The War Through Women’s Eyes, Part I

Posted on February 18, 2021February 18, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

"[July 23 1861] Witnessed for the first time a military funeral. As that march came wailing up, they say Mrs. Bartow fainted. The empty saddle and the led war-horse---we saw and heard it all, and now it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and it comes, until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.^"

From Mary Boykin Chesnut's
A Diary from Dixie.

Part I of

The War Through Women's Eyes

by Douglas Southall Freeman

Chapter VI of
The South to Posterity,¹1939.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : This is a fascinating article in which I have inserted 11 illustrations, mostly photographs. There is much on Phoebe Pember, who was born and raised in Charleston, and there are several dramatic passages from A Diary from Dixie at the end of this post. The style of the citation, and content of each note, are Douglas Southall Freeman's, verbatim.]

SCARCELY A WOMAN'S NAME appears in Lee's confidential dispatches to President Davis. Not many are mentioned in the Official Records outside the correspondence on espionage and "suspected disloyalty." To assume on this account that women made no contribution to the writing of Confederate history would be almost as unreasonable as to ignore their influence on the morale of the armies. Their letters brightened many a night-watch; their formal publications soften the hard lines of military narratives.

Few of their letters are extant. Most of those taken from the dead bodies of soldiers mercifully were destroyed, but occasionally one finds in family papers a closely and carefully written sheet that passed to the battle front and, in some fashion, found its way back home again. At least one such letter should have a place here to illustrate in what spirit the women heartened the men at the front. The letter selected as typical of the best was penned June 29, 1863, by Sallie Radford Munford of Richmond, to her first cousin, John Henry Munford, Lieutenant of the Letcher Battery, which was making its way along Pennsylvania roads. Miss Munford was then about twenty-two and was the first of the ten daughters of Col. George W. Munford, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia, by his second wife, Elizabeth T. Ellis. Miss Sallie's half brother, Col. Thomas T. Munford, had distinguished himself in a score of cavalry actions. The lieutenant, her correspondent, was the elder of the two gallant sons of Doctor Robert Munford and his wife, who had been Anne Curtis. The connections of the family were of the widest and highest in Virginia.

Gettysburg Battlefield, marker for Hill's Corps, ANV, Pegram's Battalion, Brander's Battery, and Letcher Artillery.

Sallie Munford's half brother, Col. Thomas T. Munford.

Here, then, is what Miss Sallie Munford wrote to her kinsman on the day that General Lee ordered his infantry to converge on Cashtown and Gettysburg:

