In 1961, an official U.S. commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly, the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy.
Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.
In the Confederate Army, an officer was judged by stark courage alone, and this made it possible for the Confederacy to live four years.
I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy.
Southern states in the confederacy were not ready to give up their fight to secede or give up their way of life, which was made possible in large part through the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves.
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
From infancy, I had been accustomed to hear pro and con discussions of slavery and the American Civil War. Although the British government finally decided not to recognise the Confederacy, public opinion in England was sharply divided on the questions both of slavery and of secession.
The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded.
During the Civil War, the United States government had organized new territories in the West at a cracking pace, both to keep the Confederacy at bay and to bring the region's mines and farmland under government control.
The Confederacy was formed for the purpose of seceding from the Union because those states could not part with their rights to own slaves.
