George Martin Holcomb
Cullman Tribune
1915

"I want it distinctly understood that my family did not own Negroes, and cared very little about their freedom or severitude, but we wished to maintain the constitution our forefathers gave us. The Supreme Court decided the slave owner had a perfect right to take his slaves into any state or territory they saw fit. Mr Lincoln the then newly elected president said he, nor his party, would not observe this decision. Seeing the party in power would willfully violate the constitution and ignore the supreme court there was nothing left for the south to do but secede from the union. If we had not taken up arms, we would have been traitors. We believed if the party in power could so willfully violate one or two clauses of the constitution they would violate or ignore other clauses that did not suit them. We thought the thing for the south to do was to separate from them.

Now I am not trying to reopen a dead issue, but only giving a hint at a few of the causes that brought on the war which may cause someone to see that we were not all that bad."

George Martin Holcomb was married when he enlisted at age 19 in Carroll County Georgia,he was captured at Vicksburg. After the war he was a Primitive Baptist Minister near Berlin in Cullman County Alabama.