Having furnished most of the soldiers who conquered Mexican territory, the South was particularly outraged by the proposal to shut them out of its benefits. “When the warworn soldier returns to his home,” asked an Alabamian, “is he to be told that he cannot carry his property to the country won by his blood?”22 “No true Southron,” said scores of them, would submit to such “social and sectional degradation. … Death is preferable to acknowledged inferiority.”23
