers, who enlisted for one year. When the war began, many Americans expected it to be brief, even glorious. Many young men were even eager to fight in the conflict. By April 1862, however, it was already apparent that the war would not be brief, and both sides began to encounter more difficulty raising armies. In 1862, the Confederacy passed the first Conscription Act in American history. (Today we refer to conscription as the draft.) The act empowered the Confederate government to compel men to join the army and fight for the Confederacy. Some Southerners resented conscription, because they believed that the Confederacy had been created to fight against a central government that was too strong.
Another source of resentment was the Twenty Negro Law. This allowed white Southerners who owned twenty or more slaves not to fight in the war. Confederates justified the law on the grounds that if all the slave masters were away fighting, the slaves would refuse to work and would revolt. This law led to the charge that the war was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Finally, the Confederacy also passed the Impressment Act. This law spelled out exactly how much Confederate troops had to pay farmers or merchants for needed supplies, and it even allowed them to confiscate supplies if they were unable to pay for them. Conscription, the Twenty Negro Law, and Impressment all made the war's cost and unfairness apparent to white Southerners.
In 1863 the U.S. government also began conscription by passing the Enrollment Act. The passage of this law led to one of the war's most notorious episodes, the Draft Riot, when workingmen in New York City lashed out against the Enrollment Act. Many of the rioters were Irish-Americans who had been in the U.S. only a few years. They resented the government's ordering them to risk their lives in the fight against slavery. In the course of the Draft Riot, rioters lynched (tortured and hanged) a dozen black men to express their outrage over being ordered to fight against slavery.