First person accounts are the best way to know what was in the minds and hearts of those who fought for the Southern cause. Only a fool would think some modern day “historian” on the History Channel knows better. Here are the words of a Confederate soldier, Randolph McKim:
“Now with these facts before him, the historian will find it impossible to believe that these men drew their swords and did these heroic deeds and bore these incredible hardships for four long years for the sake of the institution of slavery. “Everyone who was conversant with the opinions of the soldiers of the Southern Army, knows that they did not wage that tremendous conflict for slavery. That was a subject very little in their thoughts or on their lips. Not one in twenty of those grim veterans, who were so terrible on the battlefield, had any financial interest in slavery.
“No, they were fighting for liberty, for the right of self-government. They believed the Federal authorities were assailing that right. It was the sacred heritage of Anglo-Saxon freedom, of local self-government, won at Runnymede, which they believed in peril when they flew to arms as one man, from the
Potomac to the Rio Grande.
“They may have been right, or they may have been wrong, but that was the issue they made. On that they stood. For that they died.” Travis [><]
