CONFEDERATE
FLAG CONTROVERSY
"I
was a soldier in Virginia in the campaigns of Lee and Jackson, and I
declare I never met a Southern soldier who had drawn his sword to
perpetuate slavery.... What he had chiefly at heart was the preservation
of the supreme and sacred right of self- government.... It was a very
small minority of the men who fought in the Southern armies who were
financially interested in the institution of slavery." [Quote from The
Gray Book, Sons of Confed. Vet's., p. 36]
Regarding
the War Between the States, J. H. Thornwell (1812-1862), President of
South Carolina College & Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary wrote:
"But the consequences of success on our part will be very different from
the consequences of success on the part of the North. If they prevail, the
whole character of the Government will be changed, and, instead of a
federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we
shall have a central despotism, with the notion of States for ever
abolished, deriving its powers from the will, and shaping its policy
according to the wishes, of a numerical majority of the people; we shall
have, in other words, a supreme, irresponsible democracy.... On the other
hand, we are struggling for constitutional freedom. We are upholding the
great principles which our fathers bequeathed us; and if we should
succeed, and become, as we shall, the dominant nation of this continent,
we shall perpetuate and diffuse the very liberty for which Washington
bled, and which the heroes of the Revolution achieved. We are not
revolutionists; we are resisting revolution. We are upholding the true
doctrines of the Federal Constitution. We are conservative... We shall
have a Government that acknowledges God, that reverences right, and that
makes law supreme. We are therefore fighting, not for ourselves alone,
but, when the struggle is rightly understood, for the salvation of this
whole continent." [Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell, pp.
582,583.]
