Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery

Establishing a methodology for the book as a whole, this first chapter argues that the draft connected the abstractly political and concretely biopolitical via acts of public reading that occurred at the site of the draft lottery, when names were drawn that were then further disseminated in print. A popular literary trope, reading the names generated a citizenry that could be individuated (to the level of the subject) and function as a collective (generate populations), with the draft operating as an important hinge between these two scales of biopower. The draft lottery and its depictions in images and poetry, including Herman Melville’s, formed an assemblage that connected embodied with imagined communities and linked American lives to national ideology. Wartime print periodicals did not merely report on but actively participated in practices of public reading that drew on a range of gestures to facilitate military subject formations.

The Heroic Substitute

For white men, conscription posed a racially destabilizing proximity to enslavement; for African Americans, it opened up possibilities of citizenship and inclusion in the state’s population. Analyzing the recruitment efforts of Frederick Douglass, this chapter pushes back against critical race theory’s near-universally dim view of state power, and argues that military service held positive value for free black people and recently freed slaves. At the same time, the chapter draws on critical race theory to show how Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) countered the racialization of biopower. Set during the war and its aftermath, the novel is structured—like the draft—by a narrative logic of substitution, which recurs at the level of character and plot. Harper offers a wide spectrum of the wartime experience of African Americans, who saw in the draft—as in military service more broadly—a chance for state recognition as fully participating civic actors.

“We Are Coming, Father Abraham”

This chapter traces changing attitudes towards the draft, and examines the oppositional power parody took on under governmental regulations of speech (when it became treasonous to criticize the draft) and of bodies (when the Lincoln administration suspended the writ of habeas corpus). This chapter pairs the deliberations over the draft that occur in historical archives, specifically in newspaper editorials and personal letters, with the poetry and prose repertoires that express the voices those archives silence. Tracking the relationship between voluntary enlistment, conscription, and substitution as these ramify at the level of trope (metaphor/metonymy/synecdoche), the chapter analyzes how deliberations over draft substitution engaged and fundamentally reshaped the politics of representation established in the Constitutional Convention and developed in Walt Whitman’s antebellum celebrations of democratic equivalences. The draft’s provisions for physical substitution undercut and reshaped familiar structures of political representation, as Abraham Lincoln’s hiring of a “representative recruit” makes clear.

Introduction

This introduction provides a critical framework for re-evaluating a tacit assumption in the field of American literary scholarship, namely that its objects of study are civilian. While scholars have examined how texts negotiate the relationship between subjects and citizens, such considerations have overwhelmingly overlooked the importance of the military for shaping both. The Civil War draft transformed the content of citizenship for Americans, and embedded the military in the structures of representative democracy. Because the draft drew on yet unsettled norms of representation established as far back as the Constitutional Convention, a vast outpouring of texts not only thematized the draft but made textual representation itself a crucial domain for thinking through the draft’s promises of metaphoric equality and pitfalls of synecdochical rendering. Identifying substitutes as a particularly important subset of the draft, this book traces a cultural history of the connections between the symbolic nation and its body politics.

Alter Egos

The draft gave rise to a booming economy of substitute brokers. While the so-called principal and his “alter ego” could, in theory, enter into an economic relationship that affirmed novelistic structures of character and personification, the insertion of middlemen brokers disrupted that possibility and posed the threat of turning substitutes into commodities. Tracking the development of this draft economy, the chapter traces its theorizations in diaries, letters, and poems, as well as in the iconography of the new paper currency, the greenback dollar bill. The chapter focuses in particular on the work of Emily Dickinson, whose career-defining interest in economics, embodiment, and split subjectivity took on additional urgency when her brother Austin procured the services of a substitute who was most likely a formerly enslaved black man. Concerned about the ability of poetic substitution to be representative, Dickinson developed an affirmation of substitution that rejected its monetization.

Conclusion

As soldiers returned from the battlefield with horrific injuries, the cultural formation of citizen-soldiers came to orient itself around the disability of veterans whose “impaired state” (in Henry James’s evocative phrase) called forth new relations of physical substitution around an ethics of care, but also became the site for the cultural reconstruction of the state. Claiming the injured veteran as a figure of whiteness, racialized biopower reoriented itself around the abandonment of metaphoric equality and came to embrace metonymic suture as the fraught conjunction of reconstructed bodies and the reconstructed nation. Drawing on categories of exemption inaugurated by the draft, the injured veteran was able to offer a unifying figure for all whites to claim a privileged relation to the nation.