MAIL CALL Fort Blakeley Camp #1864 Sons of Confederate Veterans Thomas B. Rhodes, III, LTC USA (Ret.) Commander Baldwin County, AL July 2017 Volume 17 Issue 07 Battle of Fort Blakely, April 1864 Dedicated to the memory of the Confederate soldier, the ideals for which he fought and those Southern Patriots who supported and sacrificed all for the Southern Cause. MAIL CALL is the official newsletter of Camp 1864 and is published monthly by The Fort Blakeley Camp # 1864, Southwest Brigade, Alabama Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans Isaac Brownlow III, EDITOR Message from the Commander’s Tent: Well, we dodged a hit with Tropical Storm Cindy. However, we did get over 10” of rain over a three day period. Yes, we had some limbs down and a few trees uprooted but at least it was no worse. The fight is still going on against our Southern Confederate Heritage and our History. Thanks you all for helping make the Alabama Monuments Protection Bill is an ALABAMA LAW. You did your part for OUR SOUTHERN HERITAGE. Our featured speakers at our June meeting were Past AL Div Cdr Gary Carlyle and Kathy Carlyle – “The War through the Eyes of a Southern Citizen”. Their presentation was most entertaining. Gary sand and played his guitar while Kathy narrated the program. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed their program. Now they are wondering when we can have them back for another outstanding program. We really appreciate Gary and Kathy traveling all the way from Henagar, AL to be with us. Of course they had some family with them and stated at the beach so I guess we were a side trip. Our July 11th meeting will feature Compatriot Robert Wisniewski - "Shiloh - Lessons Not Learned". His presentations are always most informative. I hope you can attend the meeting. Check out the new Alabama SCV Division website. It has the registration form for the upcoming AL Division Reunion in June. It will be held in Cullman this year. http://www.scv.org/new/ It Is not too late to register for the Reunion. If you are interested in serving on the cannon crew, please let your Commander know. Our Cannon (20# Parrot Rifled Cannon) has been completely repainted and looks better than it did when it was new. The cannon trailer is in the process of being repainted. Members will be kept informed as we progress. CAMP NOTES: The Ft. Blakeley Camp #1864 now has 37 AL Division Guardian Members. Thanks you Compatriot Richard Sheely for all your efforts. Four more are in the works. The camp also has seven National Guardian Members. The camp now has Life Memberships available. We have had camp Life Membership made and also have a nice Life Membership Certificate. Check out our camp website. http://www.fortblakeley1864.org/ Thank you Webmaster Chris your contribution to the camp. CAMP LIBRARY: Books are available for check-out at our Camp Library. Contact the Commander if you are interested. If you have some books you would like to donate, please bring them to a meeting or the Commander and arrangements can be made to pick them up. All donations are appreciated. Remember, we are a 501-C-3 organization which means your donations are tax deductable. We can give you a letter documenting your donation for you to use for tax purposes. “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory, destroy its books, its culture, its history, then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” Milan Hubl, Czech Historian SHOW YOUR COLORS! Ask Adjutant Doster about a Ft. Blakeley Camp 1864 Lapel Pin. Purchase one and wear it with pride. Camp Life Member Lapel Pins are also available. CONFEDERATE FACT: During the evening just prior to the battle of Fredericksburg it was reported CSA musicians played “The Bonnie Blue Flag”. During the battle itself, Meagher's Irish Brigade was decimated as they attacked Marye’s Heights. A Confederate Irish Unit (possibly the 2nd Georgia) was opposing them. An officer in that unit was Willie Mitchell, who was the son of John Mitchell, General Meagher's friend, fellow prisoner in Australia and fellow Young Ireland member. Following the war, Mitchel was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis. Upon release he later edited a Pro- Southern newspaper in Richmond. Northern Newspaper Quote: According to the New York World, any federal soldier near St. Louis was in mortal danger. The headlines on September 12, 1861 read, "Mrs. Willow and a free colored woman named Hanna Courtena were arrested yesterday for selling poisoned pies to the soldiers at Camp Benton." Monthly Confederate Quote: "War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle. I have a more vivid recollection of the first than the last one I was in. It is a classical maxim that it is sweet and becoming to "die for one's country"; but, whoever has seen the horrors of a battlefield feels that it is far sweeter to live for it..." - John Singleton Mosby Colonel, Confederate States Army > as quoted by Mosby in 1887 WBTS Q & A: Question - Who was the only Jewish member of the group that functioned as a cabinet for Confederate president Jefferson Davis? Answer – See below War of Northern Aggression Fact: Southern generals owned slaves but northern generals owned them as well. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s slaves had to wait for the Thirteenth Amendment for freedom. When asked why he didn’t free his slaves earlier, General Grant replied, “Good help is so hard to come by these days.” In February of 1865, Grant in fact ordered the capture of “all the Negro men ... before the enemy can put them in their ranks.” And Frederick Douglas warned President Lincoln that unless slaves were guaranteed freedom (those in Union controlled areas were still slaves) and land bounties, “They would take up arms for the rebels.” Alabama War of Southern Independence Fact: Old Cahawba, Dallas County, was a site of a Confederate Prison for Yankee POWs. Alabama SCV Division 1st Lieutenant Commander Carl Jones- “Want to see a Lincolnite go apoplectic? Ask them "if the South only seceded over slavery, then why did they not accept the Corwin Amendment as the North offered, rejoin the union and keep their slaves?" I've asked this question hundreds of times over the years and been subjected to diversions, name calling, spitting and sputtering, but I've yet to receive even an attempt at answering the question. Not One!” No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State “Lincoln in his first inaugural address said that he'd favor making this amendment "express and irrevocable" (Get that? If left to Lincoln slavery would STILL be constitutional!) All the seceded States had to do was rejoin the union and slavery would have been protected forever. No war, no subjugation. If it was all about slavery, then why did the South not simply accept this amendment and keep their slaves? A simple question that I've never once gotten an answer to.” John and George Crittenden were brothers who were both generals during the war. John for the North and George for the South! Southern Quote: Dr. Clyde N. Wilson, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History of the University of South Carolina and primary editor of the Papers of John C. Calhoun writes about my book: "Historians used to know - and it was not too long ago - that the War Between the States had more to do with economics than it did with slavery. The current obsession with slavery as the “cause” of the war rests not on evidence but on ideological considerations of the present day. Gene Kizer has provided us with the conclusive case that the invasion of the Southern States by Lincoln and his party (a minority of the American people) was due to an agenda of economic domination and not to some benevolent concern for slaves. This book is rich in evidence and telling quotations and ought to be on every Southern bookshelf." Damn Yankee Quote: I believe the practice of slavery in the South is the mildest and best regulated system of slavery in the world now or heretofore. -William Tecumseh Sherman, 1861 British Quote - “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.” - Charles Dickens, 1862 Southern Quote: “The South is a land that has known sorrows; It is a land that has broken the ashen crust and moistened it with tears; A land scarred and riven by the plowshare of war and billowed with the graves of her dead; But a land of legend, a land of song, a land of hallowed and heroic memories. To that land every drop of my blood, every fibre of my being, every pulsation of my heart, is consecrated forever. I was born of her womb; I was nurtured at her breast; And when my last hour shall come, I pray God that I may be pillowed upon her bosom and rocked to sleep within her tender and encircling arms.” - Edward Ward Carmack (1858-1908), United States Representative, Tennessee Northern Quote: “If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion.