Confederate Monument on the Road to Perryville

This monument on the courthouse lawn in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, has honored Anderson County Confederate veterans since 1894. It consists of a granite figure on a pedestal, around which may be found the names of the Confederate regiments raised in Anderson County and a list of those men wounded or killed during America's tragic war of 1861-1865. The monument features an eight-foot tall figure dressed in winter coat with a rifle held vertically before him.

Lawrenceburg was the site of several skirmishes in the War for Southern Independence, leading up to the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862. Later in the War, a Home Guard unit was stationed in the city to attempt to quell guerrilla activity there.

Perryville, which is in the next county to the south of Anderson, was the site of Kentucky's largest battle in the War Between the States. Two of my great great uncles fought for the Confederacy in that battle. One was captured and the other was listed as missing. He is presumably one of the several hundred unknown Confederate dead who are buried on the Perryville battlefield in a mass grave. I will tell their story in more detail in future posts.

The Stars and Bars

This flag flies over the Confederate Cemetery at Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site, Perryville, Kentucky. It was on this same battlefield where two of my Confederate great uncles fought to defend their homeland from an invading Northern army. Here my uncle John Thomas Conn (known as J.T.) was captured and sent to Camp Morton, a Union Prison in Indianapolis. His brother, my Uncle James Walter Conn, is still listed as missing in action from that battle. No doubt James is one of the hundreds of unknown Confederate dead who are buried in the mass grave beneath this flag.

When the Confederate States of America were formed in 1861, the flag pictured here was the first to officially fly over the new nation. It is the flag properly known as the "Stars and Bars," The circle of seven stars represents the first seven states that seceded from the Union: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas.

This first official flag of the Confederacy was adopted by the Confederate Congress on March 4, 1861 and raised over the dome of that first Confederate Capitol. The Stars and Bars were flown until May 26, 1863, when it was replaced because during battle it was sometimes mistaken as the Stars and Stripes - the flag of the invading enemy.

Why My Confederate Uncles Fought at Perryville

In my last post, I shared the #1 most interesing photo out of more than 15,000 travel pictures I have on Flickr.com. Today I am posting the #2 favorite, along with the description I give on Flicker. It is especially interesting to me that both of these top favorites - as determined by the amount of views from the general public - are on Confederate themes, when 98% of my Flickr travel pics have absolutely nothing to do with the Confederacy. This is an indication of the intense worldwide interest people have in America's War Between the States.



This is the final photo in a set in which I share the tragic story of two of my great uncles, Confederate soldiers from Georgia, who fought to defend their homeland against an invading Northern army in the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky.

In war the victors write the history, and the politically correct version of America's un-Civil War heard most often today is that the North fought to free the slaves in the South. Virtually no serious historian believes that, but many average citizens do.

The Conn family, like the vast majority of Southerners, owned no slaves. My Conn ancestors came to America as indentured servants from Ireland. Some of my other ancestors were Cherokee - Native Americans. There were more abolitionists, anti-slavery societies and free blacks in the South than in the North. More than 60,000 blacks, both slave and free, were in the Confederate army.

The Southern commander, General Robert E. Lee, called slavery "a moral and political evil" years before the war. When Lee inherited slaves, through his wife's family, he freed them. General Ulysses S. Grant, the Union commander, was a slave owner who refused to give up his slaves even after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Slavery would have soon ended in the South without war, and the needless slaughter of 620,000 men and tens of thousands of innocent Southern civilians, including blacks, whites women and children. Slavery would have ended peacefully in the South just as it did in Massachusetts (Which had slaves for decades before Georgia did), New York (The largest of the slave trading states - all of them in the North), and in scores of other countries, all without war.

The battle of Perryville, where two of my great uncles fought, took place during the second year of the War, and it was not until the beginning of the following year that Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation in an effort to change the course of his war for power and empire. Lincoln called his proclamation a "war measure." It was rhetoric that did not free a single slave, including slaves in several northern states. Freedom didn't come until the ratification of the 13th Amendment, months after the war was over.

At the Perryville Visitors Center are many quotes from soldiers who fought there. Among them I did not see a single mention of slavery. In their own words, the Southern men fought to defend their homes and families. They felt that America should remain a confederacy of sovereign states with a limited federal government, as outlined by our founding fathers in the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln and the North fought to squash states rights and institute an all powerful, centralized empire. Before the war America was always called "these" United States. Now it is "the" United States.

There are many good books that tell the truth about the War Between the States, but you won't find many of them in Federally funded public schools.

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You may see the entire story on my Flickr site by clicking here: http://flickr.com/photos/jstephenconn/2886700867/in/set-72157607484183354/

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Photo and Article by J. Stephen Conn