The Civil War at home: township committees, the aid societies, and the draft

1861 – 1865 · the machinery on this ground

The first week: the news of Sumter reached South Bend on Sunday, 14 April 1861. On Monday night, 15 April, on a few hours' notice, the courthouse filled for a war meeting "irrespective of party" — John A. Henricks presiding, A. E. Drapier and Judge Robertson vice-presidents, Boyne's Cornet Band playing, speeches by Henricks, Colfax, Drapier, Miller, George, Anderson, Lynch and the Reverends Reed and Moore. A Volunteer Aid Association was organized at that meeting to equip the company being formed and to assist the support of volunteers' families, with a committee to solicit subscriptions. Four days later, on 19 April, a second meeting appointed committees in every township to collect the subscriptions, under a county disbursing committee. Harris and Clay townships enter the war's record at that point, by name of their class: from the war's first week, each township had its own committee of the aid association, raising money for the county's soldiers and their families. The township committees' own papers have not been found; the fact of them stands in Howard.

The home front: through the war the county's Soldiers' Aid Societies, fairs and festivals raised sanitary supplies for the armies, and Chapman records "but little actual suffering" among the families at home. The county fairgrounds served as a military camp for quartering and organizing troops; the camp's name is not established in the record consulted and is carried as a gap rather than guessed. The Sisters of the Holy Cross, whose motherhouse stood in Clay Township, went out from this ground to nurse the armies; their course stands in this section's women article, below.

The draft: the draft came to this county as it came to every Indiana county — enrollment of the townships' military-age men, quotas laid on each township under each call, and subscription lists by which a township raised money to fill its quota with volunteers rather than see its men drawn. No consolidated county figure for men drafted, substitutes furnished, or bounty money raised is printed in either county history, and no Harris or Clay quota or credit figure is printed anywhere reached. The paper trail survives where the South Bend build found it: the county's wartime office records — draft subscription lists, soldiers' aid society papers, registers of the sick, wounded and dead — are preserved as the Saint Joseph County Civil War Records in the University of Notre Dame Archives, and the state's official credits stand in Adjutant General Terrell's report. Both are named here as the settling sources; the figures themselves are this section's first named gap, and they are not estimated.

The county's whole: the histories' record, as counted in the South Bend build, is two thousand of the county's men out, against Chapman's Roll of Honor — the county's printed roll of its Civil War dead, 230 names as counted in the South Bend pass, officers first and then the non-commissioned officers and privates alphabetically, each with the place and manner of his death as Chapman gives it. The townships' share of both figures is the subject of the next four articles; it is smaller than the county's fame, and it is what the record carries.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), ch. VII — the meeting of 15 April 1861 whole; the aid societies; "but little actual suffering"; the Roll of Honor (pp. 444–448).
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2 — the meeting of 19 April 1861 and the township committees; vol. 1 — the fairgrounds camp.
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, finding aid, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Civil War Records, 1861–1932 — the draft subscription lists and registers, as the South Bend build cites them.