JOHN BROWN GORDON
This is a memorable historical quotations because it shows the extreme level of hypocrisy and lack of logic of which man is capable of when his way of life and world view is threatened. In this case Gordon sees the right to own slaves as a basic civil right. He does not see that the right of possessing slaves totally denies virtually all civil rights to the slave. In his and other Southern views, to assure a man’s liberty he had to have the right and freedom to deny freedom to others, torture others at will, destroy families and remove all hope and aspiration of some people.
John Brown Gordon (January 9, 1904) was an attorney, a slaveholding plantation owner, general in the Confederate States Army, and politician in the postwar years. By the end of the Civil War, he had become "one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals."(p241)
