In this unique series, the Civil War comes vividly to life, as those who were there give eye-witness accounts from both sides of the bloody conflict. A sugar farmer and gentleman politician with no military training before the war, General Richard Taylor--son of President Zachary Taylor--plays a major role in the Red River campaign. Out of print since 1879.
It can also be found for free in electronic format on many websites, including google books.
In an essay I wrote called the Constitution and the Confederacy, I state less that one in a hundred Southerners could have been motivated by slavery. Winston Churchill in volume three of his History of the English Speaking People, begins discussion of the subject by saying, ”An aristocracy of planters living in rural magnificence and almost feudal state, and multitude of smallholders, grew cotton for the world by slave labour. Of the six million white inhabitants of the so-called ‘southern states’ less than three hundred and fifty thousand owned slaves, and only forty thousand controlled plantations requiring a working unit of more than twenty field hands. But the three or four thousand principal slave-owners generally ruled the politics of the South as effectively as the medieval baronage had ruled England.”