The Draft Was Never Repealed. Here Is What Changes in December

Now, in the autumn of 1814, the United States was losing a war.

The capital had been burned in August.

The treasury was empty.

Enlistments had dried up, and the Secretary of War sat down to write to the chairman of the Senate's Military Committee about how to find men.

The Secretary of War was James Monroe, the same James Monroe who would be president in three years.

His letter went to Senator William Branch Giles in the middle of October, and it offered Congress several ways forward.

The one that mattered proposed to take the free male population between eighteen and forty-five, divide it into classes of one hundred men each, and require every class to produce four men for the army within 30 days.

If the class did not produce them, they would be taken.

Monroe's constitutional argument was short, and it is still the argument today.

Congress has the power to raise armies.

A power to raise armies must include the means of raising them.

Otherwise, the power is ornamental.

And Giles brought in the bill on the 5th of November.

The Senate passed it on the 22nd with a term of service set at two years.

And then, on the 9th of December, a 32-year-old House congressman from New Hampshire stood up.

Something to note.

Daniel Webster never published it, and the official record of the debates do not contain it.

What survives is a manuscript in Webster's own handwriting, written out, his editors say, after he delivered it, preserved by the New Hampshire Historical Society.

It was printed for the first time in 1902, and it sits in the standard scholarly edition of his papers.

So what we have is Webster's own text rather than congressional record of the floor speech.

But with that qualifier aside, here is the sentence that sums his point.

"Where is it written in the Constitution? In what article or section is it contained that you may take the children from their parents and the parents from their children and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?" Notice what he is not saying.

He is not saying that the war is wrong, though he thought it was.

He is not saying the country has no right to an army.

He is asking a locatable question, a point to the clause.

Now, in the autumn of 1814, the United States was losing a war.

The capital had been burned in August.

The treasury was empty.

Enlistments had dried up, and the Secretary of War sat down to write to the chairman of the Senate's Military Committee about how to find men.

The Secretary of War was James Monroe, the same James Monroe who would be president in three years.

His letter went to Senator William Branch Giles in the middle of October, and it offered Congress several ways forward.

The one that mattered proposed to take the free male population between eighteen and forty-five, divide it into classes of one hundred men each, and require every class to produce four men for the army within 30 days.

If the class did not produce them, they would be taken.

Monroe's constitutional argument was short, and it is still the argument today.

Congress has the power to raise armies.

A power to raise armies must include the means of raising them.

Otherwise, the power is ornamental.

And Giles brought in the bill on the 5th of November.

The Senate passed it on the 22nd with a term of service set at two years.

And then, on the 9th of December, a 32-year-old House congressman from New Hampshire stood up.

Something to note.

Daniel Webster never published it, and the official record of the debates do not contain it.

What survives is a manuscript in Webster's own handwriting, written out, his editors say, after he delivered it, preserved by the New Hampshire Historical Society.

It was printed for the first time in 1902, and it sits in the standard scholarly edition of his papers.

So what we have is Webster's own text rather than congressional record of the floor speech.

But with that qualifier aside, here is the sentence that sums his point.

"Where is it written in the Constitution? In what article or section is it contained that you may take the children from their parents and the parents from their children and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?" Notice what he is not saying.

He is not saying that the war is wrong, though he thought it was.

He is not saying the country has no right to an army.

He is asking a locatable question, a point to the clause.