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Our Confederate Ancestors: Part Two of The Daring Exploits of H. D. D. Twiggs and His Confederate Compatriots in the War Between the States

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A Series on the Daring Exploits of Our Confederate Ancestors in the War Between the States.

We were enjoying, as only ravenous soldiers could, the delicious viands which tender hands at home had stored away in this precious box, and had nearly finished our meal, when one of Tutt's men came in hurriedly and reported, with a voice quivering with emotion, that a well-known comrade of his command (whose name the writer has forgotten) had just been shot dead in the open fort by one of the enemy's sharpshooters from the house referred to.

Tutt sprang from his seat, his dark eyes flashing fire, with a strange light gleaming from their depths, and, looking into our faces said, with his own set hard with determination and with fury written in every line: "Boys, let us get a rifle apiece and drive the d____d rascals from that house and burn it, or perish in the attempt."

Part Two of
The Daring Exploits of H. D. D. Twiggs and His Confederate Compatriots in the War Between the States
Perilous Adventure at Battery Wagner

by Judge H. D. D. Twiggs from Confederate Veteran, Volume XII, No. 3, March, 1904

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : This is one of the most exciting stories I have ever read. The unbelievable daring of this handful of Confederates is so typical, which is why we celebrate them as the truest heroes of American history. Their cause of Southern independence in 1861 was identical to the cause of the Patriots of 1776, which is why George Washington in military uniform on his horse is front and center on the great seal of the Confederacy.

It is also why the most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South the year before the Cotton States seceded came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This article is dedicated, with great love and respect, to Lieut. Thomas Tutt, of Augusta, Georgia, and Sergt. Hopps, of Missouri, two of the five Confederates who carried out this daring raid but were killed later in the war.]

Perilous Adventure at Battery Wagner
by Judge H. D. D. Twiggs

The incident above referred to took place during the siege of Battery Wagner, S. C. , a short time prior to the bombardment and assault upon that historic fortress, which occurred on the 18th of July, 1863 resulting in the complete repulse of the Federal forces and one of the most signal defeats of the war, the numbers engaged considered.

Although the writer has heretofore given a very full account of this great siege, bombardment, and assault in several addresses which have been printed, no reference was made to the episode hereinafter described, for the reason that he was one of the participants in the same. At the special request, however, of some of his comrades in arms, he has consented to send it to the Confederate Veteran, being largely induced to do this because of the pleasure it gives him to make public the conduct of his gallant associates upon the occasion referred to.

Battery Wagner was situated on Morris Island about six miles from Charleston. Its guns commanded the channel approach to that city and the possession of the island was considered the key to the city. The enemy had affected a landing on the southern end of the island, and, moving up their forces, had erected heavy batteries about sixteen hundred yards in front of Wagner.

Harper's Weekly, Sept. 26, 1863, caption: ". . . View from the sea-face of Fort Wagner. . ."
Harper's Weekly, Sept. 26, 1863, caption: ". . . View from the sea-face of Fort Wagner. . ."

The latter, which was occupied by our troops, was a large bastioned earthwork inclosed (sic) on all sides and situated upon a neck of the island, so narrow that the battery (more properly fort) extended across its full width two hundred and fifty yards at that point from the sea or ship channel on one side to Vincent Creek, a deep and narrow salt water creek, on the other. This island was a long, low, sandy, sea island, almost denuded of growth, save a few palmetto trees, a number of which grew along the banks of Vincent Creek.

There was situated near the banks of this creek an abandoned two-story wooden house, much nearer the enemy's works than ours, of which a small body of the enemy took possession; in fact, it was the headquarters of their night outpost picket.

From the upper windows of this house a band of sharpshooters had been constantly harassing the garrison at Wagner by firing plunging shots in their elevated positions from their long-range rifles, and scarcely a day passed without some soldier in the open parade of the fort being killed or wounded. Of course, the troops could not perpetually remain under cover in the stifling bomb proofs, and they were necessarily exposed to the rifle fire of this unseen, pitiless foe, who were dealing death day after day in their ranks.

They could not be dislodged by infantry, as they had the near support of ten thousand troops in their own works (our force in the fort being less than fifteen hundred men). They could not be shelled by artillery, because we were day and night strengthening our works, and any artillery demonstrations from our fort would have resulted in drawing upon us the concentrated fire of all the enemy's siege guns, which were of the heaviest caliber.

In the daytime the enemy's pickets were withdrawn from the house, leaving only the sharpshooters to do their daily, deadly work. No feasible expedient could be adopted to burn this house and abate this intolerable nuisance, and night only brought relief to the harassed garrison.

It was possible for a very few men, under the shelter of the creek bank in places, and the scant growth of shrubbery, to approach the house in the daytime, but no considerable number could do so without being seen at once, and it was, of course, impracticable to do so at night.

At the time mentioned I was a captain of infantry, but detached from my regiment in Virginia, and was temporarily assigned to staff duty as inspector general with Gen. William B. Taliaferro, who commanded Fort Wagner.

Judge Twiggs, 1904, 41 years after destroying a nest of Yankee sharpshooters with four others.
Judge Twiggs, 1904, 41 years after destroying a nest of Yankee sharpshooters with four others.

One morning in July, 1863, about a week or ten days before the bombardment and assault on the 18th of July, described in my address, Lieut. J. J. Doughty, of Augusta, Ga., who is still living in that city, received a box of eatables from home, and invited the writer, Lieut. W. M. Hitt, and Lieut. Thomas Tutt, also of Augusta at that time, and Sergt. Hopps, from Missouri, to dine with him in his quarters in the fort.

Around 1904.
Around 1904.
Around 1904.
Around 1904.

We were enjoying, as only ravenous soldiers could, the delicious viands which tender hands at home had stored away in this precious box, and had nearly finished our meal, when one of Tutt's men came in hurriedly and reported, with a voice quivering with emotion, that a well-known comrade of his command (whose name the writer has forgotten) had just been shot dead in the open fort by one of the enemy's sharpshooters from the house referred to.

Tutt sprang from his seat, his dark eyes flashing fire, with a strange light gleaming from their depths, and, looking into our faces said, with his own set hard with determination and with fury written in every line: "Boys, let us get a rifle apiece and drive the d____d rascals from that house and burn it, or perish in the attempt."

There were five of us present---Tutt, Doughty, Hitt, Hopps, and myself in the party. We were all quite young, and the strange magnetism of Tutt, who was our senior by several years, and his determined bearing immediately fired us all with an enthusiasm which I will never forget, and, without taking time to reflect upon the peril or the consequences of the enterprise, we agreed, and at once formed our plan of action. Gen. Taliaferro had gone that day to the city of Charleston, and, in his absence, the command of the fort devolved upon Col. Charles H. Olmstead, formerly of this city, but now living in New York.

We quickly made our plans, and, each procuring a rifle and ammunition, we secretly left the fort about 3 p.m. on the perilous expedition. Being a staff officer, I was enabled to pass the party out at the sally port, and, crouching low and stealthily, in Indian file, Tutt being in the lead, we glided slowly up the creek, taking advantage of its banks, the palmetto trees, and occasional sand dunes to hide us from view (which we found it to be a very difficult matter to do).

The house was about fifty yards from the creek, and, when we had reached a point about one hundred yards from it, we halted, and, lying down together behind some stunted shrubbery, held a council of war. It was impossible to retreat then, because the sharpshooters had evidently seen some movement, and, with their rifles in hand, we could see them at the windows, looking intently in our direction.

The space between us and the house was a perfectly open sand area, without the slightest shelter or protection. There was not a moment to lose, as the enemy was growing more and more suspicious. There were eight sharpshooters in the house, but at the time we did not know the number. There were only five of us.

We at once concluded to make a dash for the house. The enemy were at the windows on the side of the house looking toward our fort. We had crept to a point nearly opposite the end, so that they could only get a few oblique shots at us from the windows before we could pass the line of fire, the end of the house interposing its friendly shelter after passing this line.

At a signal from Tutt (who, by common consent, became our leader), and on the full run we rushed for the building, a scattering volley being fired at us, providentially without effect. Meeting together on the opposite side of the house, we ran pellmell into the building through the open door in the back of the same.

The enemy seemed stunned by the suddenness of the attack, and we were fairly in the hall before they were enabled to start down the narrow stairway to meet us. A general fusillade followed. The vivid flashes of the rifles lighting up the hall, which was soon filled with dense smoke, caused them to retreat to their former position, and Tutt, raving like a demon, started upstairs alone, but we pulled him back.

He then, in a loud voice, ordered the house set on fire, which we at once did, retiring to the open area in the rear after the fire had made considerable headway, which we started immediately under the stairsteps. The building was old and dry, and burnt like tinder, and it was a case of the enemy being cremated or leaving the house. Some of them ran out of the doors, and others jumped from the windows. We stood around with our rifles cocked, firing at them as they appeared. They made a feeble resistance, shooting wildly, and the survivors took to their heels. Several of them were shot and the others made good their escape.

By this time the musketry and the burning building had aroused the respective garrisons of the two forts, which swarmed in masses on their parapets; we were at easy rifle range of the Yankee garrison, and if we attempted to retreat across the open area of sand, death to us would have been the inevitable result. The only way back by the creek margin was already swept by a hurricane of bullets, the enemy evidently supposing that there was a large body of us concealed in the shrubbery near the now consumed house. We realized too late that we were caught like rats in a trap.

In front of us, two hundred yards nearer the enemy's works, was a little hillock or sand dune on this open area of sand, and, although it brought us much nearer the Federal works, we made a dash for it in order to shelter ourselves from the terrific fire which was now concentrated upon us by the thoroughly aroused Yankee garrison. With only a slight wound received by Hopps, though some of us had our clothing torn by bullets, we providentially gained the sand hill, which was only a few feet higher than the surrounding plane, and each of us sank down at full length behind it, and for the time being were comparatively safe from the enemy's leaden missiles, which sung around us, intermixed with that ominous sound of the bullet----s---t, s---t, s---t----familiar to all soldiers who saw service in that war.

It was our purpose in seeking this shelter to remain there until night had set in then slip back to Wagner under cover of darkness, but it was not so ordered. After lying in the position described, under the pitiless rays of a scorching July sun for some little time, the enemy's fire greatly slackened and I stealthily peeped over the sand dune to take an observation, when, to my horror, I saw a full company of Yankee infantry, which had silently moved out of their works, rapidly approaching us, the sunlight flashing from their bright bayonets as they marched.

Turning to my companions, I said: "Boys, look yonder; it's all up with us now." Certain death or capture indeed seemed inevitable, and we each realized it.

The invincible Tutt, however, swore that he would not be taken alive and seemed inexorable in this determination, although we assured him that any resistance we might then make would be unavailing against such a body of men, numbering thirty of forty rifles, and would end in our butchery by an exasperated foe.

Tutt persisted, however, and, indignantly scorning the idea of surrender, without further parley discharged his rifle full at the approaching enemy. This, of course, settled the question, as nothing was then left to us but to stand by our reckless and intrepid comrade, which we did for all we were worth.

With elbow touching elbow, and our heads alone visible above the sand bank, we kept up a steady fire upon the line of blue rapidly nearing us. At the first volley they halted, returned the fire, and then with huzzas came for us on the full run. The situation was appalling, but we continued to pour our fire into them.

Occupying a position prone on the sand, and our vision obscured by the smoke of the guns, we did not see the effect of our shots, and did not know until afterwards informed by Col. Olmstead, who watched the scene closely with his field glass, that several of the enemy were carried off by their comrades.

What was it, then, that shook the island from center to circumference? Turning our heads in the direction of the sound, we witnessed a sight which sent the blood tingling in our veins. The entire face of Wagner were suddenly opened upon the approaching Federal infantry. Charlie Olmstead, my old schoolmate, who was commanding in the absence of Gen. Taliaferro, had come to the rescue.

The artillery fire, conducted by that accomplished and gallant soldier, Lieut. Col. J. C. Simpkins, of South Carolina, and chief of artillery, was directed with wonderful precision, and the shells passing over our heads and bursting beyond us uncomfortably close, in the very face of the enemy, scattered them like chaff before the wind.

But something we had not counted on followed. The Yankee fort immediately opened their batteries of heavy guns upon Wagner, and one of the most terrific artillery duels I ever witnessed during the war was thus precipitated between the respective forts, and all stirred up by our little band.

The scene was grand and awe-inspiring, both sides shelling furiously over our heads at each other. Of course all the infantry on both sides were driven from the parapets by this terrific artillery fire. It was plain that this demonstration on the part of Col. Olmstead was made to safely cover our retreat, and we rapidly raced for our works through the heavy sand and under the rays of the hottest sun I ever felt. We arrived safely, completely winded and exhausted.

Once in the fort we separated, and silently crept to our respective quarters. Col. Olmstead soon made his appearance and placed the writer under arrest. The Colonel had, without orders, assumed a grave responsibility in the prompt and gallant action he had taken to save us, and save us he did, as but for his conduct not one of us would have been left to tell the tale.

The heavy firing on the island had greatly excited the people in Charleston, and Gen. Taliaferro hurried back to the fort, reaching it a little after dark. Olmstead met him at this boat landing at Cummings Point and related to this grim old soldier all that had passed. They then came together into my quarters (also the quarters of the General), and, feigning sleep, I overheard their conversation.

"Well," said the General, "the boys destroyed that infernal nuisance, the house, did they?"

"Yes," responded Olmstead.

"Good," grunted the old General. Then, nodding toward me as I lay on the floor, "Release him from arrest when he wakes up," which Charlie was only too glad, of course, to do.

Tutt and Hopps not long afterwards joined the ranks of that great army underground---they were spared the great sorrow of the final disaster, when the sun of the Confederacy went down at Appomattox. They were both killed. Three of us survive---J. J. Doughty, of Augusta, Ga.; William M. Hitt, now of Atlanta, Ga.; and the writer. "May both these boys be spared for many years to come, for truer soldiers and more gallant men never faced a foe!"

Our Confederate Ancestors: Part One of The Daring Exploits of H. D. D. Twiggs and His Confederate Compatriots in the War Between the States

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A Series on the Daring Exploits of Our Confederate Ancestors in the War Between the States.

A small redbird was found at the close of the bombardment with a wing torn from its body as it flew across the terreplein of the fort, and again three men who volunteered to draw a bucket of water from a shallow well, not more than twenty feet distance from the entrance of the bombproof of the fort, were all killed before they reached the well.

Part One of
The Daring Exploits of H. D. D. Twiggs and His Confederate Compatriots in the War Between the States
Maj. H. D. D. Twiggs at Battery Wagner

by Col. Henry D. Capers, Twelfth Battalion Georgia Artillery from Confederate Veteran, Vol. X, No. 1, January, 1902.

Confederate Battery Wagner on Morris Island, next to Folly Island and James Island.
Confederate Battery Wagner on Morris Island, next to Folly Island and James Island.

[From] Col. Henry D. Capers, who commanded the Twelfth Battalion Georgia Artillery:

The memorable siege and defense of Charleston, S. C. , from its commencement in June, 1863, to the evacuation of that city by the Confederate forces in February, 1865, presents one of the most interesting records in the annals of war. In all the details of this heroic defense, in all that fully illustrates the devotion of the patriot garrison, in the many incidents of superb courage, heroic discharge of duty, manly endurance, and personal gallantry, there can be found no record superior to that made in the defense of Forts Wagner and Sumter, the outposts of the devoted city.

Permit me to describe a single incident which will, in a measure, give some idea of the endurance, courage, and soldierly bearing which made every day and every hour of the siege of Fort Wagner one of the most brilliant, as it certainly was one of the most terrific, experiences of the "war between the States."

In the month of August I received orders at my camp, near Savannah, Ga., to report without delay to Gen. Beauregard at Charleston with my gallant comrades of the Twelfth Georgia Battalion of Artillery. On reaching the city we were ordered to report to the officer commanding at Fort Wagner, on Morris Island, the extreme outpost on the sea front of the city and six miles therefrom.

The incident referred to will illustrate the ordeal the garrison at Fort Wagner passed through and endured for more than a year. At the time of this occurrence the fort was in command of Brig. Gen. W. B. Taliaferro, a typical Virginia knight "Sans peur et sans reproche."

July 18, 1863, will long be remembered as one of the most noted and terrible bombardments known to history. It was followed by an assault at sunset, unsurpassed for its gallantry and fury.

With the first dawn of day the large fleet of the enemy's monitors, battle ships, and their Ajax of floating batteries, the renowned Ironsides, steamed close in and took position in the sea front of Wagner. Before the sun had sent one cheering beam to brighten the gloom of this foggy morning, there came an eleven-inch shell from the Ironsides, the signal shot for the terrific bombardments referred to.

