Draft Evasion and Resistance

The 18th Century

Known also as conscription or impressment, the draft in the 18th century allowed civil authorities to raise men for service in regular army, provincial, or militia units—usually for a short duration. Given the draft's compulsory nature, opposition to it was common among those selected for such duty. These were often members of the lower social classes or conscientious objectors from religious sects.

From the early colonial period through the Revolutionary War, religious dissenters, including Quakers, Mennonites, and Moravians, sought to evade compulsory military service. Several colonies imposed significant fines or physical punishments on such dissenters. Many colonies (later states) gradually came to recognize a conscription exemption for religious sectarians. North Carolina, for example, allowed Moravians to form their own frontier militia company for strictly defensive purposes during the Seven Years' War. Quakers in Pennsylvania were similarly exempt from conscription for military duty in the 18th century; even during the Revolutionary War, the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution allowed Quakers “conscientiously scrupulous of bearing arms” to pay money in lieu of physical service.

The well-to-do colonist could also legally evade the draft in the 18th century through the hiring of a substitute. Conscripted men in Massachusetts during the Seven Years' War could pay a fine to the colony to be used to hire a substitute, with whom they would also negotiate an arrangement for service and pay a separate fee. During the same period, Virginia allowed men to avoid service by paying a similar fee in addition to a sum negotiated between draftee and hired replacement.

[Page 228]Other potential draftees avoided service in one colony by enlisting in the forces of another, if the latter paid a recruiting bonus. This practice, known as bounty jumping, was particularly common in the northern provinces.

To be drafted was widely unpopular, partly because civil authorities often resorted to conscripting the most marginal members of society. This served to stigmatize service as undesirable and led men to avoid enlistment or being impressed, particularly in the South where compulsory service was equated with slavery. The North Carolina Assembly, for example, passed a bill in 1755 that allowed for the drafting of vagrants in the colony between the ages of 21 and 50—a move indicative of most North Carolinians' general disinclination to serve during the French and Indian War. Later that year, the Assembly called for drafting unmarried militiamen for service outside North Carolina, an unpopular measure that resulted in widespread unrest within the province. The governor even called for a system of forts on the American frontier to be garrisoned by convicted felons and vagabonds. Virginia's practice of forcing into service men who could not demonstrate a regular trade or livelihood created resentment among those in this class, while reports of men hiding in swamps or in the mountains to avoid being drafted for military service were not uncommon throughout the colonies during colonial conflicts. Draft riots during the French and Indian War occurred in two Virginia towns, Petersburg and Fredericksburg, where local authorities refused to act to put down the disturbances. The extreme aversion to being drafted led British military authorities during the 1750s to forgo forcibly drafting colonial troops into regular battalions, despite the acute British need for manpower and clear legal authority to do so during wartime. The threat of widespread resistance to the draft in the 1750s led Massachusetts and Connecticut to avoid the use of impressment to fill the ranks of their regiments.

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