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Confederate Spy in Florida, Rebel, July 17, 2006
This review is from: Rebel Storehouse: Florida's Contribution to the Confederacy (Alabama Fire Ant) (Hardcover)
In the swamps of South Florida, Panther captured the Moccasin, a slivery Rebel spy. Florida was a slave state in 1862 and most of the planters depended on slave labor. They felt that the Confederacy had the God-given right to independence, just as the thirteen Colonies had managed to win and prove their right to rebel against England. Now, the Rebs were the patriots just as their forefathers in New England, USA, were.
A battle of wills between the Union major McKenzie and the Confederate spy, Lanie McMann. He'd been ordered to capture the South's most notorious spy, not knowing he'd find a beautiful young woman dressed in men's clothes. By law, she would have been hanged; for Lanie, however, her captor became her lover, even married her before becoming her bitter enemy. The Civil War, as I once explained it to a native of Belize, was brother against brother in the South, and was not about slavery per se. It was Lincoln's assassination by Rebel sympathizers which brought the issue of slavery into the possible reasons for such a horrific internal war.
She proved to be the most exasperating human being he'd ever come in contact with: willing to fight when all hope of any purpose or victory was gone, and never ever willing to accept defeat in any way, shape, or form. Just as I was taunted by a mean person saying "You're wrong," "Wrong again" because he claimed to be a 'professional. I have news for him, a pro does not have to always prove he's right. With the captured spy and her manly Union captor, some dialogue: "You have been beaten" and "You are beaten, and the point here is t hat you must learn that you can be beated." "You should be horsewhipped," she declared -- and she was right. No man tells a Southern woman that she is inferior in any way. We fight for our rights. Some years ago, I told a local historian had I loved back them, I might have been hanged as a Confederate spy (Knox. was Union) and he agreed. In one of his recent history lessons, he describes the defeated Jeff Davis as a man of 63 with receding hair and a wispy goatee who visited this town in 1871 who was on his way via rail to Memphis. Davis described Grant's administration as wicked and the writer had him and one of his generals, Forrest, as leaders of the klan which was started by a group of Pulaski lawyers and judges. It was not a part of the Confederacy at all, formed to protect Southerners from the Northern Carpetbaggers during reconstruction. We still need their protection, as a director of the Carpetbagger Theater hoodwinked $100,000 out of the City Council on false pretenses. We also need their protection from corrupt 'professionals.' "Her grief was real; the only way to find life again was to live," in any type of warfare. Other titles in this series about Florida's involvement in the Civil War include 'Captive' and 'Surrender.'
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