Richard Caton Woodville, Sr., War News from Mexico (1848): Yes, I know the date and subject of this painting precede the Civil War by over a decade. But I’d like to imagine that such a scene took place in front of the Carroll House in Ossipee during the war when Joseph Q. Roles was its proprietor. Perhaps groups gathered to read the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, the states’s Democratic paper of record, and discuss the fate of McClellan’s campaign on the Peninsula, the Emancipation Proclamation, or some other such event. I can’t refrain from pointing out here that the American-born Woodville (1825-1855) was the father of the British-born Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. (1856-1927), Britain’s foremost artist of military subjects in the late 19th century.

I know the title of this post sounds like clickbait, but hear me out. The following piece is about substitute brokering during the Civil War—an occupation that often involved kidnapping, immigrant-running, grand larceny, assault, and murder.[i]

In the fall of 1863, the selectmen of Conway, NH, found themselves in a terrible predicament. In October, President Abraham Lincoln had called for another 300,000 soldiers to fill the ranks of the Union army. Conway’s contribution to this call was set by the state at 25 men. If the town could not draw enough volunteers—a likely prospect since folks had not shown much enthusiasm for enlisting during previous calls—the difference would have to be made up by conscription. Nobody relished such a prospect because the war had badly divided Conway. Although it had voted for Lincoln by a small majority in 1860, McClellan would go on to win the town by a similar small majority in 1864. In the summer of 1863, angry debates in town meetings over the war and how to meet previous presidential calls for troops had culminated in tit-for-tat incidents of arson between Republicans and Democrats.

In an attempt to gin up enlistment, a town meeting approved a municipal bounty of $300 for volunteers or draftees that would augment federal and state bounties ($100 each). By Christmas, however, only five men had stepped forward to enlist. The despairing selectmen appointed Hiram C. Abbott to make contact with substitute brokers in Concord to fill the town’s quota. The idea seemed to be that if the people of Conway were unwilling to serve, they should not be made to do so through the draft.

William Marvel has described substitute brokers as “totally unnecessary opportunists who materialized wherever things—or people—were being marketed.”[ii] It is true that volunteers were not legally required to enlist through a broker, but brokers facilitated the task of matching large numbers of substitutes with a) drafted men looking to wriggle out of service and b) desperate towns willing to pay top dollar to meet their quotas. Indeed, if I correctly understand the system as it stood in late 1863, there were important incentives for enrolling as a substitute (and therefore using a broker) rather than as a volunteer. A volunteer could enlist on his own and collect the town, state, and federal bounties. But a substitute could collect these bounties as well as the money owed to a substitute—typically $300 at this point (the same as the commutation fee)—minus, of course, the substitute broker’s cut. Not only that, but brokers usually had hot tips on which towns offered the largest bounties; big bounties, theoretically, meant more money for both the substitute and the broker. 

I write “theoretically” because this unregulated trade was rife with swindling and fraud. Substitute brokers often did their level best to extract as much money as they could from their unfortunate charges. Brokers always had the upper hand because while they were familiar with all manner of sharp practices, most men who sought to become substitutes were not. Brokers frequently obtained substitutes under false pretenses and reneged on their financial promises. It was a nasty commerce, and substitute brokers were rightly likened to “body-snatchers” and “slavetraders.”

And so it must have been with some repugnance that Abbott made his way to the draft rendezvous in Concord to commence negotiations with the substitute brokers there. On January 5, 1864, Abbott reached an agreement with a “Mr. Lindsey” who provided seven substitutes at $275 each (saving Conway, which had alloted $300 per man for the task, $175). Since that day was the deadline by which the quota required fulfillment, subsequent negotiations with other brokers proved much more expensive as they tried to take advantage of Abbott’s desperation. On January 8, Abbott obtained 11 men from Joseph Q. Roles for $355 each. The price would have risen even higher if the deadline for meeting the quota had not been extended to February. In addition to the 18 substitutes he located, Abbott also found two volunteers. As they enlisted, all were credited to Conway. Abbott must have returned home much relieved, his mission accomplished if somewhat over-budget.[iii] The deal Roles had made with the substitutes, the extent to which he adhered to it, and how much they received of their bounties and substitute money all remain unknown.

What caught my eye when I first read about this transaction was the name Joseph Q. Roles. I first encountered Roles some time ago when I looked into who recruited the 5^th New Hampshire’s original volunteers during the fall of 1861. Residing in Ossipee, Roles brought in about 20 men to the regiment—mostly in the region north and west of Lake Winnipesaukee (i.e., Brookfield, Conway, Effingham, Moultonborough, Ossipee, Tamworth, and Wolfeboro). But who exactly was Roles? And how did he end up in such a disreputable business as substitute brokering?