Think of the guns from five monitors, guns of the heaviest caliber, whose  fifteen-inch shells were exploding every few seconds over, against, and within the parapet walls of a bastioned earthwork that did not occupy the area of two acres; add to this the steady fire of the Ironsides, with her immense batteries of eleven-inch guns, six on each side, and one each in the bow and stern; to this add the accurate fire from two sloops, carrying batteries of two hundred pound rifle guns, and of five land batteries constructed on the island, with the heaviest modern armaments, within seventeen hundred yards of Wagner, and the reader may have some idea of the infernal rain of death-dealing shot and shell that fell upon the fort on that long and memorable day.

Bombardment of Battery Wagner by Monitors and ships off shore.
Bombardment of Battery Wagner by Monitors and ships off shore.

There were some vivid illustrations. A small redbird was found at the close of the bombardment with  a wing torn from its body as it flew across the terreplein of the fort, and again three men who volunteered to draw a bucket of water from a shallow well, not more than  twenty feet distance from the entrance of the bombproof of the fort, were all killed before they reached the well.

Late in the afternoon, in the midst of this terrific fire, it became necessary to ascertain the movement of the Federal troops in front of the fort and within the enemy's fortifications. A large body of their infantry, who were known to be formed behind the hills, had been ordered to assault Wagner as soon as the bombardment ceased, and, as the Federal general supposed, the fort would be practically dismantled, and what was left of the garrison demoralized by the bombardment.

As it was growing late, and the critical time approaching for the deadly assault, which was afterwards made, it became necessary (for the safety of the garrison) to learn whether the forward movement on the part of the assaulting column had commenced. Gen. Taliaferro communicated his anxiety to the members of his staff grouped about him in the bombproof, but hesitated to designate an officer to discharge this perilous duty.

Maj. H. D. D. Twiggs, then attached to the general's staff as inspector general (afterwards lieutenant colonel of his regiment, and now Judge Twiggs, of Savannah), a handsome and gallant representative of a chivalrous family, quietly stepped in front of his chief, volunteered to leave the bombproof, to ascend the parapet, and make the necessary observation.

I saw him when he left us, and I felt then, as did others, that it would be the last service that Twiggs would render for his country. I noticed Gen. Taliaferro standing near the entrance of the bombproof with the greatest solicitude depicted on his face, and could see from the movement of his lips that he was asking the intervention of Divine Providence in behalf of his gallant staff officer.

With the utmost coolness Maj. Twiggs passed out into the exposed and open area, heedless of the storm of death falling all around him, reached the parapet of the fort, ascended it to its very summit, and standing there midst the bursting shells, flashing and thundering above and around him, he deliberately raised his field glasses and surveyed the enemy's batteries and surrounding sand hills, with apparently as much self-possession as if he were in an opera house and looking at the form and features of a prima donna.

He had not remained in that position more than one minute when a fifteen-inch shell descended almost vertically, striking the parapet within two feet in front of him, and, burying itself in the earth, exploded with terrific force. Instantly, with a great cloud of earth and sand, Maj. Twiggs was thrown up into the air six or eight feet, and fell back from the parapet down upon the terreplein of the fort, completely covered with sand, and to all appearances dead.

Several of us watching him immediately rushed to where he was lying, and bore his apparently lifeless body into the bombproof. To our surprise he opened his eyes and made his report to Gen. Taliaferro. "General," he said, "the enemy are moving to the assault." He then became unconscious, but after the application of such restoratives as were at command the surgeon exclaimed: "He is not dead, General!"

The next day Maj. Twiggs was fast recovering from a severe concussion of the brain, and in a short time rejoined his regiment in Virginia, from which he had been temporarily detached for staff duty.

While I was an eyewitness to many "close calls" during the civil war, and had a few myself, I have always regarded the heroism of Maj. Twiggs as not only unsurpassed during the war, but his escape from death at Fort Wagner was most remarkable.

The Real Jim Crow, How Northern Jim Crow Laws Moved South – Guest post by Leonard M. “Mike” Scruggs

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The Real Jim Crow
How Northern Jim Crow Laws Moved South
Guest post by Leonard M. "Mike" Scruggs
Thomas D. Rice, the original Jim Crow, in costume.
Thomas D. Rice, the original Jim Crow, in costume.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : I am delighted to publish this article by Mike Scruggs, historian, author, columnist for The Times Examiner out of Greenville, South Carolina. I have Mike's 359 page illustrated book, The Un-Civil War, Shattering the Historical Myths, which promises to be outstanding. I look forward to reviewing it in the next few weeks.

This article contains much historical detail and makes it clear why Southern states, after the horrors of Reconstruction, felt an imperative to copy the Jim Crow laws of the Northern states. Before Reconstruction, the South was integrated, by necessity, according to C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which produced an intimacy between blacks and whites not found anywhere else in the country. That's not to say that race relations were always great, but they were far better in the South than in the North and the West. Blacks and whites in the South did not recoil from each other as did the white Yankee women at the end of Gone with the Wind with the thought of Mammy touching their children. Scarlett O'Hara found that absurd. That is a good case of fiction perfectly illustrating reality.

The North and West were the opposite of the South. Blacks and whites were rigidly segregated, by custom, law, or both.

There are links to The Times Examiner website, Mike's columns, and to Mike's books, below, after his bio and article.

You will love Mike's other columns. They are outstanding just like this one. To give you a sampling, go to The Times Examiner website and check out: "Social Justice Gone Mad, The Poisoned Chalice of Critical Race Theory"; "States Rights and the Future of Liberty, Remembering John C. Calhoun"; "The Civil War and Just War Doctrine, Beneath the Virtue-signaling Propaganda of Total War"; and "The Legacies of Reconstruction, How "White Supremacy" Was Born and Repainted".]

Mike Scruggs is the author of two books - The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths; and Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You - and over 600 articles on military history, national security, intelligent design, genealogical genetics, immigration, current political affairs, Islam, and the Middle East.

He holds a BS degree from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Stanford University. A former USAF intelligence officer and Air Commando, he is a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War and holds the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and Air Medal. He is a retired First Vice President for a major national financial services firm and former Chairman of the Board of a classical Christian school.

The Real Jim Crow
By Mike Scruggs

(First published in The Times Examiner, 24 May 2021; bold emphasis, below, is from the author)

How Northern Jim Crow Laws Moved South

“Jim Crow” was the stage name of New York actor Thomas D. Rice (1808-1860), who made a career of minstrel performances in blackface and thus popularized that form of entertainment. The name “Jim Crow” came from a popular 1832 song, “Jump Jim Crow,” written and sung by Rice and became a common term referring to African-Americans.  Later it became a nickname for legislation restricting the rights of African-Americans.

Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, who put the term "Jim Crow" into our lexicon.
Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, who put the term "Jim Crow" into our lexicon.

Blackface is not necessarily demeaning. Rice may have based his character on slave folk tales about a clever trickster.

Al Jolson (1886-1950), a Russian Jewish immigrant, and the most popular and beloved American entertainer beginning with the movie The Jazz Singer in 1927 and lasting for many decades, was said to be the “king of blackface.”  Jolson’s personal feelings and many of his songs were certainly sympathetic to African-Americans.

What most people do not know is that Jim Crow laws first originated in Northern States.  Northern Jim Crow Laws were the model for Southern States following the ruin, corruption, and oppression of Reconstruction. As author C. Vann Woodward has stated, “Jim Crow has had a strange career.”

In Alexis de Toqueville’s 1835 book,  Democracy in America, he wrote that "the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the States that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known."

Before the “Civil” War, most Northern States had discriminatory laws against blacks. In 1847, Ohioans prohibited the settlement of the 518 emancipated slaves of the Virginia statesman John Randolph.  An Ohio congressman threatened armed force to stop any emancipated blacks who tried to cross the border into Ohio.  In 1860, only Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine allowed blacks to vote.

In the 1840s, New Jersey and Connecticut amended their constitutions to prohibit black suffrage. Most Northern States did not want blacks within their borders. Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, and Illinois were among the most restrictive.

In an 1854 speech on Kansas and Nebraska becoming states, Abraham Lincoln said that it was about “preserving these states for the homes of free white people.”   Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull explained that "there is a great aversion in the West---I know it to be so in my State---against having free Negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the Negro."

Illinois had some of the strongest anti-black laws. The 1854 Illinois Black Laws prohibited blacks from entering the state for more than 10 days under penalty of arrest and required posting of a $1,000 bond to assure their good behavior. Anyone who hired a black could be fined $500, which was a considerable sum at the time. In a September 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas, in Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln insisted vigorously:

I will say that I am not…in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office…

Lincoln was for gradual slave-owner compensated emancipation of slaves, a common sentiment in both North and South, but he was pessimistic about blacks and whites coexisting in the same country. He favored their peaceful deportation to the Caribbean, Central America, or Africa.

In an 1852 eulogy of Henry Clay, he quoted Clay’s words on colonization of blacks back to Africa approvingly:

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children…they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law, and liberty.

In his February 27, 1860, Cooper Union speech, he advocated the peaceful deportation of blacks so that their places could be filled by “free white laborers.”

After the War, in late 1865, Connecticut and Michigan voters rejected black voting rights. In 1867 and 1868, voters in Ohio, Minnesota, and Kansas also refused to extend the right to vote to blacks. In 1868, 12 Northern and Midwestern states still either prohibited or sharply limited black voting rights.

Yet Reconstruction architect, Republican House Chairman of the Rules Committee,  Thaddeus Stephens,  had managed to get 700,000 blacks registered  in the South, while disenfranchising at least 250,000 Confederate veterans. This was the means of maintaining Republican carpetbagger control of 11 Southern states and preserving a Radical Republican majority in the U.S. House.

The years of military occupation and Radical Republican control in the South were sometimes spoken of as the years of “Negro Rule," or “Negro Supremacy,” although the real power rested with corrupt Federal politicians and their agents along with carpetbagger opportunists and local scalawags.  These were years of extremely exploitive, corrupt, and irresponsible state and local governments, where most of the native whites felt they had no rights or recourse to justice. Reconstruction was no Marshall Plan to rebuild the South’s economy. It was all about plunder and building Radical Republican political power in the South and the nation. Stirring up black resentment and hatred against their former Democrat masters was the key political strategy.

This high-handed exploitation and tyranny resulted in colossal, bankrupting, tax-wild misgovernment, which kept the South in poverty until its extraordinarily exploitive tariff burden was relieved by President Woodrow Wilson’s Underwood Tariff Act in 1913. The racial tensions built up during Reconstruction, however, are still exploited by politicians. Only now it is the Democrats applying the maxims of social Marxism that are destroying the whole country by stirring racial resentment and hatred.

Although the highest levels of tyranny and misgovernment came from the Federal Government through the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and subsequent acts and policies, local Reconstruction policies were usually enforced by the Union League. Federal Army forces were constantly being reduced, so Union League militias became the main armed force supporting the carpetbagger governments.

The Union League was founded in 1862 to support the Union war effort. After the War, the Union League (or Loyal League) was established in the occupied territories to help the carpetbagger governments stay in power.  Loyalist whites soon dropped out of the League except for the carpetbagger politicians and Federal Army officers who formed its key leadership.

Union League militias numbered about 250,000 troops in 10 Southern States. North Carolina Governor William Holden controlled 80,000 of them.  The vast majority of the enlisted force were former slaves, and about 100,000 had served in the Union Army. Most Union League militiamen, both Union veterans and ex-slaves, wore the Union Army uniform.

Most people today know something about the Ku Klux Klan but nothing about the Union League. Yet the Union League perpetrated far more violence against both blacks and whites in the post Civil War Reconstruction years of 1865 to 1877 than the Klan ever has. The birth of the Klan was in fact a response to Union League bullying, violence, and murder. Why have these black militias virtually disappeared from history?  The memory of such is just too embarrassing not to hide.

Union League meetings were conducted as a mystical secret society with secret rituals. Meetings were especially devoted to stirring up enmity between blacks and whites.  A catechism written by Radical Republicans in Congress was used in Union League meetings to create an unreasonable sense of entitlement, grievance, and resentment. They were taught that Northern Republican whites were their friends and allies and that white Southerners and Democrats were enemies to be hated and despised.

Burning the barns and sometimes houses of whites were typical Union League activities. There were Union League barn burnings and other destruction in every North Carolina county. During a single week of 1869 in Gaston County, nine barns were burned.  In two months of the same year in Edgecombe County, two churches, several cotton gins, a cotton factory, and many barns and homes were burned.  The Raleigh Sentinel reported on August 29 that year that ten Union League companies had terrorized the Goldsboro area and committed violent depredations of all sorts. It reported the actions of the troops “so violent that it was unsafe for women to leave their homes.” This was all part of the Reconstruction mandate to remake the South.

Former Confederate General John B. Gordon, later U.S. Senator and Governor of Georgia, testified in 1871 to the Joint Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States that:

The first and main reason (for the Klan) was the organization of the Union League….[It] was therefore necessary to protect our families from outrage and preserve our own lives, to have something that we could regard as a brotherhood---a combination of the best men of the country to act purely in self defense.

A minority report from the Congressional Committee that investigated the Klan in 1871 is a good summary of why many white Southerners turned to the Klan for protection. The majority report had simply condemned the Klan, which was the electioneering purpose of the committee in the first place. But the minority report of eight Northern Democrats, which had some conservative Republican support, gave a more useful and fairer appraisal.  Here is an excerpt of their report:

…when the courts were closed and Federal officers, who were by Congress absolute rulers and dispensers of what they called justice, ignored, insulted and trampled upon the rights of the ostracized and disenfranchised white men while officials pandered to the enfranchised negro on whose vote they rallied, in short, when people saw that they had no rights which were respected, no protection from insult, no security, even for their wives and children, and that what little they had saved from the ravages of war was being confiscated by taxation…many of them took the law into their own hands and did deeds of violence which we neither justify or excuse.  But all history shows that bad government will make bad citizens.

As Reconstruction ended, Southern legislatures wanted to end the corruption and misrule they had suffered. They believed the solution was to copy the example of Jim Crow laws in 12 Northern States.

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Link to The Times Examiner website: www.timesexaminer.com

Link to Mike's columns at The Times Examiner: https://www.timesexaminer.com/mike-scruggs

Link to Mike's book website: https://www.universalmediainc.org/books/. His books are also available on Amazon and other places.

Secessionville, Assault on Charleston by Patrick Brennan – Review by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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A Review of

Secessionville, Assault on Charleston by Patrick Brennan

De Capo Press, second edition, (Campbell, CA: Savas Publishing Company), 1996, 408 pages, hardback, numerous maps and pictures, Order of Battle, interview with the author, detailed explanatory endnotes, comprehensive bibliography, index. Cover states that this is: "The second title in our acclaimed 'Battles & Campaigns of the Carolinas' series."

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

9781882810086-56K

Patrick Brennan's Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, is an exceptional, exciting and thorough book that all people who are interested in the War Between the States should own.

It will also appeal greatly to those who love a good fight in which the underdog, outnumbered 6,600 to 500 at the beginning of the battle, outthinks his enemy and defeats him with ingenuity as well as guts.

The Battle of Secessionville was of major significance to the entire War Between the States. If the Confederates had lost, Charleston might have been lost in 1862 thus changing the course of history. The Southern victory kept the Yankees out of the city they wanted to capture or destroy worst than any other place in the country.

Charleston was symbolic to the North, but critical and symbolic to the South. Gen. Lee had said that Charleston was "to be fought street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand upon."

A resolution stated the same thing:

Resolved, That the governor and Executive Council concur in opinion with the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, that Charleston should be defended at any cost of life or property, and that in their deliberate judgment they would prefer a repulse of the enemy with the entire city in ruins to an evacuation or surrender on any terms whatever.

The battle began around 4:30 a.m. (would be 5:30 a.m. today) Monday, June 16, 1862 in light rain but because of the many units involved and the terrain of saltwater creeks and pluff mud, plus the brilliant Confederate defenses and the staggered Union attack, there is a lot to understand.

Excellent accounts of the battle have been written by many in more ranging works such as E. Milby Burton in The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865; John Johnson in The Defense of Charleston Harbor, 1863-1865; and former Confederate Major-General Samuel Jones in The Siege of Charleston, and the Operations on the South Atlantic Coast in the War Among the States.

And there have been vivid accounts of the battle by participants focusing on their units and experiences, as well as newspaper accounts and other primary sources, but all this wonderful material was widely scattered until the Northerner Patrick Brennan, with his love of Charleston and his Charleston connection, came along and gathered most of it up, organized it and put it in his book.

