MoosedHistory
Menu
Military

Military

The Machinery: Enrollment, Draft Boards and Recruiting as Institutions on This Ground

The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.

The men of the military fragment's rolls did not simply volunteer into a list; a machinery stood between the city and its soldiers, and this entry writes the machinery as the system it was. For the Civil War the instrument was the Enrollment Act of 3 March 1863, the first federal draft in the nation's history. It enrolled every male citizen — and every immigrant who had declared his intention — between twenty and forty-five years of age, by congressional district, under the Provost Marshal General's bureau in Washington. Each district kept a board of enrollment: a provost marshal, a commissioner and a surgeon, who enrolled the names, heard exemptions, examined the drafted and filled the district's quota under each presidential call. A drafted man could hire a substitute, and until 1864 could commute his service for $300 — the clause that made the draft a market as much as a levy. Indiana ran under this machinery entire: St. Joseph County's names were enrolled in its district's books, its quotas credited against the volunteers the county's towns raised, and the county histories carry the local half of the system — the bounty votes, the recruiting meetings, the quota arithmetic — at county frame, as the military fragment prints them. Mishawaka's own Civil War generation was taken by that machinery, at the district's seat across the county line of jurisdiction if not of geography. The twentieth century rebuilt the machine in local form. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 put the draft in the hands of local boards — neighbors, named by the governor and seated in the community, who classified every registrant. The county's boards sat in South Bend, and Mishawaka's registrants of 1940–45 were classified by the county machinery, as their sons were under the postwar acts. What does not reach the open record is the board-level file itself: the number, seat and membership of the local board or boards that served Mishawaka's registrants, and their classification books, stand in the Selective Service records at the National Archives (Record Group 147) and in the Enterprise's wartime columns on the public library's film — the named settlers for the machinery at city size. The system is printed whole here; its city desk is the gap, and the gap is named.

Cite this page

Using this page? Copy a credit line. Last updated November 12, 2026.

Source: The Machinery: Enrollment, Draft Boards and Recruiting as Institutions on This Ground, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/mishawaka/military/machinery-enrollment-draft-boards-and-recruiting-as-institutions-on/