Weren't rich people paying poors to take their place back during the American Civil War?
They were, in both North and South.
The South had an even more screwed-up system, in that if you owned more than x slaves (where 'x' is a value I don't want to look up now) you were ineligible for the draft. So explicitly exempting the wealthy slaver-aristos.
Also, CSA officers could resign whenever they wanted to, except in the middle of a battle. (Shades of Starship Troopers). So slaver-aristos joined up, and if they didn't like it, they left. Which at least meant that you had officers who wanted to be there in charge of troops.
The accounts in the novel Cold Mountain of groups of soldiers going through the countryside impressing anybody they could catch for service as cannon-fodder in the Southern armies were also accurate. This practice gained strength especially in 1864.
This was needed due to the generally crappy CSA supply situation. Soldiers could be starving and in rags, while 20-30 miles away were depots full of food and clothes that weren't getting to the front. For some strange reason this reduced motivation to stick around and fight for The Cause. At least in the eyes of the regular soldier.
It was particularly the done thing, for a few fellows, to take some rich boy's money to join up in his place, enjoy the Army life and relatively abundant military gear, and then one evening vanish into the darkness of the night. An easy trip back north and a new alias meant that even a fairly lazy scam artist could milk this trick over and over again.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2022-02-13 08:25 am
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(Anonymous) 2022-02-13 02:46 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
They were, in both North and South.
The South had an even more screwed-up system, in that if you owned more than x slaves (where 'x' is a value I don't want to look up now) you were ineligible for the draft. So explicitly exempting the wealthy slaver-aristos.
Also, CSA officers could resign whenever they wanted to, except in the middle of a battle. (Shades of Starship Troopers). So slaver-aristos joined up, and if they didn't like it, they left. Which at least meant that you had officers who wanted to be there in charge of troops.
The accounts in the novel Cold Mountain of groups of soldiers going through the countryside impressing anybody they could catch for service as cannon-fodder in the Southern armies were also accurate. This practice gained strength especially in 1864.
This was needed due to the generally crappy CSA supply situation. Soldiers could be starving and in rags, while 20-30 miles away were depots full of food and clothes that weren't getting to the front. For some strange reason this reduced motivation to stick around and fight for The Cause. At least in the eyes of the regular soldier.
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