The enrolling officers all over the State, says the Raleigh Progress of the 4th, are picking up conscripts, and we are glad to see the people yield obedience to the law, for our ranks need men, and men we must have ; but we do protest against the iniquitous provision of the act which exempts a man simply because he has twenty or more slaves. It is for the right to own and hold slaves that we are fighting, and this being so the slave owner has not only the love of country and desire to be free to actuate him to do his duty, but his property is at stake, for unless the South be successful slaves become valueless. Some people those who are skulking from the army behind their n — — rs may consider this kind of talk dangerous, but if we are establishing a Government whose laws make it dangerous to tell the truth, we had better know it at once, it is all right-for the poor man with ten or fifteen children, to go, but the rich man is enabled by a law of the Confederate Congress to skulk his duty to his country because he owns twenty slaves.
President Davis has expressed his disapprobation of the law, and the patriotic masses every where cry out against it, and we demand that the cotton lords who seem to, lord it in the present Congress, repeal it. The fact that our people have submitted to this law proves them to be emphatically a law abiding people, for every principle of justice and equity of equality and right the superiority of the white man over the slave cries out against it
We learn that many persons who own twenty slaves are presenting themselves and demanding exemption, and hence we appeal to the Confederate Congress to repeal the unjust and disgraceful clause now, that these men may be put in ihe army. If it be not done and the war be protracted, the poor man, in and out of the army, may stop to ask what all is for? — Wadesboro’ Argus.
Semi-Weekly Standard, Raleigh, NC, February 20, 1863