Author: Jessica A. Bandel
On July 20, 1917, Secretary of War Newton Baker reached into a large glass bowl and plucked from it a single capsule—like the one shown here—as film cameras spied the scene. The fates of more than 9.6 million men between the ages of 21 and 30 hung in the balance, and that immense burden of responsibility was not lost of Baker. He handed the capsule gingerly to a draft official, who opened it and carefully unfurled the tiny slip of paper, revealing the first number to be called in the first American draft since the Civil War: 258. From start to finish, the drawing of all 10,500 capsules took close to seventeen hours.
In the following weeks, notices to report for medical examinations reached those summoned for service in the first call. While most North Carolinians responded favorably to the call over the course of the war, there were a few who protested the draft laws. Perhaps the best known incident of resistance in North Carolina took place in Ashe County in the summer of 1918 when approximately forty deserters armed themselves and prepared to fight off draft officials. One confrontation led to the death of two men, a deserter named David Welch and Winfield Goss, the man who had attempted to arrest him. The violent development influenced state draft board officials to send an urgent request to Gov. Thomas Bickett for counsel and support.
Governor Bickett, however, did not see deploying militarized reinforcements as a reliable means of bringing a swift, safe end to the standoff. Instead, the governor determined to make a personal appeal, and on June 30, addressed a gathered crowd in the county seat of Jefferson to publically call upon the deserters to come forward. One man turned himself in right on the spot. Several more followed in the days after the address. Within a week, the dramatic standoff between draft dodgers and draft officials—once thought to require the assistance of Federal authorities to quell—had fizzled out, and the men were allowed to return to their training camps.