Dave, you sound like a wonderful fellow and I'm sure your heart is in the right place.

But the inescapable fact is: if you wear the gray, you inescapably REPRESENT slavery. There's no way to sugar-coat it.

That's what your sires mistakenly died for. They didn't know it, possibly, but they were dying for their own version of New England fat cats who were only looking out for their own economic interests.

Look at the secession docs for Mississippi and other southern states. Slavery looms very large in all those docs.

You guys were cannon fodder, just like we were. Only we won, and our sacrifices were therefore justified.

You can gloat about killing 300,000 Yankees, as the song "I'm a Good Old Rebel" says, but in the final analysis, we took what we had to take to win. And we did.

And you guys didn't. And that's what's killing this board 140 years later.

Peace to you. Really mean it. Handshake to all you boys who will take it.