"We Southron are people to whom the past is forever speaking."
We listen because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices. Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood went through fire and storm to break a path to the future and form a true government, by the people, and for the people.
We are part of the future they died for; they are part of the past that brought the future. What they did--the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died--make up a part of our own experience. We can not cut ourselves off from it. It is as real to us as something that happened last week. It is a basic part of our "Southern Heritage" as Americans" (Author unknown)
Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants." ~
Lee Kennett, Marching through Georgia: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, p. 286
