This is correct. Many of these "Experts" are not experts at all. There are many prolific noted writters whose works I respect and more that I don't respect because they gained their noterity by their agenda.

Now I will admit that I am pro southern, that should be obvious from my post. But I am Pro southern not because of my birth but because of my study and trying for fifty years and better, to determine why my grandfathers would Volunteer (and not be Conscripted) to go to war. They were simple people who did their best to make a living from day to day scratching a living out of the dirt without the help of owning any slaves. I can not find any reason why they would want to fight so that the big planters and merchants and powerful people could own their slaves.

I can find a reason for them to fight for the defence of their states and thereby their homes. But why did they feel this need to defend their homes? Were they stupid to believe all the rethoric and war fever that was prevelent at that time?

I don't believe that was the case. People of that time on the frontier were practical people who were not given to histeria because they faced a hard life every day of their life just to make their daily bread. Putting down the plow and picking up their Musket meant that their family would face hard times in making that daily living. It wasn't an easy personal choice and one not made out of haste or in the passion of the moment. Men of that time gave their word and kept that word.

I grew up in a time before the civil rights movement in the south, in a colored community. I was eighteen before highway construction caused us to have to move. It was a different enviroment then amoung the three familes of whites and the blacks of that community. There wasn't the personal division among the races then as there is now.

Yes, there were the "Official" divisions. But outside of the "Official" designations these people worked together and helped one another. I knew that if old ms Lucy Lee, who lived across the street behind our house hollared at me not to be doing something I was doing I had better not do it. Even though she was black, I knew that my mother respected her and I would be the one in trouble. Lucy Lee reminded me a lot of a real life "Mammy" (Hattie McDaniels) in "Gone With the Wind". The Lee's had a telephone and we didn't, we were welcome to use their phone when we needed to. My Father and Grandfather were looked upon by the blacks as being the patricarch of the community and their council was sought and welcomed. People sat on their front porches and greeted each other as they walked by. And when my Grandfather died in 1960 the blacks asked if they could attend his funeral and were welcomed. And we attended many of the funerals of those blacks and attended their wakes and brought covered dishes, as they did to ours.

It is from that experience that I know that southern White and southern Blacks lived and worked together in the old south for the same ends, to survived and make their daily bread, outside the "official" divisons of their status and race. It is from this enviroment that we can understand that southern Blacks could well have fought side by side with south Whites in an "Unofficial" capacity and "off the record" for "official" reasons, thereby raising the numerious reports of their presence in the O.R.'s. Why we even have pictures of Blacks southerners armed, and the common evaluation is that the picture is a fake and staged. Well was it? Yes, All the period photographs were staged for those early cameras. But why do we assume that the picture of southern blacks as soldiers were faked? I wonder who paid the photographer to take that picture and why? Do we ignore that evidence and accept only the "Hard" evidence which fits our preceptions? What about that intangible evidence?