Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The voice of a Southern soldier..

In his own words explaining what the CW was clearly NOT about.
The man was there, unlike the liberals that pollute this forum. I found the ending very moving in light of our current National embarrassment.


https://youtu.be/uHDfC-z9YaE

I graduated High School in 1970 in Springfield VA, Fairfax County...

Listening to the end of the link above about a talk with Mr Howell, about why they fought during the Civil War in Virginia had nothing to do with slavery and it was about State's Rights... that is exactly how we were taught in Virginia History, which was required in 4th grade, 7th grade and 10th grade back during those days...

you never read about Virginia tried to abolish slavery within the state in 1808.. they were buying the freedom of slaves from their land owners, which was predominantly in the SE part of the state where the major plantations were...it almost bankrupted the State, because recently freed slaves were kidnapped, and taken over into North Carolina, where their freedom was not recognized...and the kidnapped slave was swapped for one from North Carolina....to the first slaves owner...

it was a revolving door until the State of Virginia had to stop it in 1810, before the state went bankrupt...

but I also know from history taught in those days...it varied in other states....

if Union forced hadn't invaded Northern VA in Arlington and Fairfax Counties, the entire state of Virginia probably would have not seceded from the Union... but once invaded.. that killed that... .that is why the western counties didn't want to secede.. and became West Virginia, as they had no real slavery there.. just mountain hill folk... but many of them fought for the South and Virginia...

Over the last 50 years, history has been rewritten. It’s convenient for the unlearned or the naive to say that the Civil War was over slavery. The truth is that the war just “didn’t happen.” There was a long series of events that lead to the shots fired in 1861. States‘ rights was the issue of the day. Slavery was not abolished until the emancipation proclamation in 1863.

It’s time to stand up for the truth. If we don’t, it’s just a matter of time for decency and honesty to disappear. These riots are wrong. Paying the rioters off with corporate money will on embolden the rioters more.

Slavery was not abolished until the ratification of the 13th Amendment in late 1865..

Rewriting and destroying statues/history does not mean it never happened. These were Americans fighting other Americans for their beliefs. People don't put their lives on the line lightly. All individuals involved in the Civil War deserve our respect, regardless of the side they fought for. I am deeply offended with the destruction of the Southern monuments, almost like it erases that part of history. Here in super liberal NY, Confederate Flags are considered illegal to sell, but I can buy Nazi and even Isis flags. So we are letting 13% of our population dictated what is acceptable for all of us, that BLM is meaningful on signs/Tshirts, but not to Black on Black killings. When will we finally stand up and tell these folks to suck it up, get off welfare and actually become self supporting members of our society?

I'd go out on a limb and say about 95% of those 13% don't care. It's the white liberals that are driving it.

It is so sad the way they are rewriting history to make the Confederate States and their brave soldiers out to be heathens and heels. You can't whitewash history. There were very brave men that gave their lives for their states. AMERICAN men. Their history deserves to be know, and not biased by the views of the liberalists.

Here in the North we were taught the war was about slavery. There is.clearly much more.to the story. What has happened in education the last 50 years is a travesty and we.let it happen. Question becomes what to do to fix it.

We have empowered the Negroes who are little more than children. Anything they are in charge of will be destroyed. Big cities are good examples.

As a 35 year veteran now retired History teacher here in NY, my students were taught about the economic/political aspects leading for 40+ years up to the eventual break up of the US. Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, the Compromises of 1820 and 1850, and on and on were just some of the major items on the path towards the Civil War. History is not in my opinion just What happened , but truly WHY it happened. But, I am a rare breed in the ultra liberal field of teaching having been raised by conservative farmers, who worked for themselves, not some employee of a major corp. I am probably a Dinosaur in today's liberal, anything goes, world. I don't care what race, religion, sex/sexual preference, etc. that you are - good people prove their worth to me and get my support. Would I prefer more people were like me and many independent thinkers on this Chat Board? Certainly, but I realize that many of today's youth were raised with parents who worked outside the home and really had no responsibilities except to possibly take care of their room. They never had chore responsibility or worked side by side with their parents earning the family income.

Sorry for the sidetrack, but..........

To presume that one man can know the heart of another man is pure arrogance.

