Damn, another misstep on your part....
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.
Smithwick requires no defense from me, disappointing though and very telling that you would actually describe the man as "traitorous scum", about like your dismissal of all those fine Union men as "useful idiots".
...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.
Smithwick left because he was sure he would be murdered simply for being pro-Union.
As events turned out he was exactly right, several of his friends WERE murdered, lingering anger over the same being his own stated reason why he never returned to Texas.
Do you accuse them of being illiterate?
Far from it, I have been insisting all along their very literacy meant they MUST have known the causes they were fighting for also included front and center a Constitution based upon the perpetuation of slavery.
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.
This is all very dramatic.
OK, its a given that the Union side contained a larger proportion of recent immigrants....
...but, were there not also "tens of thousands" of Union men, children and grandchildren of Rev War vets who, like Smithwick, took the Union side?
Of course these would be the guys you have dismissed as "dupes" and "useful idiots"....
..and now "traitorous scum"....
Birdwatcher