The short answer to the first question is that he was a prominent businessman and a Democratic party stalwart. Born in 1828 in Ossipee, Roles was only 18 when his father Azor died, leaving the family in poverty. Contracting an early marriage in 1849 to 15-year-old Mary Wood (their first child arrived at the end of that year), it seemed the odds were stracked against Roles escaping penury. Yet as a “traveling merchant,” he managed to support his new family while contributing to the upkeep of his mother and four younger siblings. By the outbreak of the Civil War, he was running the Carroll House, a hotel in the old village center of Ossipee (now referred to as Ossipee Corner), his total estate then amounting to almost $4000. His biography in the History of Carroll County, New Hampshire (1889) states Roles was “engaged in hotel keeping, also in staging [an important task before the arrival of railroad], dealing in cattle and real estate, lumber etc.” and that he “conducted for a time a wholesale and retail grocery at Union Village.”[iv] By around 1870, he had also taken over the Pine River House, described in accounts simply as a “house of entertainment.”[v] Certainly, Roles was a man on the make. According to the Census of 1870, he had amassed about $18,000 in property, an extremely large sum. Could it be that he saw in the traffic of substitutes an opportunity to make money that was no different from “hotel keeping, staging, dealing in cattle and real state, lumber, etc.”? One also wonders how much he owed his $18,000 to substitute brokering.[vi]

What is most striking about Roles is that he engaged in this business of substitute brokering while holding state office. He started his political career as a selectman in Ossipee (1856 and 1859) before becoming a Carroll County commissioner (1861-1862). The transaction with Abbott occurred while Roles represented Ossipee in the state house (1861 and 1863-1865). It’s true that the worst abuses associated with substitute brokering occurred with the connivance of authorities such as corrupt provost marshals and recruiting officers. But trafficking in substitutes while serving as a member of the state legislature seems, well, a bit bold. Many people must have known what he had been up to during the war; after all, Abbott could not have been the only agent who obtained substitutes from Roles in an attempt to fulfill a town quota. Yet, as Roles’ postwar political career indicates, no one seemed to hold his substitute brokering against him. He became a fixture in county and state politics, serving as county auditor (1869), county treasurer (1876, and 1878-1879), and a state representative (1871, 1874-1875, and 1878-1884).[vii]

How Roles justified his brokering to himself need not detain us. After all, any man can explain away his actions to himself if given the right circumstances and sufficient incentives. The truly intriguing question is how Roles vindicated himself to his colleagues in the Democratic party. In all likelihood, such a vindication must have been political.

By 1863, Roles’ fellow Democrats vigorously argued that Republicans had imposed an unconstitutional draft so as to prosecute an unconstitutional war whose object was the unconstitutional emancipation of slaves. Democrats resented the draft largely because it would compel white men to risk their lives to free Black men.[viii] That being the case, Roles may have framed his brokering as a kind of resistance to what Democrats saw as federal overreach. I do not know who his substitutes were and how he obtained them (this information may be in the report that Abbott submitted to Conway which remains in the town’s archives). But if they were recent immigrants—and there’s a very good chance they were—Roles could have posed as somebody who earned a few dollars while trying to protect New Hampshire’s young, white, native-born manhood from the maw of an iniquitous war that sought to free Black men from their shackles. That was certainly a position New Hampshire Democrats would have found acceptable.

Of course, the foregoing is speculation. Roles’ ruminations on his career as a substitute broker went to the grave with him. In December 1885, he committed suicide in Ossipee while suffering from “mental despondency.”[ix]

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[i] Eugene C. Murdock, still the leading authority on the draft and substitution, uses these particular phrases to describe the various “devices” employed by brokers. See Eugene C. Murdock, “New York’s Civil War Bounty Brokers” The Journal of American History 53:2 (September 1966), 259.

[ii] William Marvel, “A Poor Man’s Fight: Civil War Enlistment in Conway, New Hampshire” Historical New Hampshire 43:1 (Spring 1988), 29.

[iii] The tale of Conway’s struggle to locate volunteers and substitutes in late 1863 and early 1864 comes from Marvel, “A Poor Man’s Fight,” 28-29.

[iv] This quote about Roles’ career appears in Georgia Drew Merrill, History of Carroll County, New Hampshire (Boston: W.A. Fergusson & Co., 1889), 631.

[v] Information about Roles and the Carroll House as well as the Pine River House appears in Merrill, History of Carroll County, 616. See also https://www.ossipee.org/sites/g/files/vyhlif3641/f/file/file/mp_7_history_11.1.pdf

[vi] Information about Roles’ wealth and family come from the following: “United States Census, 1850”, database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MWZZ-1NN : Mon Jul 17 22:12:04 UTC 2023), Entry for Joseph Q Roles and Mary E Roles, 1850; “United States Census, 1860”, database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M7W5-3S8 : Mon Jul 17 21:22:53 UTC 2023), Entry for Joseph Q Rolls and Mary E Rolls, 1860.; “United States Census, 1870”, database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MH55-277 : 29 May 2021), Joseph Q Roles in entry for Daniel A Hyde, 1870.; (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MHR6-3DH : Thu Aug 03 02:43:20 UTC 2023), Entry for Joseph Q. Roles and Mary E. Roles, 1880.

[vii] One can find a list of Roles’ political offices in Merrill, History of Carroll County, 635-636.

[viii] See Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1997). See also Lex Renda, “Credit and Culpability: New Hampshire State Politics during the Civil War” Historical New Hampshire 48:1 (Spring 1993).

[ix] Information about Roles’ death comes from Merrill, History of Carroll County, 631; “New Hampshire Death Records, 1654-1947,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FSLW-XJL : 23 February 2021), Joseph I Roles, 04 Dec 1885; citing Ossipee, Bureau Vital Records and Health Statistics, Concord; FHL microfilm 1,001,103.