Conscription in the United States in the context of "Gangs of New York"

The Regular Army of the United States succeeded the Continental Army as the country's permanent, professional land-based military force. In modern times, the professional core of the United States Army continues to be called the Regular Army (often abbreviated as "RA"). From the time of the American Revolution until after the Spanish–American War, state militias and volunteer regiments organized by the states (but thereafter controlled by federal authorities and federal generals in time of war) supported the smaller Regular Army of the United States. These volunteer regiments came to be called United States Volunteers (USV) in contrast to the Regular United States Army (USA). During the American Civil War, about 97 percent of the Union Army was United States Volunteers.

In contemporary use, the term Regular Army refers to the full-time active component of the United States Army, as distinguished from the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard. A fourth component, the Army of the United States, has been inactive since the suspension of the draft in 1973 and the U.S. armed forces became an all-volunteer armed force.

During the American Civil War, the United States Army, the land force that fought to preserve the collective Union of the states, was often referred to as the Union Army, the Federal Army, or the Northern Army. It proved essential to the restoration and preservation of the United States as a working, viable republic.

The Union army was made up of the permanent regular army of the United States, but further fortified, augmented, and strengthened by the many temporary units of dedicated volunteers, as well as including those who were drafted in to service as conscripts. To this end, the Union army fought and ultimately triumphed over the efforts of the Confederate States Army.

The Libertarian Party (LP) is a political party in the United States. It promotes civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism, and limiting the size and scope of government. The world's first explicitly libertarian party, it was conceived in August 1971 at meetings in the home of David Nolan in Westminster, Colorado, and was officially formed on December 11, 1971, in Colorado Springs. The organizers of the party drew inspiration from the works and ideas of the prominent Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard. The founding of the party was prompted in part due to concerns about the Nixon administration's wage and price controls, the Vietnam War, conscription, and the introduction of fiat money.

The party generally supports "personal liberty" and fiscal conservatism, as compared to the Democratic Party's modern liberalism and progressivism and the Republican Party's social conservatism and right-wing populism. Gary Johnson, the party's presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016, claims that the Libertarian Party is more socially liberal than Democrats, and more fiscally conservative than Republicans. Its fiscal policy positions include lowering taxes and abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), decreasing the national debt, allowing people to opt out of Social Security, and eliminating the welfare state, in part by utilizing private charities. Its social policy positions include ending the prohibition of illegal drugs, advocating criminal justice reform, supporting same-sex marriage, ending capital punishment, and supporting the right to keep and bear arms.

In the United States, freedom of religion is a constitutionally protected right provided in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The Bill of Rights supports freedom of religion as a legally-protected right, reading that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...". George Washington stressed freedom of religion as a fundamental American principle even before the First Amendment was ratified. In 1790, in a letter to the Touro Synagogue, Washington expressed the government "gives to bigotry no sanction" and "to persecution no assistance." Freedom of religion is linked to the countervailing principle of separation of church and state, a concept advocated by Colonial founders such as Dr. John Clarke, Roger Williams, William Penn, and later Founding Fathers, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

The way freedom of religion is interpreted has changed over time in the United States and continues to be controversial. The issue was a major topic of George Washington's Farewell Address. Several American states had their own official state churches both before and after the First Amendment was passed and various Native American religions have been banned for most of US history. Illegal Native American religion was a major cause of the 1890–1891 Ghost Dance War. Starting in 1918, nearly all of the pacifist Hutterites emigrated to Canada when Joseph and Michael Hofer died following torture for conscientious objection to the draft. Some have since returned, but most Hutterites remain in Canada.

The United States ran a draft, a system of conscription, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the peacetime years before the Vietnam War. It was administered by the Selective Service System. In the second half of 1965, with American troops pouring into Vietnam, there was a substantial expansion of the US armed forces, and this required a dramatic increase in the number of men drafted each month.

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court concerning enforcement of the Espionage Act of 1917 during World War I. A unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., concluded that Charles Schenck and other defendants, who distributed flyers to draft-age men urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense. The First Amendment did not protect Schenck from prosecution, even though, "in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants, in saying all that was said in the circular, would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done." In this case, Holmes said, "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent." Therefore, Schenck could be punished.

The Court followed this reasoning to uphold a series of convictions arising out of prosecutions during wartime, but Holmes began to dissent in the case of Abrams v. United States, insisting that the Court had departed from the standard he had crafted for them and had begun to allow punishment for ideas. In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot).

The Army of the United States was one of the four major service components of the United States Army. Today, the Army consists of the Regular Army, the Army National Guard of the United States, the Army National Guard while in the service of the United States, and the United States Army Reserve. Previously however the Army of the United States was a component. However, the Army of the United States has been inactive since the suspension of the draft in 1973 and the U.S. military's transition to an all-volunteer force. Personnel serving in the United States Army during a major national emergency or armed conflict (either voluntarily or involuntarily) were enlisted or inducted into the Army of the United States without specifying service in a component. It also includes the "Retired Reserve". Those are retired soldiers who have reached the required years of creditable service, or creditable service and age; regardless of the component, or components they formerly served in.

The term "Army of the United States" or "Armies of the United States" is also the legal name of the collective land forces of the United States as prescribed by the United States Constitution. In this concept, the term "Army of the United States" has been in use since at least 1841 as in the title General Regulations for the Army of the United States. Also included by Act of the 39th Congress (1866) were the U.S. Volunteers, persons holding a brevetted rank, and the U.S. Veteran Reserve Corps.