As the war progressed, social change and internal turmoil engulfed much of the Confederacy. At the outset, most white southerners rallied to the Confederate cause. No less fervently than northern troops, southern soldiers spoke of their cause in the language of freedom. “We are fighting for our liberty,” wrote one volunteer, without any sense of contradiction, “against tyrants of the North ... who are determined to destroy slavery.” But public disaffection eventually became an even more serious problem for the Confederacy than for the Union.
Even as it waged a desperate struggle for independence, the South found itself increasingly divided. One grievance was the draft. Like the Union, the Confederacy allowed individuals to provide a substitute. Because of the accelerating disintegration of slavery, it also exempted one white male for every twenty slaves on a plantation (thus releasing many overseers and planters’ sons from service). The “twenty-negro” provision convinced many yeomen that the struggle for southern independence had become “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”