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![But most Southern volunteers believed they were fighting for liberty as well as slavery. “Our cause,” wrote one in words repeated almost verbatim by many “is the sacred one of Liberty, and God is on our side.” A farmer who enlisted in the 26th Tennessee insisted that “life liberty and property [i.e., slaves] are at stake” and therefore “any man in the South would rather die battling for civil and political liberty, than submit to the base usurpations of a northern tyrant.”17 One of three brothers who enlisted in a South Carolina artillery battery believed that “a stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost.” The Confederate states were united by the institution of “slavery[,] a bond of union stronger than any which holds the north together,” wrote the second brother. Therefore, added the third, the Souths “glorious cause of Liberty” was sure to triumph. A wealthy planter who married one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s sisters became an officer in the 4th Alabama to fight for “Liberty and Independence.” “What would we be,” he asked his wife, “without our liberty? . . . [We] would prefer Death a thousand times to recognizing once a Black Republican ruler . . . altho’ he is my brother in law.”18 Southern recruits waxed more eloquent about their intention to fight against slavery than for it—that is, against their own enslavement by the North. “Sooner than submit to Northern slavery I prefer death,” wrote a slaveowning officer in the 20th South Carolina. The son of a Mississippi planter dashed off a letter to his father as he rushed to enlist: “No alternative is left but war or slavery.” Subjugation was the favorite word of Confederate recruits to describe their fate if the South remained in the Union or was forced back into it. “If we should suffer ourselves to be subjugated by the tyrannical government of the North,” wrote a private in the 56th Virginia to his wife, “our property would all be confuscated ... & our people reduced to the most abject bondage & ut…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lzlqyldh7nfc34pfffvd24ko/bafkreicjsecassuuix3ws7fz5vvrce7ktilmurokcezr4gl6vajrtd3ery)
![Some Confederate volunteers did indeed avow the defense of slavery as a motive for enlisting. A young Virginia schoolteacher who joined the cavalry could not understand why his father, a substantial farmer and slaveowner, held out so long for preservation of the Union when reports in Southern newspapers made it clear that the Lincoln administration would “use its utmost endeavors for the abolishment of slavery.” After all, Lincoln himself “has declared that one of the peculiar institutions of the South, which involves the value of four billions . . . is ‘a moral evil.’ “ No true Southerner could hesitate. “Better, far better! endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar.” A slave-owning farmer enlisted in the 13th Georgia because “our homes our firesides our land and negroes and even the virtue of our fair ones is at stake,” while a young Kentucky physician told his slaveholding relatives that he would join the Confederate forces “who are battling for their rights and for an institution in which Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee are [as] interested” as the lower South. “The vandals of the North . . . are determined to destroy slavery . . . We must all fight, and I choose to fight for southern rights and southern liberty.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lzlqyldh7nfc34pfffvd24ko/bafkreidyxklsauh3kcmakipqif2mig665nt7kxb4qbvgyte4hxjtqxjgzu)