Richmond, June 29th 1863.
My Dear John,
I had promised myself the pleasure of sending you a long letter by Willie Pegram, as I had not been able to write by the last opportunity which carried you letters from home, but I was so unwell the day before he left, I would not inflict upon you one of my stupid epistles. Now I can only write, hoping if it ever reaches you, it will serve to show how much we all constantly think of you, through I much fear, from the present state of the Army, my letter will never find your Battery. We are kept in the most constant state of anticipation and suspense concerning the present movements of our troops; everything is shrouded in mystery, except the one fact that our gallant boys are at last in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and are by no means idle there. I can not learn whether your Battery has yet crossed the Potomac, though as Pegram's Battalion of Artillery was bringing up the rear when last heard from, I supposed you are with Gen. Lee's portion of the Army. I know you will have a fine chance when you cross the river, and only wish I could be there to witness the entrance of our troops in some of those Union towns. War at all times, and especially such a war as we are engaged in, makes all classes fearfully bloodthirsty, and I am oftentimes astonished at the force of my feelings against the Yankees, but when I remember what we have suffered and lost, when I think of all the horror they have inflicted upon our people, and of the shameful display of barbarity and uncivilized warfare they have always displayed, I cannot wonder at the strength of such feelings, not blame the merest child for desiring retaliation. And if the accounts in the papers are true Ewell, Imboden and Jenkins, are at last carrying this fearful war into the enemy's territory, and causing them to feel some of the horrors of burning houses, homeless families, desolated fields, and an impoverished country. While such rumours as the burning of Harrisburg, the vast destruction of public and private property slowly reach us, we, the good people of Richmond are by no means quietly moving on the "even tenor of our way"; raids, and intended attacks by the Yankees upon our town, caused a good deal of excitement last week, which culminated when we learned the Yankees, reported 20,000 strong, were advancing in our direction. The Militia, were all called out, and yesterday, Sunday, the entire male population from 16 to 55, were occupied in drilling and manning the fortifications. There has been no alarm at all, for no one dreamed that the city could be taken, but as Gen. Lee has telegraphed for more troops, before we could send them, it was necessary to find out what militia force we could count upon, and the display has been a most satisfactory one.---I have been enjoying Kate Corbin's visit most amazingly; the weather has been entirely too warm for any unusual exertion, so we spend our time mostly in sewing, in reading aloud, and of course talking, for who ever knew a parcel of girls assembled together who did not talk. And what do you supposed we talk about? Our noble, brave, and gallant soldiers,---the deeds of daring and heroism which has made this the most unsurpassed of all wars, where one common feeling animates the breasts of high and low, old and young. And such a subject is inexhaustible; I do long sometimes to be a man that I too might fight for so glorious a cause, never had I felt more than now how hard it is to do a woman's part,---to wait, and that patiently, until others shall strike the decisive blow.---We have suffered a good deal of anxiety about Bro Tom recently; for the last fortnight, he has had a fight with the Yankees, either in Fauquier or Loudoun, every day, and some of these have been most desperate, hand to hand encounters.---In the first, on the 17th, Jemmie Tucker was very badly wounded, by a pistol ball in the back, the ball lodging under the right shoulder blade, and rendering his right arm perfectly useless---After great exertions uncle Bev succeeded in reaching him, and last night they arrived here, but the wound has healed entirely, and the ball not yet being found, the Surgeon will be obliged to probe it, and I fear it will be a tedious and most painful wound. It seems so hard that such a boy, (he is just 18,) should have to suffer so much.---I know you will be glad to hear that your Mother's school closes tomorrow; it will be a great relief to her I know, and I hope she will entirely recruit during the summer.---The Munfords had intended to have paid their visit to the Prices' last week but the approach of the Yankees deterred their going, and they will wait now until all is quiet. Nannie has grown to be a very pretty girl, and seems to greatly enjoy the freedom of being away from Yankee rule.---Congratulate Robert, for me, upon his well merited promotion. I was so very glad to hear of it, and hope before long you will also earn the title of Captain.---I expect to hear great things from your Battery this summer, and I know I shall not be disappointed. And what a campaign we are to have; hardships, toilsome marches, and wearisome nights of watchings I know will be your portion, but the end that is before our gallant soldiers is a sufficient recompense, and when our loved country is free, who will not be proud to tell that he was one of that army which so nobly fought for her independence. My paper gives out, and I must close, with the ever fervent prayer that our Heavenly Father may guard Robert and yourself, and bring you safely through all the perils that surround you. All join me in warm love, ever
Your much attached cousin,
Sallie R. Munford²

(Please read endnote No. 2, below.
It identifies all the people she mentioned
in her captivating letter.)

This typical letter has been preserved because it never was delivered. Ere it could reach the Army of Northern Virginia, by the long route through the Shenandoah Valley and across the Potomac, Gettysburg had been fought and lost. John Munford had fallen, with a desperate head wound, in the ghastly action of July 3 when Lee had attempted to storm Cemetery Ridge. The young lieutenant was brought with other wounded back to Richmond where, babbling in delirium of charges and ranges, he died within a week.

Miss Sallie later married Charles H. Talbott, lived to great age and, ere the end, had unique distinction. In November, 1927, Virginia received again the State flag that had been hauled down from the Capitol on the day the Union army had entered Richmond. Maj. A. H. Stevens, Jr., of the 4th Mass. Cavalry, had won that prize and had kept it with care. His grandson, Frederick A. Stevens, Jr., of Arlington, Massachusetts, decided that the long blue standard should be returned to the Old Dominion. When announcement of the coming ceremony was published, Mrs. Talbott, who was then eighty-seven, remarked casually that she believed she could identify the flag for the quite sufficient reason that she had made it. Her father, she explained, had been responsible as Secretary of the Commonwealth for the supply of standards for the Capitol. Late in the war he had observed that he was having difficulty in procuring a new banner to take the place of the wind-ripped one then flying. He could procure the bunting, he said, but he had no one to paint for the center the figure of Liberty conquering Tyranny. Miss Sallie then had volunteered to make the flag and, with her sisters, had done so. Sixty-three years later, in the old Hall of the House of Delegates, when the flag was returned, she ran her fingers along the seams she had sewed as a girl.³

