But shelby does have a lot of the tendencies of the supporters of the myth of the lost cause. Youre welcome. Yes, sir . According to gary gallagher, university of Virgin Islands concerning black troupes or lets say black support. He said that lee went into the getties Burg Campaign with 77,000 troops. But also he took with him about 10,000 slaves that not only were personal servants and laundry. They also were teamsters. They were cooks. And they may not have been firing artillery, but they may have been driving the horses on the thing. Is this a fair assumption. I think so. I dont know about the number of 10,000. It is possible because when lee invaded pennsylvania he needed a lot of transportation. He needed a lot of teamsters and a lot of people doing a lot of grung work, loading the grains taken into the state. The dolly was stripped. It was a huge Market Basket for lee. And maybe the best thing that came out of the campaign was the success in moving cattle and horses and mules and huge quantities of materials back. And having black slaves to do it would free up white soldiers. But what that doesnt get around is the fact these people were slaves. They were slaves. They were not subject to the uniform code of military justice. They did not get promotions. They did not get any military pair. They were assets. They were slaves, and they they would have gotten no respect. But they were resources. I think i mentioned them earlier. They were used to build fortifications and that kind of thing. So there were subsidiary jobs, something less than a full soldier they were allowed to do, and i think it makes it very difficult to study that issue where slaves used or not. Thats why you have to get into, lets see, what did Congress Officially authorize . They did not authorize slaves to be used. Sir . I think the book was wonderful, but something you touched on in the book and you didnt have as much time for tonight, though, is the idea of general sherman. And i read two biographies of him, and i just wanted to put as a question to you, do you think hes unfairly treated as a casualty of the myth and that he was actually an extremely effective general but he gets swupt up in this hatred in the myth and the reason to sympathize with the south. Right. Youre right. I didnt reach that point. Thats sort of my last point, had to do with the allegations that the north won only by total war and the allegation is primarily that sherman in georgia and the carolinas and sheridan are the classic examples of the north using total war. What i say is excuse me. There is a difference between total war and hard war. Total war is gain kus can, the 30 years war in germany, what the russians, germans did in world war ii. That is you have mass rapes and mass murders of civilians, intentional, deliberate destruction of civilian population. Total to me means unfettered. You use every weapon at your disposal and obliterate the army. What the north did is exercise hard war, hard war. And that term is used a lot, too, and i think its much more accurate to describe what happened. But the north did, yeah, what i went in and did a lot of damage. They burned barns. They burned crops. They killed animals. They basically imposed severe, critical economic damage on the south. But thats not total war. Thats not total war. And, of course, books continue to be written. What sherman did to us and things like that, and basically i said, well, sherman gave you brig because he didnt do around killing people. Very few deaths involved in his march and the same thing is true of s herks rigag. Minor sur masses, but basically go in and destroy the enemy infrastructure, and thats called hard war. And the morale of the south plumted as a result of what sherman was doing and many of the tens and thousands of deserters from lees army were people who in good faith went home because they felt a greater responsibility to their wives and children than they did to what was left of the confederate cause in 1864 and 1865. Thank you. Sir . I want to follow up in a way. I think the morale issue is something germane. I mean, you depicted very well, i think, the reasons for the myth. It was all very reasonable. But when you get into this notion of morale and mind set and the other factors that that did exist in the south that helped propagate the myth, i mean, they lost. They were ravaged, not just by the war, but by reconstruction. There was this even demic povty. There was a romantic ideal to begin with that existed there and then the war really deflated that. So i think, yes, it is reasonable to look at the data and sa, yeah, this is this myth is bogus. But that doesnt mean that its easily dealt