The South tried to fight mainly a defensive war, not because that's all they could fight, but because all they wanted was to be left alone. But Sherman in his kindness burned down half the South on his little Southern jaunt. Interesting isn't it that when the South marched all through Pennsylvania, there is not recorded one such act on the level of Sherman.
Just goes to show who the REAL gentlemen were in that war. And as for me, I fly the flag of the Confederacy.
The gentlemen of the south were tutored on Bible stories and the chivalry of Sir Walter Scott. And even if they were illiterate backwoodsmen, they knew the stories by wrote.
In the furtherance of illumination and edification for Northerners, I offer this fragment from "Sir Walter Scott and the South" By Hamilton James Eckenrode:
[... The mediaeval revival was largely confined to the South. In the rough West, there was little scope for romanticism in any form, and the West grew to be the bulwark of American democracy, which had lost so much in losing the planters. In the North mediaevalism did not revive for another reason. The Northern people, seeing their opportunity, were engaged in the epic economic development which resulted in the rise of the great American industries. The hard-headed, practical, unimaginative North had decided on reality, leaving romance to the South.
So uninformed are our historians in social phenomena that they have attributed the peculiar trend of Southern life from 1815 to 1860 to the influence of slavery. Slavery is, in fact, the devil of American history; all the sins of our past may be comfortably laid at its door. But a more careful study of American life -- not documents -- would almost certainly show that slavery has played a far smaller part in determining the fate of the country than Northerners and Southerners alike have supposed.
Negro slavery, like most other institutions, had its vices and its virtues. The historians have fallen into the natural error of investing it with a positive quality it never possessed. Slavery indeed resembled the actuating principle in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: "The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison house of the disposition, and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth."
In the eighteenth century slavery was the cradle of democracy. It gave the Revolutionary generation the leisure to read French philosophers and English political theorists, and on a slave-worked farm George Mason made the first written constitution. Slavery, too, did something more than give leisure. It fostered the generosity and desire for human improvement which distinguished the Southern revolutionists. It did this because it spared them the need of struggling for a living, a necessity which is only too apt to kill in us the noble desire to help humanity at large. Washington, Jefferson, Madison -- all that broad-minded breed -- grew up in a land of slavery, and from the soil of slavery sprang the fiery democrat, Patrick Henry, and many another of his kind.
It may further be believed that if the democratic movement had not been checked by disillusion and the revival of mediaevalism, slavery would have continued to aid the progress of the world. If Jefferson had left any disciples other than States' rights debaters, they might have led mankind onward along the right road. In this development slavery itself must have disappeared, but it would have lasted long enough to allow priceless leisure to a race of political and economic thinkers which might have richly blessed mankind.
It was not to be. In the nineteenth century we find slavery playing a different part. Democracy had fallen in Europe and the planters had ceased to believe in it. The ideals of the slave country were no longer those of republican Rome or democratic Athens but of Richard Coeur de Lion and the Crusades. Slavery now formed the basis of a feudalistic way of living that could hardly have existed without it. The South, through slavery, was able to realize Sir Walter's mediaevalism to no small extent. This romanticism, fastened on a rural, warm-climate community, produced one of the most picturesque societies in history. The South was not nineteenth century, nor was it eighteenth century; it belonged to no known century but to a kingdom of the imagination which had no time.
Beyond doubt Scott gave the South its social ideal, and the South of 1860 might be not inaptly nicknamed Sir Walter Scottland. He did not create the state of feeling which held sway in the South so long, but he gave it expression. Many things show this. The term "Southern chivalry," unknown in the colonial period, came into use through his influence. The somewhat exaggerated respect for women which once distinguished the South is another indication of the knightly ideal. Similarly, the South largely put by its ancient and beloved amusements of horse-racing and cockfighting in order to take up the tournament...]