The 6th Alabama Infantry, with one company called the “Columbia Blues”, was one of the first regiments to leave Henry County for Virginia during the Second American Revolution (1861-1865). Under the leadership of Captain Thomas Tipton Smith, this Company of Alabama Infantry left the Egypt, Alabama post office, on the Chattahoochee River Plantation a few miles north east of Haleburg on the Chattahoochee River by General Bartlett Smith originally from Sumner County, Tennessee. Capt. T. T. Smith was the late General’s nephew. This conflict, called by the Yankees, as the “civil war” was indeed the Second American Revolution, when the states of Dixie fought for their independence from an oppressive United States Government in the mid 19th Century. Not only that, but these Southern Patriots were defending themselves, hearth and home from an invading army from the North, repelling the resupplying of Confederate Forts by Union ships, and a horrid, choking blockade put in place along the long coastline of the Confederacy. Slavery entered the war in 1863. The Confederacy’s President Jefferson Davis had sent a communiqué to the United States President Lincoln stating that any of these actions would be considered by the Confederacy as “acts of war.” Mr. Lincoln did them all post haste thus the aggressor in the war.

The natural cavalrymen and marksmen/soldiers of Dixie through 1862 were hammering Mr. Lincoln’s army. Lincoln was fighting much disapproval of so many dead soldiers in his war "to preserve the Union" with Northerners saying “let the South go in peace!” Lincoln was fighting groups like the Copperheads who were preaching to let the South go in peace, stop the war, and have dual nations in North America. And, during this time of loss by the Union, the largest draft riot in American history occurred in New York City as young men refused to fight this war to preserve the union. It was greater than any protest of the Viet Nam War in the sixties of the 20th Century. To reenergize his troops with a "noble cause", Lincoln waited for a Union Victory to launch the Emancipation Proclamation to free the enslaved Africans of America. He settled for a military draw at Antietam, a military draw, yet it repulsed General Robert E. Lee and his plan to claim Maryland as the newest Confederate State. Lincoln freed NO SLAVE. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the "states of rebellion against the United States." As a purist Southern historian, it is asinine for Mr. Lincoln to do this. The so-called "states in rebellion" had legally seceded from the Union and were in the sovereign nation of the Confederate States of America. Thus leaving only the states loyal to the Union where slavery remained in force, even in Washington, D. C., lest we forget, is a Southern city.

In the beginning of the war, Mr. Lincoln stated strongly that he cared not if the war freed one or all the slaves, just so the Union was preserved. He would not allow "colored troops" until manpower was getting short in the Union Army in the last two years of the Revolution. Originally he stated that the Negro had not the mental capacity of the white man for military discipline, the ability to stand fast in battle, and were generally inferior to wear the blue uniform of the Union. In the South, there were colored Regiments fighting for the Confederacy. Alabama had three full regiments of Colored troops. Other states in Dixie had the same. Also, the slaves left the plantation to work in the war industries that had been vacated by the white soldiers. We Southerners can never forget that the Negro protected the farms and plantations of the South, its white women left alone by a soldier in the army or widowed, and they took the helm of the farm to keep producing as much cotton and food stuff as possible to keep the South alive.

Summarily, "to the victor belongs the spoils of war" INCLUDING the recording of the HISTORY of the war. The North has perpetuated a war for freedom of the African slave that has shot the nation in the foot in 2002 with African Americans seeing whites as devil slaveholders with a bullwhip in their hands living like Scarlet O'Hara and Ashley Wilkes in the most profound example of "The Myth of the Old South" in the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. In FACT, only 1% of the Southern population lived like the families of "Tara" and "Twelve Oaks". Over 75% of the population were a strong middle class of yeoman farmers living in double pen "dog trot" log homes, merchants, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, cotton ginners, steamboat industry workers, and other artisans. Of the people of the South who actually owned salves, 88% of them owned 5 or fewer slaves, not the great masses of slaves in the slave quarters portrayed in UNITED STATES history books. Like the African American, women, Native Americans, and other minorities, the true history of the South and her people have either been left out of the U. S. History books, or the history has been eschewed to favor the Union to keep the nationalism of the dominant victorious nation in check. Dixie is the only region of the nation that never loses a war causing Southerners to live a paradoxal life between victory and defeat.

Even the battles of the Second American Revolution have Union and Confederate names: Bull Run (US) is Manassas Junction (CS) and Cold Harbor (US) is Gaines Mill (CS). I learned all of these great things through years of personal reading and research after being taught, Alabama History, Old South History, and New South History under the late Dr. Ray Mathis, an expert on Southern History and Studies, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, and a professor of History at Troy State University--Main Campus in the seventies of the 20th Century. He tragically died quickly of brain cancer circa 1981. As one of his students and protégées, I assisted him in transposing original letters and documents of John Horry Dent, a planter of Barbour County, Alabama. Dr. Mathis published a few books before his death. Had he lived, he would possibly be a renowned revisionist Southern Historian that would cause Shelby Foote to pale in comparison. A short, balding, bespeckled man, he had a bombastic voice and cast a long shadow over all of the scholars who were blessed to sit under the sound of his voice and under his tutelage.

I taught American History from a Southern exposure at Abbeville High, predominately African American in 1984-87. The African students seemed to appreciate hearing the TRUTH of the Second American Revolution more than did the white students who due to the North's agitating and meddling in the South's personal, regional affairs for 135 years has turned several generations of white youngsters into racist--from mild to rabid. When they view their Southern ancestors as fighting to keep the "nigger" a slave and losing, they are bitter toward the black man. If told the TRUTH, that their ancestors fought for freedom of the South to have self-determination on all issues facing the region including slavery that by 1861 had become inefficient and ineffective and not cost effective AT ALL. But Mr. Lincoln threw us into a war that wiped away the wealthiest per capita region of the nation into a poor, struggling region, yet in 2002 the scapegoat of the nation, a region that lost its war where other non-Southerners have the "always won" attitude of the United States with Viet Nam as a suppressed and blocked out memory in the nation's collective conscience. The South did not create "racial problems" but reacted to racially charged agitation by outsiders of the North. When the Radical Republicans under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens led the charge of "Reconstruction" (1867-1877), it was actually "further destruction" of the South, a region that was not just defeated, but a region that was TOTALLY DEVASTATED after the Revolution.

