I recently found out Confederates were the first to institute a general military draft, on April 16, 1962. The order was highly controversial, since such a coercive act by a central government was seen as contrary to why the South fought the war in the first place.
According to Wikipedia, the order was riddled with exemptions, including for those with involvement in munitions production, as well as a string of professions.
A few questions, then. How pervasive was the draft? I've read that the process was terribly inefficient and disorganized. Were poor Mississippi whites as likely to be ordered to report as those in, let's say Arkansas? Which localities bore the greatest brunt of providing rank and file solders?
Given the exemptions (including one that included overseers on plantations with 20+ slaves), what narratives do we have about poor white resentment toward being forced into military service?
How was that resentment countered, through coercive and non-coercive means?
What forms of resistance to the draft among poor Southern whites have been reported? Were there any incidents of mutiny or violent opposition; a Southern equivalent of the New York City draft riots in 1863?
Finally, according to Nancy Isenberg's "Poor White Trash," the rural South was riddled with poverty and malnutrition, including significant incidence of clay eating and hookworm. Given these factors, was the health and fitness of the draftees ever a concern?
It really depended on the state you were in. Since the Confederacy had a very weak central authority from Richmond and by 1862 the the Confederacy's coffers were beginning to feel the burdens of war the draft was doomed from the beginning. It was the responsibility of each state to outfit and equip each regiment so there and to fill these regiments with men. There was a lack of coordination. It was not as if that Lee said "hey, I need X amount of men by Y time of the year" and the army would be reinforced. It was a very messy and difficult task to get all the states to agree on how many men to draft and when.
In terms of exemptions, the first one that comes to my mind is the "Twenty Negro Law" passed by the Confederate Congress in 1862. This meant that if an individual owned 20 slaves or more than they were exempt from military service. The logic behind this was fear of a slave rebellion with there being so many white men gone off to the various theaters of war and that by leaving behind a handful of wealthy plantation owners the slaves would not only be less inclined to rebel but the plantations could keep running smoothly and producing more vital cash crops to be sold, which in turn the levies passed on those products funded the Confederate war effort.