To presume that one man can know the heart of another man from 150 years ago is pure arrogance and extraordinary stupidity.

What can be known of a man... is the actions that his heart causes him to demonstrate. Obviously, those actions can and should be clearly judged.

Short of demonstrative action... no man has a right to judge another.

If all white men are guilty because they are white, obviously all black men are guilty because they are black. No?

It really is. I think if you boil it all down it was a complicated morass of competing political and economic interests that had been festering for almost 100 years. The only real way to for anyone living now would be to dedicate a huge amount of time to reading newspaper articles from both the north and the south from say 1850 onward....if that would even be possible. We are presented today in media and education, a vastly oversimplified picture of what was going on at the time......that the nice people in the north one day found out that the mean people in the south had slaves and decided to free them.

I had a great history teacher in the 11th grade.....truly great. He was a real historian who lived and breathed it, I think he was probably on par with Shelby Foote. He tried to present the politics and economics of the time to us as best he could and I would love to be able to go back and sit in his class again at with the experience of age 55 instead of age 16.....I'd pay to be able to do it. I made good grades in his class because I used to possess a really good memory which allowed me to regurgitate non-mathematical facts for tests but my main agenda at the time was a failed attempt to get a cutie named Alexis who sat beside me in that class to give me the time of day.

I think that southern paranoia was a major cause of the war. Southernors thought that all Northerners were abolitionists. Not so. In fact, many Northern counties passed laws prohibiting even free Negroes from living there. They also thought that Lincoln was a flaming abolitionist. He wasn't.

On the morning of Lincoln's first inauguration, the US Senate passed a constitutional Amendment guaranteeing slavery forever in the 15 states where it then existed. The House had passed the same amendment a few days earlier. If the war hadn't started, it is likely 15 states would have ratified the amendment. As it was, five did before the war caught everyone up. In his speech, Lincoln commented favorably on said amendment, though he said he had not had a chance to read it yet. The South should have stayed in the Union and ratified it.

The other thing the South got wrong was Fort Sumter. They just should have let it alone. It wasn't going to threaten anybody and the North couldn't even reinforce it. Butt by firing on it, they gave Lincoln his causus belli.

Lincoln, of course, thought he could end the rebellion in 90 days. All wars, including WWI, have the same reason for carrying on.

Even Viet Nam:

1. We can't withdraw. We've got 15,000 American dead.

2. We can't withdraw. We've got 30,000 American dead now.

And so on, until Nixon finally said if you give us our prisoners back, we'll withdraw.

The victors always get to write history, and in this case, since the North won, they chose to make it about slavery, and nothing else..............something which any student of history knows was not the case. Slavery was the excuse used by the North to try and bring the Southern states "back in line," because the South was becoming an economic giant because of cotton, and the North didn't like it.

States Rights covers a lot of ground, too much to get into here, but we are seeing something in the way of it today, with a handful of states wanting to have power over the rest of the country. If not for the Electoral College, they would have it too. The War Between the States resulted because of the North desiring to tell the Southern what they could and could not do.............and that has not changed at all in the past 150 years.

Great thread and some excellent post!
I think it was Shelby Foote who told this story and it goes somewhat as follows.
Some northern soldiers were deep in the heart of the south and had captured some southern soldiers. When the Union soldiers asked the southern soldiers why they were fighting the southern soldiers simply replied,”because you’re down here”.

This is the best thing to be on the campfire in years, thanks so much for posting.

And the "state right" as issue was the "right" to own a human being as if he were a horse or a dog or a mule. The Founders intended the Union to be perpetual. Even the southern secessionists did not term their secession a "revolution" because they knew it was not. The South had no more right to secede than does CHAZ in Seattle. When the South seized millions of dollars worth of federal property and fired on Ft. Sumter, what was the Union supposed to do? Just sit there and take it?

The "re-write of history" is the claim the war was not about slavery. It most assuredly was.

Of my 6 direct ancestors who fought in the war only 1 owned slaves, the rest were just dirt poor, so they were definitely not fighting for the continuation of slavery

My understanding is that is how most northern states have pretty much always taught it, but if the war was over slavery then why were the last states to free the slaves the states that stayed in the union, some of them didn't free their slaves until more than 6 months after the end of the war