IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/apl/wpaper/06-07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Economics of US Civil War Conscription

Author

Listed:
  • Timothy J. Perri

Abstract

The US government had limited power during the Civil War, including an inability to tax income. Similar to conscription plans considered in the War of 1812, Civil War conscription was not intended to compel service, but was a second-best plan to shift the tax burden to state and local governments. The time allowed communities to provide volunteers after a federal call for enlistments, along with substitution and the payment of a fee to avoid service (commutation), meant few were actually drafted---about 2% of all who served. Commutation could have lowered social cost, but appears to have been a binding ceiling on the price of a substitute.

Suggested Citation

  • Timothy J. Perri, 2006. "The Economics of US Civil War Conscription," Working Papers 06-07, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:06-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://econ.appstate.edu/RePEc/pdf/wp0607.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Patrick L. Warren, 2012. "Volunteer Militaries, The Draft, and Support for War," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(3), pages 227-258, November.
    2. Timothy J. Perri, 2010. "The Draft and the Quality of Military Personnel," Working Papers 10-05, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N11 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • N41 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:apl:wpaper:06-07. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: O. Ashton Morgan (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deappus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.