Last Virginia state flag over Richmond capitol at end of war, sewn by Miss Sallie Munford.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Talbott did not write her memoirs, nor did many of the older women who played a conspicuous part in the war. For example, Mrs. Arthur Francis Hopkins, wife of the Chief Justice of Alabama, apparently left no record of her great labors for the South. Born Juliet Opie, of the high blood of the Lindsays, she married Capt. Alex. G. Gordon of the Navy while she was quite young. After early widowhood, she became the wife of Judge Hopkins. On the outbreak of the war, she was forty-five, wealthy and the mother of several children. Without hesitation she gave herself to the service of the Alabama volunteers and, when the first of them went to Richmond, she followed and organized in the Confederate capital the Alabama Hospital, one of the best of many. It is of record that she and Judge Hopkins gave $200,000 to the maintenance of this hospital and to similar works. Alabama honored her by formal legislative thanks and by placing her fine, aristocratic face on two of the State's bank-notes. She had the still higher honor of shedding her blood for the South. On the field of Seven Pines, where she went to succor the victims, she received two wounds, and to the day of her death, limped from the effects of her injuries.⁴ She is buried in Arlington among the brave, her peers, and by that very interment she is memorialized; but what a monument her own narrative of her experience would have been!

Juliet Ann Opie Hopkins, the Florence Nightingale of the South.

From the diaries of the few who recorded their experiences, Doctor Matthew Page Andrews has quoted most effectively in his Women of the South in War Times.⁵ Probably the first in date of publication among these journals and certainly among the very first in interest was Mrs. Judith Brockenbrough McGuire's Diary of a Refugee, issued in 1867.⁶ Mrs. McGuire was of devoted Virginia stock and was the wife of Reverend John P. McGuire, principal of the Episcopal High School, near Alexandria. At forty-eight years of age, she fled before the oncoming Federals and moved to Richmond. Ere she left her home, she began a daily record which, as she subsequently explained, she kept "for the members of the family who are too young to remember these days." The diary was not one of those spuriously confidential documents written with an eye to subsequent publication. In its naturalness and informality, it is a perfect picture of the mind of the high-bred, religious Southern woman of middle life. The gentility it displays without a single self-conscious touch, the faith it exemplifies, and the light it throws on the hopes and fears of the South make it as interesting psychologically as it is historically.

More diverting than the Diary of a Refugee, though about ten years farther removed from the scene, is Mrs. Phoebe Yates Pember's A Southern Woman's Story.⁷ Mrs. Pember had journeyed to Richmond in her desire to relieve the suffering troops, and at the instance of the wife of the Secretary of War, she accepted the superintendency of a "division" of the vast Chimborazo Hospital. Except as she appears in her own pages, we have only a glimpse of her elsewhere. T. C. de Leon, the Confederate St. Simon, describes her as "brisk and brilliant . . . with a will of steel, under a suave refinement, and [a] pretty, almost Creole accent [which] covered the power to ring in defi on occasion."⁸ She found the hospital under excellent general management, with one of the great men of the south at its head; but she discovered among the war surgeons some drunkards and some incompetents. Medical attention was negligent, graft was not lacking. The average ward was anything but what a patriot would like to credit to an institution where, on occasion, as many as 7000 soldiers simultaneously were under treatment for wounds or disease.

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, around 1855. She was born and raised in Charleston, SC.

The story of Mrs. Pember's war on waste and thievery, of her struggle with indifference, and of her battle to save the lives of individual soldiers would be heartbreaking were it not told with an odd humor. She wrote as she talked, always to the point; wherefore one almost can hear her relate the story of the family that descended on the hospital and refused to be ousted, or that of the patient's wife who presented him with a baby daughter on his own hospital bed and had the temerity to name it after the outraged matron. These and a hundred other emergencies Mrs. Pember met with a decision which, one ventures, even the most besotted surgeon learned to respect.

