[color="White"].
Civil War historian [color="Navy"]Shelby Foote weighs-in from his grave on the Confederate Flag controversy with another insight into the complex and multi-dimensional motivations behind the War Between the States... Feel free to distribute this freely to your friends...

"[color="Navy"]Robert Toombs or somebody once gave the best definition of that war I ever heard, "It was a war of one form of society against another form of society, and because one of those forms of society included chattel slavery and the other side didn't, except to a limited extent, it's always been identified as a war over slavery. Believe me, no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves, they were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds.""

"Southerners thought they were fighting a second American revolution; Northerners thought they were fighting to hold the Union together, and that held true throughout the whole war, except for some people who were absolute partisans on both sides: fire eaters in South Carolina and abolitionists in Massachusetts. But most of the people were fighting because they were fighting for... Southerners once said I'm fighting because you are down here; if you want to invade my home you've got me to fight, others say you are trying to tear the fabric of the Union, therefore you should be put down and not allowed to do what you claim what you want to do."

"It's a very complex subject and I'm sorry to see it degenerate into a such things as identifying that flag as a symbol of racism, it is not. It was never intended as such. [The] Confederacy respected law above all things." ~ [color="navy"]Shelby Foote

[ame=

Foote on the Confederate Flag - YouTube[/ame]

[color="navy"]Shelby Dade Foote, Jr.
(17 Nov 1916 – 27 Jun 2005)

[color="White"].
.