Brennan is a musician as well as a lover of history and the War Between the States. He was playing at Myskyn's on Market Street in downtown Charleston (nice place but I liked Cap't Harry's better!). Brennan writes:

I trace my interest in the Battle of Secessionville to a visit I made to Charleston in January 1990. I'm a musician by trade, and my band had been booked into Myskyn's, a music club in downtown Charleston. On the day I hit town, armed with Blue and Gray Magazine's tour of Civil War Charleston, I found Secessionville and the remains of Fort Lamar. Hurricane Hugo had recently devastated the area, and the fields looked like I had just missed the fight. Needless to say, I was tremendously moved. Standing on the right flank of the fort, I resolved to write something about the battle. So, as odd as it may seem, it was that performance of Dick Holliday and the Bamboo Gang at a club only five miles from the Secessionville battlefield that started the journey that ends here.1

When the book arrived at my house a week ago, I thumbed through it then turned to June 16, 1862 and could not put it down for 65 carefully read pages, until I had to leave to meet a friend.

The beauty of Brennan's book is that, inasmuch as any author can cover a complicated subject in a single work, he has everything in this book. He knows it is complicated so he strives to make it all understandable by using maps and a device often used in fiction: the use of informal sections within a chapter. One section might present Confederate action, and the next, Union action going on at the same time.

It keeps the material organized and clear.

Most of the maps are adequate though a couple are confusing, but that does not affect Brennan's excellent narrative. This is a well-written, clearly-written, well-organized book that took Brennan six years to write.

He gives the background in the Prologue, with the Union navy's victory at Port Royal, and Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River. He then focuses on Charleston.

There is a lot of behind-the-scenes tension, intrigue, jealously and rivalry among officers in both armies, some of whom are talented and do their jobs well, and some are not, just as in any human endeavor. Brennan explains all of this well.

There are 22 pictures of various commanders on both sides which greatly enhance the narrative. Most of the pictures are poorly reproduced. They are too dark and some a little blurry, but, again, this takes nothing from Brennan's outstanding writing. His short biographies and histories of the main participants along with the pictures tell the story well.

When he gets closer to the battle, Brennan gives us a daily account of all action starting with June 4, 1862, and running past the battle to June 21, 1862.

The battle date, June 16, 1862, covers 104 pages.

The "Cartography" includes 23 maps and Brennan has done a brilliant thing by having a full-page map every 10 minutes throughout the entire battle showing the positions of the various units engaged. You can see how the battle developed and who was in action and where. He starts at 4:30 a.m. with the first map, and the penultimate covers 5:50 - 6:00 a.m., then the last one is 6:00 - 8:30 a.m.

In Chapter Seven, "Positions, Places," under the heading Monday, June 16, 1862, Brennan writes:

With a lusty cheer the Michigan line charged forward, passing over a combination ditch and hedge that some of the men mistook for rifle pits. As the Federals drove forward, the front face of the Confederate battery erupted in a serious of fiery explosions. A deafening roar rent the air, then another, then a third. In one terrifying moment, the center of the Michigan line melted before a hissing spray of Confederate shell and canister. Broken and bleeding bodies shivered by the blasts littered the patchy cotton rows, while those still standing pressed forward into the metal storm. 'Every discharge of their old churn (as we called it) would pass through the ranks of our brave boys and  mow them down like grass before a scythe,' recalled one veteran, 'but with dogged persistence they closed ranks and pushed on with the federal yell.' But even as the main line of the 8th Michigan was rocked by the artillery blasts, elements of the 'forlorn hope'---companies C and H---were covering the final yards fronting the battery.2

The section the above paragraph is in includes the following full-page map of the unit positions at 4:30 a.m., 16 June 1862.

Secessionville-Review-MAP-p170 52K

In the next section comes the Confederate action. Three paragraphs into it, Brennan writes:

The sentinel roused the slumbering Colonel Lamar, who rose to see the distant blue formations gelling before his eyes. Already, the 150 cannoneers of the two companies that had slept along the parapet were being awakened by the shouts of excited orderlies. The colonel turned to a waiting aid and issued firm orders: Get Gaillard's and Smith's battalions from their Secessionville camps up to support the battery immediately, then find General Evans and inform him of the attack. Lamar then turned to Lt. J. W. Moseley at the Columbiad and ordered him to load the 8-inch gun with canister (a metal container holding dozens of small round iron balls). Lamar himself sprang onto the chassis and aimed the piece, setting the sights on the center of the surging Federal line. To the left of the Columbiad, Sgt. James Baggott swung his 24-lb. artillery piece into action, aimed it, and blasted off the fort's first response to the attack. Lamar, beaten to the draw by Baggott by just a few seconds, tugged the Columbiad's lanyard and sent a storm of canister screeching into the enemy's line. The battle was joined.3

After the battle, there were scenes of carnage everywhere. Brennan writes:

Similar scenes marked the fields north of the marsh. Once the Federals disappeared from that sector, small Confederate parties moved out from the slashing to investigate the ground that the enemy had held. Benjamin Sheppard from the Eutaw Battalion wrote his mother that although the battle was bad, 'The scene after the battle is worse than all. . . I saw men laying  in all kinds of postures, some looked as though they were praying after they were wounded and died.' Augustine Smyth accompanied a squad that was detailed to gather arms from the Washington Light Infantry's front. 'Such a scene I wish never again to witness,' he wrote:

Twenty or thirty men lay stretched out on a small field, wounded, dying, & dead. One must have been in the Act of loading his gun when a grapeshot took out the whole of his back, for he lay dead with his hands raised, just as if he were even then loading. Another one lay close by with his leg entirely shot away, & only a piece of skin connecting his knee and his thigh. Many were in the water, dead, in a small creek between them and Secessionvillle, one poor fellow, wounded in his back and throat, lay in the water close to the bank, but unable to get out, while tide was up to his shoulders and continually rising. We helped him up and gave him water, & left him on the field for the litters to carry off.4

Later, when Union prisoners were taken into Charleston, Brennan writes:

A large crowd gathered at the Charleston wharf on the afternoon of the 16th to meet a tugboat bearing news of the morning battle that was waged just five miles away. Making a line from Fort Johnson, the tug docked around 2 p.m. Soon, a group of bedraggled Federals filed off the boat, greeted by 'shouts and the use of hard names,' remembered one. The Confederate guards moved forward to control the rowdy civilians, such was the passion of the moment. One not particularly charitable Charlestonian counted 30 prisoners and noted 'Nearly all of them have the appearance of veritable cut-throats, and they are, evidently, the scum of the communities from which they were recruited.' Someone recognized one captured Federal as Napoleon Mayo, an entertainer who had appeared in Charleston as member of 'Matt Peel's strolling Negro troupe.' With catcalls echoing in their ears, the Northerners marched down East Bay to Broad Street where they entered the Guard House to spend their first night in captivity.5

There were two brothers in the battle, one Confederate, one Union. Brennan writes about Union troops when they were back in their camp:

Most of the Union troops were too spent to record their thoughts immediately, but within a few hours, one Northerner fought off his exhaustion to write a letter to his wife. The Highlanders' flag bearer, Alexander Campbell, began, 'I am all safe. . . we are very tired,' then went on to describe in some detail his role in the battle. In mid-letter he revealed a startling bit of news: 'Brither James was in the fort.' Campbell spoke of a wounded Confederate who told him that his brother was a lieutenant in the Union Light Infantry of the Charleston Battalion, a unit that had fought on the fort's right flank. Campbell concluded, '[P]erhaps he is Killed for our guns shelled them terrebly (sic),' but he determined to find out his brother's fate. . . . 6

I take issue with one thing Brennan said. In the Prologue, page XII, he said: "Abraham Lincoln's November election provoked Carolinian leaders into elucidating a uniquely Southern view of states' rights. In December of 1860, they invoked what they saw as their constitutional prerogative and voted to secede from the Federal union."

Seceding from the Union is not a "uniquely Southern view of states' rights." New England states threatened to secede five times in the antebellum era over the War of 1812 (treasonous Hartford Convention), the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas, and at other times when they felt their political power was being diluted. Nobody questioned the right of secession back then, and it was certainly a right.

Before acceding to the Constitution, three states specifically reserved the right of secession: New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Because all the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, the other states had it too because all states entered the Union as exact equals.

For ten years the North used hate against the South to rally votes so they could use their larger population to take over the government. Their goal was to continue their economic rape of the rest of the country with their bounties, subsidies, monopolies and tariffs that resulted in the South paying around 85% of the country's taxes while 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.7 Southerners were fed up.

The main thing that triggered secession was that Northern hate. Southerners saw Northerners promote terrorism against them by financing John Brown who hacked pro-South settlers to death in front of their families in Kansas, then be martyred in the North when he was brought to justice. Southerners were not about to accept as their rulers, people who hated them.

They had the right to secede and they exercised it property. Like the Declaration of Independence says, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and there was no consent in the South in 1860-61 to continue in the Federal Union.

I take issue with another point Brennan made. He said that Brig. Gen. Isaac I. Stevens had been slandered by a William Lilly: "Old charges that Stevens was questionable on the slavery issue, a charge that most Democrats had to face at one time or another, combined with Lilley's fabrications to hold up Stevens' confirmation."

That's an odd point for Brennan to make because the one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. Brennan did not footnote his comment so there is no way to know exactly what he was talking about.

The War Aims Resolution of the Northern Congress (the war is about Union, not slavery), and the Corwin Amendment (leave blacks in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already exists), passed overwhelmingly in the Northern Congress and was ratified by several states before the war made it moot. They prove the North's true feeling about slavery.

There is other irrefutable proof such as the six slave states that fought for the Union the entire war, three of which had slavery months after the war, until the second Thirteenth Amendment finally freed them. The first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment.

The North was interested in its money and power, not ending slavery. They brought most of the slaves here. They damn sure did not want them to move North and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws on the books forbidding free blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.

Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 states clearly "hereafter, as theretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation" between the U.S. and seceded states i.e., the Union (emphasis added). There is no mention of slavery.

Lincoln also states in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that efforts would continue to find a place to send blacks to in the future such as back to Africa or into a place they could survive. That was Lincoln's view his whole life. See Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

The actual Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 deliberately did not free any of the thousands of slaves in Confederate territory already captured by the Union. They were specifically exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation and were left in slavery as were all the slaves in the six Union slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia. West Virginia had come into the Union as a slave state, ironically, within weeks of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln's own secretary of state, William H. Seward, and others such as Charles Dickens made fun of Lincoln for issuing such a ridiculous document that freed slaves where he had no control, but left them in slavery where he could have freed them easily.

Another excellent review on this book was done by Brett Schulte and can be found at: Review: Secessionville: Assault on Charleston by Patrick Brennan — TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog (brettschulte.net)

The famous drawings of the Battle of Secessionville that are used for the cover of Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, come from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, the July 12, 1862 edition. It can be viewed here with the original captions: The battle of Secessionville, James Island, S.C., bayonet charge of union troops, commanded by Brigadier-General Stevens; Repulse of the rebels at James Island, near Charleston, S.C. - South Carolina and the Civil War - UofSC Digital Collections.

Those drawings were made by Frank Leslie's artists from sketches sent to Leslie by a Union officer in the battle. They are from the Northern perspective and are not completely accurate.

We need some Southern artists like Bob Graham of Bob Graham Fine Art here in Charleston to do some great artwork of the Battle of Secessionville from the Confederate perspective! Bob's gallery includes several beautiful works from the war as well as western subjects and American Indians: http://bobgrahamfineart.com/.

Patrick Brennan's Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, is an exceptional, enjoyable, valuable book about an important battle.

As distinguished historian John Lukacs said, the best history in the future will be written by independent historians like Brennan. It certainly will not come from politicized academia, which cares nothing for truth.

NOTES

1 Patrick Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, Acknowledgments, II.

2 See Note 30, page 346, for the primary sources listed for this paragraph. It comes from Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, 171.

3 Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, 172.

4 For the primary sources quoted here, see Chapter 9, Note 40 in Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston. Both paragraphs come from page 260.

5 For primary sources, see Chapter 9, Note 52. This comes from Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, 265.

6 For the primary sources, see Chapter 9, Note 54. This comes from Brennan, Secessionville, Assault on Charleston, 266.

7 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 103.

Battle of Secessionville, June 16, 1862, 158th Anniversary Commemoration Address by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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Battle of Secessionville, June 16, 1862
158th Anniversary Commemoration Address by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Historic Marker Secessionville 62K

[Publisher's Note: It is a great honor to give the address for the Battle of Secessionville Commemoration each year on the battle site at Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve on James Island, between Folly Beach and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2020, because of COVID, the Commemoration was held November 21st rather than in June, close to the battle date, and this worked out well.

What is so impressive about our Confederate ancestors in this battle is that they were greatly outnumbered and outgunned, as they were throughout the War Between the States, so to win, they had to outthink and outsmart the enemy, and they did, regularly.

Fort Lamar, initially called Tower Battery, was built in a strategic location on James Island on the narrowest part of a peninsula that is shaped like an oblong hourglass. Tower Battery itself was only 125 yards across, with saltwater creeks and pluff mud on both sides. WE knew Yankees would not be able to walk through any pluff mud, but they didn't. So we were able to concentrate our strengths where we needed them.

Tower Battery. Observation tower and footbridge not on this map.
Tower Battery. Observation tower and footbridge not on this map.

There were two separate, small batteries, one, a mile away, and both laid down an enfilading fire on the front of the fort that was devastating to the attacking enemy in the battle.

Even the defense of Charleston, which had been set up by Gen. Robert E. Lee when he was in charge down here, is something to be greatly admired in the annals of war. The Charleston and Savannah Railroad ran 100 miles between Charleston and Savannah, and whichever city needed troops, the other was to send them on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. Confederates successfully defended 100 miles of railroad the entire war.

A footbridge capable of men and horses was built a mile across the marsh and over that footbridge came the reinforcements including the Fourth Louisiana that turned the tide in the Battle of Secessionville.

Rough but excellent sketch of Tower Battery showing the critical footbridge.
Rough but excellent sketch of Tower Battery showing the critical footbridge.

Of course, a huge ditch out in the field in front of the fort that forced attacking Yankees to bunch up together, where they were then wiped out by grape and canister from the fort, was unquestionably a strategic move that worked brilliantly.

As I said, Confederates were greatly outnumbered and outgunned, so they had to outsmart the enemy to win, and they did, regularly.

The bottom line is that Confederates in Charleston were never beaten in the War Between the States. Yankees wanted to destroy Charleston worst than any other city yet on the day in early 1865 that Confederates were ordered to evacuate in order to continue the war elsewhere, Yankees were denied a military surrender such as Union Maj. Robert Anderson had done four years earlier at Fort Sumter. Charleston was, instead, turned over to the enemy by a city alderman, unbeaten and unbowed, with much of the city in smoldering ruins after one of the longest sieges in military history.

This is the copy I spoke from so I did not add footnotes but people I quoted are noted in the text and all statements by anybody else have quotation marks around them.

A short, select bibliography includes: E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970); W. Chris Phelps, Charlestonians in War, The Charleston Battalion (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2004); Warren Ripley, ed., Siege Train, The Journal of a Confederate Artilleryman in the Defense of Charleston (Published for the Charleston Library Society by the University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1986); John Johnson, The Defense of Charleston Harbor, 1863-1865 (Charleston: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., Publishers, 1890; reprint, Germantown, Tennessee: Guild Bindery Press, 1994); Samuel Jones, Formerly Major-General C.S.A., The Siege of Charleston, and the Operations on the South Atlantic Coast in the War Among the States (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1911); numerous maps, and articles by veterans of the Battle of Secessionville such as "In the Battle of Secessionville" by R. De T. Lawrence, Marietta, Georgia, in Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, Nov., 1922; also by R. De T. Lawrence, "Signal Corps in Defense of Charleston" in Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXVIII, July, 1920; "The Fourth Louisiana Battalion at the Battle of Secessionville, S.C." by H. J. Lea, Winnsboro, Louisiana, in Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXXI, January, 1923; "The Battle of Secessionville" in Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, Oct., 1922; and "Three Vital Episodes in the Attacks on Charleston" by Robert W. Barnwell, Sr., Florence, S.C. in Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXXVIII, Dec., 1930.]

 

I was introduced by Gene Patrick, President of Confederate Heritage Trust.

Thank you, Gene.

Good Morning.

It is a tremendous honor to stand on this sacred ground and speak to you this morning as we commemorate one of the most important battles of the War Between the States: the Battle of Secessionville.

There had not been that much immigration into the South in the antebellum days. The Confederates of 1861 were largely the same blood as the patriots who fought the British in 1776.