Her most charming story, which she must be permitted to tell at length in her own words, dates from a cold day in 1862, when a "whining voice from a bed in one of the wards drawled, 'Kin you writ me a letter?'

"The speaker was an up-country Georgian, one of the kind called 'Goubers' by the soldiers generally; lean, yellow, attenuated, with wispy strands of hair hanging over his high cheek-bones. He put out a hand to detain me, and the nails were like claws.
"'Why don't you let the nurse cut your nails?'
"'Because I aren't got any spoon, and I use them instead.'
"'Will you let me have your hair cut then? You can't get well with all that dirty hair hanging about your eyes and ears.'
"'No, I can't git my hair cut, kase as how I promised my mammy that I would let it grow till the war be over. Oh, it's onlucky to cut it!'
"'Then I can't write any letter for you. Do what I wish you to do, and then I will oblige you.'
"That was plain talking. The hair was cut (I left the nails for another day), my portfolio brought, and sitting by the side of his bed I waited for further orders. Then came with a formal introduction---'For Mrs. Marthy Brown.'
"'My dear Mammy:
"'I hope this find you well, as it leaves me well, and I hope that I shall git a furlough Christmas, and come and see you, and I hope that you will keep well and all the folks be well by that time, as I hopes to be well myself. This leaves me in good health, as I hope it finds you and---'
"But here I paused, as his mind seemed to be going round in a circle, and asked him a few questions about his home, his position during the last summer's campaign, how he got sick, and where his brigade was at that time. Thus furnished with some material to work upon, the letter proceeded rapidly. Four sides were conscientiously filled, for no soldier would think a letter worth sending home that showed any blank paper. Transcribing his name, the number of his ward and proper address, so that an answer might reach him---the composition was read to him. Gradually his pale face brightened, a sitting posture was assumed with difficulty (for, in spite of his determined effort in his letter 'to be well,' he was far from convalescence). As I folded and directed it, contributed the expected five-cent stamp, and handed it to him, he gazed cautiously around to be sure there were no listeners.
"'Did you writ all that?' he asked, whispering, but with great emphasis.
"'Yes.'
"'Did I say all that?'
"'I think you did.'
"A long pause of undoubted admiration---astonishment ensured. What was working in the poor mind? Could it be that Psyche had stirred one of the delicate plumes of her wing and touched that dormant soul?
"'Are you married?' The harsh voice dropped very low.
"'I am not. At least, I am a widow.'
"He rose still higher in bed. He pushed away desperately the tangled hay on his brow. A faint color fluttered over the hollow cheek, and stretching out a long piece of bone with a talon attached, he gently touched my arm and with constrained voice whispered mysteriously:
"' You wait.'"⁹

Surely this reveals as much of Southern character, male and female, and explains as much of the war as does any page of Mr. Davis's or any ream of Mr. Stephens'. If historians have lapsed since Mrs. Pember's day in realistic treatment of the war, the fault assuredly is not hers.

United States postage stamp, 1995, honoring Phoebe Pember.

US stamp, 1995, honoring Phoebe Pember.

One of the most remarkable of all the women's commentaries on the war was never written. That is to say, it was spoken---presented as testimony before a Senatorial committee. The upper house of the 48th Congress in 1883 directed the committee on Education and Labor to investigate "the relations between Labor and Capital." As chairman served Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire. Among the eight other members were Gen. William Mahone of Virginia and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. As the committee was dispatched, apparently, on a serious quest for information and not on a smelling expedition, it travelled (sic) widely and held hearings in many cities. In November, it came to the town of Birmingham, Alabama, which was then twelve years old and boasted 12,000 population. As witnesses, Congressman G. W. Hewitt brought before the committee the town's best---Doctor H. W. Caldwell, President of the Elyton Land Company, which developed Birmingham from an old field, Mrs. Caldwell, Mrs. R. W. Boland, and, as a special attraction, Mrs. George R. Ward.

