Free Republic

It was in this month, one hundred and fifty-seven years ago, that the Civil War ended. I have seen afficionados of both sides lament what happened, while they might argue over who was right, and what was lost. I am not an aficionado of the Lost Cause Theory. While some defenders of Dixie claim the issue was states’ rights, the chief underlying cause of the war was slavery. In his "Cornerstone Speech" of March 21, 1861, Confederate VP Alexander H. Stephens' stated bluntly that slavery was the very foundation of Southern society. Four states: Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina,...

WEST POINT -- The coffee-colored waters of the Chattahoochee River are a bone-numbing 52 degrees. The brisk wind adds a bitter edge to a frosty November morning.At the water's edge, a dozen divers, swaddled in layers of neoprene, with snorkels, regulators and clipboards dangling from their wet suits, make final checks of their gear. They are eager to enter the river, even though one quips, "It's so cold velcro won't stick."The divers are the first of what state officials hope will become a legion of sport divers interested in surveying and preserving the forgotten history that lies beneath Georgia's rivers,...

  A Civil War Book Collection for 2002 by Donald W. Miller, Jr.As a boy and teenager I came to know a woman who was born in 1866, one year after the war ended. She was Mary Lyde Hicks Williams, my great-grandmother. She lived in North Carolina in an antebellum plantation home that General Alfred Howe Terry of General Sherman’s Army used as his headquarters during Sherman’s march through North Carolina. Her father fought for the Confederacy at Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, and led the 20th North Carolina Regiment in the Battle at Gettysburg. He was captured on the...