The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Two: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

Posted on October 31, 2022November 1, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Two

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Two of Four

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by historian Michael R Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part One)

THAT IS WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN said over and over and over that the war was being fought for the preservation of the Union, not to end slavery.

Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley August 22, 1862, sixteen months into the war, and again made that clear. The italics are Lincoln's:

. . . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do thatWhat I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help the Union.¹

To Southerners, the Union had become a violent, lawless threat to their safety. Northerners financed John Brown and sent him and his murderers into the peaceful communities of the South to rape, destroy and kill then hailed him as a hero when brought to justice.

The Republican Party printed Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document, which called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. Republicans printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast.

George Washington warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but Wendell Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party

is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national it is sectional. The Republican Party is a party of the North pledged against the South.²

Northerners began realizing how critical the Union was to their well being. Editorials like "The Value of the Union" began appearing all over the North. New York City threatened to secede from New York State over its enormous trade with the South.

Horace Greeley acknowledged the right of secession and self-government in a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession"³ in which he quoted the Declaration of Independence stating "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government."

That was the most widely quoted phrase in the South in the secession debate that took place in the year prior to states seceding.

Greeley went on: "We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood" and

if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.

Greeley says "we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred" and we should "Let Them Go!" but when this sniveling hypocrite realized Southern secession would affect his money, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Northerners were pouring drool like a pack of starving wolves before tearing a lamb to bits to win the election of 1860, control the Federal Government and rule the country with their larger population.⁴

That is exactly the "tyranny of the majority" the Founding Fathers warned about, but as South Carolina stated:

[W]hen vast sectional interests are to be subserved, involving the appropriation of countless millions of money, it has not been the usual experience of mankind, that words on parchments can arrest power.⁵

So many of the politicized "historians" in academia and the idiot news media today proclaim that slavery was the cause of the war but one can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

All Northern documents before and up to two years into the war after hundreds of thousands of men had been killed strongly supported slavery.

Six slave states, or 25% of Union states, fought for the North the entire war.⁶ That, alone, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

If the North was fighting a war to end slavery, they would have first ended it in their own country by passing a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

Instead, they passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed.

Lincoln strongly supported the Corwin Amendment and lobbied the governors to pass it in their states. He said in his first inaugural, "holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." Five Union states ratified the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.⁷

The Northern War Aims Resolution passed in July, 1861, three months into the war stated:

. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . . ⁸ (Bold emphasis added)

Even the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued September 22, 1862, just weeks before the actual Emancipation Proclamation, states in the first paragraph:

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be, suspended or disturbed. (Bold emphasis added)⁹

There are legion statements by Abraham Lincoln out there supporting slavery such as this one in his first inaugural made before he stated his support for the Corwin Amendment:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

The proof is overwhelming and conclusive that the North did not go to war to free the slaves.

The North went to war because its economy was dependent on Southern cotton and without it they were headed for economic annihilation.

In 1860, the South was "producing 66 percent of the world's cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half [over 60% alone] of all U.S. exports."¹⁰

The American cotton industry before the war was awesome to behold. The New York Tribune agriculture editor, Solon Robinson, in 1848, wrote about "'acres of cotton bales'" on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre.¹¹

King Cotton was "the backbone of the American economy" and "the North ruled the kingdom."¹² Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.¹³

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "'Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'"¹⁴

Without the South, the North was in serious economic trouble. Southerners had made protective tariffs unconstitutional. They had a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States' Rights nation.

At the same time, economically ignorant Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 37 to 50% higher. It threatened to reroute the Northern shipping industry into the South overnight because nobody was going to ship into the North and pay a 47 to 60% tariff when they could ship into the South and pay 10%.

The Morrill Tariff meant that Northern ship captains would have a hard time getting cargoes in the North but in the South they would be guaranteed all the cargoes they could handle of cotton and other valuable Southern commodities to transport around the world.

Those same ship captains would then be able to bring cargoes back from around the world and into warm water Southern ports where they would be put on boats in the Mississippi, and on railroads, and shipped to all parts of the Union.

Northerners could have passed a tariff competitive with the South but they didn't.

Because of Northern greed and economic stupidity, the Morrill Tariff threatened to give Southerners a gift of much of the commerce of the entire country.

The Northern manufacturing industry faced obliteration too because over half of its market was its captive market in the South. Independent Southerners would not be buying overpriced goods from people who sent murderers into their country to kill them.

Southerners had for decades wanted free trade with Europe so they could get out from under extortionate Northern prices for inferior goods jacked up by Yankee tariffs and monopolies.

