The reason the white lads and men of Henry County were eager to fight in the war of the middle 19th century was because the majority of Southern Patriots were fighting the "Second American Revolution” for the independence of Dixie, to be able to form their own loosely formed union, where the states were indeed sovereign with "states rights" never to be usurped by the larger Confederacy. These yeoman farmers, most without a slave on their place, took up arms to defend themselves, their families and their homes from an invading army from the north, i.e., the United States of America. As Yankee captors would question young Rebel soldiers as to why they were fighting, most simply said, “Because you are down here!”

However, since "to the victor belongs the spoils," American History books, the history as told by the victorious North and United States, have been written to place slavery as the number one cause of the conflict which is a myth and a ploy. To save the union was the Commander-In-Chief’s plans, not slavery, and the Southerner under the Stars and Bars was repulsing an invading army from the north. But the victor’s account of the war, always pointed to the head of the white Southerner, has created a white race that blames the losses of the war on the African American and the Southern African American has been told that the white man was no more than a demon and the devil in disguise. Slavery was most assuredly a part, a portion of and an issue of the conflict, but the independence of the Southern States "to make those decisions as sovereign states on slavery" was the cause Southerners fought back, not to necessarily fight and die to keep the “peculiar institution” itself. Though rarely taught, there were regiments of Confederate African American soldiers while others worked in the mills of the South and kept farms adrift while the white man was away. The Yankee President Lincoln was never the President of Alabama, only Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, as taught to me from a child by a grandfather reared by a Confederate Veteran and a survivor of the harsh period of Radical Republican Reconstruction that followed the disastrous war.

Even President Abraham Lincoln had no interest in the freedom of the slave stating early on that if he could preserve the Union that he did not care if a single slave was freed. It was only when the war was being lost by the Union, with anti-war riots breaking out in Northern cities, with the Copperheads against the war for “the preservation of the union” being of much less value than the loss of life the United States was being dealt by the Southern marksmen. There too was a strong move to end the war in the North by many who said let the Southern States go in peace and bring home our boys. All these were pressing issues plaguing President Abe Lincoln and his stand for the preservation of the Union at all costs.

As the bright politician that he was, Lincoln needed something emotional, something more honorable that just "saving the Union" to keep his blue bellies in the battlefields. So, like a hawk, the shrewd country politician Lincoln waited for a turn in the tide of defeat and a win on the battlefield by the Union troops. His wish was granted with the bloodiest day in American History at the horrid Battle of Antietam, a military draw, yet it repulsed Confederate General Robert E. Lee's march into Maryland to pull that state over into the Confederate States instead of a “border state.”
At greater stake was the fact that the European powers of England and France were ready to enter the fray on the side of the Confederacy since their cotton mills were so dependant of the cotton in the fields of Dixie. To even consider issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had to have the "win" that was his at Antietam. However, contrary too popular belief spread by the victors of the war, Lincoln freed not one slave, not one single solitary slave when on January 1, 1863 his Emancipation Proclamation was issued! The Emancipation Proclamation freed ONLY slaves in the "states in rebellion" who had in Southern opinion seceded, were legitimate states of the Confederacy, and were a recognized nation as was the United States, the Confederate States of America stood with support on the ebb and flow to them from England and France until the pivotal Antietam battle. England and France accepted the Confederate Secretary of State and recognized the legitimacy of the Confederacy and was on the threshold of entering the war with the South until that fated fall of 1862.

All slaves in the United States of America were still slaves under Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The slaves in the North and in Washington, D.C. were still slaves and chattel property. It was after Mr. Lincoln was sadly killed, that a constitutional amendment freeing the slaves had to be ratified by each Southern state before being readmitted into their former national government of the USA that any slave was legally set free. When the slaves entered the Union Army encampments during the war, they were considered "contraband of war". I say Mr. Lincoln's death was "sad" for the killing of any man is undeniably evil and sad. And in is death, the South lost its greatest friend who wanted to forgive and forget after the war and rebuild the South. With the war over, the two years following Lincoln's death under President Andrew Johnson was a time of unity building between the races of the South and the new positions they were now faced with. One example of this is in the Baptist Churches of Henry County who did not excommunicate its former slaves to go and build their own church until after 1867 when the Radical Republican’s of the North took control of Congress with these things in mind: 1) Treat the South as a "conquered providence" and rule it with an iron hand. Federal troops walked the streets of Abbeville, Eufaula, Columbia, and Fort Gaines. 2) To eliminate from power any white man over 21 who had been a part of the Confederacy in any way. That removed some of the state’s brightest minds and turned the government on all levels over to the Republican freedmen (former slaves) who were unable to read or write, and to the “carpetbaggers” who swept through the South voting as Republicans to hammer the old Democratic Party and enlist the unwanting black man into political life. 3) There was never a plan to "reconstruct" Dixie that had hosted the war, had its telegraph lines destroyed, its currency voided and worthless, its fledgling railroads in shambles cut apart and left in "Sherman hairpins” where a rail was heated and wrapped around a telegraph pole or tree. The farms were over grown, the cities burned, universities like the University of Alabama burned by Yankee raiders in April of 1865 when it was a needless act, taxes were set so high that the old plantations of the South had to be dismantled to pay the taxes of the carpetbagger from the North and the “scalawag” of the South who took advantage of a devastated nation for personal gain.

The late President Lincoln had wanted to forgive and forget, replace the states in the Union, and go about rebuilding the South with the slaves now as manual laborers, getting paid for their work to be able to rise up to owning their property and education for the many uneducated freedmen. Instead, after Andrew Johnson filled Lincoln's term in office, the Radical Republicans in the Congress of the North created 10+years of "further destruction” of the South instead of any “reconstruction.” The South is the only "country" that the U.S. has not rebuilt after a war! With the Jan. 1863 Emancipation Proclamation the emotional fervor of "freeing an enslaved people" calmed the naysayers in the North and caused the Yankee soldier to fight for an emotional reason instead of Lincoln's pure and simple aim of "preserving the 50+ year old Union.”

