Preserving Confederate Heritage: Honoring Traditions, History, and Values
presented by US Patriot Flags
“Everyone 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. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles. ”
A lot of folks tell us what the Civil War was all about. Professors and reporters and “very important” people tell us. And with what conviction they tell us! But I rarely hear from the scholars about why the man in uniform was fighting. Seems the soldier is simply forgotten.…
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State flags across the United States carry rich histories and powerful symbolism, often sparking passionate debates about their meaning and design. Minnesota’s flag, in particular, has been at the center of a growing discussion. The debate between the old and proposed designs reveals much about how Americans view tradition, identity,…
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In March of 1865, a Jewish Confederate Captain Samuel Yates Levy wrote his father from a Union prisoner of war camp, "I long to breathe the free air of Dixie." Many Jewish Southerners rallied to their states and sacrificed their lives in battle. It was probably the largest ethnic group…
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Cotton was the reason for the war.
LOL. So “cotton” was the “principle” for which the South fought? Guess it could have been worse. You could have said slavery. Still the reason(s) for the war and what the South fought for are two different things and that’s R E Lee’s point.
Hopefully no one thinks cotton was what the fight was about. In truth, there were folks behind the scenes agitating for the conflict because they had things to gain from both the fight and the hoped-for break up of a nation that was a great influence around the world for liberties and freedom, virtues those folks were very much against. Regarding Lee, he wrote that he did “…not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution…” but he did choose to stand with his state of Virginia. We cannot make some blanket statement as to why “the South” did what it did. We can, though, isolate why individuals did what they did. I wrote an article about the flag Alabama was flying at Secession, and one key source of my research was a document written by an Alabama delegate at the Secession Convention. He voted against seceding from the Union, but once it was a fact, he supported his state and its choice to join the Confederacy. 40% of the delegates, as I recall, were against secession, a ratio that was pretty common in the Southern states, some of them rather closer to 50-50. Lots of people in the South preferred to stay in the Union and work out differences in a less dramatic fashion.
The South fought to protect their state rights and slavery.
States rights(Nullification Crisis of 1832) and slavery.