Hello and welcome to This Day, a history podcast from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This Day, May 1861, a few weeks after the battle at Fort Sumter, with the path to an all-out civil war hastening, President Lincoln issues a proclamation encouraging people to,

well, join the fight. We've touched on the many moral and political fissures that brought the U.S.

to the brink of civil war, but at a nuts and bolts level, the two sides needed bodies.

This forced many people and many states to pick sides in the brewing war, and now the union needed more troops.

Indeed, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Army consisted of just 16,000 men,

fewer than 200 companies, nearly all of which were stationed west of the Mississippi River.

So let's talk about the North's mad scramble for soldiers and who ended

up volunteering and why. And no surprise, I guess this helps us understand that age-old question.

What was the Civil War all about anyway? So here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt

and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello, Jody. Hey there.

Going to crack that big mystery. Yeah, we're going to solve it here about 14 minutes or so,

so buckle in folks. But no, I mean, you know, what we'll get into, I'm really struck by

some of the language around this time and what gets mentioned and not mentioned when people

talk about the motivations

for joining the fight. Just to set a little bit of the context, obviously we have Fort Sumter,

which is thought of as the kind of kickoff to the war that does not go well for the North.

And Lincoln, he kind of issues, I would say, sort of un-Lincoln-like proclamation. It's pretty like

pedestrian, but he just says, whereas existing exigencies demand immediate and adequate

measures for the protection of the national constitution and the preservation of the

National Union by the suppression of the insurrectionary combinations now existing in several states for opposing the laws of the union and obstructing the execution thereof, yada, yada, yada, we need more troops.

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