Mustering at Wooster

Wooster was quick to heed the call to arms that sounded in the spring of 1861.  According to Wooster historian Ben Douglass, as soon as news of the shots fired on Fort Sumter reached the city, the townspeople felt a rush of patriotic zeal and recruitment immediately began, organized by Wooster’s judge, William Given.  On April 16, 1861, “a wildly patriotic crowd” assembled in the courthouse to discuss recruitment and by the end of the day over a hundred men had volunteered to fight.¹   On the 21^st of April, these first volunteers departed the city for Columbus.  Flags hung from every building and an alleged ten thousand people lined the streets to the railway station in support of the recruits.  By the end of the conflict, Wooster and Wayne County had sent 3,200 volunteers and a substantial conscripted force to fight in the war.

The Draft

The patriotic zeal that Wooster had experienced in the early days of the war diminished as the conflict dragged on into 1863.  In that year, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, instituting the nation’s first wartime draft.  This action enraged Ohio Copperheads, Democratic Southern sympathizers, who spoke out against the war and President Lincoln.  Although Wayne County was free from significant violence during the later years of the war, the neighboring counties of Holmes and Ashland saw draft riots and arson committed by militant Copperheads.²    

¹ Ben Douglass, “History of Wayne County, Ohio” (Indianapolis: Robert Douglass, 1878), 749.
² “Battle of Fort Fizzle,” Ohio History Central, Ohio Historical Society, accessed June 11, 2014, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Battle_of_Fort_Fizzle?rec=474; “Work of Ashland Copperheads,” The Wooster Republican, July 30, 1863.