leading political issues all along the eastern seaboard and in Mississippi. Taxation, impressment of produce, and in-kind taxation were widely seen as confiscatory. This was especially important in Virginia. Elsewhere, the poor objected to regressive schedules and the rich called for the government to purchase entire crops of cotton. Administration suspension of habeas corpus to corral able-bodied men dodging military service was especially offensive in North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The results overall did not result in a no-confidence majority against the administration. Former Democrats still outnumbered former Whigs 55-45 percent, but war weariness had taken its toll among the civilian population. The delegations from North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia were the most antagonistic to the Davis Administration, and Alabama, Florida and Texas only slightly less so. The Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee delegations were largely elected by soldier vote, and so were solidly pro-administration, as were the congressmen nominally elected to represent districts encompassing the Union-occupied regions of Virginia -- these were mostly in West Virginia, since its admission to the Union as a separate state was never recognized by the Confederacy. At the time of elections in each state, just over forty percent of the Congressional Districts were occupied or disrupted by Union forces, yet the fragmentary Congressional results from army and refugee camps were accepted as representative of the majority of residents in each state, a practice that one historian has called delusional. As historian Wilfred B. Yearns concluded, “Only the nearly solid support from occupied districts enabled President Davis to maintain a majority in Congress until the last days of the nation." Second Congress, First Session After a two-and-a-half month intersession from the end of the First Congress, the First Session of the Second Confederate Congress sat from May 2 until June 14, 1864. During this period, Sherman began his Federal March to the Sea, and Grant advanced to the outskirts of Richmond at Cold Harbor, Virginia. Confederate forces fell back into defensive positions. Mobilization In his message to Congress on December 7, 1863, Jefferson Davis insisted that Congress must “add largely to our effective forces as promptly as possible.” He proposed adding older men aged 45–60 to the draft to replace able-bodied men performing inactive duties. Secretary of War Seddon proposed that Congress organize non-conscripts in every state to hunt down deserters and to assist local enrolling officers. The first draft law had compelled a