(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) Recovered audio of a Confederate soldier who was born in 1846 reveals a truth that mainstream historians don’t want you to know: that for ordinary men and women in the American South, the Civil War had very little to do with the preservation of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
According to Julius Franklin Howell (1846-1848), young men like himself who joined the Confederate army had no interest in perpetuating the institution of slavery, but fought instead against a Northern-dominated federal government that had every interest in “curtailing” states’ rights.
“My friends, as a boy of 16 1/2 years old, I didn’t think about the abolition of slavery,” Howell says. “My mind wasn’t developed enough to take in what the politicians had in mind.”
“The South did not fight for the preservation or extension of slavery,” he continued, as he thanked God that he did not have to “bring up my boys and girls under a system of slavery.”
Howell’s comments confirm the view of the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote, who made a similar argument on Ken Burn’s famous documentary on the war.
“Early in the war a Union squad closed in on a single ragged Confederate, and he obviously didn’t own any slaves and he couldn’t have much interest in the Constitution or anything else,” Foote related. “They said, ‘What are you fightin’ for anyhow?’ and he said, ‘I’m fighting because you’re down here.'”
One cannot expect such evidence to have any effect on the revisionist work of journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates or the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.
The deep-state-media complex, of course, has no interest in giving up its penchant for constantly hyping a supposed “neo-confederate” threat to the constitutional order even after the destruction of numerous Confederate monuments during the George Floyd riots in 2020.
