The purpose of this volume is to follow the life of a Confederate private as I lived it and saw it lived by others in the great struggle of 1861-65. The causes leading to the Civil War are history, and need not be enumerated here, except to say that our New England cousins first engaged in the African slave trade, but, finding their labor not profitable in that section, sold their slaves to the Southern people, and a few years afterwards looked upon the institution as horrible and the Southern people as barbarians. Their continued onslaught against it caused the separation of the Methodist Church, and we of the Southern branch have been known as the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Many of the older people of that date predicted that the agitation of the question would lead to the secession of the Southern states, which they thought would be done peaceably. In their fight against slavery in the South the abolitionists vilified and abused the Southern people; their school primers were illustrated with pictures of Southern farmers with whip in hand chastising brutally the poor blacks. The book written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the drama therefrom, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," were a libel upon the Southern people; yet they served their purpose in inflaming the minds of the people North and prejudicing the South against the North. Mrs. Stowe may have visited a Southern plantation in which, the owner being absent, the overseer may have treated Some of the slaves in a cruel manner; but this would have been an isolated case, and not representing the Southern people as a class.