This notable woman, born in Augusta, Georgia, December 8, 1841, had been Margaret Ketcham, and, through her mother's line was a grandniece of Samuel Griswold Goodrich, better known to the juvenile readers of his school histories as Peter Parley. All the long line of the Connecticut Griswolds was her kin. At sixteen, Margaret Ketcham had married George R. Ward, by whom she had several children, among them George B. Ward, who later became a renowned mayor of Birmingham. During the war, Mrs. Ward lived in Georgia and shared most of the horrors of the invasion, but in 1871 she went to Birmingham with her husband. By the time the Senatorial committee arrived, Mrs. Ward, though only forty-two, was revered as one of the "pioneers" and was a social arbiter besides.

On the evening of November 15, she took the stand. After some formal questions about herself, Mrs. Ward was asked by the chairman: "Had you opportunity of observing the course of life in [Georgia] upon plantations and in society generally prior to the war?" When Mrs. Ward admitted that she had "very full opportunity," the chairman said, "Give us an idea of how things were in Georgia in those days." Then Mrs. Ward fairly began. She talked admirably, without a stumble or a pause for correction, and she had a humor, an aptitude for illustration, that entranced the committeemen. After a time, Doctor Caldwell chimed in; Mrs. Boland added her observations; so did Mrs. Caldwell; Colonel Hewitt corrected their history and gave general direction to the hearing. After Mrs. Ward had said about all the committee seemed to need concerning the "servant problem," one of the members of the committee asked her to relate her experiences during the war. Without a second's preparation she started and, as the evening wore on, held the committee breathless with her narrative which, after more than fifty years, is as fresh and authentic as when it came from her lips. At the end occurred this colloquy:

The Chairman. Well, Mrs. Ward, on the whole what do you think of the situation?

Mrs. Ward. I think I am going to try to make myself as comfortable as I can with the darkies under existing conditions.

The Chairman. Do you blame us Northern folks for it all, or how do you feel about it?

Mrs. Ward. Yes: I blame you for a great deal of it. I think if you had stayed at home and let us go out of the Union we would have avoided all this trouble. I don't see what you wanted to keep us in for. When we wanted to go out, you wouldn't let us, and then when we got back you kept all the time dinging an dinging at us as if to make us go out again. You "reconstructed" us as thought we had never known anything at all, and as though we were indebted to the Northern people for the very first ideas of civilization.

The Chairman. You will get over that feeling after a while.

Mrs. Ward. Oh, yes. You have no idea how soothing it is to be able to say what you please to somebody on the other side, and this is the first opportunity I have ever had to air my sentiments before a Republican Senator.

The Chairman. I have enjoyed it very much, haven't you?

Mrs. Ward. Intensely. I am very glad to have had an opportunity of saying it to you face to face, and I never say anything worse about people behind their backs than I say to their faces.

The Chairman. Well, speaking for myself, I must say that I like you Southern people down here very much.

Mrs. Ward. We are all very glad you do like us. We thought all the time you would like us if you knew anything about us, but you weren't willing to take our say-so in the matter. You just seemed to make up your minds you wouldn't like us and that you weren't going to like us, but I hope that is passed now, and I do reckon that the times will be better hereafter.¹⁰

Margaret Ketcham Ward finally gets to confront the Yankees to their faces!

She had the last word, and she deserved it. "I hope you will not think me foolishly enthusiastic when I write you," Margaret Mitchell told George G. Ward, in 1936, "that I think your Mother's testimony is undoubtedly the most perfect and valuable complete picture of a long gone day that I have come across in ten years' research into the period of the Sixties." She added: "If I had had that book, I am sure I would not have had to read hundreds of memoirs, letters and diaries to get the background of Gone with the Wind accurately."

