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1861 – 1865 · the township's war machinery
In April 1861, before the township had a company, it had a committee. Both county histories agree, in the same names: at a meeting of Union Township's citizens in April 1861, John Jackson, John Moon, and C. J. Turner were appointed a committee "to appraise the property of the township for the purpose of levying a tax to create a fund for the support of volunteers' families" — the township taxing itself for its soldiers' households in the war's first month, the earliest war institution this section can name. The draft reached the township once in the carriers read, and the case is a family's, not a board's: Edward Cordray was drafted, and his father Nathan — in whose sawmill and store the township's economy turned — "accompanied him to Indianapolis and paid 200 dollars for his discharge," Chapman's sketch of the family recording the commutation as a plain fact of the household's war. No township quota figure, bounty schedule, or enrollment total stands in any carrier read: the county's machinery for those numbers (the commissioners' bounty records, the draft subscription lists, the adjutant general's statistics) is named's note as the settler, and the township's total out stands as a gap beside its company's roster — the men named, the count missing, which is the honest shape of this township's Civil War arithmetic.