Three of my ancestors, all three brothers, James, John, and William served in Company D of the 37th Mississippi at least as early as April 1863. In December of 1864 all three brothers were captured on the left flank during the second day's battle of the Siege of Nashville. The Tims trio was transported to Camp Douglas like cattle to what is coined by many historians today, a regular extermination camp. And known by those that suffered there, Eighty Acres of hell.
Alabama born Private William Tims died of exposure that led to pneumonia. The Chicago winter in 1864-65 was one of the coldest on records and the POWs there had little more than their old musty and tattered infantry coats to keep warm. The barracks were elevated adding to the misery of the wind and cold.

These three patriots stood together as the finest moment in my family's history. I hope to find some information regarding the 37th's flag, for I have never seen a copy or photo of the original.
I think there should be two laws regarding Confederate colors from the period whether they were regimental flags or ceremonial.
1. Any period any design or example of Confederate or state flags existing in the north under private or public ownership should be returned to the state the flag was originally made. If it's origin cannot be established, the flag should be donated to a worthy Civil War or Confederate museum in one of the thirteen states or two territories of the old Confederacy. Giving it over to the Sons of Confederate Veterans could be a great solution for orphaned Confederate flags existing in the North, for the organization is the living link of the soldiers and sailors that carried the Confederate flags into battle and immortality.
*In Norlands, Maine near Livermore there is a Confederate battle flag on display in the historical library there. It is neither being preserved appropriately nor displayed in an honorable fashion. It hangs from a pole near a giant window. Much of it is faded and tattered already. It may be very near to being too damaged by 148 years of exposure, light, dusty, and moisture. I do not know the origin of the flag but it is a Confederate flag from the period that men followed such flags with muskets and rebel yells. The Washburns, a very prominent, wealthy, and political family of Maine during the Civil War hailed Norlands as one of their bases. Most likely, the captured flag was presented to one of the Washburns by a Maine unit. Mayors, governors, senators, legislators; both North and South politicians and puffed up patriots standing their post in luxirious town homes and hotels hundreds of miles from combat posts made frequent requests to combat officers for flags captured from the enemy. Most were saved and used as decorative trophies, much like the Norlands flag still appears today! Sadly, many others were publicly burned or destroyed otherwise.
Very soon the Norlands flag will share this fate if some of us do not attempt to press the principal that the war is over. These flags having witnessed the same sacrifices on the field and in camp as the soldiers had experienced, they are as sacred as the final resting places of those brave soldiers!

Please visit http://www.norlands.org/ and voice your concern and interest in the matter. If you click on the museum link on the front page you’ll see in the left hand side of the forth photo, the wasting away of the captured battle flag.

2. It should be illegal to sell or auction any period Confederate or state flags privately or publicly. In my opinion this is as shameful and critically harmful to the history of my ancestor's struggle for independence and defense of everything and everyone in their life that was dear. Their homes. The less we preserve the less we leave to our children. Though we may never "impound" all the Confederate battle flags turning into dust in peoples' attics or junk chests, a serious new effort needs to form to bring these precious symbols of the bloodiest war in our history into the light and preservation!
One of the causes that so many Confederate flags, even those saved by museums are not preserved or displayed correctly is because both the NAACP and KKK have joined forces for generations to mislead the public of the true history and nature of these symbols of Southern heritage. For you will never see the 20th Maine regimental colors being buried in a museum basement or sold to the lowest bidder. Lest we forget that the enemy of those that charged with the 20th Maine banner happen to be many of our own ancestors!
The true history of the War against secession needs to be taught and respected. And when the true stories that these banners were a part of become as sacred to our country as the history and flags from every other period in our history, both shall be preserved. There would be no greater loss to our history than loosing its symbols.

And for the record, I believe these two "laws" should go both ways, regarding period Union flags as well. But the salvation and preservation of most Union war flags have never been as failing an issue as the plight of flags born in the Southern Confederacy.

Welcome
to my new blog devotion.  The Confederate States of America lost it's
rightful independence in 1865.  The Southern states lost more than
their sacred right to be free.  More than three hundred thousand
soldiers and sailors and a long censured number of civilians were
killed and wounded.  Thousands became refugees out of burning
communities.  Thousands suffered or died in Northern versions of German
concentration camps (without the gas). 

I dedicate this blog devotion to exposing the long distorted truth of
their deeds and their cause.  I have concluded that the reasons many do
not look back to their day and deed with pride is that their
understanding of the Southron's deed and day has been denied them! 

