addition to its "class-exemption system" deferring school teachers, river pilots and iron foundry workers, Congress in October 1862 exempted owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves. Public opposition exploded, objecting to a system making the war a "rich man's war" and a "poor man's fight". Conscription Bureau officers often acted like kidnappers or press gangs as they enforced the draft. Southern men began volunteering for military service to avoid the stigma of being labelled a conscript. Many entered state militias, where they would be restricted to service within their states, as in Georgia. Nevertheless, the Confederacy managed to mobilize practically the entire Southern military population, generally amounting to over a third of the manpower available to the Union until 1865. In February 1862, a group of Georgia congressmen, led by the Cobb brothers and Robert Augustus Toombs, a former Confederate Secretary of State, called for a "scorched earth policy" before advancing Union troops, stating that the Confederacy should "Let every woman have a torch, every child a firebrand" in order to deprive Union troops of resources. On retiring from a city or town, the group stated that the Confederacy should "let a desert more terrible than the Sahara welcome the Vandals." It became popular to believe that the loss and self-destruction of a city would make little difference in the ultimate outcome of the war; the vast size of the Confederacy would make its conquest impossible. Thus, by the spring of 1862, it was obvious that, if the Confederacy were to survive, Southerners were of necessity changing their ante-bellum worldview, including constitutional principles, economic markets and political axioms. President Davis referred to the Confederacy's "darkest hour", and, with consent of Congress, reconstituted his cabinet on March 19. Thomas H. Watts, an Alabama Whig, became the Attorney General, and, without a Confederate Supreme Court, he became the de-facto final arbiter of legal questions involving the national government. Congress had authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and to declare martial law in any city, town or military district at his personal discretion as of February 27, and by March both Norfolk and Richmond were under martial law. Second Session of the First Congress The Second Session of the First Congress met from August 18 to October 13, 1862. During this period, Union river operations had continued success, capturing Memphis, Tennessee and Helena, Arkansas. Along the Atlantic Coast,