They had the same strong feelings about liberty and self-government.

Indeed, the most widely quoted phrase of the secession debate in the South during the year leading up to South Carolina's secession came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The country was not centralized in those days. Each state was sovereign and independent, like the countries of Europe. King George III agreed to the Treaty of Paris, September 3, 1783 which listed EACH American state then proclaimed them all QUOTE "to be free, sovereign and independent states . . . ".

No state ever rescinded its sovereignty or gave up its independence.

In fact, three states INSISTED, before they would join the new Union, that they could secede from it if it became tyrannical in their eyes. Those states were New York, Rhode Island and Virginia.

Because all the states were admitted to the Union as equals, the acceptance of the right of secession demanded by New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, gave that right to all the other states as well.

The Battle of Secessionville took place one hundred and fifty eight years and five months ago---on Monday, June 16, 1862---before dawn on a dark, drizzly morning fourteen months into the war.

If this battle had been lost, Charleston would have been lost, then soon, the war.

Charleston was a HUGE symbol for both sides.

Charleston is where the Confederacy began when South Carolinians met here December 20, 1860 in a convention of the people and voted unanimously, 169 to 0, to secede from the Union.

Charleston is where the war began 16 weeks later, on April 12, 1861, after Abraham Lincoln refused to remove his troops from sovereign South Carolina soil.

Instead, he lied to the Southerners. He promised to remove the Fort Sumter garrison, but secretly ordered it reinforced.

He knew full well that would start the war.

When Major Anderson, Union commander inside Fort Sumter, received notification that he would be resupplied and possibly reinforced, Anderson responded with a letter on April 8th that stated in part:

. . . a movement made now when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country. . . . We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced . . .

Major Anderson SEES that the war is to be "Thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln.

The importance of holding Charleston can not be overstated.

Gen. Robert E. Lee wrote to Gen. Pemberton and said: "The loss of Charleston would cut us off almost entirely from communications with the rest of the world and close the only channel through which we can expect to get supplies from abroad, now almost our only dependence."

Gen. Lee added that Charleston was "to be fought street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand upon."

A resolution stated the same thing:

Resolved, That the governor and Executive Council concur in opinion with the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, that Charleston should be defended at any cost of life or property, and that in their deliberate judgment they would prefer a repulse of the enemy with the entire city in ruins to an evacuation or surrender on any terms whatever.

The North wanted to destroy Charleston as badly as we wanted to protect her.

Horace Greeley's New York Tribune on June 9, 1862, one week before the Battle of Secessionville, stated:

'Doom' hangs over wicked Charleston. That viper's nest and breeding place of rebellion is, ere this time, invested by Union Armsperhaps already in our hands. If there is any city deserving of holocaustic infamy, it is Charleston. . . .

This is the same Horace Greeley who believed in the right of secession and stated it proudly---let our erring sisters go---until he realized it would affect his money. Then he wanted war as did the whole North.

Southern secession had triggered the beginning of an economic collapse in the North. Northerners had not realized that their economy was largely based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. Cotton alone was 60% of US exports in 1860.

Each year, tens of millions of dollars flowed out of the South and into the North because of tariffs, bounties, subsidies, and monopolies for Northern businesses.

Southerners were producing the wealth of the nation as the most esteemed economist of the time, Thomas Prentice Kettle, wrote in his famous book: Southern Wealth and Northern Profits.

Southerners were paying most of the nation's taxes, yet, outrageously, three-fourths of the tax money was being spent in the North.

Georgia Senator Robert Toombs called it a suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it in the North.

Henry L. Benning, one of Gen. Lee's most able brigadier generals and for whom Fort Benning, Georgia is named, said $85,000,000, a gargantuan sum in those days, was the amount flowing CONTINUALLY through Robert Toombs's suction pump.

The prescient Benning also said:

The North cut off from Southern cotton, rice, tobacco, and other Southern products would lose three fourths of her commerce, and a very large proportion of her manufactures. And thus those great fountains of finance would sink very low. . . . Would the North in such a condition as that declare war against the South?

Without the North, the South was in great shape with 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet: cotton.

Without the South, the North was DEAD.

Both sides realized that James Island was the key to taking Charleston and despite problems, . . . the defenses of Charleston were BRILLIANT. The Confederates defenders, most of whom were native Charlestonians, were fearless, and they knew the terrain.

A member of the 1st South Carolina Regiment who was in action in Charleston, B. A. O. Norris, of Graham Texas, stated after the war:

I think I am right when I state that this was the only place besieged that did not yield to the forces besieging it. It was stronger and abler to repel any attack on the day that it was evacuated than ever before.

The defensive perimeter around Charleston extended from Christ Church parish in Mt. Pleasant, to the Wando River then across Charleston Neck to the Ashley River, through St. Andrew's parish to the Stono, and on across James Island to Secessionville.

Because Charleston had been taken by the British in the Revolutionary War from the neck area, "A strong line of fortifications was built across the peninsula from river to river . . . the whole system could be flanked by fire from gunboats" in either the Ashley or Cooper River. . . .

A strong cremalliere line [JAGGED] was constructed across James Island from Fort Pemberton on Wappoo Creek in Riverland Terrace to right here where we are standing. That line was a mile in advance of the regular Confederate line. This was done January to February, 1862, nine months into the war.

If you look at an aerial map of the Secessionville peninsula, it is shaped like an oblong hourglass and right here is the narrowest part across the peninsula.

It was Col. L. M. Hatch's idea. He constructed the priest-cap work across the neck, built a strong bridge a mile long to connect Secessionville with the main island, and erected an observatory which commanded an extensive view of the approaches to Charleston.

The priest-cap design was two reDANS, side by side, so, together, they looked like the letter M. That design allowed troops inside to shoot an enfilading fire on anybody attacking the front. The whole front was approximately 125 yards across.

The footbridge was capable of men AND horses so Tower Battery could be reinforced.

The tower was 75 feet high and a lookout with field glasses could see all over James Island including the Yankee positions at the mouth of the Stono in the area where Folly Beach County Park is today.

They also built two small flanking batteries, each a mile away, to lay down enfilading fire on anybody attacking the front of the fort.

Milby Burton, in The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865, writes that "On June 2, 1862, General Pemberton wired Jefferson Davis that there were 20 vessels in the Stono Inlet."

"On June 8, Pemberton informed W. J. Magrath, president of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, that 'the enemy in large force is preparing to attack Charleston---Probably through James and John's Island.' He requested Magrath have several trains ready to move at a moment's notice."

On June 9, Union General Wright's division crossed the Stono "and took position on Thomas Grimble's plantation. The Confederates immediately opened fire of solid shot and shell, which fell into, around, and over General Wright's camp and among the gunboats in the Stono. This quickly convinced Union commander General Benham that their main camps and landings were untenable while exposed to Confederate fire. He would have to abandon James Island or silence the Confederate batteries."

"On June 10, Pemberton ordered the Confederate lines to advance in order to establish a battery of heavy guns on the edge of Grimball's plantation with a view to driving the gunboats from the immediate area and make landing hazardous." There was sharp fighting and Confederates lost 60 to 70 men.

On June 14, Emma Holmes in her diary wrote "Skirmishes of almost daily occurrences on James Island."

On June 15, "General Pemberton wrote Governor Pickens that he had on James Island only 6,500 effective men."

Sunrise on Monday, June 16, 1862, was 5:14 a.m. but three hours earlier, at 2 a.m., 35 hundred Federal troops formed the first of two columns, and 31 hundred formed the second.

Milby Burton writes that "The assaulting group was to advance in silence and make the attack at 'first light' with the bayonet. The large number of Federal troops should have been more than sufficient to surprise and crush a garrison of 500 men.

"In spite of feverish activity, the breastwork was incomplete at the time of the attack. Col. Thomas G. Lamar, who was in command, had pushed his men to the point of exhaustion. Finally, at 3 a.m. on the morning of June 16, he allowed his worn-out men to sleep."

One of the things they had been doing was transferring guns from an old gunboat into Tower Battery.

The Southerners were barely asleep when the assault began. Burton writes: "Lamar rushed to one of the big guns, already loaded with grape, and pulled the lanyard. The roar of the gun aroused the troops, and grape tore into the oncoming ranks."

This was around 4:30 a.m., and the Battle of Secessionville was on.

"Confederate troops rushed to the aid of Colonel Lamar's defenders as they were aroused. Those of the assaulting troops who had reached the parapet were either killed or repulsed. The Eighth Michigan fell back and re-formed; around 5:10 with the aid of the Second Brigade they charged under fire for 1000 yards, assaulted the works, and again gained a foothold. After more fierce hand-to-hand fighting, they were again pushed back."

The Yankee perspective tells us a lot about the effectiveness of our Confederate boys. Gen. Samuel Jones, in his book, The Siege of Charleston, quotes a Union officer:

It had been reported to General Benham some days before that from the masthead of a naval vessel in the Stono, several long trains of cars loaded with troops had been seen pouring into Charleston over the road which Colonel Christ's expedition had failed to break.

Colonel Christ's expedition was an attack on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, a critical part of coastal defenses. Whichever city needed troops, the other was to send them on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. It's defenses were put in place by Gen. Robert E. Lee who had his headquarters along the railroad line at Coosawhatchie, SC, half way between Charleston and Savannah, from November, 1861, to March, 1862, when he was in charge down here. There were numerous attacks by Union troops to break the railroad but they were always defeated by tenacious Confederates. Our West Ashley Greenway that you can access from South Windermere Shopping Center was where the tracks of the Charleston and Savannah Railroad ran.

The West Ashley Greenway, former location of Charleston and Savannah RR tracks.
The West Ashley Greenway, former location of Charleston and Savannah RR tracks.

"The regiments of the leading Union brigade went forward into line in double-quick time when a storm of grape and canister from the Confederate guns crashed through the center of the line and continued tearing through the ranks with great rapidity, severing the line, one part crowding toward the right, the other to the left."

"They kept moving fast leaving the ground in their rear strewn with their dead and wounded. They did not stop until they gained the parapet and delivered their fire upon the enemy in his works. But being entirely unsupported for a considerable time, they fell back slowly, contesting every inch of ground . . . .".

"When within two or three hundred yards of the Confederate works the Seventh Connecticut 'came obliquely upon an unforeseen ditch and morass,' crowding and doubling up the regiment toward the center. At this moment a terrific fire of grape and musketry swept through the ranks. 'The line was inevitably broken.'"

I'll guarantee you that ditch was planned.

While the First Brigade was being cut up, the Seventy-ninth Highlanders, leading the Second Brigade, was ordered to attack, and they made it to the parapet.

Union Lt. Colonel Morrison said "'As I mounted the parapet, I received a wound in the head, which, though slight, stunned me for the time being; but still I was able to retain command. With me, many mounted the works, but only to fall or to receive their wounds from the enemy posted in rifle-pits in rear of the fort . . . . From the ramparts I had a full view of their works. They were entrenched in a position well selected for defensive purposes and upon which our artillery seemed to have little effect, save driving them into their retreats, and in attempting to dislodge them we were met with a fierce and determined opposition, . . . ".

"The Seventy-Ninth continued their attack and when about three hundred yards from the Confederate works 'We entered the range of a perfect storm of grape, canister, nails, broken glass, and pieces of chains, fired from three very large pieces on the fort, which completely swept every foot of ground within the range and either cut the men down or drove them to the shelter of the ravine on the left. I now turned to see the One Hundredth Pennsylvania Regiment just entering the fatal line of fire which completely cut it in two. Some reached the foot of the embankment and a few climbed it . . .".

Around 5:25 across the creek "The Third New Hampshire and Third Rhode Island approached to within forty yards of the fort and opened fire. Colonel Jackson, commanding the regiment, reports that he found no artillery on that part of the Confederate works and that he could easily have gone into the fort."

"'IF,' he adds, 'I could have crossed a stream between me and the earthworks about twenty yards in width with apparently four or five feet of water, and the mud very soft; the men therefore could not cross. The enemy soon opened on me from a battery about two hundred yards in our rear, throwing grape in to the ranks, from which we suffered severely. In a short time they opened fire with rifles and infantry. At the same time a battery about a mile north of us opened on us with shot and shell.'"

The Third Rhode Island penetrated the brushwood to dislodge the Confederate sharpshooters, but did not succeed. They withdrew.

Here's what the Charleston Battalion had to say about it from Charlestonians in War:

One hundred and twenty-five yards across the marsh that was protecting the Confederate right flank, the rattle of musketry was heard followed in a split second by a shower of bullets and booming artillery fire from an undetected Federal force. . . . These fresh Union troops, namely the Third New Hampshire Infantry and Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, were pouring a 'continuous and deadly fire. Many of our men fell at the guns and along the line.' These New Englanders had managed to reach a point behind the Confederate right flank where they could fire into the unprotected rear of the battery and resultantly the few remaining Confederate artillerists were compelled to abandon their guns and take cover while the infantry desperately returned the enemy fire.

"Due to loss of blood from his neck wound, Lieutenant Colonel Lamar now passed command of the entire battery to Lieutenant Colonel Gaillard, who himself was soon severely wounded in the knee. Without hesitation, Gaillard moved some of his men down the bank of the marsh, where they stood opposite their foe and exchanged rifle shot for rifle shot in a slugging match of endurance. . . . On the field arrived the Fourth Louisiana Battalion . . . " and "Twenty-fourth South Carolina Infantry and Eutaw Battalion, who both had rapidly advanced from their camps several miles to the battlefield." This was around 5:30.

After Lieutenant Colonel Gaillard was wounded in the knee, he turned command over to Lt. Col. T. M. Wagner, for whom Battery Wagner on Morris Island was named a month later, after Wagner was killed at Fort Moultrie.

To sum it up:

It was 66 hundred Federals against 500 Confederates who were reinforced by around 750 more Confederates, so 66 hundred against 12 hundred and fifty.

The Yankees had almost 700 casualties with 107 dead.

"Confederates lost 204 with 52 dead, most of them the troops who defended the Secessionville batteries. The struggle for the parapet had been fierce. Muskets were clubbed and Lieutenant Campbell and Mr. Tennant, of the Charleston Battalion, in default of better weapons, seized handspikes and wielded them with effect."

Yankees learned their lesson and left James Island.

Milby Burton writes:

"Two things helped turn the battle in the battery's favor." One was "two small field guns at two different locations, one manned by Lieutenant Jeter, the other by Lt. Col. Ellison Capers" later known as Battery Reed, whose purpose was to enfilade an enemy attack on the breastwork at Secessionville from a mile away." . . . . "Both men fired their guns with excellent effect into the Third New Hampshire and helped to hasten their withdrawal" as the hand-to-hand fighting had continued until the "assaulting troops were again repulsed."

Another major factor was "Lt. Col. J. McEnery, commanding a battalion of Louisiana troops, that had been aroused by Col. Hagood and sent to Secessionville. McEnery and his men "advanced to Secessionville over the bridge, nearly a mile long. They arrived on the run . . . and gave considerable assistance in repulsing the Third New Hampshire, which was pouring a deadly fire into the rear of the battery."

Here is an account by a soldier IN that Louisiana battalion, H. J. Lea of Winnsboro, Louisiana:

I was a member of Capt. J. W. Walker's company, which enlisted and went out from Monroe, Louisiana March 2, 1862. We went to Savannah, Ga. and there were attached to and made part of the 4th Louisiana Battalion, commanded by Col. John McEnery.

At the break of day on the morning of the 16th, firing was heard up in the front of the fort, the alarm given and the LONG ROLL BEAT. The line was quickly formed with orders to march in double-quick time. . . .  Just before the head of our line reached the fort, the Yankee regiment, having formed on the opposite side of Lighthouse Creek, about one hundred yards distant, opened fire on us. We were ordered to halt, face to the right, and fire. This continued but a short time; the storming party in front was crowding in and we were ordered to face to the left and rush to the fort, where the Yankees were scrambling for the top of the parapets crowding forward in great numbers with a desperate determination to capture the fort. We arrived just at the critical moment; a few minutes later would have been too late. They were repulsed, routed, and fled in the same quick time that they came, with our rifles and artillery playing on them to the extreme range.

It seemed that every man there in defense of the fort felt as though the whole responsibility of holding the fort rested on him for it would have been impossible for any force of the same size to have done more. As soon as the storming party in front gave way and fled, the flanking party across the creek also fled hurriedly, for had they remained, even for a short time, they would have been cut off and captured or killed.

Another Confederate in the battle, R. De T. Lawrence of Marietta, Georgia, wrote:

Many years after, I met at the Confederate Home of Georgia, a Mr. Jordan, who had been in the engagement in the battery, and subsequently in a number of battles in Virginia, and he told me that the one at Secessionville was the closest and hardest fought of any.

