There you go Birdy, words from a prominent Confederate denying that slavery was the sole issue for the war.
That Sir, is a brilliant post
We should all bookmark it.
...and thank you for increasing my knowledge of this man, so sadly wasted at Franklin.
Birdwatcher
You'll also note from the quote that it was a reference to a common sentiment OF THE TIME. Even then, Confederates were responding to the charge that it was all about slavery and denying it.
Really, it boggles the mind. You made mention of some traitorous scum in Texas who abandoned his friends and neighbors and left them to the scourges of the Yankee invaders because he could not bear to fight against the country his father fought for in the American Revolution.
Well, if you want a list of prominent Confederates who had fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who were prominent men in the Revolution the list would surely run into the high dozens. If you include common men, it would be in the tens of thousands. So these men with DIRECT familial connection to the Revolution and an understanding of its principles learned not from books, but from words of their fathers and grandfathers at the fireside, chose to fight for the Confederacy as their fathers had fought for the colonies before them. Do you accuse them of being illiterate? Do you accuse them of abandoning their much beloved country for insufficient reason? Do you accuse them of betraying their fathers and grandfathers? Or does it make more sense that they believed, as it was in their understanding, that their fundamental rights and liberties were at stake and that steeped in the spirit of their revolutionary fathers, they chose to fight for them rather than see them lost without a whimper?