South Carolina almost seceded thirty-three years earlier over the Tariff of Abominations, and should have.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Three

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Three of Four

NOTES:

¹ Letter, A. Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) V:388.

² Wendell Phillips quotation in Albert Taylor Bledsoe Is Davis A Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to The War of 1861? (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866); reprint, (North Charleston, SC: Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing, 1995), 250. Lincoln, whom over 60% of the country voted against, "was the first and only sectional president in American history." See Donald W. Livingston, "The Secession Tradition in America" in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27.

³ "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

⁴ Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that if any one state got control of the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power and that is exactly what happened except it wasn't one state but all the close-knit Northern states with their commercial-industrial interests.

⁵ "Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States," adopted 24 December 1860 by the South Carolina Secession Convention, Charleston, S.C., in John Amasa May and Joan Reynolds Faunt, South Carolina Secedes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1960), 82-92.

⁶ The Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation exempted all six Union slave states as well as Confederate territory already under Union control.

⁷ Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment are "Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois." See Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 127.

⁸ The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John. J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861 and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed April 19, 2022.

⁹ The next paragraph of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expressed another of Lincoln's beliefs, that black people should be shipped back to Africa or into a place they could survive: ". . . the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued." See "Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22,1862" at https://www.archives.gov/

exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/transcript_

preliminary_emancipation.html, accessed 4-12-22.

¹⁰ Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Comprehensive Summary, Part One: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One of Four

Posted on October 24, 2022October 24, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

Prologue

Setting the Stage

To understand the past you have to look at the past the way the people who lived in the past looked at it. It was the present to them just as today is our unfortunate present. So-called historians and journalists judging the past by the goofy standards of today falsify history and feed us political propaganda. They aren't seeking truth. Read the words of the people of the past, study the conditions of their lives and make up your own mind.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.,
Charleston Athenaeum Press

Lieutenant T. J. Cureton of Company B, the Waxhaw Jackson Guards, fought all three days at the Battle of Gettysburg in the famous Twenty-sixth North Carolina Regiment. They were nearly wiped out the first day and survivors were in Pickett's Charge two days later on July 3, 1863.

Cureton describes the charge that third day in a letter after the war stating that Union artillery opened on them "a half mile of the works" but Confederate lines "crossed the lane in splendid order when about two hundred yards from their works the musketry opened on us."¹

By the time those North Carolina boys got to within forty yards through booming cannons, smoke and murderous fire with dead and mangled bodies all around "our regiment had been reduced to a skirmish line" but still kept "closing to the colours."²

Through the confusion he heard a cry from Davis's Mississippi Brigade to the left and turned to see it wiped off the face of the earth by artillery fire like "chaff before a 'whirl wind'"³

He sums it up:

[T]he gallant old 26th Regiment had sixty-seven muskets and three officers present on the night July 3 1863 of the eight hundred and fifty carried in the fight July 1st 1863.⁴

Death 'reigned with universal sway' in the War Between the States.⁵

In the book This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War, historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.⁶

Dead soldiers in the War Between the States

were equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.⁷

Faust writes that 620,000 died. Those are the long-accepted figures of Union officer William F. Fox who, in the 1890s, counted losses regiment by regiment.⁸

Fox knew his numbers were low because of incomplete records from the devastated South and other problems with undercounting.

Fox's numbers were updated in 2011 by historian J. David Hacker who analyzed census records for three decades, the decades before, during and after the war, using techniques such as comparing female survival rates with male, to come up with a range of 650,000 to 850,000 deaths. The midpoint, 750,000, has become widely accepted. James McPherson calls that number "plausible."⁹

That number is more horrifying when one considers that there were only 31.4 million people in the country when the war started.¹⁰

Compare the 750,000 dead of the War Between the States with the 419,400 dead of World War II out of a national population of 132,164,569.

Consider the carnage. Faust quotes historian James McPherson:

[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.¹¹

Historian Phil Leigh writes:

At least five percent of the white population of the eleven Confederate states, from which the government drew her soldiers, were killed during the Civil War. If America were to go to war presently and suffer the same death ratio [as the South], the number of killed would total seventeen million. That is more than forty times the number of American deaths during World War II.¹²

Leigh is making the point that:

Given the magnitude of such losses, nobody with common sense could believe that the prime motive to erect and display memorials to seventeen million dead . . . would be anything other than to honor their memory.¹³

The War Between the States was not only bloody, it changed our government forever. It is commonly referred to as the central event in American history.

We went from the republic of the Founding Fathers in which states were supreme and sovereign,¹⁴ to a consolidated national government that was supreme over the states.