Warren Ripley writes in the Introduction of Siege Train:

. . . just as the Southerners had discovered the power of the U.S. Navy at Port Royal, Fort Lamar taught the Yankees a valuable lesson --- don't tangle with the Confederate Army beyond protective range of the warships' guns. These two principles were to color military thinking in the Charleston area for the remainder of the war.

Mary Boykin Chesnut in her famous diary wrote:

At Secessionville, . . . Henry King was killed. He died as a brave man would like to die. From all accounts, they say he had not found this world a bed of roses. . . . Dr. Tennent proved himself a crack shot. They handed him rifles, ready loaded, in rapid succession; and at the point he aimed were found thirty dead men. Scotchmen in a regiment of Federals at Secessionville were madly intoxicated. They had poured out whiskey for them like water.

Milby Burton writes:

"After the battle, Tower Battery was named Battery Lamar in honor of Confederate commander Col. Thomas G. Lamar."

"When the news of the repulse of the Federal forces reached Charleston, the citizens were elated, but when the casualty list arrived including the names of many Charlestonians, one commentator wrote: 'a Gloom has been cast over our City by the death of many fine young men.'"

"After the valiant defense of the battery, the Confederate Congress passed the following resolution: 'That the thanks of Congress are due and are hereby tendered to Colonel Thomas G. Lamar and the officers and men engaged in the gallant and successful defense of Secessionville against the greatly superior numbers of the enemy on the 16th day of June, 1862.'"

Charleston was never conquered militarily or surrendered. When Confederate forces were ordered to evacuate at the end of the war to continue the fight elsewhere, the city was turned over to the Union Army by an alderman.

Confederate soldier R. De T. Lawrence also said after the battle:

The troops which had reinforced the command of General Gist on James Island were returned to their former stations on the coast and at Savannah, and the heroes of Secessionville were toasted on every hand.

Thank you.

On ‘Good Uses’ for the Confederate Battle Flag, Guest Post by Rev. Larry L. Beane

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But I did bury my boy, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, with two Confederate battle flags (a generic one, and the flag of a Virginia military unit) – the symbols of which my colleague thinks should be used as toilet paper. By contrast, that symbol meant a great deal to my son. He knew his heritage. And just as he saluted Old Glory, he also saluted the flags of the Confederacy. He stood for Dixie. Along with his favorite pop music, he listened to the old songs of our ancestors: Dixie, The Bonnie Blue Flag, I’m a Good Old Rebel, and many others. He understood that God created him incarnationally as part of a family, bearing flesh that was given to him from his ancestors: including men who fought for Scottish independence, American independence, and Southern independence.

On 'Good Uses' for the Confederate Battle Flag

Guest Post by Rev. Larry L. Beane, Pastor, Salem Lutheran Church, Gretna, Louisiana

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : I first met Larry Beane around 25 years ago on Hilton Head Island, SC when we were part of a mostly SCV crowd marching and supporting the continued flying of the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina Statehouse. It had been put up there in the early 1960s as part of the Centennial for the War Between the States. South Carolina had supplied 60,000 soldiers to Southern armies in the war, and 40,000 had been killed or wounded (20,000 were killed). Over 750,000 Americans died in the War Between the States, and over a million were maimed. President Eisenhower had issued a formal declaration in 1956 encouraging all states, North and South, to commemorate our bloody war and the reconciliation that occurred after it thanks to selfless leaders like Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose picture President Eisenhower kept in his office in the White House his whole time there.

The NAACP had been marching against the flag yelling "red rag, take it down!" My wife and kids, two and seven-years-old, were with me and got their pictures in the Hilton Head paper because my youngest was in a stroller with a battle flag.

Some of you might remember an excellent newsletter back then called The Liberator, named after William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, but this one was published by Larry and pro-South all the way. I told Larry I loved The Liberator! It was Southern patriotic, clever, full of history, and extremely nicely written as are all of Larry's articles.

Following the article below, are links to Larry's many fascinating blogs (check out the one from 2011 on the trip to visit his fellow Lutherans in Siberia, Russia!), and links to a longer bio as well as to his many articles on Lew Rockwell's website, which states that "Rev. Larry Beane serves as pastor at Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Gretna, LA and teaches high school Apologetics, Economics, and Government at Wittenberg Academy."

Larry's main website/blog is entitled Father Hollywood from when he was serving the Lord in a ministry but also moonlighting at Hollywood Video to pay for health insurance for his family! It has a lot of articles, and sermons from his church.

The Lew Rockwell articles are excellent Southern history, and current issues affecting our history, such as: "We Suffer Under Dual Tyrannies, of the majority and the minority, says Larry L. Beane II"; "American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God"; "Civil War 2.0?"; "Racism and Reputation"; and several others.

At press time for this post, I received my outstanding daily article from the Abbeville Institute Blog, under the command of Dr. Brion McClanahan, and to my pleasant surprise, it was this same article by Larry Beane! All I can say is GREAT SOUTHERN MINDS think alike!]

 

ONE OF my colleagues in the ministry of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS) recently wrote that among “good uses” for the Confederate battle flag are “diaper, shop rag, kindling, stuffing for a pillow, burping cloth,” and “toilet paper.”  In the ensuing discussion – which I was not a part of – he added, “It’s a treason/slavocracy flag.  Plain and simple.  It’s the revisionists that have a complete lack of understanding of history.”

Fortunately, this kind of churlish and disrespectful rhetoric is not common among my brethren in the ministerium.

Caption on Larry's Travels in Lutheran Siberia: Father Vlad (right) and I finally meet in Chelyabinsk.
Caption on Larry's Travels in Lutheran Siberia: Father Vlad (right) and I finally meet in Chelyabinsk.

But it is a helpful window into how much our education system and culture have degraded.  There was indeed a time when the movie Idiocracy was a farcical comedy and not a documentary.

His assertion is that anyone who disagrees with him is a “revisionist” with a “complete lack of understanding of history.”  My colleague is quick to point out that he is a Ph.D. student.  I wonder if his Declaration of Historical Ignorance applies to scholars like Clyde N. Wilson, M.E. Bradford, Richard M. Weaver, Jr., or the twelve scholars known as the Southern Agrarians – among many others in the Southern intellectual tradition.

Maybe these men, unlike my enlightened and brilliant colleague, were all just stupid.

My colleague’s hubris is the inevitable result of history being taught in our schools as “social studies,” as political activism, where intelligent discussion is replaced by an iron-fisted intolerance of dissent, where history is not permitted to be a dialogue between different schools of thought, but rather a Pharisaical, virtue-signaling, one-size-fits-all interpretation to be determined by the state and its interests.  And in such a Soviet-style 1619 Project-based “education” paradigm, there is no room for historiography or the examination of original source material from differing sides of a conflict.

In the current paradigm, there are not many perspectives and voices in the study of history, only the right view (which is politically-correct) and the wrong view (which is deemed “white supremacist”).  The arrogance and ignorance in my colleague’s rhetoric takes the tack that he has read deeply on the subject, and has considered various perspectives.  And having done so, anyone who disagrees with him is a “revisionist.”

But just what has been revised?

In any conflict, there are different assumptions and interpretations.  That’s why there are conflicts.  This is why there are debates and disputes, and this is why there are wars.  Johnny says the toy is his.  Mary says the toy is hers.  Each child sees his claim as valid.  If the children cannot agree, an adult will have to step in and resolve the dispute.  And lacking such a judge, the larger and stronger child will simply prevail.  And the smaller child’s perspective may or may not be remembered.  The result of the bigger child winning may well simply be accepted by all as the outcome.  But the point is that there is a dispute because there are two different claims of ownership.

In the war of American secession from Great Britain, there were two rival claimants as the legitimate overarching government of the colonies/states.  And in international disputes, there is no authority, no adult to decide to which child the toy belongs.  And so there is sometimes war to “settle” the matter.  In the case of the First American War of Independence, the secessionists won, and American government schools generally teach the school of history friendly to the rebels, while the loyalist point of view, if taught at all, is downplayed.

And yet, regardless of who wins or loses, there are differences of opinion.  To really understand what happened, it is important to consider all points of view – even if, and especially if, one’s opinion is biased toward one side or the other.

Our Confederate ancestors – be they the politicians who led, the military personnel who fought, or the civilians on the home-front who supported the war effort and suffered depredation – had a point of view.  It was based on the Jeffersonian understanding of the Union, the compact theory of the Constitution.  Their opponents held to the Hamiltonian perspective of the Union, the nationalist interpretation of the Constitution.  This dispute predates the Constitution itself, as manifest in the debate between the so-called Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.  To this day, both views are held by different camps of Americans.  Without understanding this nuance, it is impossible to make sense of the conflict.  Nor is it possible to go beyond the churlish historiography of “the toy is mine and anyone who disagrees with me is a poopy-head.”

Unfortunately, the “poopy-head” theory of history is precisely what is being taught in our schools and on our ubiquitous TV screens.  It is pushed in popular culture and shrieked by activists.  It is how most of our politicians operate.  And it is, of course, based on the victors’ perspective and the Big-Government Hamiltonian school.  It ignores the Jeffersonian model that has, of course, been around since the beginning of the Republic.  It ignores the fact that there has been no “revision” – as the Southern perspective on the War for Southern Independence has been consistently taught for a century and a half.  The idea that there was a consensus and a united historiography until now – when all of the sudden, people invented a new history, a revised history – is simply objectively untrue.

The radical changes in our culture and worldview: the resurgence of socialism, the new interpretation of all American history as “racist,” the plummeting test scores for Americans in literacy and math, the politicization of every educational subject, and even the normalization of the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory in matters of race and sex are all evidence that we are not dealing with historical revisionism, but rather a social and cultural revolution.  And the teaching of history has been coopted by this movement.  The 1619 Project agenda – with its demonstrable falsehoods – has been mainstreamed.  Sadly, my colleague has fallen for it.  But it is also part of a psychological agenda to be on the Hegelian “right side of history.”  People want to be part of the “winning team.”  And from where we stand right now, the malleable and political “right side of history” is with the iconoclasts who are toppling monuments – not only memorials to Confederate history, but to American history as a whole.  My colleague will either one day scratch his head when statues to Washington, Jefferson, and even Lincoln and Grant come down (which has already begun), or he will be so invested by that point that he will be part of the mob, self-righteously calling for their eradication.

But perhaps more disturbing than his shocking ignorance of history and historiography is his hatred toward people who hold the Confederate battle flag with reverence.

Symbols are, by nature, subjective.  Most Americans hold the Stars and Stripes dear.  And this can be for many reasons.  It may be as simple as a love for one’s home.  It may be that one’s family members fought in past wars for the nation.  It may be that one sees in the flag the principles of liberty.  Or it may be a combination of all three.

But there are also other opinions.

Perhaps someone is a recent immigrant without any particular sense that the flag represents his home.  It may be that one’s ancestors – like perhaps the American Indians – fought against the United States, and may have even been oppressed by the United States or by individual Americans.  It may be that one believes that the premise of liberty is a lie, as one’s family may have been transported as slaves on boats flagged with Old Glory, or one’s recent family were interned in camps for Asians during World War II with the Stars and Stripes on the flagpole, or maybe one has been railroaded by a crooked prosecutor representing the federal government.

How might a victim of the My Lai massacre see the US flag?  How about those whose families were incinerated by bombs dropped on civilian targets by the United States?  What if one’s entire family, innocent of any wrongdoing, were wiped out in a drone strike?  Do such events in history mitigate against a family in Peoria putting out Old Glory on the house for the 4th of July?  Would it be within the grounds of propriety to suggest that the flag of the United States should be used as toilet paper?

After all, as the 1619 Project will gladly point out, just as Robert E. Lee was an aristocratic Virginia rebel who fought for a county that had black slaves, so too was Washington.  In fact, Washington’s image appears on the great seal of the CSA.  Every stripe on the current US flag stands for a slave state in 1776.  Nearly every signer of the Declaration of Independence was a slaveholder.  And on that 4th of July, the slaveholding United States seceded from a nation that had abolished slavery.  The 1619 Project holds that the entire reason for being for the United States was the preservation of slavery, and thus slavery must be the single interpretive lens for reading American history.

The narrative sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?

Another similar disagreement over history and symbols is seen in the intertwined history of England and Scotland.  For centuries, Scottish rebels fought in wars of independence against their English overlords.  In the 13th and 14th centuries, Sir William Wallace led the Scottish bid for independence, until he was captured.  He was tried for treason, tortured, and executed as an enemy of the state.  His head was put on a pike to discourage any further rebellions.  Centuries later, following another Scottish rebellion in 1745 – one that members of my own namesake ancestors participated in – the defeated Scots, who had already been banned from speaking their native language, were proscribed from wearing their traditional tartan symbols of their tribal allegiances.

And yet today, a monument and statue of William Wallace stands at the site of one of his greatest victories over England.  Today, members of the English royal family wear kilts bearing the tartans of their own Scottish ancestors.  The flags of Scotland and England are both part of the flag representing the political Union between the two.  And in spite of both waving the Union Jack, both singing God Save the Queen, they are separate countries.  When there is a soccer game between England and Scotland, the English sing their national anthem Jerusalem, while the Scots sing their anthem of rebellion Flower of Scotland.  Both sides have a perspective, a narrative, a historiography, but as a people coexisting in a Union, there is mutual respect.  And while the flags of England and Scotland are waved by the rivals in the stadium, and while both sides see their own view as correct, neither side considers it to be its duty to crush a different perspective, or use the other side’s symbols for toilet paper.

Southerners are like their British cousins, being inclined to remember their ancestors and nations, while the denizens of other regions of America scoff at such nostalgia.

I have no particular affection for the national symbols that are not my own nor of my heritage.  But I certainly understand that other people do hold these symbols with reverence.  I could not imagine telling my Russian, Kenyan, or Brazilian friends that I would like to use their flags for toilet paper.  I may not respect their symbols as they do, but I respect the people who do respect them, and I understand that which they hold dear may not be that which I view with reverence.

The Confederate battle flag as we know it today became a unifying symbol for the defeated South, and has since also become a symbol of many things: rock and roll rebellion, motorcycle culture, Southern music, food, and folkways, as well as a symbol of political liberty – as it was waved in East Germany and other Iron Curtain countries as Communism fell and nations held captive were permitted to secede and establish home rule apart from colonial oversight.  It continues to be treasured the world over.  It is a symbol that we continue to place at the graves of our ancestors – a characteristic of Southern culture that often mystifies people from other regions who perhaps could not even tell you the names of their own grandparents, have no particular attachment to familial land, and who care little for their heritage.

How many bumper stickers or tee shirts have you seen that say, “American by birth, Midwestern by the grace of God”?

I have been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans for nearly 30 years.  It is in one sense a genealogical society, but it is really much more than that.  When the Confederate veterans returned to civilian life, they received no federal pensions, and in many cases, their destroyed states were too poor to provide for their needs.  And so, they created a veterans’ organization, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) in 1889.  And their daughters stepped up, establishing the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1894 to establish homes for the aging veterans and to erect monuments and grave markers.  Their sons established the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) in 1896 to be the legal successor organization to the UCV.

There has been a continuum from the veterans themselves, to their sons and daughters, to their grandchildren who continue to honor their memories today.  We are the guardians of their history, their stories, and their artifacts.  We have their diaries and their writings. We have their uniforms and their flags.  We meet each and every year, as we have without fail since 1896.  We are the inconvenient speedbumps to the 1619 Project and its Orwellian scheme to rewrite history and crush dissent.  And we are also living monuments, whose very existence is repugnant to the keepers of the Marxist oppression narrative.

Perhaps the most repugnant aspect of my colleague’s words is the obliviousness to the fact that other people, those who have a different historiography than he, those with family ties to the South, hold the Confederate battle flag with affection, see it as a symbol of their own families – ancestors and descendants alike – and use it as a funerary device.  Of course, we continue to mark and visit the graves of our veteran ancestors – some of whom lived full lives after the war and were buried in family plots, and some of whom fell in battle and were thrown into unmarked trenches and mass graves.  The monuments across the South serve as grave-markers for those who were never found.

Today, not only are these statues, many more than a century old, being toppled by mobs (often while police watch passively) and removed by legislatures, mayors, and governors – even grave markers and tombstones are being vandalized and destroyed, all with self-righteous justification.  And of course, this cancer of the vandalism of graves has metastasized and spread even to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution.

When nothing is sacred, even funerary symbols are treated with contempt.