I had discovered over the years of patient
and passionate reserach that the biggest reasons Americans favor the
Northern victory at the conclusion of the War against secession are based on a deeply
biased view of a history conviently censured in many places. In recent
years I have concluded that the motivations behind creating a flawed
memory of that war was as bad as the campaign against the truth. 

I
want to show you the unpopular and untouched truths and memories of
those that sacrificed all for an independent Confederacy for their
children.  It is incredibly wrong that the history of so many of
our ancestors have been tormented and forgotten.  I want you to witness
me
destroying myth for truth and what side of history that actual facts
and period testimonies prove is right. By using a wider base of
references and sources and being
more open minded to the passions of the period with not a small amount
of passion of my own is how I will approach this devotion.

Jefferson Davis, the one time president of the Confederate
States of America responded to the outright revisions the history he
had led, already becoming staples in the education system. He wrote,
"Truth crushed to the earth is TRUTH STILL and light a seed will rise
again."

My
study and tribute of the rights characters, and campaigns of the War against secession will
not follow a strict timeline.  I will add to it as I do with anything.
Whatever inspires me at the moment. 



So enjoy the very first part of Good Morning CSA


A
CONFEDERATE OFFICER AND PARTICIPANT OF THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG'S
RESPONSE TO LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG ADDRESS THE PRESIDENT'S WAR AGENDA



Lincoln created a new brand of persuasion:



So
many of us learned President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address before we
were even taught to read.  Few understand, however, that it was nothing
more than a justifying of the insane death toll at the battle of
Gettysburg, the deadliest battle in American history.  He knew that his
twenty-one state union's commitment to the war could reverse at any
moment.

The
words are an example of the still highly successful fear tactic that
become more common when mutual faith in the government is low or when
that government needs the people in a bad way. 
Roosevelt used the wild reaction over Pearl Harbor to finally enter the
war that would decide which of the nations would end up being the
supreme world power.  Bush milked the passion and fear following 9/11
to not only loose our armies on two different nations but also allow
incredible spending and a smashing of our rights. How will Obama use
fear? (or fear that he "inherited")  

Many know that the
South fired on Fort Sumter.  But few understand the details of it and
why that battle was so important to Lincoln's plan for war.  War is
always good for powerful governments.  

When South Carolina seceded from his union,
Lincoln refused to remove Federal troops garrisoned within the state's
borders at Fort Sumter.  Having them there was like a foreign
nation's military posted on Staten Island. It was right. It was asking
for trouble. Lincoln was bad like that. An earlier example of Lincoln's
self will was his determination to become president even though the
states, the people, felt threatend enough by him to warn of secession. 


With South Carolina's promised  December
1860 separation from the Union, by April of 1861, the Union Army still
remained in Charleston Harbor  When the Federal post there was
re-supplied by the US
government, it became clear to the Southern military that the invadors
were ordered to remain.  The foreign
occupiers would not leave willingly.  It was damned if you do, damned
if you don't.  If they didn't fire on the fort, then that Federal
garrison, right in
the middle of the state's busiest harbors, would remain in
control of another government.  If the Carolinians did fire on the
fort, the North could interoperate it as aggression. It would be a
cause for Lincoln to use to gather his much wanted armies. No one stops
to consider that occupying territory in another government's borders is
an act of aggression of its own! I imagine that any state today might
still have an issue if a Federal post acted against the state's
concerns. To remove the occupiers, the
Confederate military did eventually fire upon Fort Sumter and reclaim
it.  The small Federal garrison had no chance of victory. 

It is
funny how the government will set itself up for a big crises or defeat
to motivate the majority towards war.  Pearl Harbor, for example, was a
sitting duck.  The destroyers were lined up alongside each other.  And
as if somebody knew that an attack was coming, the most valued part of
the Pacific Fleet, the carriers and bombers were absent from the harbor on Dec 7 1941. Just saying

Fort Sumter was left just as vulnerable, dangled out like bait. News of
a defeat and surrender of one of their flag's garrisons combined with
the deceptive points of Lincoln's first innagural speech gave the North
reason to invade and kill their late brothers to the South.

When
South Carolina reclaimed her fort, the Northern invasion was set in
motion.  Lincoln warned his people that the South intended to destroy
the Union, over throw it, and dissolve what the founding Fathers had
created.  

In his Gettysburg Address Lincoln wrote,

"Now we are
engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any
nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

And later,
"We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting
place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. 
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth."



A Confederate officer from Alabama saw the true meaning of the 16th
president's speech upon the battlefield where he lost his brother and
so many neighbors four months earlier.

