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American Law and Economics Review Advance Access originally published online on December 4, 2008
American Law and Economics Review 2008 10(2):424-453; doi:10.1093/aler/ahn015
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Law and Economics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Economics of US Civil War Conscription

Timothy J. Perri

Appalachian State University

Send correspondence to: Timothy J. Perri, Appalachian State University, Raley Hall, Room 3092, Boone, NC 28608, US; E-mail: perritj{at}appstate.edu.

JEL Classification: N11, N41, J45


  Abstract

US conscription in the Civil War is analyzed. Conscription was designed to gain federal control of enlistments, leaving state and local governments much of the fiscal and administrative responsibility for raising troops. Due to the hiring of substitutes, the payment of a fee to avoid service (commutation), and community-provided funds, only 2% of those who served were conscripted. Theory suggests that federal pay and local government bonuses increase as the marginal opposition by citizens to the number of reluctant draftees increases, and commutation could have lowered social cost. Instead, commutation was a binding ceiling on the price of substitutes.

I thank an anonymous referee, Steven Shavell (the editor), Fred Wallace, Don Parsons, and seminar participants at Appalachian State University, including Judkin Browning, Todd Cherry, and Jari Eloranta, for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.


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