And the Confederate battle flag is not only used to mark the graves of Confederate veterans.  For it is a symbol of our heritage, and our families are a continuation of that heritage.  For example, when my fifteen year old son died suddenly and tragically last year, he was buried with certain symbols.  First, of course, was the cross that he wore to serve with me at the altar for seven years.  The cross is the symbol of his redemption and of his impending resurrection.  Second, he was buried in the dress blue uniform of the US Air Force Auxiliary: the Civil Air Patrol.  He loved serving his community, state, and nation, and held the rank of Cadet First Lieutenant.  He saluted the US flag and was even called on a live mission for the Air Force on one occasion.  Like many Confederate descendants, he was an American patriot and served his country insofar as he was able to do so at his young age.

I do regret that I didn’t also bury him with a piece of the MacBean family tartan, as he was proud of that aspect of his heritage as well, and the DNA in his bones reflect our brave ancestors who fought for their country and clan, as well as for political liberty and independence.  That too is part of who we are as a family – past, present, and future.

But I did bury my boy, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, with two Confederate battle flags (a generic one, and the flag of a Virginia military unit) – the symbols of which my colleague thinks should be used as toilet paper.  By contrast, that symbol meant a great deal to my son.  He knew his heritage.  And just as he saluted Old Glory, he also saluted the flags of the Confederacy.  He stood for Dixie.  Along with his favorite pop music, he listened to the old songs of our ancestors: Dixie, The Bonnie Blue Flag, I’m a Good Old Rebel, and many others.  He understood that God created him incarnationally as part of a family, bearing flesh that was given to him from his ancestors: including men who fought for Scottish independence, American independence, and Southern independence.

Tolerance is the hallmark of a civilized and intelligent people.  Only barbarians and savages cannot understand that there are many different sides to a conflict, and that it is natural and laudable to honor one’s fathers and mothers and respect one’s heritage while being respectful of the heritage of others.  Our country and our culture have descended to a dark and sinister place, one where there are masters on the top of the pyramid, who dictate history and historiography to the rest of us, who sit in judgment of our heritage and of our ancestors, who tell us what we are permitted to believe and hold dear, a place where we who dissent are being increasingly marginalized, proscribed, and even subjected to violence.

And no matter how crass, vile, hateful, and churlish people like my colleague are, and will continue to be, I am honored that my son awaits the resurrection with symbols of who God created him to be in this life: a Christian, an American, and a Southerner – as well as a dissident against an increasingly intolerant and totalitarian culture and state.

May he rest in peace until I see him again.  Deo vindice.

Rev. Larry Beane and his son.
Larry's articles on Lew Rockwell's website:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/larry-l-beane-ii/?ptype=article
Rev. Larry Beane, bio, blogs:
https://www.blogger.com/profile/06705910892752648940
Larry's main website/blog (with sermons, articles, links):
Father Hollywood
http://fatherhollywood.blogspot.com/

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

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The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession
Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

A gentleman wrote me this past March stating that when arguing history, Northerners always use the four declarations of causes for secession as proof that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

Those four declarations prove nothing of the sort.

Below, is our correspondence including the question posed by the gentleman, but first, here is some additional information:

THERE WERE 13 SOUTHERN STATES represented in the Confederate government. That 13 included Missouri and Kentucky, which were divided states that did not actually secede. They remained Union slave states - two of six Union slave states - the entire war (WHAT! UNION SLAVE STATES! I thought the war was fought over slavery with the Union fighting to end slavery! Man, they should have started with their own country. In fact, three of the six Union slave states - New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware - had slavery several months after the war. It took the second 13th Amendment in December 1865 for slavery to end in those three Union slave states.).

Remember, the first 13th Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed. It was passed by the Northern Congress and ratified by several states before the war made it moot. The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of the North on the slavery issue though it is only one small piece of the massive evidence that the North did not go to war to end slavery. There is much more absolute proof, so much so, that it is irrefutable that the North did not go to war to end slavery. The North was fine with slavery.

Back to the six Union slave states: The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them as well as slaves in already captured Confederate territory. That prompted Lincoln's secretary of state, William H. Seward, to state "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." It also gave Charles Dickens a good laugh at Lincoln's phoniness and hypocrisy, especially since all of Lincoln's life he favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

All 13 states represented in the Confederate government produced a legal document such as an ordinance of secession that withdrew them from the Union. Tennessee's was called a Declaration of Independence. Most of the ordinances of secession were straight-forward legal documents referring to their ratification of the Constitution and withdrawing the state from it, proclaiming their sovereignty, etc. Alabama and Arkansas did go a little beyond pure legalese in discussing some issues but nothing like a declaration of causes.

Only four of the 13 Confederate states issued declarations of causes. Nine did not.

Those four declarations are the basis for the entire argument against the South in most people's minds though anti-South detractors often use the Marxist technique of simply ignoring substantial evidence they don't agree with. They ignore the six Union slave states, the Corwin Amendment, the War Aims Resolution (war is being waged for Union, not to end slavery) and a ton of other evidence that slavery was not the cause of the war. The North was more interested in its economic power and wealth, not ending slavery, and they sure did not want a bunch of desperate freed slaves to come North with massive crime and social problems, and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding free blacks from living there or even visiting for long, including Lincoln's Illinois.

Anti-slavery in the North in 1856 and 1860 was political, to rally votes in the North so Northerners could control the Federal Government and continue their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and their massive tariffs like the Morrill Tariff. It was not morality for the benefit of the black man.

Even the slavery in the West issue was based, not on concern for blacks, but the opposite: Northern racism. They didn't want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West. Historians know this. It started with the Wilmot Proviso and is a clear fact.

The four declarations of causes are statements as to why states seceded, what their grievances were, and such. They are not declarations of war. Southerners expected to live in peace. After all, Yankees threatened to secede five times before Southerners finally did. Nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley during the time that South Carolina seceded in December, 1860. Greeley strongly supported the right of secession ("let our erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money, then he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Wars are always fought over money and power, never because one country does not like the domestic institutions in another. Would you send your precious sons off to die to free slaves in another country? Hell no.

Lincoln sent his hostile flotilla to Charleston and Pensacola to start the War Between the States in April, 1861, because a free trade South with European military alliances and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet - King Cotton - would rise to dominance in North America. The North would not be able to beat the South in such a situation. That's why Lincoln wanted to use his enormous advantages at that point in history, and fight. He wanted to establish the North as the dominant cultural and economic region of our great country, and he did. It's been that way for over 150 years though many of the big cities of the North today are on a death spiral thanks to liberal wokeness that permits violent crime and discriminates against the law-biding.

The four declarations of causes all mention several reasons for seceding. All mention the many constitutional violations of the North. The North was untrustworthy.

All mention Northern terrorism against the South such as John Brown who wanted to murder Southern men, women and children with a bloody slave insurrection like they had in Haiti. Brown was financed and organized in the North, then celebrated as a hero when brought to justice. His two sons were protected by Ohio and Iowa rather than being sent back to Virginia for trial as the constitution required.

South Carolina's declaration is a fascinating constitutional and early American history lesson. It proves South Carolina's sovereignty:

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definitely Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." / Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

Georgia's declaration goes into great detail on the economic causes of secession. As Robert Toombs said, the North was a suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it into the North constantly. The Georgia declaration states:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.

This is a powerful statement as to why the Union was critical to Lincoln and the North, but was the antithesis of the States' Rights philosophy of the South.

Even Mississippi's declaration that begins with an assertion that it is identified with slavery as the basis of its economic well-being makes several critical points. It affirms the constitutional violations of the North but states about the North:

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. / It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. / It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. / It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. / It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

Texas's declaration of causes includes:

By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States. / The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.

Read these declarations and especially know your own state's if you live in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia or Texas. As stated, they do mention slavery along with numerous other extremely important issues. Northern constitutional violations are extremely important. If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, you can't trust them with anything.

The Northern support for terrorists like John Brown was a huge issue. The North was already at war with the South. Would you stay in a country with people who sent murderers, thieves and arsonists into your peaceful towns to kill your family and neighbors, destroy your property, poison wells, encourage the unimaginable horror of bloody slave insurrections with rape and murder, from which there would be no survivors like in Haiti?

The economic theft also mentioned was huge. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.1

Nobody in the North, ever a single time, suggested a workable plan for gradual, compensated emancipation such as the Northern states and all other nations on earth used to end slavery. The reason why is that Northerners were not about to spend their hard earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North with crime and violence, and be job competition. They would rather do as they did and just pass laws that forbid black people from settling or even visiting Northern states for long.

One can take the anti-South position and argue that the declarations of causes indicate slavery was one of many causes for the secession of four states, but only for those four.

The other nine did not issue declarations of causes, and four of the Southern states, in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, seceded over nothing to do with slavery. Those states were horrified that the Federal Government would illegally and unconstitutionally invade other states, kill their citizens and destroy their property to force them to obey a Northern sectional majority. Those four were Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

Nothing the North or anybody else says matters anyway. The South had the right to secede and they did so properly. Among the conclusive evidence of the right of secession is the reserved right to secede demanded by New York, Rhode Island and Virginia before they acceded to the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, thus they had it too, since all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 13, 2021

HI Gene, I love your history books. I have just one question. I agree that the majority of the reasons the Civil War happened had to do with economics, taxation, and an overbearing Federal Government. Lincoln and the North made it clear that the reason they went to war was to "preserve the union." As for the South, many letters, speeches and papers talk about the economics of secession, but all of the States Declarations, start off with the Institution of Slavery and the election of Lincoln and his threat to Slavery as the reason they were pulling out of the Union. I just don't understand why, when you clearly lay out that Lincoln never did or said anything about going after slaves, was the South so scared and put this in the top part of their reasons for secession? Why not just say, we are tired of being economically raped? We are not being represented at the federal government level, we want the right to free trade, our own currency, we don't want to be part of this union. Thank you. Bill M.

Gene Kizer to Bill M. March 15, 2021

Bill, Good to hear from you! Your question is a great one and easily answered.

Only four out of 13 Southern states issued declarations of causes for their secession along with their ordinances of secession. Those states were: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. The other nine had ordinances of secession but no declarations of causes.

The four declarations of causes do mention slavery, as you say, along with numerous other things including much grievance over tariffs and taxes, and the money flowing constantly out of the South and into the North because of Northern bounties, subsidies, monopolies, etc.

They all also state that Northern hate and promotion of terrorism is a prime reason for their secession, as well as Northern violations of the Constitution. Southerners did not trust Northerners and for good reason. If somebody sent terrorists into your country to kill your citizens and poison wells, etc., would you want to stay in the same country with them? Or leave, peacefully, as Southerners did? Remember, John Brown hacked Southerners to death in Kansas, he was financed in the North, then came to Harper's Ferry to start the kind of mass murder that had taken place in Haiti. When Brown was executed, he was celebrated in the North as a hero. Brown's two sons were protected from prosecution by Ohio and Iowa. So, Northerners sent terrorists into the South to murder Southerners then they martyred the terrorists when they were brought to justice. The country was already at war. Southern secession was the South dealing with it in their way, which was to leave peacefully.

Those four declarations of causes form the entire argument against the South yet all they do is establish the grievances that led to secession. Southerners unquestionably had the right to secede. Three states - New York, Rhode Island and Virginia - had reserved the right of secession before joining the Constitution, and all the other states accepted the right of NY, RI and VA to secede if they saw fit. That gave the right of secession to all the states because they all entered the Union as equals.

Slavery as the cause of the War Between the States is such an absurdity.

No Northerner said, before the war, that they should march armies into the South to free the slaves. They could care less about the slaves as was proven by the Corwin Amendment (leave blacks in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress), the War Aims Resolution (the war is being fought for Union, not slavery) and legion other documents and statements.

Yankees were making money hand over fist manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. They were draining the South dry with tariffs and taxes. They weren't about to give that up then have to face the South as a major competitor with European support and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet: Cotton.

The imminent collapse of the Northern economy because of Southern secession is what caused Lincoln to start the war. That, and the fact that they had the South outnumbered four to one, and outgunned 100 to one. I'll guarantee you if the North only had the South outnumbered two to one, and certainly if it was even, there would have been no war.

When the guns of Fort Sumter sounded, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy because Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee had not yet seceded. Those four states seceded immediately after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, and their clear reason why had nothing to do with slavery. It was their abhorrence of Lincoln using the Federal Government to invade a peaceful part of the country and kill its citizens for the benefit of Northern wealth and power.

In those four states, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, lived 52.4% - a majority - of white Southerners, so it is a fact that a majority of white Southerners seceded over nothing to do with slavery.

There is a ton more evidence but this is the short answer.

As stated above, when the war started, there were eight, soon to be nine slave states in the Union with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state during the war (think about that) VERSES the seven Cotton States.

That's eight Yankee slave states verses seven Southern slave states though that number was soon to be nine Yankee slave states.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not touch the slaves in the Union slave states or in captured Confederate territory. Yankee slaves were to remain in slavery.

Unquestionably, Yankees did not go to war to end slavery; and unquestionably, Southerners did not go to war to preserve it.

Southerners went to war because they wanted to be free and independent of people who hated them and who had sent terrorists into their country to kill them.

The most quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year before the war was from the Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Thank you for posing this excellent question. I have a lot more coming out in the next year or two solidifying even more my already irrefutable argument.

Are you on my email list? If not, give me your email address and I'll add you. I send out a blog article every week with history, defense of monuments, etc.

Good to hear from you.

Gene

Gene Kizer, Jr.
Charleston Athenaeum Press

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 15, 2021

Thank you very much Gene. FYI. I agree with you about why the South went to war. I feel the same way today. I agree with Hank Williams Jr, had the South won we would have a free country. Not an overbearing corrupt Federal Government and court system. We would have had a chance. Reason I ask is because I read those 4 states and Florida’s. And they seemed to focus on Lincoln's election and slaves. Liberals and do-gooders always bring that issue up to me when I tell them today is the same as 1860. It is not and was not about slavery. I am not on your email list. I am familiar with many of the facts you listed. They are in your book. I need to re read all the declarations from the states again. Thanks

Gene Kizer to Bill M., March 15

Bill, Got you added to the list! There will be a blog article in your inbox Thursday morning. There are a lot of articles on the website (www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com) you will enjoy. In fact, I might use this correspondence we've had here as a blog post since it is concise and your question an excellent one. A lot of people would benefit from that. I would keep your identity and contact information private. I don't know that I definitely will post it but it would be the basis of a good post. I agree with you 1000% about old Hank Williams, Jr.! I love that song If the South Woulda Won. All the best to you! Gene

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 15

Thanks Gene. That is fine. I love Hank Williams Jr. And your books. Was born in the North but raised in the South when it was still the South. I read the Constitution in Law School along with all the Founding Fathers' notes. There is no doubt in my mind they would have supported the South. I worked on Wall Street and the most evil creation on the planet is the Corporation. The fact is. They were banned under the original laws in our Country. To me, the civil war was about the greed of the North Bankers, Industrialists and RR barons power over the Republicans. They wanted all the $ and power. They smelled blood. What we have and what the world has today is the Military Industrial Complex and the Corporations have merged with the Entire Federal Government including the judiciary. Outside of states pulling out of the Union, I don’t know what else can stop what we are heading for. You can use my blog. I am sick of liberals telling me that the war was all about slavery cause that is what CNN says.

Gene Kizer to Bill M., March 20

Bill, Thanks for your excellent message! I haven't been on FB in the past few days. I'm with you all the way. You are so right. I had a blog article a few weeks ago by Lysander Spooner, the abolitionist, and he said basically the same thing you just said. You are right about corporations. They are whores for money and will sell out the USA to China and others just like the NBA, Nike, Google, FB and the rest of them. Big tech is the worst. I think a lot of good people like you and me are aware of everything going on and are very concerned about it. We are at a crossroads in America and there are truly some bad people who want to take us in a horrible direction, the opposite of what we were founded on. One good thing: It will be our states that preserve something of our founding. They were supposed to be sovereign and have all the power anyway, and they might have to use it to save the country. If HR1 passes and somehow SCOTUS allows it to stand, all bets are off. I would have never in a billion years thought the Supreme Court would even consider letting an obviously unconstitutional abomination such as HR1 stand, but SCOTUS let us down badly with the election law suits the past couple months. They should have heard the Texas case as Alito and Thomas wanted. Roberts is a coward and the worst chief justice in American history so no telling what his court might do. I am so surprised at Kavanaugh and Barrett. Hopefully an election case can come up. I think Gorsuch is with Alito and Thomas now. We'll see. A lot is going to happen in the next few months. Thanks for writing! Agree with you 100% Gene

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 21, 2021

Hi Gene. We are in 100% agreement. I think that the Supreme Court has been compromised. Our only hope is the states. I know many of us feel the same way. Question is. How to we unite to form a coalition like the corporate communist left has?

