THE NEW MILITIA ORGANIZATION AND CONSCRIPTION.
Since your adjournment in December, the Adjutant and Inspector General, under my direction, has done all in his power to press forward the organization of the militia of the State, in conformity to the act passed for that purpose; and I have the pleasure to state, that the enrollments are generally made, except in a few localities, where proximity to the enemy has prevented it; and the organizations will soon be completed.
At this stage in our proceedings, we are met with formidable obstacles, thrown in our way by the late act of Congress, which subjects those between 17 and 50 to enrollment as Conscripts, for Confederate service. This act of Congress proposes to take from the State, as was done on a former occasion, her entire military force, who belong to the active list, and to leave her without a force, in the different counties, sufficient to execute her laws or suppress servile insurrection.
Our Supreme Court has ruled, that the Confederate government has the power to raise armies by conscription, but it has not decided that it also has the power to enroll the whole population of the State who remain at home, so as to place the whole people under the military control of the Confederate government, and thereby take from the States all command over their own citizens, to execute their own laws, and place the internal police regulations of the States in the hands of the President. It is one thing to "raise armies", and another, and quite a different thing, to put the whole population at home under military law, and compel every man to obtain a military detail, upon such terms as the central government may dictate, and to carry a military pass in his pocket while he cultivates his farm, or attends to his other necessary avocations at home.
Neither a planter nor an overseer engaged upon the farm, nor a blacksmith making agricultural implements, nor a miller grinding for the people at home, belongs to, or constitutes any part of the armies of the Confederacy; and there is not the shadow of Constitutional power, vested in the Confederate government, for conscribing and putting these classes, and others engaged in home pursuits, under military rule, while they remain at home to discharge these duties. If conscription were constitutional as a means of raising armies by the Confederate government, it could not be constitutional to conscribe those not actually needed, and to be employed in the army, and the constitutional power to "raise armies", could never carry with it the power in Congress to conscribe the whole people, who are not needed for the armies, but are left at home, because more useful there, and place them under military government and compel them to get military details to plough in their fields, shoe their farm horses, or to go to mill.
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Conscription carried to this extent, is the essence of military despotism; placing all civil rights in a state of subordination to military power, and putting the personal freedom of each individual, in civil life, at the will of the chief of the military power. But it may be said that conscription may act upon one class as legally as another, and that all classes are equally subject to it. This is undoubtedly true. If the government has a right to conscribe at all, it has a right to conscribe persons of all classes, till it has raised enough to supply its armies. But it has no right to go farther and conscribe all, who are, by its own consent, to remain at home to make supplies. If it considers supplies necessary, somebody must make them, and those who do it, being no part of the army, should be exempt from conscription, and the annoyance of military dictation, while engaged in civil, and not military pursuits.
If all between 17 and 50 are to be enrolled and placed in constant military service, we must conquer the enemy while we are consuming our present crop of provisions, or we are ruined; as it will be impossible for the old men over 50, and the boys under 17, to make supplies enough to feed our armies and people another year. I think every practical man in the Confederacy who knows anything about our agricultural interests and resources, will readily admit this.
If, on the other hand, it is not the intention to put those between 17 and 18, and between 45 and 50, into service, as soldiers, but to leave them at home to produce supplies, and occasionally to do police and other duties, within the State, which properly belong to the militia of a State; or in other words, if it is the intention simply to take the control of them from the State, so as to deprive her of all power, and leave her without sufficient force to execute her own laws, or suppress servile insurrection, and place the whole militia of the State, not needed for constant service, in the Confederate armies, under the control of the President, while engaged in their civil pursuits, the act, is unconstitutional and oppressive, and ought not to be executed.
If the act is executed in this State, it deprives her of her whole active militia, as Congress has so shaped it as to include the identical persons embraced in the act passed at your late session, and to transfer the control of them all from the State to the Confederate government.
The State has already enrolled these persons under the solemn act of her Legislature, for her own defense, and it is a question for you to determine, whether the necessities of the State, her sovereignty and dignity, and justice to those who are to be affected by the act, do not forbid that she should permit her organization to be broken up, and her means of self-preservation to be taken out of her hands. If this is done, what will be our condition? I prefer to answer
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by adopting the language of the present able and patriotic Governor of Virginia: "A sovereign State without a soldier, and without the dignity of strength--stripped of all her men, and with only the form and pageantry of power --would indeed be nothing more than a wretched dependency, to which I should grieve to see our proud old Commonwealth reduced."
I may be reminded that the enemy has three times as many white men, able to bear arms, as we have, and that it is necessary to take all between the ages above mentioned, or we cannot keep as many men in the field as he does.
If the result depended upon our ability to do this, we must necessarily fall. But, fortunately for us, this is not the case. While they have the advantage in numbers, we have other advantages, which, if properly improved, they can never overcome. We are the invaded party, in the right, struggling for all we have, and for all that we expect our posterity to inherit. This gives us great moral advantage over a more powerful enemy, who, as the invaders, are in the wrong, and are fighting for conquest and power. We have the inner and shorter lines of defense, while they have the longer and much more difficult ones. For instance, if we desire to reinforce Dalton from Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile, or to reinforce either of those points from Dalton, we can do so by throwing troops rapidly over a short line from one point to the other. If the enemy wishes to reinforce Charleston or Chattanooga from Washington or New Orleans, he must throw his troops a long distance around, almost upon the circumference of a circle, while we meet them with our reinforcements by throwing them across the diameter of a semicircle. This difference in our favor is as great as four to one, and enables us, if our troops are properly handled, to repel their assaults with little more than one-fourth their number.
