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will do so eventually.
If I live in this country, as I expect now to do, I shall feel it my duty to demean myself as a good and true citizen.
Yours affectionately,
Notes and Queries.
the term ‘Rebellion’ as applied to our ‘war between the States’ has been again and again repudiated by our most careful Confederate critics, and candid writers on the other side are coming to admit that the war was in no just sense a rebellion.
We took occasion in our December (1883) number to protest against the use of this inaccurate and offensive term as the title of the publications of the ‘War Records Office,’ and this elicited from our friend
E. L. Wells, of
Charleston, S. C., the following well put comment.
Our friend's point is decidedly ‘well taken’:
I notice that in criticising the title ‘Rebellion’ affixed to certain State Papers by
Washington officials, you speak of the term as one which is as inapplicable to the popular movement of 1861 as it would be if applied to that of 1776.
I should think there was this difference: The uprising of 1776, however justifiable morally it may have been, was legally a rebellion of disloyal subjects against their government.
The war of secession, on the contrary, was in pursuance of legal right, and was not against a “government” at all, but was waged between States or sectional populations; therefore, whatever else it may have been, it certainly
was not a “ Rebellion.”
Yours, very respectfully,
’ has been so often shown to be a myth that we have been both surprised and amused at seeing the story recently revived in one of our Southern papers, whose editor gives the following version of it:
