Now let's bring this discussion on home, i.e., the Southerners who fought for, rather than against, the United States.

What about the rights of Southerners living in, say, Tennessee? Because they were in the minority on the secession issue, they suddenly find themselves foreign nationals on their own Blue Ridge farms, subject to the arbitrary rule of a Confederate government they didn't vote for, have no say in, and consider to be in an illegal rebellion against the National government. Must they submit to this assault on their liberty? Must they abandon their ancestral homes and emigrate to the North?

You can't have it both ways. If you consider Southerners who fought for some ephemeral right of secession to be noble, then you must also recognize the nobility of those Southerners who chose to remain loyal to the country established by their forefathers. If resistance to the dictatorship of one man is a proper political act, then so is resistance to the dictatorship of the mob.

It is not "grievous," as a previous post claimed. Nor is it EVER a matter of shame to don the uniform of the United States Army!