Lost was a generation of young men; lost was the wealth in Alabama as the 7th wealthiest state in the U. S. in 1860 in the top ten and Mississippi being at # 5; lost was the brilliant minds of the South who were on the cutting edge of architecture, engineering, economics, education, and many other areas; destruction of the South's greatest University's burned to the ground as was the University of Alabama in April 1865, just 3 days before Lee surrendered to Grant. As the blue-bellies were burning the university, an elderly professor went to Capt. Croxton and begged him not to burn the "Rotunda", a circular building located where the Lurleen Wallace Library stands on the "Quad" behind Denny Chimes today. The Professor spoke of the need for the very large library and it being of no military value to the Confederacy in April 1865. Croxton struck him in the head and the Rotunda burned to the ground. It was not until 1892 that there were as many horses and mules in the agricultural South as there were in 1860. With both armies living off the land and the South "hosting" this war, lest we forget, farm animals, livestock, etc. was in shortage for decades. In Eufaula in 1865 an egg cost 75 cents in 1865 U.S. currency. That would be about $10.00 an egg today. A pair of boots in 1865--$75.00 that in today's money is $2,000 a pair to a society with worthless Confederate money in their hands further demonstrates the devastation.

Salt was more valuable than gold due to the Union blockade. Groups of older men and young boys would travel to the Gulf Coast and other coasts and distill the salt water to gather a few granules of salt. The beaches were lined with these desperate men and boys from towns deep in the interior of the Southland. You could buy a plantation with a bushel of salt! Telegraph and railroads destroyed, and major cities like Jackson and Vicksburg, Mississippi either bombed or burned out with Atlanta and Richmond burned. The whole region was in disrepair for in four years nothing could be found to patch, rebuild, or repair farm machinery, homes, barns, churches or public buildings. Civic organizations were closed--depleted by the members in battle like the Henry County Lodge that was disbanded when the Masonic Lodge served as a "welfare" organization for widows and orphans in these times. The Brown's Crossroads Lodge # 529 was reconstituted in 1892 with Henry A. Ethridge as worshipful master. Today all Masonic Lodges in Henry County have disbanded and joined the solid old Free Masons at Brown's Crossroads, returning 100 years later as THE Lodge in the county. The Republicans lied to the gullible freedmen (former slaves) promising them "40 acres and a mule."

In Congress all white men who fought for the Confederacy were stripped of their right to vote--disfranchised--and not allowed to hold office. So across the South, newcomer “carpetbaggers” and literate, uneducated, unprepared freedmen, even representing the South in Congress, ran local governments. Question? "Was the white population to be happy, content, and appreciative that suddenly all they had worked to develop prior to the war was now in the hand of Yankees and African freedmen that a year ago were slaves in their fields?" Place yourself in that situation and then consider how the United States through legally disfranchising the white Southerner created a great chasm to be dropped between the white and black person of Dixie! Then, when the pre-war Democrats by any means possible repulsed, voted out, threw out, and ran out the Republicans in 1874-1876 they immediately began to pass the infamous Jim Crow laws placing the African back into segregation, second class citizenship, and disfranchised. Punishment for the blacks? NO! NO! It was to spit in the face of the North and the old Radical Republicans! The South was using the Africans in the region, Southerners all, as a sacrifice to show the North that they did not control Dixie ANYMORE!!!! Sadly the Jim Crow laws, caused by the terrible treatment of the South by the North in the horrid Reconstruction Days, again by "outside agitators" (sounds like George C. Wallace and John Patterson) stirring to the top the tempers of the largely Scottish and Irish descended population of Dixie to pass another racist law like poll tax, segregation that was made ironclad by the United States Supreme Court with Plessey vs. Ferguson in 1896.

In Plessey Vs. Ferguson, a man in Louisiana that was 1/5th African was forced to sit in the back of the train. The Supreme Court of the United States, not of the defeated Confederacy, agreed with the "separate but equal" segregation. So long as the facilities were EQUAL, then the races could be separate. Thus began duel school systems, hospitals, and simple things like water founts and restrooms along with bus seating and restaurant seating. How well I remember eating at "Edd's Place" on the square in Headland, Henry County, Alabama and seeing every time that the kitchen door swung open the long table in the back with Negroes all around a long eating table, laughing and talking, entering the hot dog stand/cafe through a back door with a sign on the sidewalk out front with a "colored" sign with a caricature hand pointing to the back of the cafe. In conclusion, and I can hear the big "WHEW", had the North allowed the South to be sovereign states, have "states rights", slavery would have run its course and the African Southerner would have been slowly but surely integrated into society. The Southern Mind was then and is now--"Leave me alone!" When someone from the outside tries to force something on the South, just like the thousands of mules that once plodded her farm land, Dixie will balk just for the sake of not being run over. This is true in the individual Southerner and in the South as a hold. You can try to overrun a Southerner and he will smile. Try it again and he will yet smile again. Yet, when you least expect it, still smiling...he'll kill you.

Deep in the Heart of Dixie,
Steve Elliott

All Rights Reserved. No portion of this essay may be used in whole are in part except by the written permission of the author, J. Steven Elliott. Copyright being applied for.