 

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History,  2020), 103.

Woke Liberals in Academia, and the Marxist Communists They Love

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Woke Liberals in Academia,
and the Marxist Communists They Love

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Academia has given our country the racist identity politics of Critical Theory, the anti-white hatred of Critical Race Theory, and they have taught a generation of young Americans to hate their country.

Many in academia promoted Marxist Communism in the 1960s because they thought it would bring utopia (and they also realized that elites promoting Communism and socialism often get rich while the rest of us get the shaft). Look at the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who proudly proclaims herself a Marxist and just bought her fourth million-dollar home.

Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. Technology-wise, almost nothing from that time period is relevant today. The struggles against capitalism he was upset about have been obliterated by capitalism's enormous successes, which have produced more freedom and the highest standard of living in the history of the world. Karl Marx didn't have air conditioning and probably most of his life had to use an outhouse and corn cobs (the Sears catalog was not around in Europe back then).

Marx's class struggle, idolized by unimpressive people in academia, was irrelevant in America because we were, and still are, the essence of optimism and can-do thinking. We conquered a continent, landed on the moon, and are now doing helicopter experiments in the thin air of Mars. We created 50 strong states in the process, any one of which could thrive as an independent nation on this earth.

But many in academia, who are constantly trying to prove how smart they are (because they actually are not very smart), think they have found a better way than American optimism and capitalism, and Marx is their man.

The Communism inspired by academia's idol, Karl Marx, has caused a hundred million people to be murdered in the past century.

In The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, the definitive work on Marxist Communist horrors, all their crimes are laid out for riveting reading. Communism, according the book's original French publisher, is a "tragedy of planetary dimensions" with victims "variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history."1

Those number are itemized here:2

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: 1 million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 2 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Latin America: 150,000 deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths

Yet, Marxism is proudly proclaimed and promoted by BLM and by a great many liberals in academia.

Here's how Communist atrocities happen:

Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless "class war," in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants.3

There is no difference in this and Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman writing his wife, telling her that there is a class of Southerners, men, women and children, who must be exterminated. Many former Union officers also planned extermination of the Plains Indians (except for George A. Custer, whom the Indians exterminated).

Another troubling statement from the paragraph above is "The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal . . . means...". That is no different from the Democrat Party's use of the legal system against their political adversaries today with the Mueller witch hunt, two baseless politically motivated impeachments, and recently the Biden DOJ going after Rudy Giuliani. There are also many politically-motivated harassment investigations of Donald Trump. They are designed, like the fraudulent polls that had Trump 16 points down just before the election, to drive down support for Trump.

It will likely not happen because these methods are well-known now, though the Republican Party without Trump is so stupid and cowardly, Democrats might get away with it again.

Here is a "preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes,"4 the same regimes that were and are admired by so many in academia and on the left:

---  The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922

---  The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people

---  The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920

---  The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930

---  The liquidation  of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38

---  The deportation of 2 millions kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932

---  The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33

---  The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45

---  The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941

---  The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943

---  The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944

---  The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944

---  The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978

---  The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950

Communism easily drew people into its horrific orbit. Tzvetan Todorov speaks with authority:

[T]otalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to draw so many people into its fold. There is something else---it is a formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of human identity . . . Furthermore, Communist society strips the individual of his responsibilities. It is always "somebody else" who makes the decisions. Remember, individual responsibility can feel like a crushing burden . . . The attraction of a totalitarian system, which has had a powerful allure for many, has its roots in a fear of freedom and responsibility. This explains the popularity of authoritarian regimes (which is Erich Fromm's thesis in Escape from Freedom). None of this is new; Boethius had the right idea long ago when he spoke of "voluntary servitude."5

Americans are sure as hell not afraid of freedom. People came here from the beginning seeking freedom, and still do. It is in our blood.

Academia, like the rest of the left, is committed to the lie that America is systemically racist. They will not admit it but they know that the hundreds of thousands of people who cross our southern border illegally every month, prove that systemic racism does not exist. That many people would never risk that long and difficult a journey to come to a racist country. Those people should not be allowed to break our laws, but they do.

The Black Book of Communism compares Nazis and Communists:

Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. However, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasily Grossman, whose mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Book on the extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in Ukraine: "writers kept writing . . . Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites; they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed 'that the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they must be destroyed as a class, because they are accursed.'" He adds: "To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings." In conclusion, Grossman says of the children of the kulaks: "That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: 'You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews!'"6

How is this different from racist academia's anti-white Critical Race Theory? It vilifies white people, white children, and dehumanizes them, demands that they admit privilege, and requires them to acknowledge things that do not exist like systemic racism. There is not a single law in America discriminating against anybody because of skin color and there hasn't been in well over a half century. In fact, it is just the opposite with affirmative action programs that shower privilege on blacks and discriminate against whites.

The majority of white people do good because they study and work hard, stay out of trouble, have a good attitude. Nobody gives them a damn thing.

Where will Critical Race Theory lead? Or will we stomp it out right now?

What Vasily Grossman above said is exactly what Gina Carano said earlier this year in an accurate, intelligent statement acknowledging that Germans dehumanized the Jews first, before rounding them up with ultimate destination for many, the gas chamber. Carano was fired from her successful show, The Mandalorian, by woke bigots at Disney. The Walt Disney Company today, far from the patriotic All-American company it was in years past, promotes a program of anti-white racism to its captive employees. They should SUE Disney every chance they get.

The "perversion of language" that the woke do all the time is another Communist technique:

Perhaps the single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concentration-camp system was turned into a "reeducation system," and the tyrants became "educators" who transformed the people of the old society into "new people."7

The term "equity" is a prime example. It refers to equal outcomes, not equal opportunity.

America is not about equal outcomes. American is about equal opportunity so that those who are ambitious can work harder than other people and reap the benefits if they so chose.

The Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We have a great country because of the ideals of our Founding Fathers who were all white men. If that's white supremacy, it has created the greatest nation in the history of the world and has served us well, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, men, women, all of us.

To the horrors of Marxism and Communism admired by so many in academia and on the left, must be added the inhumanity of the Nazis:

. . . Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis. This clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which as late as 1991 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which, even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its supporters the world over. And even though many Communist parties have belatedly acknowledged Stalinism's crimes, most have not abandoned Lenin's principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts of terrorism.8

It would be nice if academia and the left would acknowledge Stalinism's crimes, but BLM's founders are proud to proclaim to the world that they are "trained Marxists."

Admitting the crimes of Marxism would take character and honor, which is missing from much of academia as it teaches young Americans a fraudulent history like the 1619 Project so they will hate their country. The 1619 Project's primary theme --- that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery --- is a total, complete and utter fraud with not one iota of evidence, I mean, not one letter, newspaper article, diary entry, nothing, yet Biden's Federal Government is pushing it into high schools all over the country along with racist Critical Race Theory.

Nikole Hannah-Jones got a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, which proves that Pulitzer Prizes mean nothing in this day and age. The NY Times got one too for their reporting on a hoax, Mueller's Russian investigation of the Trump administration. Both of these Pulitzers should be rescinded or have asterisks by them indicating that they are frauds.

All of this is a shakedown by the left with the constant false accusation of racism. It wasn't enough to steal the last election. Nikole Hannah-Jones wants reparations. The Democrat Party has a sick, maniacal desire for power. They all want white people, who have never been racist in the least, to pay money to people who are the essence of racists, for whom race is everything. They have their own Marxist Communist-type ideology in Critical Race Theory and identity politics.

The things that MLK fought against are the very things that many in academia are pushing today, and it should not be tolerated. NO taxpayer money should go to ANY academic institution that teaches even a hint of Critical Race Theory. State legislatures need to crack down on this racist hatred. Academia might as well offer courses by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Pary because there is no difference in the Klan's racial hate, and academia's racial hatred via Critical Race Theory.

American capitalism obliterated Marx's class struggle of the 1800s that academia so wanted to work here. We have never had any use for Communism or socialism. Our constitutional republic and the freedom, opportunity and wealth capitalism gives us makes us way more dynamic than any pathetic system of government handouts. We will run circles around that garbage, and we have since 1776.

Much of academia is an unimpressive racist hateful place in this day and age. The mediocre philosophies that come out of it don't compare to the freedom and opportunity that we already have.

America defeated real fascists, Nazis and Communists last century. We will certainly not be fooled by Marxist wannabes in academia this century, or ever.

 

1 Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Consulting Editor Mark Kramer, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), X.

2 Ibid, 4.

3 The Black Book of Communism, 8-9.

4 Ibid, 9-10.

5 Tzvetan Todorov, L'homme depayse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), p. 36, in The Black Book of Communism, 13.

6 Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 142, 144, and 155, in The Black Book of Communism, 16.

7 The Black Book of Communism, 19.

8 Ibid, 15.

Confronting the Woke in Academia

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When I think of the damage my race has caused the world, I just want to cry in my pumpkin spiced latte! I feel such shame for all the toxic things we have invented that have caused so much harm, such as the rule of law, constitutional rights, electricity, the elimination of famines, the combustible engine, nuclear energy, penicillin, clean water, sanitary sewer systems, hospitals, spacecraft, weaponry to keep us safe, the internet, and well, I could go on because pretty much everything ever invented is the fault of my people’s arrogance. Surely, this county would be better off if everyone ran around half naked with bear grease smeared on their bodies to keep the flies off of them like the Native Americans were doing when the evil white people got here. We certainly ruined their standard of living.

From an April 27, 2021 letter to UVA Pres. Ryan
by an alum, published below in its entirety

Confronting the Woke in Academia
Everybody Should Follow the Lead of This Fed Up UVA Alumnus

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : Academia, in many respects, is the enemy of America. It has given us the same kind of racist hate that the Ku Klux Klan promotes.

Woke academia's Critical Race Theory is nothing but vile abject race hatred and discrimination against white people. Leftists are promoting it all over the country at every level. Even the Federal Government is now promoting it to high schools and elementary schools. If the country does not soon get a grip on it, it will be impossible to cure.

Marxists in Academia are a big reason 120 retired flag officers (admirals, vice admirals, or rear admirals) are so concerned. They especially do not like Silicon Valley censorship, anarchists in the streets, the Democrat attack on election reform, and the use of "antiracism" to suppress dissent.1 They warn:

Our nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. . . . The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.2

The whole country had happily accepted the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King such as his I Have a Dream speech. That was the promise of the Civil Rights Movement: America as a colorblind meritocracy.

The country is all IN on that but racist academia is NOT.

Woke academia's Critical Race Theory specifically rejects Dr. King and his teachings, just like BLM rejects the nuclear family (which exposes their radical agenda because it has been known for years that the absence of black fathers in black homes is the major problem holding black people back, encouraging crime, etc.).

Of course, there is still much good in the idea of academia. We all love our alma maters.

But academia is SICK because it is 100% liberal. It has no credibility.

A real debate on any subject is impossible because academia can only present one side, albeit with different variations of that side, but, nonetheless, one side only.

They are liberals trying to out-liberal each other, yet even they often do not express their true feelings. They know if they say the wrong thing, the mob will show up at their office, or they will be accused of being a racist and their careers will be over. As I say, academia is sick.

Students know if they don't write liberal dogma on papers they will get poor grades and may also be accused of being a racist.

Academia is teaching a generation of young Americans to hate their country but they are 100% wrong in their reasons and justifications. In President Trump's Mount Rushmore speech July 3rd, 2020 he identified the problem beautifully:

Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.

So many in academia embrace Marxist hatred and doctrines, which shows how out of touch with reality they are. Just look around you! We have more wealth and the highest standard of living in the history of the world because of capitalism, competition, the enormous opportunity in our country from sea to shining sea!

Many thousands of people every single day are breaking our laws, which they should not be allowed to do but nevertheless are doing, by illegally crossing our Southern border. Unlike woke liberals in academia, they know that America is the promise land of opportunity for everybody who will go after it.

Most of disgraceful academia does not condemn the 1619 Project whose primary theme --- that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery --- is a total, complete and utter FRAUD without an iota of evidence.

Yet the Federal Government is now promoting this garbage and academia is going along with it because they are political liberals first, and scholars second.

Not a single PENNY of taxpayer money should go to any academic institution that encourages even a hint of Critical Race Theory. With no taxpayer support, they will have to raise all of their own money, and it can be pointed out how racist and worthless so much of what they are teaching, is.

Legislatures need to step up. Idaho and Florida have outlawed Critical Race Theory. Other states are working on it. All 50 need to make that racist garbage against the law.

Below, is an outstanding and clever letter by a Richmond attorney and 1981 UVA graduate, Robert Coleman Smith.

He has used the "F" word a couple times to make a valid point about woke UVA president, James E. Ryan's, acceptance of such language from the student, Hira Azher, whose entire campus dorm door is a vulgar sign (picture below) that starts with "Fuck UVA."

Bravo, Mr. Smith! Excellent Letter! I agree with every word of it.

Please share this post far and wide!

Links to several good articles about the situation at UVA are at the end of this post.]

ROBERT COLEMAN SMITH
Richmond, Virginia

 

April 27, 2021

James E. Ryan
Office of the President
University of Virginia
Post Office Box 400224
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4224

Dear President Ryan:

I’d like to wish you a warm and hardy fuck you! I had always thought this expression was a vulgar and disparaging term. But judging by the way you have embraced Hira Azher’s use of these words, I now know these “University sponsored” words must be a warm and loving idiomatic expression of peace and acceptance. Surely adding the word “fuck” to our academic nomenclature makes the University “great and good.”

Hira Azher's dorm room door at UVA. Photo by Sophie Roehse | The Cavalier Daily.
Hira Azher's dorm room door at UVA. Photo by Sophie Roehse | The Cavalier Daily.

I’d like to thank you for making my beloved alma mater more woke and progressive. In fact, the daily missives from UVA Today have transformed me from a well mannered Southern boy to a fully woke devotee of Saul Alinsky. Thanks to you, I now know that my white supremacist background has given me a distorted value system that is antithetical to not only the values of the University, but also to the various pagan gods that I never knew good woke people should be worshiping. I have now devoted my soul to the gods of Hatred, Division and Ignorance.

I am ashamed of my past and previous belief system that was once rooted in the tenets of Western Civilization and Judeo Christian ethics. To illustrate, just one of the errors of my pre-woke value system, I once believed in the sanctity of private property! I used to be a sympathetic admirer of the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. I realize now that this greedy and carnivorous cabal was just a bunch of hate mongers, and David Hume and Adam Smith were just evil, selfish white guys. Why what good UVA alum could possibly think that private ownership of property benefited the social construct? Ha, what a fool I was!

I used to have an extensive library (another example of my white privilege for which I am ashamed), but because of you, I have now burned all my books. Doing away with Virgil, Livy, Gibbons, Bede, Thomas Aquinas, Locke and hundreds of histories and books of classical literature has liberated me from my Eurocentric past. I mean, what have Europeans ever done to advance civilization? Certainly not as much as the Hutu or Tutsi tribes of Rwanda!

I used to think that events from the past had a bearing on our present times and could give us perspective on how to make our world a better place. But now I know that these lessons from the past are dangerous and if uncovered threaten the University’s mission to cancel evil white guy culture. Why if the public actually learned these lessons from the past, our fellow comrades might think that the University’s leftist teachings are nothing but gobbledygook nonsense! We must destroy knowledge or else we will never reach our goal of a Marxist utopia!

Another example of my southern heritage that I have now discarded, is my parents taught me to be polite, deferential and respectful towards all people of all backgrounds. How bourgeois! Thanks to you and your stellar leadership in allowing students to scream trite, banal obscenities when debating important issues of public policy, I have given up respectful, fact and logic based dialogue. I have learned how to bowl over my adversaries. Why, the other day, I walked into Brooks Brothers and stole a $750 sports jacket. When the clerk confronted me, I fell into a histrionic fit, called him a racist and screamed a torrent of cuss words at him. I was able to keep the jacket. Sadly, they would not do the alterations for free despite me repeatedly yelling the word “equity” and “justice” at the store manager.

By the way, I am fully in the foxhole with Miss A…… (oops, see, that’s a patriarchal misogynist gender title of the old regime), I mean with Comrade Azhi! The nerve of Episcopal High School and the University of Virginia and all of their honkey alumni for paying for her education! She has every right to be angry and outraged. By the way, I listened to the secret tape she recorded of your conversation with her. I was really impressed with the way you pretended to be such a marshmallow. That was just great reverse psychology. You really showed her who was boss!

