The Civil War at home · the meetings, the aid societies, and the machinery of the draft

1861 – 1865

The war began in South Bend on a Monday evening in the courthouse: On 15 April 1861, three days after Sumter, a war meeting filled the old courthouse with Dr. John A. Henricks presiding and speeches by Schuyler Colfax, Ariel E. Drapier, William Miller, William G. George, Andrew Anderson, and Captain William F. Lynch — the Notre Dame professor who headed the university's Continental Cadets and afterward raised the 58th Illinois and became a brigadier general. A Volunteer Aid Association was organized at that first meeting to equip the company going out and to support volunteers' families; a second meeting on 19 April appointed committees in every township to collect subscriptions, with a disbursing committee over them. 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 through the war 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 draft came to this county as it came to every Indiana county — enrollment, quotas, calls, and the subscription lists by which townships raised money to fill their quotas with volunteers rather than drafted men. The paper trail of that machinery survives: the county's wartime office records, including draft subscription lists, soldiers' aid society papers (the New Carlisle society's among them, with correspondence of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission of Chicago), registers of the sick, wounded and dead, and soldiers' correspondence, are preserved as the Saint Joseph County Civil War Records at the Notre Dame Archives. No consolidated county figure for men drafted, substitutes furnished, or bounty money raised is printed in the county histories consulted; Adjutant General Terrell's 1869 report is where the state's official county credits stand, and its St. Joseph County line is carried on this section's pull list rather than estimated here.

Sources:

1. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 2 — the meetings of 15 and 19 April 1861, the speakers, the Volunteer Aid Association and the township committees; the fairgrounds camp (vol. 1).
2. Chas. C. Chapman & Co., History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VII — the Soldiers' Aid Societies, fairs and festivals, and "but little actual suffering."
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, finding aid, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Civil War Records, 1861–1932 — the county war offices' records: registers of the sick, wounded and dead; draft subscription lists; soldiers' aid society of New Carlisle papers; 12th Indiana Cavalry and 128th Indiana reunion papers; Co. B, 15th Indiana papers.