'Tis Not Our War
Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North
Paul Taylor, Stackpole Books, 2024, 456 pages
Book Review published on: August 25, 2025
A common refrain of American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan was "we went to war; America went to Walmart." The idea that the folks back home did not share or understand the sacrifices of the troops at the front is a sentiment that is as old as war. In 'Tis Not Our War: Avoiding Military Service in the Civil War North, Paul Taylor notes that the soldiers of the Union Army not only held these beliefs, but their fears were also largely justified. Taylor notes that in this most existential of American wars at least 60 percent of those eligible to serve in the North chose not to do so. While a vast array of historians have studied what motivated Civil War soldiers to serve, fight, and die, Taylor asks the equally important question of why the majority of able white Northern males actively or passively avoided military service.
The book offers a wide-ranging examination of the reasons why men chose not to enlist or to avoid conscription during the war. For some, the reasons were relatively straightforward. Tangible family obligations simply trumped their commitment to the intangible Union, thus only 30 percent of those who enlisted were married. Others followed a "personal cost-benefit analysis." As the wartime economy started booming, many chose to stay at home and take advantage of the new prosperity, and those who had enlisted in 1861 to simply have a job when the economy was then in a recession sought to leave the Army as quickly as possible to join in the wealth. As the casualty lists grew and veterans reported home about the grim realities of the war, scores of men opted out of the service rather than risk death in the ranks for $13 a month.
Taylor also highlights the importance of politics and ideology in guiding the northerners' propensity to service. While wounded by its regional divisions in the years leading up to the war, the Democratic Party was still a force to be reckoned with. Many Democrats viewed the Lincoln administration's tax policies and suspension of habeus corpus as an unconstitutional trampling of civil rights and as unjustified expansions of federal powers. Taylor further notes that the imposition of conscription and the Emancipation Proclamation further alienated northerners who viewed these actions as contrary to hallowed beliefs about individualism and the "proper" racial order in the Republic.
Those disaffected from the federal government's policies or seeking to avoid military service had many avenues to express their opposition. As conscription was based on state quotas, Taylor notes that men could simply cross into other states until their home requirements were filled or, in an unintended consequence of the Homestead Act, skipped their military obligations to seek their fortune out west. In a preview of Vietnam, approximately ninety thousand other potential soldiers fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Others took advantage of substitute hiring loopholes and the state bounty system to make money and then desert.
'Tis Not Our War is a well-researched and provocative study of the challenges of mobilizing personnel during wartime. While at times Taylor perhaps overemphasizes the dissatisfaction with the war in the North, it does point to the complexities of a democratic republic fighting a protracted war. To develop a fuller appreciation of the North's overall willingness to wage the bloodiest war in the Republic's history, the reader should balance Taylor's argument with James MacPherson's For Cause and Comrades. Given the Army's current challenges in convincing the nation's youth to join the ranks, this work is an excellent primer for understanding the long-running issues and history of this complex problem.
Book Review written by: Richard S. Faulkner, PhD, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas