The various organizations mentioned in the War Records, the Junior Reserves, Senior Reserves, Mobile Regiment, Home Guards, Local Defence Corps,[174] and others, were, except the reserves, volunteer organizations for local defence, and all that saw active service before 1865, except the Home Guards, were absorbed into the Confederate organization.[175] The stupid conduct of the legislature during the last two years of the war in failing to provide for the defence of the state cannot be too strongly condemned. The final result would have been the same, but a strong force of militia would have enabled Governor Watts to execute the laws in all parts of the state, and to protect the families of loyal citizens from outrage by tories and deserters. SEC. 3. CONSCRIPTION AND EXEMPTION Confederate Enrolment Laws In the spring of 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the Enrolment Act, by which all white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five were made liable to military service at the call of the President, and those already in service were retained. The President was authorized to employ state officials to enroll the men made subject to duty, provided the governor of the state gave his consent; otherwise he was to employ Confederate officials. The conscripts thus secured were to be assigned to the state commands already in the field until these organizations were recruited to their full strength. Substitutes were allowed under such regulations as the Secretary of War might prescribe.[176] Five days later, a law was passed exempting certain classes of persons from the operations of the Enrolment Act. These were: Confederate and state officials, mail-carriers, ferrymen on post-office routes, pilots, telegraph operators, miners, printers, ministers, college professors, teachers with twenty pupils or more, teachers of the deaf, dumb, and blind, hospital attendants, one druggist to each drug store, and superintendents and operatives in cotton and wool factories.[177] In the fall of 1862, the Enrolment law was extended to include all white men from thirty-five to forty-five years of age and all who lacked a few months of being eighteen years of age. They were to be enrolled for three years, the oldest, if not needed, being left until the last.[178]