Southerners had wanted their states supreme and sovereign forever: States' Rights. The Preamble to the Confederate Constitution makes that clear:

We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America. (Bold emphasis added)

But Northerners wanted the federal government supreme. They were the "Federals" in the war.

They wanted to control the country's economy, banking, money, commerce, taxes, tariffs and wealth by controlling the federal government.

Federal legislation giving Northerners monopolies, bounties and subsidies for their businesses that were always paid out of the national treasury had made them rich and powerful. Georgia's declaration of causes for its secession had accurately stated:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.¹⁵

Yet, Southerners were producing the wealth of the country with their agriculture. Southern agricultural commodities "accounted for close to 82% of [the] U.S. export business"¹⁶ in a global plantation economy. Cotton alone was over 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.

And Southerners were paying 83% of the country's taxes while 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.¹⁷

To show what was truly at stake in the country just before the war, contrast these Northern and Southern statements within three weeks of each other starting with Georgia Senator Robert Toombs who gives us a perfect analogy - the North as a suction pump sucking money out of the South - via

bounties and protection to every interest and every pursuit in the North, to the extent of at least fifty millions per annum, besides the expenditure of at least sixty millions out of every seventy of the public expenditure among them, thus making the treasury a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands.¹⁸

Here is The Daily Chicago Times in abject panic December 10, 1860, a week before South Carolina's secession convention was to convene:

In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not complete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment. (Bold emphasis added)¹⁹

The title of the editorial above is "The Value of the Union," which shows why the Union was the lifeblood of the North. It had given them all their wealth and power. Without it their economy was dead. (to be continued - scroll down for NOTES)

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Two

Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

NOTES:

¹ Letter from T. J. Cureton to Colonel J. R. Lane, 22 June 1890, Lane Papers, in Archie K. Davis, Boy Colonel of the Confederacy, The Life and Times of Henry King Burgwyn, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), Appendix, 351.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid. The Twenty-sixth North Carolina Regiment covered itself in glory at Gettysburg. William F. Fox, in Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, states that it suffered "the severest regimental loss during the war."

⁵ Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xiii. The statement was made by a Confederate soldier.

⁶ Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xi.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (Albany, N.Y.: Joseph McDonough, 1898).

⁹ Rachel Coker, "Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead," published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News - Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University, http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html, accessed July 7, 2014. See also Bob Zeller, "How Many Died in the American Civil War?", January 6, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths, accessed 3-8-22; and Jennie Cohen, "Civil War Deadlier Than Previously Thought?", https://www.history.com/news/civil-war-deadlier-than-previously-thought, accessed 3-8-22.

¹⁰ The United States Census Bureau on their website lists 31,443,321 as the population of the United States in 1860 according to the "Eighth Census under the Secretary of the Interior." https://www.census.gov/history

/www/through_the_deades/fast_facts/1860_fast_facts.html, accessed 3-7-22.

¹¹ Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii. She cites James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 3, 177, n. 56.

¹² Phil Leigh, "Ketanji Jackson and the Confederate Flag," Civil War Chat,

Ketanji Jackson and the Confederate Flag

accessed 3-22-22.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ The Treaty of Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War stated in Article 1: "His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." (Emphasis used by Christopher Memminger in the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union," adopted December 24, 1860 in S.C.'s secession convention, from where this quotation was taken.).

¹⁵ Report on the Causes of the Secession of Georgia adopted by the Georgia Secession Convention, Tuesday, 29 January 1861, in the Journal of the Georgia Convention, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900); reprint, Historical Times Inc., 1985, Series IV, Volume 1.

¹⁶ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 114.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Robert Toombs, "Secessionist Speech, Tuesday Evening, November 13" delivered to the Georgia legislature in Milledgeville November 13, 1860, in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson Secession Debated, Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38.

¹⁹ Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, Vol II (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964), 573-574.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, now available in ebook, softcover and hardback

Posted on October 18, 2022October 18, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 Comments

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : In the past few weeks, we have expanded our distribution network to include, not only Amazon, but the Ingram Book Company, the largest wholesale book distributor in the world. We'll be in select bookstores, libraries, universities (they NEED it!) and retail outlets - bricks and mortar, and online - worldwide. We are extremely proud to announce that historian Michael R. Bradley's outstanding new book, The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, is our first title on both Ingram and Amazon and is now also available here on our website as an ebook, softcover and hardback.

When Dr. Bradley first approached me with the idea for The Last Words, I immediately knew it would be an important book in this day and age of nauseating politicized historians and journalists whose idea of historical truth comes from the New York Times and Communist Manifesto.

Dr. Bradley had dug out the seventeen extant farewell addresses of commanders on both sides - eight Confederate and nine Union - so that readers can see and hear in their own minds the actual words of the men who fought the war. They knew exactly what they were fighting for and they said so.