The most famous war-diary of a Southern woman probably is that of Mrs. James Chesnut, Jr. She was born Mary Boykin Miller, daughter of Stephen Decatur Miller, South Carolina Congressman, Governor and United States Senator. Two years after her father's death in 1838, Mary Miller married James Chesnut, Jr., the inheritor of a distinguished Carolina name and the son of a rich planter. As she was only seventeen at the time of her marriage, Mrs. Chesnut entered with exuberant zest into the social life of the Palmetto State. Her husband, a Princeton graduate, made politics his avocation and devoted to it far more of his time than to his profession, the law. Gradually he came to the front of the secession party, which sent him to the United States Senate in 1858. On the outbreak of the war, he accepted a place on the staff of General Beauregard, but later he took similar service with President Davis, who had a high opinion of Chesnut's judgment. Varied as were his duties and titles, James Chesnut was, in reality, liaison officer between the Confederacy and South Carolina. On his numerous missions, he often was accompanied by Mrs. Chesnut, who had friends everywhere in the South. Her diary, as published in 1905,¹¹ begins November 8, 1869, [Publisher's Note: This is a typo. The "9" should be a "0". The diary begins November 8, 1860.] and ends August 2, 1865. Although she intended to write daily, there are gaps of some length. The internal evidence indicates also that, for some reason, occasional passages of different dates are confused or are connected with disregard of the precise chronology. Despite these blemishes and the exclusion of many items, the printed text of A Diary from Dixie is a remarkable human document. Of the complete devotion of Mrs. Chesnut to the Southern cause, there could be no question; but occasionally the reader hears champagne corks pop while boys are dying in the mud. Then again there is all the poignancy of woman's understanding of the sorrows of her sisters.

A Diary from Dixie started Nov. 8, 1860 and ended August 2, 1865.

Here, for example, are her entries on the death of Col. Francis Bartow in the First Battle of Manassas:

July 22 [1861] Mrs. Davis came in so softly that I did not know she was here until she leaned over me and said: "A great battle had been fought. Joe Johnston led the right wing, and Beauregard the left wing of the army. Your husband is all right. Wade Hampton is wounded. Colonel Johnston of the Legion killed; so are Colonel Bee and Colonel Bartow. Kirby Smith is wounded or killed."
I had no breath to speak; she went on in that desperate calm way, to which people betake themselves under the greatest excitement: "Bartow, rallying his men, leading them into the hottest of the fight, died gallantly at the head of his regiment. The President tells me only that 'it is a great victory.' General Cooper has all the other telegrams."
Still I said nothing; I was stunned; then I was so grateful. Those nearest and dearest to me were safe still. She then began, in the same concentrated voice to read from a paper she held in her hand: "Dead and dying cover the field. Sherman's battery taken. Lynchburg regiment cut to pieces. Three hundred of the [South Carolina Hampton] Legion wounded."
That got me up. Times were too wild with excitement to stay in bed. We went into Mrs. Preston's room, and she made me lie down on her bed. Men, women, and children streamed in. Every living soul had a story to tell. "Complete victory," you heard everywhere. We had been such anxious wretches. The revulsion of feeling was almost too much to bear. . . .
A woman from Mrs. Bartow's country was in a fury because they had stopped her as she rushed to be the first to tell Mrs. Bartow her husband was killed, it having been decided that Mrs. Davis should tell her. Poor thing! She was found lying on her bed when Mrs. Davis knocked. "Come in," she said. When she saw it was Mrs. Davis, she sat up, ready to spring to her feet, but then there was something in Mrs. Davis's pale face that took the life out of her. She stared at Mrs. Davis, then sank back, and covered her face as she asked: "Is it bad news for me?" Mrs. Davis did not speak. "Is he killed?" Afterwards Mrs. Bartow said to me: "As soon as I saw Mrs. Davis's face I could not say one word. I knew it all in an instant. I knew it before I wrapped my shawl about my head." . . .

Col. Francis S. Bartow signed the Georgia Ordinance of Secession. He was wounded at First Manassas and died shortly after.

[July 23] Witnessed for the first time a military funeral. As that march came wailing up, they say Mrs. Bartow fainted. The empty saddle and the led war-horse---we saw and heard it all, and now it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and it comes, until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.¹²

Two more glimpses of Mrs. Bartow appear and then, in May, 1862, occurs this:

Mrs. Bartow, the widow of Colonel Bartow, who was killed at Manassas, was Miss Berrien, daughter of Judge Berrien, of Georgia. She is now in one of the departments here [in Columbia, S. C.], cutting bonds---Confederate bonds---for five hundred Confederate dollars a year, a penniless woman. Judge Carroll, her brother-in-law has been urgent with her to come and live in his home. He has a large family and she will not be an added burden to him. In spite of all he can say, she will not forego her resolution. She will be independent. She is a resolute little woman, with the softest, silkiest voice and ways, and clever to the last point.¹³

It is from touches of this nature that characters take life and stand out from Mrs. Chesnut's pages. She said of herself and her sister: "We keep all our bitter words for our enemies. We are frank heathens; we hate our enemies and love our friends."¹⁴ Of this, if it were not playful exaggeration, little appears in her diary. Those whom she did not like she dismissed with few words. About those she admired she wrote again and again. Her finest sketch is of her father-in-law, who fascinated her always. Curiously enough, the figure of her own husband, though it was strong and forceful in public life, is almost shadowy in her pages. Her qualities are oddly gallic: One has to pinch oneself to realize that she is writing of hungry Richmond and of the Anglo-Saxon South.