Colonel William C. Oates commanded his
Confederate unit, the 15th Alabama against the Union defenses on Little
Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg.  His canteen detail having
been ambushed, Oates and his men marched through the most trying
terrain in Adams County, PA on it's hottest day of the year.  Even when
half his men died from heat and thirst they drove the Federal 1st
Sharpshooters from Big Round Top and had come close to crushing the
left flank of the Northern army on Little Round Top.  From Virginia to
Tennessee and Georgia, Colonel Oates and his men were worthy of a
greater honor than the deceptive speech Lincoln gave for the Union
fallen.

For ten years I belonged to
a Civil War reenactment group that portrayed the veterans of the 15th
Alabama and so have learned much of its campaigns and heroes.  

In
his 1905 thick study of the War against secession, its causes, and the campaigns he
and his unit fought in titled The War between the Union and the
Confederacy, Oates gave his own response to the speech named for the
battle where his only brother fell.  







“President
Lincoln’s great oration on the field of Gettysburg at the dedication in
November, 1863, proceeded entirely on the erroneous hypothesis that the
life of the nation was at stake.  A proper analysis of his speech was
that if the Confederates succeeded that the nation was destroyed-that
it would prove not only that American Government was a failure, but
would accomplish its destruction as well.  He assumed that if the South
were divorced from the North it would prove the death of each.  How
fallacious and deceptive.  The secession of a part of the states did
not, could not, and never did put the life of the nation in jeopardy. 
In all his letters and messages he asserted that the life of the nation
was at issue, when no one knew better than he that the seceding States
united in a Confederacy sought peaceable separation and were anxious to
treat with the Union still composed of twenty-one States.  He
considered a slump in a body of one-third of the states of which the
Union was composed would kill the Union, or the nation, as he called
it, which would still after the secession have been composed of
twenty-one of the most wealthy and populous States.  The assumption
that the Confederates sought the destruction of the Union was
preposterous.”



It is too often that we are convinced of one
biased and one-sided view of the Gettysburg Address. A view that
Lincoln intended to perpetuate.  I do not know how readers of both
George Bush and Lincoln's speeches fail to acknowledge the
similarities.  The deceptions, the fear, the flowery war cry.  



Colonel William C Oates arguably wrote the most detailed and
interesting history of the Civil War.  He addressed every issue that
started the conflict and brought its immortal actors and witnesses and
events to a wonderfully real life.  

One of the things I find most
fascination is how many facts that he included in his work that have
never been shared, studied, or defended since!  Though Oates filled his
pages with historical fact, the truth contradicts the Union/Lincoln
worship agendas of modern historians.  What leads these misleading and
censorships (Oates book will never be found on a required reading list
at Universities nor in their libraries) is that historians choose sides
defending views that they themselves would defend.  The only
problem with that is, it leaves a out very critical points. 
Too many history books are written like opinion sections of papers
different from Good Morning CSA. It is retarded to write a history
study using modern popular or personal views
as a guide for choosing sides 148 years ago.  



William
C Oates actually lived and fought during the War against secession.  I would trust
his examination of the conflict before any other.  For example, if you
wish to learn the truth of a crime, you will gather all the witnesses
available.

I appeal to students of history that, like in court,
actual witnesses of the War against secession give a more authentic portrayal of
the time period than works of those that merely studied it more than a
century after.  I mean, would the Bible still hold the same credit it
does today if all its books had been written centuries after the fact?
No. The Bible's greatest strength is that many first hand witnesses
told it.  

Yet when it comes to history, like for example, the War against
secession, people content themselves to believe whatever is easiest to
learn.  Instead of reaching for one of the many hundreds of
autobiographies, memoirs, and historical works of those that lived it,
we turn to biographies and documentaries based on a history that is so
misunderstood and distant from modern writers.  It is all about who can
write the most sensational and unique account.  Truth is controversy
and not a profit if unapproved.  

Unlike studies written in modern times or by Union veterans, former
secesh usually included references to the
constitution and pre-Civil War history in their first couple
of chapters. In presenting their history, the works of former
Confederate veterans or citizens give  unique and very detailed but
simple examinations when arguing their cause to the readers. They led
any personal opinion in their works to specific direct
sources and facts.  In making their case they include statements, laws,
articles, and quotes otherwise lost to history.  

The South got a
bum wrap during and after the war against secession.  The smearing and cover up of
Southern history is about what I would have suspected England would
have did also if the colonies had lost the revolution.  

The soul
aim, in my opinion, for the big media and the education enforcement in
the government to portray Southern secession as an attempt to preserve
slavery is keep a very disturbing vision in each of us when the
word secession is mentioned. For the powers that enjoy a power over the
states it would not do for a majority of Americans to consider and be
inspired by ancestors that fought the power to free some of these
states.

