The thing about war is that in every era and in every age, it always seems to be a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war. This was certainly true of the Southern rebellion of our Civil War, in which the Confederates enacted a law that stipulated that the white plantation owner would be exempt from military service if his plantation had at least twenty enslaved people, under the theory that the white man needed to be on a given plantation so as to maintain law and order upon it. Indeed, to a certain degree, this policy made sense because somebody in authority needed to still be on the plantation, especially during a Civil War and a possible slave rebellion. That said, it doesn’t seem to take into account that the same important personages who insisted that secession was necessary had provided themselves a law that would keep them safe from the fight to come.
So too, there were plenty of white people in the South, who were not plantation owners, and owned little or nothing of their own, who were obviously not exempt from having to serve the Confederate cause, because those whites that volunteered were not enough men so needed for the Southern armed forces, and thus conscription became the law of the land, signifying that unless a white male of fighting age could find some sort of legal excuse, they were subject to that draft and to a fight that they may or may not have wanted to make, especially in consideration, that for the South, the fight was about defending the institution of slavery and the value of those slaves so held, of which, those that didn’t own slaves, weren’t going to gain much of anything, no matter how the battle turned out.
Indeed, in any war, no matter the results thereof, there are going to be winners, and there are going to be losers, of which those who ended up dead or maimed would obviously be on the losing side. In contrast, those who benefited would not only be those who maintained their status but would also be those who were still alive and well. This indicates that the least that those who advocated for rebellion, secession, and the like needed to do was to put their own lives at risk, and not have had hidden behind laws that permitted them not to fight, such as the Twenty Negro Law, which shouldn’t even have been needed to have been passed, if those that who were so hellbent on the protection of and the need of enslaving people, actually risk their own lives, and spilled their own blood, when insisting that secession was the right thing to do, come hell or high water.
The thing about war is that it is hell, but those who really experience that hell are the ones who are putting something tangible on the line, such as their very lives; whereas, those who rant and rave about the need to fight, but don’t place themselves in a personal position of jeopardy, are fair-weather instigators that ought to have aligned their true intentions with their fighting words.