End of Part I.

NOTES:

¹ Douglas Southall Freeman, The South to Posterity (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939).

² The individuals mentioned in Miss Munford's letter are easily identified. Several of them are well known. "Willie Pegram," of course, was Col. William Johnson Pegram, the gallant commanding officer of the Pegram Battalion, A. P. Hill's Third Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Colonel Pegram was a son of Gen. James W. Pegram and Mrs. Virginia Johnson Pegram, of Richmond, and a brother of Gen. John Pegram, C. S. A. "Kate Corbin" was a devoted friend of Miss Sallie Radford Munford, and was of the well-known family of that name of Caroline County. She later was the wife of Com. John M. Brooke, Confederate States Navy, who after the conclusion of the war was a member of the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute, at Lexington. "Bro Tom" was Col. Thomas Taylor Munford, Cavalry Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. He was a son of George Wythe Munford by that gentleman's first marriage to Lucy Singleton Taylor. Colonel Munford, consequently, was an older half-brother of the writer of the letter. "Jemmie Tucker" was James Ellis Tucker, a son of Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and Jane Ellis, and a first cousin, through the maternal line, of Miss Sallie Radford Munford. A brother of James Ellis Tucker was the late Rt. Rev. Beverly Dandridge Tucker, D.D., Bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Southern Virginia. "Uncle Bev" was Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, father of "Jemmie" who had been wounded, and one of the sons of Judge Henry St. George Tucker and Ann Evelina Hunter. The reference in the letter to "the Munfords" is to Maria, Sally, and Nannie Munford, daughters of John Durburrow Munford and Eliza Roper. Their parents had been residing at the old "Tazewell Hall," in Williamsburg. These girls, who were among the first cousins of the writer, were at this time "refugeeing" in Richmond at the homes of relatives. Their father, John D. Munford, was a son of William and Sarah Radford Munford. One of these Munford cousins of the writer, Sally, later married Judge J. D. Coles, of Chatham, Pittsylvania County, and Nannie married Capt. Robert A. Bright, of Williamsburg, who was an aide to Gen. George E. Pickett. Maria Munford, the oldest of the three sisters, died unmarried. "The Prices" were the old family of that name which resided at "Dundee," a lovely old Hanover County home. The Prices were related to Maria, Sally, and Nannie Munford, who, as the letter states, had been planing to pay a visit to their Hanover County cousins. When the writer says "congratulate Robert for me" the reference is to Robert Beverly Munford who had been promoted to the rank of Captain and assigned as the A. Q. M. of the Pegram Battalion. He was the second son of Dr. Robert and Anne Curtis Munford and a brother of John H. Munford to whom the letter is addressed.

³ Richmond News Leader, July 19, 1927, p. 1; Nov. 28, 1927, p. 1, and Nov. 29, 1927, p. 8.

⁴ Cf. T. C. De Leon, Belles, Beaux and Brains of the Sixties; New York (G. W. Dillingham), 1909; pp. 383-85.

⁵ Baltimore (The Norman, Remington Co.), 1920.

⁶ New York (E. T. Hale & Co.), 1867.

⁷ New York (Carleton), 1879.

⁸ De Leon, Op. cit., pp. 146, 162, 166.

⁹ Mrs. Pember, op. cit., pp. 37-40.

¹⁰ Rept. of the Sen. Committee upon the Relations between Labor and Capital . . . ; 48th Congress (Washington), 1885, v. 4, pp. 311 ff.

¹¹ New York (Appleton).

¹² Mrs. Chesnut, pp. 87-88.

¹³ Op. cit., pp. 146, 162, 166.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 162.