Over the next few weeks, I will publish on the blog the Prologue, Epilogue and Appendices to The Last Words and many of the farewell addresses with Dr. Bradley's analysis.]

**From the Introduction to The Last Words by the author:**

Never mind that anyone touring a battlefield cannot find a single monument to Union soldiers which boasts that the men fought to end slavery. They all honor the bravery of those who fought and died, and speak of preserving the Union. Perhaps this emphasis on preserving the Union is why historians almost always call the United States forces the “Union Army” despite the fact that this name displaces slavery as the central factor supposedly causing the war.

From the Prologue by Gene Kizer, Jr. :

Dr. Michael R. Bradley has given us the words of some of the most important participants in the War Between the States at a critical point in American history, when the republic of the Founding Fathers died and the federal government became supreme over the states.

Lee had surrendered and the war was nearly over but units were still on battlefields and had not yet broken up. Not all commanders addressed their men. Many just broke up and started home as best they could.

The seventeen extant farewell addresses Bradley has dug out are an excellent representative for all the other soldiers in the war. They tell us exactly what men on both sides were feeling after all that death and destruction, and why they had fought.

The addresses also talk about the future in our reunited country.

As one might imagine there was jubilation on the Northern side at their victory, and deep disappointment on the Southern but not despair. There was a manly, dignified acceptance of the loss, and pride in their victories that were more impressive because Southerners were outnumbered four to one by a well-armed, well-fed, well-clothed invader whose army was 25% foreign born, while they, themselves, were often hungry and ragged.

Southerners were ecstatic to fight for their sacred cause of independence and die for it, and hundreds of thousands had.

Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina, states well the feeling in the hearts of the Southerners. He wrote this in his book, The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

All that I vouch for is the feeling; . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

One of the best orations was given by perhaps the greatest soldier of the War Between the States on either side, Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is often attacked by academia's jealous, politicized historians, but his address, like his deeds and life, is towering and speaks for itself.

One of the sweetest and saddest was from Confederate Major General Robert F. Hoke who writes that the Southern "star has set in blood, but yet in glory."

The address by the white officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Tyler Trowbridge of the United States Colored Troops, from Morris Island in Charleston where they were stationed, is fascinating. Bradley gives us much detail about the USCT. Black units were always commanded by white officers because blacks were not permitted to rise higher than sergeant. Often black troops and officers were looked down on by other Union soldiers. Nathan Bedford Forrest is often accused of atrocities at Fort Pillow but the USCT has a record of the same type atrocities during the attack on Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. Bradley points out that many of the Union's black troops were not volunteers but were rounded up and coerced, or a "loyal" (Union) slaveholder would enlist his slave and receive the enlistment bonus. Trowbridge, himself, was arrested and court-martialed for murder in Newberry, South Carolina but found "not guilty" by a friendly court, which brought a harsh rebuke from Major General Charles Devens who had brought the charges against him. Despite often poor officers, Bradley writes that the USCT "generally" fought well as noted by a Confederate officer paying his enemy a compliment at the Battle of Nashville.

Michael Bradley is a distinguished historian with an impressive educational background including an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. See "About the Author" for a complete biography.

He is from the Tennessee-Alabama state line region near Fayetteville, Tennessee and his love of home and its history are obvious and a pleasure to read. One always writes best on what one loves most and is most fascinated by.

Many of his books are about the War Between the States in Tennessee, or Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men, but he has written on topics ranging from the Revolutionary War to death in the Great Smoky Mountains.

He taught United States History at Motlow College near Tullahoma, Tennessee for thirty-six years.

In 1994 he was awarded the Jefferson Davis Medal in Southern History, and in 2006 he was elected commander of the Tennessee Division, SCV. He was also appointed to Tennessee's Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission.

Michael Bradley has given us biographical information on the seventeen commanders giving the farewell addresses, and exciting narrative history researched in minute detail on each unit and their battles. If you love history, it does not get better than this.

You will thoroughly enjoy this book and learn a great deal about why men on both sides fought in the War Between the States and what they planned to do afterward.

I am very proud to be Michael Bradley's publisher and friend.

Gene Kizer, Jr.
May 10, 2022

Please order The Last Words on www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com and take advantage of SPECIALS that include The Last Words with Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Another Special includes The Last Words, and Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., AND the two-DVD set on black Confederates, Mixed Up with All the Rebel Horde, Why Black Southerners Fought for the South in the War Between the States, featuring national authority on black Confederate soldiers, esteemed Professor Edward C. Smith.