Ironic that southern slave owners' perception of tyranny would not lead them to acknowledge their own hypocrisy. Also surprising that those on this board would give that perception any legitimacy.

Call the Confederate soldiers brave if you want, but it should be remembered that the Union did not draw first blood. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Moreover, the succession of the Confederate States was not in response to any mandate by the Union that slavery should end in those states. Instead, the election of Lincoln, by that time an outspoken critic of slavery, prompted those states to succeed.

This was no insurrection! Instead, it was the beginning of an inevitable, long overdue and fitting end to over 250 years of oppression. According to the best current estimates, a total of 10 million to 11 million living slaves crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century - approximately 6% of those were delivered to the United States. By the start of the American Civil War, African and African-American slaves were approximately 1/4 of the population of the slave states.

American slaves were fed, clothe, and given the minimum of medical treatment. They were sold as chattel, severely beaten, their families ripped apart, their women raped as their men were forced to watch. Most horrendously of all was the interstate slave trade, which involved giant slave breeding farms for the huge cotton plantations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and other Deep South states. It was not uncommon to find in this practice experiments in slave rearing/breading much the same way that efforts were made to discover new products that would grow on the exhausted soil.

These are the ideals - the right - for which the Confederate soldiers fought.

Characterizing the formation of confederate states as an insurrection against tyranny of the Union is as intellectually dishonest as characterizing WWII as an Axis insurrection against the tyranny of the Allied forces. Let us show the same sensitivity to the American slaves as we do to victims of the atrocities of WWII.

The greatest stand for the US Constitution in our nation's history. In truth however, this was not a "rebellion". The south never tried to take over the Union. This was a group of states exercising their Constitutional rights...a group of men who were willing to die for them.

While we can debate until we're blue in the face the relative virtues of the Union and the Confederacy, it must be acknowledged that the South truly believed in their cause, and fought and died bravely for it. And, like any way, the soldiers themselves weren't wholly conscious of the cause they were defending. If your brother shows up in a uniform ready to fight against perceived tyranny, you're probably going to put down your hoe and run off to join him. That's called loyalty, which I can admire no matter how misplaced it may be. The defeat basically destroyed the southern states until the invention of air-conditioning, and the resentment is still felt in large swaths of the deep south. Still, one must feel relieved that the South didn't win.

Good men, brave men, dying in a cause that is questionable at best. By and large very well led, but poorly served by the politicians in Richmond.

While I am not a fan of the cause they fought for, I agree they *perceived* the existing situation as a tyranny --and I have nothing but admiration for the tremendous courage the men of the Confederate army showed in their terrible struggle. In my own family history, two brothers of my great-great grandfather fought against each other at Shiloh, in April 1862 (the Confederate was killed) and the division in my family over the war was permanent.