Although they had joined the Confederacy with enthusiasm, the governors of the South were not united in their effort to support the cause with troops. State militias were held back for home defense and were not sent to the war front; if they were sent, it was with the agreement that service must be of limited duration. Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia commissioned ten thousand second lieutenants in his own state's militia in order to keep them out of the reach of Confederate recruiters. Other governors insisted that defense of their home states overrode any need for a national army to defend cities and farms in other sections of the South. Underlying these policies was the principle of states' rights, which the South had declared as the crucial reason for the Civil War in the first place. For governors and state legislators, states' rights held not...