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Re: Sons of Confederate Vets
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Silas Buck's Speech

EXCERPTS FROM SILAS BUCK’S SPEECH TO THE ERATH AND DUBLIN COUNTY CONFEDERATE VETERANS ASSOCIATION (AUG 3, 1906)

"My dear old comrades, so fine an example did you set as younger ones that in the Mobile campaign when Gen. Canby advanced on Mobile with an army of forty thousand, the command of cavalry to which I belonged, about six hundred strong, made up of largely of boys and old men, resisted so vigorously that the enemy only marched about two miles a day and went into intrenchments at night."

"If ever a civil war is justifiable this one was on our part. It was no war of religious fanaticism, nor of greed, nor of aggression and invasion. We wanted not one foot of northern territory, nor one dollar of their money. It was strictly a war of self-defense. Our liberty was at stake, the right of local self-government bequeathed to us by our revolutionary sires and sustained by every warrier, every statesman, every patriot of southern history; your homes, your property, your ?resides were involved. Aye mote, your manhood and your honor were at stake. I know that it is said that slavery alone was involved and it is freely conceded that it was intimately intermingled with the other matters between the sections. That southern soldiers did not so regard it is shown by the fact that eighty percent of Confederate soldiers did not own a slave."

"I do not care to go into an extended discussion as to the right of secession. For the first fifty years it was not disputed north or south that a sovereign state had the right to secede. Time after time northern leaders enunciated the right, leaders who then and now rank high in the love and confidence of that section."

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