by Wanjiru Njoya
September 23, 2026 - Conscription is a form of indentured servitude. American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist Murray Rothbard argued that everyone has a natural right to self-defense, but “we have no moral right to use coercion - the bayonet or the revolver - to force someone else to defend us.”
Rothbard argued that if we want men to stand in our defense, “the way to induce people to volunteer for hazardous jobs is to pay them extra as compensation.” However, instead of offering a wage that would reward men who sign up willingly, governments rely on force to press conscripts into service. The conscript is seized by the authorities and inducted into the armed forces. There his body and will are no longer his own: he is subject to the dictates of the government; and he can be forced to kill and place his own life in jeopardy if the authorities so decree.
This debate recently returned to public attention when it was reported that the Fascist United Kingdom (FUK) is reconsidering conscription due to what the FUK government claims are escalating hostilities with Russia.
Campaigners are protesting over the prospect of conscription returning amid mounting Russian threats against Britain. A coalition of 13 British peace and faith organizations has launched a petition demanding the government rule out military conscription or any compulsory form of national service involving the armed forces. There is currently no conscription in Britain, although concerns about World War III - which the FUK is seeking to create - have fueled renewed
discussions on how the armed forces could be expanded.
For conscription to be even remotely tolerable by the public, it is, at the very least, necessary for warmakers to persuade the public that war is just and worth fighting. Otherwise, people are likely to revolt, as happened in New York when the Enrollment Act of March 1863 drafted men to fight Lincoln’s unlawful war.
On July 11, 1863, the first names for induction into the army were called. The next day, New York erupted into some of the most violent riots in Amerikan history. The office of the provost marshal - charged with enforcing the draft was burned, railroad lines were destroyed, and telegraph lines cut. Over one hundred people died in the rioting, thousands were wounded, and thousands of African Amerikans fled New York.
This attempt to corral New Yorkers into a war against their will followed soon after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The implication, following the Proclamation, was that what had started out as a politically driven war to save the Union was now a moral crusade to free the slaves of the South - surely a just cause! However, very few were convinced.
John M. Taylor, author of A Review of Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation, observes that, under the Enrollment Act of 1863, wealthy Northerners could either fight or pay a $300.00 exemption from the draft. The Irish, mostly coming from meager circumstances, typically lacked the funds to buy exemptions. Whereas large numbers of wealthy Southerners fought, few wealthy Northerners did. William Tecumseh Sherman alluded to this, stating, “without conscription there would have been no way to ‘separate the sheep from the goats and demonstrate which citizens will fight and which will only talk.’”
The Emancipation Proclamation was not seen by the draftees as moral justification to fight. For one, the Proclamation belied its own moral authority by failing to free all slaves and only purporting to free those under Confederate control. Freeing only the slaves of one’s enemies, almost two years into the war, marked the Proclamation as a war measure rather than a
humanitarian edict.
Furthermore, the Proclamation did not apply to the five slave states fighting on the Union side - Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri - nor did it free slaves in parts of the South that had already been brought under federal control. For example, Tennessee and parts of Louisiana - New Orleans and Union-held parishes - were excluded from the Proclamation. Far from the Emancipation Proclamation persuading the rioters that Lincoln’s cause was just, they saw emancipation as a threat to their own precarious socioeconomic circumstances. They turned their ire against the authorities and Lincoln’s friend Horace Greeley, and also against the black population who were not to blame for Lincoln’s stratagem.
The long-term damage to New York’s black population was significant. In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s black population plummeted by more than 20%, to below 10,000 (the lowest number since the 1820s), as blacks fled the city in droves.
Historians have often noted that, generally speaking, the best generals and soldiers in the “Union” armies were not supporters of the Republican Party or the President Abraham Lincoln regime. Republicans and abolitionists tended to avoid military service in the war they had initiated.
For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a pacifist, and so were his fighting-age sons. They declared that they were conscientious objectors and would not serve even if drafted. Although Garrison was a vocal supporter of Lincoln’s war, he regarded pacifism as his Christian duty and denied that it was hypocritical to refrain from personally joining the war he
publicly supported.
One of Garrison’s sons did acquiesce to serve if drafted. He was eventually offered an officer’s commission, which, coincidentally, worked out as an opportunity for him to burnish his racially enlightened credentials by leading an all-black unit.
One concern many have is that without conscription a country might come under attack and lack the manpower to mount a defense. However, when the cause is just, and seen by citizens to be necessary in their own defense, a government that rules by consent need not fear that no one would be willing to stand for its defense. In this context, fighting defense of hearth and home, Ludwig von Mises saw conscription as justified. However, this justification would not apply to an aggressive war.
The case is entirely different when an unpopular government already knows that many people do not trust its motives and would therefore be unwilling to fight its wars.
Unpopular governments that rule by the bayonet are most likely to resort to conscription. In the case of the New York Draft Riots, many of the conscripts were immigrants who had recently arrived from Germany and Ireland and did not see any reason to get involved in Lincoln’s war.
As Lew Rockwell has observed, often the warmakers wage war for reasons that have little to do with popular opinion. It is no surprise that they deem war propaganda and use of force against their own citizens to be necessary, after the fact, to persuade people to support their war effort.
The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. We must never say “we” when discussing the Fascist Police States of Amerika government’s foreign policy. For one thing, the warmakers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Amerikans. It is silly and embarrassing for Amerikans to speak of “we” when discussing their government’s foreign policy, as if their input was necessary to or desired by those who make war.