We have all been taught through secondary school and in some colleges the United State’s version of the conflict that places the blame on the evil, dastardly slave holding South. Now through revisionist historians being able to go back, study the period and see facts from a Southern exposure, do we find many things that the victor has indoctrinated the nation with over the past 130+ years making the South the scapegoat of the nation--period! Losers we are they say. If this "spoiled history" had not been taught, there would be far less racial prejudice and the great chasm that it dropped between the Southern people who were both Southern, one black one white would not have ever existed for us to need a Civil Rights movement, desegregation, and reversal of Jim Crow laws, for they would have never existed.

The Radical Reconstruction after the death of Lincoln caused the chasm to enlarge, pushing the races further apart leading to Jim Crow laws when the old Confederates finally came back into power in 1874 across the South and became the Solid Democratic South for so long. In the 1874 election, Republican voting boxes were not counted or burned and others thrown in the river. At Eufaula, Democrats from Georgia came across the river and voted in Alabama and vice versa. By any means necessary, the pre-war Democrats were to reclaim their power and put a stop to the oppressive Radical Republican Reconstruction in Dixie! Very simply mad as hell for the past 15 to 20 years, hosting a war that left the South not defeated, but totally, utterly, destitute and destroyed in every facet of life, the Democrats saw no recourse but to use all means available to regain stability. It was not until 1892 that there were as many mules, horses and oxen in Dixie as there was in 1860. What a blow that plays into the formula for a slow return of the South since it was still a major agricultural region until the most modern times!! No farm animals, no plowing of the fields, thus no harvest or money! In other words, the victor, the superlative United States of America, shot itself in the foot for future generations by teaching the over importance of the myth that the war was for the freedom of the slave from the get-go. It was an issue. And the Confederate States of America fought for the independence and freedom to make the decision on that issue from 1861-1865. Slavery was becoming an item too costly anyway at the time of the war. It is possible that it would have been replaced without blood shed as planters turned to wages and freedom of the slaves--the two being more endearing to one another then, and their descendants today. It 'tis one of the great "IF's" in our great nation’s history. Southerners tend to solve their problems well between each other, regardless of race, if not acted upon by an outside force that agitates each side against the other. That sounds like the words of a rabid racist of the days of segregation, doesn't it? But it is the truth. If left to correct our problems, all Southerners, regardless of color, are just that, Southerners and have a feeling of indemnity towards one another as Southerners except when fringe elements that are non-Southern in thought, enter the picture causing either side to be swayed by the propaganda of these agitators, be they white, black, green or purple with red dots. As a white man in the South, I often feel very uneasy when outside influences come into my domain, a domain shared by my African American Southerners and myself.

In conclusion, the War Between the States, the War of Yankee Aggression, the War of Southern Independence, the War of Secession, was not, is not, nor never will be able to be classified as a "civil war." For in those tragic years of 1861-1865 that we oft times romanticize, there was a great blood letting on the North American continent when all the "TRUE" facts, less the propaganda, are considered to prove that two great and powerful nations, the United States (the oppressor) and the Confederate States (the states wanting to have the sacred God given right of self-determination) took to the morbid battlefield of the mid-19th Century to settle differences that could no longer be settled through diplomacy. It was truly not a "civil war" as the victor's of the war would have us to believe, but two separate nations of people that are yet divided today in many ways when the "rubber hits the road", the Southerner will still fight for his or her heritage while the non-Southerner views the war in far less emotion ties. For it was only the Southland that was literally destroyed, not the north. The greatest loss of life by the United States on its borders was not in the horrific bombings we all witnessed on 9-11. It was in the War For Southern Independence. Before the attack on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, save for Gettysburg in 1863, the South was the only region within the present boundaries of the United States to be hit with such destruction, displacement of families, killing off of a generation and having that followed up by ten years of further destruction during the terrible days of Southern Reconstruction from 1867-1874. The greatest loss? That would have to be the relationships of the people of the South, hearing the victor defame the white race, and dehumanizes the African American race through avoidance of African American history in our textbooks period. If you want to be a proud Southerner, visit Tuskegee University and the George Washington Carver Museum and "Oak Hills", the grand home of Professor Booker T. Washington. Washington was taken ill while in the North and when the question was posed to him as to whether he should go home are stay put for his life was near its end, Booker T. Washington replied that he was born in the South, that he was a Southerner, and that he wanted to die in the South.

Too much information? Well, I’m like a top on a hard surface; I spin fast and then fall over. <smile> May God Bless America and May God Bless Dixie. For in all of the conflicts that we as a nation have been involved in since the mid 19th century, it has been the fighting men of the South that have been the first to go, the determined to defeat the foe, and to protect the life we now have in America. Even now in the operations against terrorism, more reserve units have been called up from the State of Alabama than any other state in the Union. Even in 1898, during the Spanish-American 110 day war, former Confederate General and Alabamian Fighting Joe Wheeler, when giving the charge to fight the Spanish, he cried, “Let’s go boys, give the Yankees hell!” Some habits just seem to die hard.

Let’s Roll!
Steve Elliott
Descendant of:
Confederate Captain Dennis H. Zorn
Confederate Corporal Davis Andrew Jackson Elliott
Confederate Private John P. Glover
Confederate Private Henry Day
Confederate Private John F. Dukes
Confederate Private William May
Confederate Private James Whatley
And ancestors of the families of Hickman, Adams, Starling, Gamble, Brown, Raley, Condry, Jones, Windsor, Coleman, and others.