While researching my family history, I came across a letter that mentioned my 4th great uncle. It was written by a woman to the governor of Georgia asking that he be allowed to stay in their community. She references a recent proclamation by the governor and states that there were no men left in the community. She says it was becoming increasingly difficult for the women to handle the housework, the farm work, managing the enslaved individuals, and any business that was required in the town (buying/selling supplies, banking, etc.). She was urging the governor to allow this one man to stay and help them manage things since he was well-known and honest to those in the area.
So I am curious why they needed to ask permission for him to remain and not serve in the army. Was there a time, or certain areas where it was mandatory?
Yes, there was conscription in the Confederacy. In fact, the first ever conscription law was passed by the Confederates, owing to the smaller population size. There were exemptions based on occupation, if the occupation was important enough in the home front. Later on, the conscription exempted men who owned more than twenty slaves. As in the North, richer men could pay a replacement to take their spot.
Those last two exemptions caused a lot of strife, especially for the poorer Confederate citizens who felt that it was unfair that rich men essentially didn't have to serve while they did.
On April 16, 1862, the Confederate Congress passed a statute that read, in part:
The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That the President be, and he is hereby authorized to call out and place in the military service of the Confederate States, for three years, unless the war shall have been sooner ended, all white men who are residents of the Confederate States, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five years at the time the call or calls may be made, who are not legally exempted from military service. All of the persons aforesaid who are now in the armies of the Confederacy, and whose term of service will expire before the end of the war, shall be continued in the service for three years from the date of their original enlistment, unless the war shall have been sooner ended
Basically everyone between 18 and 35 who was already in the army was now in the army for three years, regardless of how long they had agreed to enlist originally, and everyone else was now subject to being conscripted. There were provisions included to allow someone who was conscripted to hire a substitute to enlist instead, and exemptions for people who owned enough slaves to qualify. As you can imagine, this didn't go over well with soldiers who had signed up for only one year and didn't have enough money (or slaves) to be exempted.
Later laws expanded the age range of people subject to conscription and eliminated substitutes, and by the end of the war most everyone who was subject to military service had been utilized by the Confederacy.
Now the letter you found brings up an interesting dynamic in the Confederacy, because one of the principles of the Confederacy was states' rights (though when you read through the declarations of the causes of secession, you see that when they had to choose between states' rights and slavery, they chose slavery over states' rights, but I digress). Georgia governor Joseph Brown was an extreme states' rights advocate, and thought that the Confederate Congress and Jefferson Davis had overstepped their authority in the Conscription Acts, and vigorously opposed it. While Lincoln was able to take full advantage of his broad war powers to bring the force of the United States to bear on the rebellion, Davis found himself hamstrung by the Southern theory of state sovereignty, and often found himself having to fight his own states to get troops and supplies where they were needed.