In the excellent Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote, by my old friend Ellen Dubois, I learned that Illinois passed the first “presidential suffrage” statute in 1912, allowing women to vote in presidential elections, but only in presidential elections. Why could women vote only for president? Because Article II of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” Thus, a majority vote of the state legislature was sufficient to allow women to vote for presidential electors, without the need for a super-majority referendum to amend the state constitution. Fourteen other states followed the Illinois example before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.
Illinois also attempted to be the first state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, but a clerical error on the ratifying resolution allowed Wisconsin to slip in ahead, and Illinois came in second.
Now a confession. I read the first third of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom when I was writing my books on the Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown, and antebellum abolitionism, but I did not finish it. I have now gone back to rectify that gap in my education, and I am awed by the breadth of McPherson’s scholarship all over again. I was particularly impressed by his explanation of the provisions for "substitution" and "commutation" in the Union's conscription law. In brief, a draft exemption could be obtained either by paying someone to take your place ("substitution") or paying the government a fixed $300 ("commutation"), the latter being about one year's pay for a laborer.
Substitution was a hallowed tradition, long practiced in Europe, but commutation has been criticized by modern historians as simply allowing rich people to buy their way out of service, which sounds awfully familiar. McPherson, however, points out that the $300 fee had actually been enacted to put a cap on the price for substitutes, which otherwise would have been raised by wealthy bidders, as was the case in the South where substitutes were going for above $1000.
The de facto limit therefore made substitution available to those of more modest means, rather than only to the wealthy. Moreover, many towns, counties, and charities raised money, sometimes funded by property tax, so that local laborers and shop clerks could also take advantage of commutation. The serious downside, of course, was that the substitutes themselves could not obtain the most money for serving in an army with nearly a 30% casualty rate, but it did serve the Union's purpose of maximizing enlistment by conscription or otherwise.
I don’t know if McPherson cited John W. Chambers’ book, To Raise an Army (The Free Press, 1987), but Jon Elster relies on it in his examination of “military service in wartime” as but one of over a dozen examples to empirically illustrate allocative issues associated with “local justice” in which the “relative good is allocated –and the principle for allocating it chosen—by a relatively autonomous institution.”* Here is one paragraph with some numbers relevant to your post:
“During the Civil War, the North relied largely on volunteers, who made up more than 92 percent of the 2,100,000 who served in the Union army. Attempts to use the draft were made, but unsuccessfully: ‘Of the 300,000 men summoned [in 1863] by draft authorities, 40,000 failed to report for examination, 165,000 were examined and then exempted because of physical or other disability or dependency, 52,000 escaped service by paying the commutation fee (contributing $15 million to the federal bounty fund), 26,000 provided substitutes, and only 10,000 were held to personal services,’ Even low-paid unskilled workers were able to buy substitutes, since the states provided them with grants to do so. By contrast, the Confederate army was largely based on conscription. ‘Although only 21 percent of the one million Confederate soldiers were obtained through the draft, the Conscription Acts had been used to keep in the service for the duration the 79 percent who had first entered as volunteers. Also the South, unlike the North, soon prohibited substitution.”
* Jon Elster, Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (Russell Sage Foundation, 1992): 29-30.
The real question is whether Elster cited McPherson, given that Battle Cry of Freedom, which included the same statistics, was published four years earlier, in 1988, winning that year's Pulitzer Prize.
It is more likely, of course, that both books cited the same primary source.
For those of you with lots of time at home these days, the Oxford History of the United States series, of which Battle Cry of Freedom is one, is a national treasure. Jump in and get started. After McPherson's work, David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear, which covers the Great Depression and World War II will generate the most interest.