We hear so much concerning the
holiness of Union and the godhead that forced the Southern states to
remain in it, Saint Lincoln.  So censured and corrupted is the balance
of true history that to defend truths of Southern history is to be
termed a racist!  A disenchanted view of states and ancestors united in
secession from the ruiling majority in the government, serves the
ruiling majority in the government well.







Learn and love history through reading what was published by those that lived and felt it.
I recommend to any of you that might have an interest in the Civil War to
hunt down this book before any other.

The War between the Union and the
Confederacy. 

Three Months in the Southern States written by a neutral observer of the war
between April and July 1863, Lt. Colonel Arthur Freemantle of Great
Britain. 

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is a very
interesting and uniquely truthful work by the leading figure of the
whole Civil War. President Jefferson Davis. 
General John Gordon's Reminisces of the Civil War  
Memoirs of Service Afloat by Admiral Raphael
Semmes.  He served in the Confederate Navy as Captain of the CSS
Sumter and CSS Alabama.  During his service he sank and destroyed more
than fifty Union merchant ships.  



This is true history from the march and the waves of the war. You may find many of these titles at Amazon.com



I
leave you with the first hand wisdom of Colonel William C Oates, former
officer in the Confederate Army, congressman of Alabama, governor of
Alabama, and United States General in the Spanish American War.  



"The
Union was a voluntary one, and that it was no longer a safeguard and
protection, but a menace to their rights, resolve to withdraw from it
and form another Union, in which it was believed there would be peace,
harmony and security of rights resulting from homogeneity of
interests."  Pg 35, The War Between the Union and the Confederacy



“They
asserted, with all effrontery of impudent falsehood, that the chief
occupation of the gentlemen of Virginia was the breeding of slaves like
cattle for the more Southern markets.  To this day the whole South is
suffering under this defamation of character, for it is well-known that
emigrants from Europe now refuse to come and settle in Virginia and the
South on account of their belief in the stories against us with which
their minds have been poisoned.”-page 46, The War between the Union and
the Confederacy.



“A majority of the people in the Northern States
was opposed to any attempt to coerce the seceding States to return to
the Union.  They knew that it would be resisted and would provoke a
bloody war, and if successful would change the fundamental principals
of the government on which the Constitution was founded, from a great
Federation based upon mutual concessions and equality of rights, as
States, and convert it into a centralized nationality with power to
govern the States by force.-page 50, The War Between the Union and
Confederacy



As I stated earlier, Oates, like many other Southern
writers of the history in and of his time, used dozens of other sources
from his time period to make a solid case.  

The following should
hopefully convince you that reading period works will give you a more
authentic understanding of the war.  For we have all been told that the
North was somehow totally united in Lincoln's agenda to fight against
Southern secession.  None of today's biographies or textbooks produces
the fact of just how diverse the sediment had actually been in the
North.  Yet, in this old memoir, Oates offers two articles written in
two major newspapers of two major Northern cities during the Civil
War.  Without Oates' help I would probably of never imagined either
that it was possible that the press from the "other side" defended the
South's chosen fate in 1861.  

Ironicly these two yankee newspaper
articles produce a  more convincing understanding of what the Southern
states practiced in 1861 than any thing printed today.  They say that the yankees write history. 
Yet, they fail to include their own history sometimes.  Like for
example Lincoln's positive opinion towards secession given in 1848 or
his 1850s rants against equality of the races and argument for racial
superiority or even General Grant's opposition against the cause of
abolition  These events as well as the following two articles are
woeful testaments to the hypocrisy and censorship of the whole history.




We hold, with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to
alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or
injurious; and if the Cotton States shall decide that they can do
better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in
peace.  The right to secede may be a revolutionary right, but it exists
nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do
what another party had a right to prevent.  We must ever resist the
asserted right of any state to remain in the Union and nullify or deny
the laws thereof; to withdraw from the Union is quite another matter. 
And, whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately
resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to
keep her in.  We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section
is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”-New York Tribune, November 9,
1860



The difficulties between the North and the South must be
compromised, or the separation of the States shall be peaceable.  If
the Republican party refuse to go to the full length of the Crittenden
amendment-which is the very least the South can or ought to take-then,
here in Maine, not a Democrat will be found who will raise his arm
against his brethren of the South.  From one end of the State to the
other let the cry of the Democracy be, Compromise or Peaceable
Separation.-The Union News Paper of Bangor Maine