I have a another mea culpa to get off my chest. I need to expiate my sins because I was once proud of my ancestry and their service to the Commonwealth and our country. However, now I know they were all a bunch of greedy, avaricious and treacherous bastards. My loathsome family has been in Virginia for 400 years, and we have done terrible things, like building businesses, creating jobs, philanthropy, inventing technologies, serving on college boards and the vestry of our churches, all elements of the white male system of oppression. No one did anything cool, like attack a police officer or stick a gun in a pregnant woman’s belly while robbing her. We have caused all of the institutional problems the University has just recently discovered and now wants to remedy. Here are just a few of my family’s sins:

Building a country out of the wilderness. We all know that nation states are bad, especially those that have borders, oh wait, all counties have borders. My bad.

Fighting in every colonial war and conflict that our disgusting country has been involved. I used to be proud of their courage and their sense of honor for fighting for what they believed in, but now, thanks to my new UVA sponsored wokeness, I want to spit on their graves! How dare they fight the British for independence and then form a constitutional, republican form of government! That damned constitution has gotten in the way of us fulfilling our Leninist takeover of this country. By the way, to show you how much UVA Today has changed my mindset, I used to think that the 100 million people that Marxism killed in the 20th century confirmed its evil nature. Now I know that evil is the one indispensable tool we on the Left have to bring about radical, progressive change.

After I burned all my “Western Civ” books and thought I had cleansed my house of its odorous past, I found an old photograph of 22 members of the Coleman side of my family (Caroline County) all dressed in the Confederate grey right before hostilities began with the Union. Many were just young boys. They of course were already brain washed as they all were descended from Revolutionary soldiers who wrongfully fought for independence. The family didn’t want to split from the Union, but Lincoln federalized the Virginia militias, basically telling them they had to go kill fellow Americans. I am ashamed that they didn’t want to go kill people in South Carolina. What militant warmongers these Confederate soldiers were! I am ashamed they had the gall and the pigheadedness to protect their homeland from invasion from a foreign army for four long years. No doubt they should have just rolled over and did what they were told. When I read about their immoveable resistance at the Bloody Angle or standing ankle deep at the Crater in a river of blood, thrusting cold steel into the flesh of the enemy, I always think “what a bunch of sissies! Why should we honor them?” Unfortunately, my Confederate ancestors didn’t have the bravery to just go to a safe room and play with a University sponsored therapy dog. What losers! The whole idea of duty, honor, sacrifice and courage are certainly not the values we want to promote at the University. I am so glad the University removed the plaque commemorating these hedonists off the Rotunda. What a bunch of weenies! Obviously, people who have spent their whole lives virtue signaling in academia are much better people than those who gave their lives for their country!

I always thought that it was property rights, capitalism and free markets that liberated people out of bondage, but now I know differently. If only you had been alive in 1860! Surely someone as virtuous as you could have ended a 6,000 year social and economic institution through the sheer power of your wokeness.

I am so ashamed of my Occidental heritage. When I think of the damage my race has caused the world, I just want to cry in my pumpkin spiced latte! I feel such shame for all the toxic things we have invented that have caused so much harm, such as the rule of law, constitutional rights, electricity, the elimination of famines, the combustible engine, nuclear energy, penicillin, clean water, sanitary sewer systems, hospitals, spacecraft, weaponry to keep us safe, the internet, and well, I could go on because pretty much everything ever invented is the fault of my people’s arrogance. Surely, this county would be better off if everyone ran around half naked with bear grease smeared on their bodies to keep the flies off of them like the Native Americans were doing when the evil white people got here. We certainly ruined their standard of living.

I love the way you let the basketball team kneel during the national anthem! My father and his three brothers ( all University men, College, Law School, etc.) were soldiers during WWII. D-Day, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima; they were all there being jingoistic imperialists. I hate them! Why do we owe these people any gratitude? When I saw those players kneel, I thought of my young Lt. father at Bastogne, outnumbered, freezing to death in the snow, leading a company of G.I.s against superior German forces, and then I laugh! How does it feel you dumb son of a bitch to see a bunch of University students disrespect you. Ha, ha, you imperialist war monger, I hope you are rolling in your grave!

Now that I am woke, thanks to you, I was wondering if I could take a class or two to learn some new platitudinal buzzwords like “micro-aggression,” “intersectionality,” “equity inclusion,” “problematic history,” “memory politics,” etc. When these right wing fascists, like that medical student Bhattacharya, disagree with me, I want to do more than just scream vulgarities at them and call them a racist. I want some cool new words that have no real meaning to scream at them too. And if I could use them in a rhyme, well no one will be able to out debate me!

Speaking of micro-aggressions, I have never had anybody of another race or gender show hostility towards me, other than of course the multitude of times my house or car has been broken into. Gee, if anybody was ever mad at me, I think I would melt like a snowflake!

I love the way that you extracted money from the taxpayers to engage in socialist economics. Bravo! As everyone knows, the original 1819 Charter of the University stated quite clearly that the President was to milk the taxpayers to pay for his virtue signaling. If one looks closely at the original charter, the paragraph about being a “good steward” of the taxpayer’s money was scratched out.

Finally, I would appreciate it if you could keep me informed of any riots, property destruction or arson I can help out with. I am very much interested in silencing the free speech of anyone who is not woke, especially those Nazis who make logic and fact based arguments. I am available to dox them, get them fired from their jobs, threaten their families, etc. Just let me know.

I am so thankful you are the head Commissar, oops I mean president of the University!

Robert-Coleman-Smith's-signature enlarged

LINKS:

https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2020/10/azher-moving-beyond-free-speech-why-i-say-fk-u-va

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/app/uploads/2020/10/Azher-Ryan-transcript.pdf

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/ryan-wilts-in-confrontation-with-azher/

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/hira-azher-speaks/

The “F— UVA” Girl Speaks

 

NOTES:

1 Tristan Justice, "More Than 120 Retired Flag Officers Call On Americans To 'Save America, Our Constitutional Republic, And Hold Those Currently In Office Accountable'", May 10, 2021, The Federalist, https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/10/more-than-120-retired-flag-officers-call-on-americans-to-save-america-our-constitutional-republic-and-hold-those-currently-in-office-accountable, accessed 5-10-21.

2 Ibid.

 

The War, The New Orleans Bee, May 1, 1861

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The War

The New Orleans Bee,
May 1, 18611

The Union is the pretext---the subjection of the South
once for all to the supremacy of sectional foes is the
real object of the war.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : In this post are two editorials, one Southern, one Northern, published a week apart in early May, 1861, less than three weeks after Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, thus starting a war that killed 750,000 men and mutilated over a million.

The Southern editorial is "The War," and the Northern is "The Object of the War."

While these are just two editorials out of hundreds, publishing them together allows one to contrast what each side was fighting for.

The New Orleans Bee is exactly correct that Southerners just wanted to govern themselves and live in peace, while Northerners wanted to conquer and rule for their own wealth and power, which were synonymous with the Union.

It is obvious that the North had such overwhelming advantages against the South, they were going to fight. Most Northerners including Lincoln thought it would be a quick Northern victory.

The North had four times the white population of the South, a hundred times the arms manufacturing, an army, navy, merchant marine, functioning government, solid financial system, and, most importantly, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the earth with which to constantly feed Union armies. They could always replace their losses. Over twenty-five percent of the Union Army was foreign born.

Lincoln was a man fifty feet tall, armed to the teeth with modern weaponry, facing a man five feet tall carrying a musket.

Of course Lincoln wanted to fight, and he knew he better fight right then because every second that went by, the South got stronger and the North got weaker.

The North was facing the loss of its captive manufacturing market in the South.

At the same time, it faced the loss of its shipping industry when greedy Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff, which made the entry of goods into the North 37 to 50% higher than entry into the South. Northern ship captains were beating a path to the South.

The South's vision was as powerful as the North's was gloomy. The South had 100% control of King Cotton, the most demanded commodity on the planet. They would now have free trade with Europe and soon manufacture for themselves. They no longer had to be in a country with people who had committed terrorism and murder against them for years, who robbed them blind with taxes and tariffs, and who used abject hatred against them to win an election.

Southerners had been paying 85% of the country's taxes, yet 75% of the tax money had been going into Northern pockets.2 That money would now be turned back inward on the South.

Lincoln could fight right then and use his enormous advantages, or allow the free trade, low tariff South, with 100% control of King Cotton and European trade and military alliances, to compete with the North and perhaps grow to dominance on his Southern border.

The stakes were control of this magnificent country for all time, which meant unlimited wealth and power for the North. It meant huge dynamic cities like New York, Boston, Philly, and a connection with the West. It meant establishing the North as the center of American culture, commerce and technology.

That's what fifty-foot tall Lincoln and the North were fighting for.

That is why Lincoln sent five hostile fleets into the South in April, 1861, to start a war so he could use his enormous advantages to win it.3

It was certainly not to free the slaves. The one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

The Northern editorial below states that an abolition war would not only be unconstitutional, it would be a "wicked and treasonable war," and "those who seek to turn this war into a crusade against slavery . . . are at heart and in effect as much traitors to their country and its Government as are the rebels . . .".

This is not surprising since the North was no friend of the black man. Jim Crow started in the North and was there for years before moving South. Before that, the Northern leader, Abraham Lincoln, his entire life, favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive.]

The War

The New Orleans Bee,
May 1, 1861

The more moderate of the Northern papers still persist in the preposterous assertion that the people of that section have taken up arms simply to preserve the Union. Now, in the first place, this is not true, and in the next, if it were true, it would not in the slightest degree diminish the enormity of Mr. Lincoln's conduct. We say it is not true that this war is waged for the maintenance of the Union. The North knows better than that. She may be cruel, intolerant, aggressive and fanatical, but she is shrewd enough to fathom motives, and sensible enough to understand the impossibility of bringing together the ruptured members of the Confederacy [by Confederacy, they mean the original American republic, the U.S., before any states had seceded], and of keeping them together if they could be momentarily forced into juxtaposition. The Union is the pretext---the subjection of the South once for all to the supremacy of sectional foes is the real object of the war. Equally true is it that if the North really had at heart the perpetuity of the Union, Mr. Lincoln's policy has been none the less barbarous and unjustifiable. Unless he is a born idiot, which we do not believe, he must be aware that to send armies to occupy the South, and fleets to blockade her ports; to seize on all provisions and other articles destined for the South; to maltreat all who sympathize with us, and to display envenomed hostility to us by every possible manifestation, is not exactly calculated to increase the cohesive affinities between the South and North. Lincoln, instead of remitting them, is driving in the wedge of separation with all his force. He has acted as if his real design had been to place an eternal and impassable barrier between the two sections. This has been the effect, let his views have been what they may.

Away then with the false and hypocritical assumption that the North is engaged in a crusade against the South to preserve a Union broken beyond the power of human skill to reconstruct! Better for the Tartuffes [religious hypocrites]4 and Mawworms [parasitic intestinal worms]5 of the North frankly to avow their implacable enmity to us, and their intention to conquer and enthrall us, if possible. There would be some honesty in such a confession. There is none whatever in the wretched pretense with which they seek to mask their odious principles.

The truth is, and it is well for us to comprehend and appreciate it---this is no holiday game between the two sections. Mr. Lincoln's protestations and proclamations disavowing the intention to invade the South are worthless pieces of paper, because they are the productions of a public functionary whose entire course since his inauguration has proved him deplorably deficient in every manly attribute. Mr. Lincoln has signalized his brief career by a monstrous mass of perfidy and falsehood, and is therefore unworthy of the smallest credit. The North is bent on war. Facts demonstrate it. Every usage of war has been put in practice. The blockade of our ports, the stoppage of supplies to the South, the wanton and Vandal-like conflagration of Government stores and fortifications exposed to capture by the South, the efforts to control the navigation of the Mississippi, the deliberate persecution, insult and injury of all Southern sympathizers who unhappily fall into Northern hands, the fell spirit of violence and despotism openly acknowledged by Administration sheets, the threats of invasion and extermination---all indicate beyond the possibility of a doubt the disposition and purposes of the North. We are to have war, and probably on an extended scale. We have no confidence in the well meant but fruitless attempts to arrest the progress of the conflict. Mr. Lincoln is aware that the South is arming only for defense, and asks nothing better than to be suffered unmolested to pursue the even tenor of her way. The responsibility of hostilities lies with him. He can suspend them whenever he pleases. He has no desire to call off his bloodhounds, and the war will therefore go on.

It is well, too, to guard against another common error---that of depreciating the adversary. Rank folly were it to deny the courage of the people of the North. They belong to the revolutionary stock, and have displayed their valor in many a battle field. They are as brave as the men of the South, and were their cause a just one, were they, as we are, defending their houses and firesides, their freedom and independence against ruthless invaders, they would be, as we trust we shall prove, invincible. Yet they are as numerous as the swarms of barbarians which the frozen North sent from her loins to overrun the Roman Empire, and this is their great advantage. But against this we place our devotion, our unanimity, our strong defensive attitude, our easily protected territory. Let them come in in their courage and their numbers, and the South will resist the shock as steadily and successfully as she resisted the veterans of the British army on the plains of Chalmette [where the 1815 American victory in the Battle of New Orleans occurred].

 

The Object of the War

Concord New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette [Douglas],
May 8, 18616

The course of a portion of republican papers and their pulpit orators has raised a vitally important question as to the object and purpose of the war which the people of the North are now so unitedly and energetically preparing to prosecute against the rebels.---That question is this: Is this a war in support of the Government, the Constitution, the Union, and the dearly-purchased rights of a free people, or a negro crusade for the abolition of slavery? Whatever may have been the views of the people as to the causes of the war, or their opinions as to the proper remedy for the troubles out of which it has grown, there is no question that the great mass of them have responded to the summons to war with the distinct understanding that they were called upon to preserve national institutions and constitutional privileges, and not to destroy them---to sustain and perpetuate the Constitution and the Union, to uphold the Government, and put down armed rebellion seeking their overthrow. If such is the real character and purpose of the war, it must and will be cordially supported and energetically aided by the united people of the North; but if it is an abolition crusade, designed to destroy the rights and institutions of the South recognized by the Constitution, then it is a wicked and treasonable war and will not be participated in by any man who loves the old Union, reveres the Constitution and has a patriot's devotion to the Government and flag of our country.

We do not doubt that the President and his constitutional advisers entered upon this great contest with a single view to maintain[ing] the integrity of the Union, the authority of the Government, the perpetuity of the Constitution, the honor, rights, welfare and glory of the country, its flag and its people; and those who now seek to give it a different direction and purpose, have no countenance from those in authority. This we think is plain from the President's own declarations, in the most important document ever issued by the Chief Magistrate of this Union---his first Proclamation. In that he declared the object of his call for troops to be to suppress rebellion and "to cause the laws to be duly executed," and to "maintain the honor, integrity and the existence of our National Union," and he further declared that "in every event" the utmost care should be observed to avoid any "interference with property." To preserve the Union is to maintain the Constitution upon which it is founded; and this is thus solemnly declared to be the great end and purpose of the war. To make it an abolition crusade, is to overthrow the Constitution, and to disregard and violate its spirit and letter. And it is thus that the people understood the matter; and this accounts for the unanimity and zeal with which they have responded to the call of the Government. And the action of the commanders of troops in refusing to aid or countenance slave insurrections and the escape of slaves, in their march through Maryland, shows very plainly their ideas of their duty in this respect; and there is reason to believe that their course has met the approval of the Government.

It may therefore be safely concluded that the Government gives no countenance to their attempt to pervert this great popular movement from its noble and patriotic purpose. That purpose is to suppress rebellion, and to preserve the Union, maintain the Constitution and uphold the Government; and for that object all patriotic men will most cordially unite in contributing their means and their personal services to the extent of their ability. And those who seek to turn this war into a crusade against slavery, or who thus represent it, are at heart and in effect as much traitors to their country and its Government as are the rebels who are openly engaged in the Devil's work of attempting to overthrow that Government by force of arms.

 

NOTES:

1 "The War," The New Orleans Bee, May 1, 1861, in Southern Editorials on Secession, Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., American Historical Association, 1931; reprint, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1964 by permission of Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 511-13.

2 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History,  2020), 103.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142.

4 Tartuffe is defined by Oxford's Lexico.com as "A religious hypocrite, or a hypocritical pretender to excellence of any kind." https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tartuffe, accessed 5-5-21.

5 Maw-worm is defined by Oxford's Lexico as "A parasitic worm which infests the stomach or intestines of humans and other mammals; especially a nematode of either of the genera Ascaris and Oxyuris." https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/maw-worm, accessed 5-5-21.

6 "The Object of the War," Concord New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, May 8, 1861, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 1942, the American Historical Association; reprint, 1964, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., by permission of Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., Vol. II, 830-31.