by F.D. Srygley, Florida Confederate Veteran... Faith and Facts Press, first printing 1891.
To people who passed through those memorable days in Dixie, it seems queer to hear Southern men and women spoken of as "traitors," "rebels," "enemies of American liberty" and "foes of the Constitution." I know not what may have been the secret motives of wily leaders, if there were any such leaders, which I gravely doubt, but as for the people, nothing but patriotism pure and simple moved them to vote secession and to enlist in the army.
The people at the South felt just as confident that the people at the North contemplated a deliberate overthrow of the Republic as their fathers in the Revolution felt that King George was a tyrant. In all the public orations and private discussions the idea that slavery was the bone of contention never once entered the minds of the common people . . . .
They understood that the Constitution of the United States was assailed, and that they were offering themselves for its defense. The question, as they understood it, was whether American liberty should be perpetuated or crushed by Northern monarchy.
Fighting for slavery? Think of the absurdity of the thing! The Southern army was largely made up of volunteers from the mountain regions. There were no slaves of consequence in that mountain country, and those poor mountaineers hated "stuck-up" slave holders as cordially as a saint hates sin. True, they understood in a vague sort of way that there was some discussion on the subject of slavery in a general way, but to them this was only an incidental and irrelevant topic of public interest which was in no way connected with the question of secession.
The people understood that the question at issue was simply their right to manage their own affairs in their own States. If the North proposed to interfere with that right, what assurance had they that it would not take from them their homes and all their property? I know not what the leaders thought, but there was no mistaking the feelings and opinions of the common people. . . .
I understood that in seceding the South held on to the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and Bunker Hill monument, and the life of George Washington. . . .
We traitors? We rebels against the American government and enemies of the Constitution? Shades of Washington and Bunker Hill! Why, what were the people up in the mountains fighting for if not for the Constitution? . . . . What did they care about slavery? Hadn't it been as a thorn in the flesh to them from time immemorial? Did not everybody know that the North had set aside the Constitution, throttled our liberty and pulled the tail feathers out of the American eagle?
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A BAND of BROTHERS
Sen. E.W. Carmack, 1903
The Confederate soldiers were our kin folk and our heroes. We testify to the country our enduring fidelity to their memory. We commemorate their valor and devotion. There were some things not surrendered at Appomattox. We did not surrender our rights and history, nor was it one of those conditions of surrender that unfriendly lips should be suffered to tell the story of that war or that unfriendly hands should write the epitaphs of our Confederate dead. We have the right to teach our children the true history of that war, the causes that led up to it and the principles involved.
"We Southron are people to whom the past is forever speaking."
We listen because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices. Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood went through fire and storm to break a path to the future and form a true government, by the people, and for the people.
We are part of the future they died for; they are part of the past that brought the future. What they did--the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died--make up a part of our own experience. We can not cut ourselves off from it. It is as real to us as something that happened last week. It is a basic part of our "Southern Heritage"as Americans" (Author unknown)
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The Confederate soldier was in most cases a volunteer. His average age was 21-23, but there were some in their early teens and some in their 60's. Most of which were illiterate and 60-70% were farmers by trade. They worked their land with their own hands and did this without salves.
These Southern patriots were raised under the shadow of The War for Independence. They were brought up to honour and respect that struggle by their fathers and grandfathers. They knew from this up bringing The War for Independence was to insure the people and states the right to rule themselves. It is not too difficult to understand why these Southerners and many Northerners "That's right" Northerners, fought for self rule and state rights.
These Confederate warriors were under fed, under clothed, and almost never paid his $11 a month. They fought until the very end and begged for another go at 'em when Lee surrendered! I ask you, is this men that would fight only for slavery, when they owned no slaves??...No I say!, They were fighting for the very thing their fathers fought for, Independence...PoP
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History is not the relation of campaigns, and battles, and generals or other individuals, but that which show the principles for which justified Her struggle for those principles.
Every one should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity.
We owe it to our dead, to our living and to our children to preserve the truth and repel the falsehoods, so that we may secure just judgment from the only tribunal before which we may appear and be fully and fairly be heard, and that tribunal is the bar of history.
Robert E. Lee
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."All that was, or is now, desired is that error and injustice be excluded from the text-books of the schools and from the literature brought into our homes; that the truth be told, without exaggeration and without omission; truth for its own sake and for the sake of honest history, and that the generations to come after us not be left to bear the burden of shame and dishonor unrighteously laid upon the name of their noble sires." Rev. James P. Smith, Last Survivor of the Staff of Lt. Genl. Stonewall Jackson.
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"The heartstrings of the mother, woven around the grave of her lost child, will never be severed while she lives; but does that hinder the continued flow of maternal devotions to those who are left her? The South's affections are bound, with links that cannot be broken, around the graves of her sons who fell in her defense and to the mementos and memories of the great struggle; but does that fact lessen her loyalty to the proud emblem of a reunited country? Does her unparalleled defense of the now dead Confederacy argue less readiness to battle for the ever-living Republic, in the making and the administering of which she bore so conspicuous a part?
If those unhappy patriots who find a scarecrow in every faded, riddled Confederate flag would delve deeper into the philosophy of human nature, or rise higher, say to the plane on which McKinley stood, they would be better satisfied with their Southern countrymen, with Southern sentiment, with the breadth and strength of the unobtrusive but sincere Southern patriotism. They would see that man is so constituted, the immutable laws of our being are such, that to stifle the sentiment and extinguish the hallowed memories of a people is to destroy their manhood.
The unseemly things which occurred in the great conflict between the States should be forgotten, or at least forgiven, and no longer permitted to disturb complete harmony between North and South. All American youth in all sections should be taught to hold in perpetual remembrance all that was great and good on both sides; to comprehend the inherited convictions for which saintly women suffered and patriotic men died; to recognize the unparalleled carnage as proof of unrivaled courage; to appreciate the singular absence of all personal animosity and the frequent manifestation between those brave antagonists of a good-fellowship such as had never before been witnessed between hostile armies. It will be a glorious day for our country when all the children within its borders shall learn that four years of fratricidal war between the North and the South was waged by neither with criminal or unworthy intent, but by both to protect what they conceived to be threatened rights and imperiled liberty; that the issues which divided the sections were born when the Republic was born, and were forever buried in an ocean of fraternal blood."
Gen. John Brown Gordon, C.S.A. - "Reminiscences of the Civil War," Charles Scribner, New York, 1904.
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The "States of Secession's" white populations, number of
troops furnished, and number of troops killed.....1861-1865
There were many from other states, even the north. I know of no records on these.
