Being a fairly new immigrant at the time of the war, William Watson's perspective will be different than that of William H. H. Lewis and Robert A. Moore, who both grew up in the South. Waton's narrative reads well and remains one of the more interesting postwar narratives by a Confederate veteran.

A member of Capt. Carnot Posey's company from Wilkinson County, Lewis grew in a plantation district and belonged to a family that owned many slaves. Before the war Robert A. Moore was an overseer on his father's farm in Marshall County MS. Lewis was killed in action at Turkey Ridge VA, June 9, 1864, and Moore died at Chickamauga. As members of slaveholding households, both Lewis and Moore would have direct concerns about their Constitutional rights not to be deprived of property without due process of law. Many Southern men with no direct connection to slavery shared many of the same concerns, and were willing to fight to protect them.

Both men say as much in these letters.