Autograph letter signed by Lt. Col. Robert D. Funkhauser, Co.D, 49th Virginia, to John E. Boos (1879-1974). Maurertown, Shenandoah County, Virginia, August 1911. 4 pages, 4to. 

Here, a Confederate veteran writes to John E. Boos (1879-1974), an avid autograph collector, and attempts to convince him that the South was right to secede. 

He opens with challenging Boos's Northern bias: "It is the consensus of opinion of the entire South, and it cannot be refuted, and if you will…you will see that much of your Northern education & opinion…has been formed by hearing only the Northern side colored by prejudice etc…if you think the North was altogether right you must ignore the state rights under the Federal Constitutional provisions in the 1787 compact." 

He continues with his opinion on Virginia's secession and slavery's role as the cause of war: "old Va. never seceded until Mr. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops from Va. to coerce her sister states, about 17th April 1861. General Jubal A. Early & many others equally prominent in our State Convention refused to vote for Secession until the last minute hoping that some satisfactory compromise could be arrived at, deprecating all the time war as a final arbitrament…when war was inevitable we went into it as one man and do you think it could have been possible for us to have put up the grandest fight record in the annals of history on false premises? To save our slaves only when 3 out of 4 Confederate soldiers did not own a slave and if the fight had been to maintain our slaves that we bought of the North & paid for them would it have been criminal offense justifying an invasion of the South by Federal authorities?"

He unequivocally avers that the Confederacy's cause was noble: "You say that the North & South were both wrong in many things. I deny the charge, and shall ever maintain that ours was a just cause, that we were fighting for our liberty & states rights and not only against large odds in the North but against the whole world & with fire as well as sword." 

An early and vehement "Lost Cause" argument. 

SCARCE, much of John Boos' collection is now held at Vanderbilt University. 

[Civil War, Union, Confederate] [African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Enslavement, Abolition, Emancipation] [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs] [Reconstruction, Lost Cause Doctrine]