Recruits

While the Southern Confederacy is impressing men into its unholy ranks, the Federal Government is refusing to receive any more recruits, and even rejecting those that had previously offered their services, for the most trivial reasons. We saw a stout, able-bodied man rejected on Wednesday, simply because, according to his statement, he had a crooked toe! He had served as a three month’s man, and now when he would go back into the service he finds what before did not incapacitate him, proves an insuperable barrier.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, April 18, 1862, p. 1