In consideration of these and numerous other advantages which an invaded people, united and determined to be free, always has, it is not wise policy for us to undertake to keep in the field as large a number as the enemy has.
It is the duty of those in authority in a country, engaged in a war which calls for all the resources at command, to consider well what proportion of the whole population can safely be kept under arms. In our present condition, surrounded by the enemy and our ports blockaded, so that we can place but little dependence upon foreign supplies, we are obliged to keep a sufficient number of men in the agricultural fields, to make supplies for our troops under arms and their families at home, or we must ultimately fail.
The policy which would compel all our men to go to the military field, and leave our farms uncultivated and our workshops vacant, would be the most fatal and unwise that
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could be adopted. In that case, the enemy need only avoid battle and continue the war till we consume the supplies now on hand, and we would be completely in their power.
There is a certain proportion of a people in our condition who can remain under arms, and the balance of the population at home can support them. So long as that proportion has not been reached, more may be safely taken; but when it is reached, every man taken from the field of production, and placed as a consumer in the military field, makes us that much weaker; and if we go far beyond the proportion, failure and ruin are inevitable, as the army must soon disband, when it can no longer be supplied with the necessaries of life. There is reason to fear that those in authority have not made safe calculations upon this point, and that they do not fully appreciate the incalculable importance of the agricultural interests in this struggle.
We are able to keep constantly under arms two hundred thousand effective men, and to support and maintain that force, by our own resources and productions, for twenty years to come. No power nor State can ever be conquered so long as it can maintain that number of good troops. If the enemy should bring a million against us, let us remember, that there is such a thing as whipping the fight without fighting it; and, avoiding pitched battles and unnecessary collisions, let us give this vast force time to melt away under the heat of summer and the snows of winter, as did Xerxes' army in Greece, and Napoleon's in Russia, and the enemy's resources and strength will exhaust when so prodigally used, much more rapidly than ours when properly economised. In properly economising our strength and husbanding our resources, lie our best hope of success.
Instead of making constant new drafts upon the agricultural and mechanical labor of the country for recruits for the army, to swell our numbers beyond our present muster rolls, which must prove our ruin if our provisions fail, I respectfully submit that it would be wiser to put the troops into the army, and leave men enough at home to support them. In other words, compel the thousands of young officers in gold lace and brass buttons, who are constantly seen crowding our railroads and hotels, many of whom can seldom be found at their posts, and thousands of straggling soldiers who are absent without leave, or by the favoritism of officers, whose names are on the pay rolls, and who are not producers at home, to remain at their places in the army. This is justice alike to the country, to the tax-payers, to the gallant officers who stand firmly at the post of duty, and the gallant soldiers who seldom or never get furloughs, but are always in the thickest of the fight. When they are enduring and suffering so much, why should the favorites of power and those of their comrades who seek to avoid duty and danger, be countenanced or tolerated at home, while their names stand upon the muster rolls?
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If all who are able for duty, and who are now nominally in service drawing pay from the Government, are compelled to do their duty faithfully, there will be no need of compelling men over 45 to leave their homes, or of disbanding the State militia to place more men under the President's control.
CONFLICT WITH THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT.
But it may be said that an attempt to maintain the rights of the State will produce conflict with the Confederate Government. I am aware that there are those who, from motives not necessary to be here mentioned, are ever ready to raise the cry of conflict, and to criticise and condemn the action of Georgia, in every case where her constituted authorities protest against the encroachments of the central power, and seek to maintain her dignity and sovereignty as a State, and the constitutional rights and liberties of her people.
Those who are unfriendly to State sovereignty, and desire to consolidate all power in the hands of the Confederate Government, hoping to promote their undertaking by operating upon the fears of the timid, after each new aggression upon the constitutional rights of the States, fill the newspaper presses with the cry of conflict, and warn the people to beware of those who seek to maintain their constitutional rights, as agitators or partisans who may embarrass the Confederate Government in the prosecution of the war.
Let not the people be deceived by this false clamor. It is the same cry of conflict which the Lincoln Government raised against all who defended the rights of the Southern States against its tyranny. It is the cry which the usurpers of power have ever raised against those who rebuke their encroachments and refuse to yield to their aggressions.
When did Georgia embarrass the Confederate Government in any matter pertaining to the vigorous prosecution of the war? When did she fail to furnish more than her full quota of troops, when she was called upon as a State by the proper Confederate authority? And when did her gallant sons ever quail before the enemy, or fail nobly to illustrate her character upon the battle field?
She can not only repel the attacks of her enemies on the field of deadly conflict, but she can as proudly repel the assaults of those who, ready to bend the knee to power for position and patronage, set themselves up to criticise her conduct; and she can confidently challenge them to point to a single instance in which she has failed to fill a requisition for troops made upon her through the regular constitutional channel. To the very last requisition made, she responded with over double the number required.
She stands ready at all times to do her whole duty to the
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cause and to the Confederacy, but while she does this, she will never cease to require that her constitutional rights be respected, and the liberties of her people preserved. While she deprecates all conflict with the Confederate Government, if to require these be conflict, the conflict will never end till the object is attained.
"For freedom's battle once begun,
Bequeath'd by bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft is ever won,"
will be emblazoned in letters of living light upon her proud banners, until State sovereignty and constitutional liberty, as well as Confederate independence, are firmly established.