In this Blogger’s opinion, the Confederacy was doomed once General Stonewall Jackson was killed, by force majeure, by his own victorious troops, by mistake, after the Battle of Chancellorsville. This Blogger believes that if Jackson had been in tactical command of Lee’s strategic vision at Gettysburg, as he would have been, the South would have won. Jackson’s death is analogous to the Gods interfering in the Trojan War; a Divine Act which altered History. Pickett’s Charge was 12,500 Southerners, the crème de la crème of  Southern manhood, Virginian cavaliers, and North Carolinian Tar heels(including Rev. Billy Graham’s grandfather) charging across an open field, almost a mile wide, into the vengeful waiting guns and cannons of the Army of the Potomac, sheltered by a wall. Slaveholders and sharecroppers joined together in a bid for Destiny’s favor.  Southern Slavery did not produce poets. It is remarkable to this Blogger how few great writers the South produced under slavery. The best a

“I’ll place my knapsack on my back My rifle on my shoulder I’ll march away to the firing line And kill that Yankee soldier And kill that Yankee soldier I’ll march away to the firing line And kill that Yankee soldier   I’ll bid farewell to my wife and child Farewell to my aged mother And go and join in the bloody strife Till this cruel war is over Till this cruel war is over I’ll go and join in the bloody strife Till this cruel war is over   If I am shot on the battlefield And I should not recover Oh, who will protect my wife and child And care for my aged mother If I must die for my home and land My spirit will not falte….. Oh, here’s my heart and here’s my hand Upon my country’s altar ….Then Heaven be with us in the strife Be with the Southern soldier We’ll drive the mercenary horde Beyond our Southern border…SOUTHERN SOLDIER." Before he died, the great Southern historian ,  Shelby Foote, in the mid 1990s,    gave an interview with PBS about the Civil War. The interview was