numbers of only its actual combatants, while the Northern returns
always included every man drawing pay, whether a combatant or
not. On the whole, the North had more than double numbers, even
if compared with a Southern total that includes noncombatants.
But it should be remembered that a Northern army fighting in the
heart of the South, and therefore having to guard every mile of
the way back home, could not meet a Southern one with equal
strength in battle unless it had left the North with fully twice
as many.

Conscription came a year later (1863) in the North than in the
South and was vitiated by a substitution clause. The fact that a
man could buy himself out of danger made some patriots call it "a
rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And the further fact that
substitutes generally became regular bounty-jumpers, who joined
and deserted at will, over and over again, went far to increase
the disgust of those who really served. Frank Wilkeson's
"Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac"
is a true voice from the ranks when he explains "how the resort
to volunteering, the unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians,
ground up the choicest seedcorn of the nation; how it consumed
the young, the patriotic, the intelligent, the generous, and the
brave; and how it wasted the best moral, social, and political
elements of the Republic, leaving the cowards, shirkers,
egotists, and moneymakers to stay at home and procreate their
kind."

That is to say, it was so arranged that the fogy-witted lived,
while the lion-hearted died.