also carried on the many collateral duties already made familiar in the Continental Army. They supervised and otherwise inspected the trade between local private merchants and Army units and individual soldiers, and they also assumed certain intelligence responsibilities, collecting and disseminating information on enemy forces.
Rivaling the work of military police in the field, provost marshals also assumed the enormous task of enforcing the nation's first conscription law. When demands for manpower led the Union to abandon its dependence on volunteer enlistments and turn to conscription, Congress created the Office of the Provost Marshal General of the Army on 3 March 1863 and appointed James B. Fry to the position in the rank of colonel of cavalry.[1] The new draft law charged the provost marshal general with overseeing the administration and enforcement of military recruitment and conscription along with a number of other quasi-military police duties associated with the war effort. It also empowered Fry to arrest summarily anyone engaged in impeding or avoiding conscription.[2]
The energetic Fry quickly organized a small army of civilian bureaucrats to supervise the draft calls. To assist him in this and an ever-increasing number of other duties largely unrelated to the draft, the War Department authorized the creation on 28 April 1863 of a new organization, the Invalid Corps (later renamed the Veteran Reserve Corps). Manned by soldiers wounded on the battlefield or weakened by illness and judged unfit for further frontline service, this special force reached a strength of more than 30,000 officers and men by the end of the war. Its units served as provost guards in large cities and towns, escorts for prisoners of war, security guards for railroads, and during the raid on Washington in 1864, they were committed to battle when the enemy penetrated into rear areas.
One of their most important functions remained to guard the many district draft offices established by the provost marshal general to supervise the selection of men under the provisions of the draft act. That legislation proved extremely unpopular and placed the Invalid Corps in a perilous position when massive resistance to conscription spread across the North. Their most notable service came in the valiant bur futile effort to preserve order at the outbreak of the riots that shook New York City in .July 1863. Few in number, the provost troops were quickly overwhelmed. The riots continued unimpeded until Washington brought in more than 100,000 combat troops, ending what would become the nation's deadliest civil disturbance.[3]
Following the pattern set at the end of the Revolutionary War, the Office of Provost Marshal General was discontinued in 1866. In fact, despite the appointment of Brig. Gen. Arthur MacArthur as military governor and provost marshal general of Manila in the Philippines after the War with Spain in 1898, the creation of a permanent military police branch in the Army would not be seriously considered until the latter stages of World War I. Ironically, it was during this period of organizational neglect that the term "military police" first came into vogue in Army circles.
- ↑ War Department Cir, 5 June 1863. See also Final Report Made to the Secretary of War by the Provost Marshal General, 1866, pp. 1–32.
- ↑ 12 U.S. Statutes 731–37.
- ↑ For a recent account of the role of the provost marshal general and the Invalid Corps in the Civil War draft, see Coakley, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, pp. 227–67.