The Story of the Beginning of the War, from Stories of Dixie

Posted on February 10, 2021February 11, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

"I believe the world has never produced a body of men superior, in courage, patriotism, and endurance, to the private soldiers of the Confederate armies. I have repeatedly seen those soldiers submit with cheerfulness to privations and hardships which would appear to be almost incredible; and the wild cheers of these brave men when their lines sent back the opposing host of Federal troops, staggering, reeling, and flying, have often thrilled every fiber in my heart. I have seen, with my own eyes, ragged, barefooted, and hungry Confederate soldiers perform deeds, which, if performed in days of yore, by mailed warriors in glittering armor, would have inspired the harp of the minstrel and the pen of the poet." --- Gen. Jubal Early, CSA

The Story of the Beginning of the War

The Irrepressible Conflict

From
Stories of Dixie
NY: American Book Company, 1915.
Chapter VI

by James W. Nicholson, A.M., LL.D.
Professor of Mathematics
Louisiana State University

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : This is a GREAT story, which today would be classified as "YA" or "Young Adult." The only difference in YA fiction and regular short stories and novels, is that the YA protagonist is a teenager or young adult, as opposed to an adult. Since so many of our Confederate boys were this age during the war, this story gives us a vivid and realistic glimpse into their lives and the lives of their families before the war, how they enlisted and departed from home, and what they faced initially.

The story's pages in the book that have illustrations on them I have scanned so you can enjoy the drawings as you read the text. The author, James William Nicholson, says that northern Louisiana, where the story starts, is a microcosm of the Old South.]

WHEN IT BECAME KNOWN that Mr. Lincoln had been elected president of the United States (November, 1860) there was great excitement all over the country. It is hard for one, at the present time, to realize how widely the North and the South had become separated in thought and feeling, especially with regard to certain leading questions and issues. It really seemed that an "irrepressible conflict" had arisen between them. So the Southern states, believing that the Union had become hurtful rather than helpful to their peace and welfare, resolved to withdraw from it, just as a partner would leave a business concern which had ceased to be pleasant and profitable to him. They seceded from the Union (annulled the compact which bound them to it), formed a government of their own, and called it the Confederate States of America.

Mr. Lincoln was an intense unionist; he believed and affirmed that the breaking up of the Union would be the greatest evil that could befall all the states. So he determined to preserve the Union at all hazards, and to this end sent an army into the South to quell the "rebellion."

How little the common people of the two sections really knew of one another---their thoughts, habits, characters, and ideals! This came from their living so far apart, and having no opportunity or means of mutual communication. Their knowledge of one another was based on hearsay, and this was distorted by partisans and fanatics. The South misjudged and undervalued the North in many ways, and evidently Mr. Lincoln himself had a poor idea of southern conditions; for, to subdue the South, he called out 75,000 troops for three months, whereas as a matter of fact it took 2,750,000 soldiers four years to accomplish it. Had the common people North and South known each other better---their patriotism, devotion to the Union, and ideals of right and wrong---probably their differences would have been healed without the cost of so much blood and treasure.

Nick Goes to War

It was on a superb spring morning that Nick, with his gun and dog, was strolling through the dark green woods near his father's country home. What lad would not have been happy under the same conditions! For him there had just been substituted outdoor freedom for indoor restraints, hunting for studying, the songs of birds and the murmur of running water for a stillness unrelieved except by the rattle of chalk or the clatter of slate pencils. No sound or sight of the landscape evaded the lad's quickened and responsive senses. A buttercup quivered and bowed under the flutter and weight of a bee extracting its honey; a "news-carrier" (syrphus fly), just arrived from fairyland, poised in mid air and cheered the boy with its fanciful message; a sapsucker flopped from a distant tree to one nearby and ran in dismal spirals about one of its big branches. All nature was "laughing in the madness of joy"; never seemed the sky so blue, the foliage so green, nor the odor of the honeysuckle so sweet.

It is dreadful how quickly a delightful situation may be changed. Over the hills came the long swelling blasts of Uncle Wash's hunting horn. Nick knew at once that it was a call to him to come home. He struck a bee line for the house, feeling that it must be something about the war, for people now thought and talked of little else. At the front gate he met his cousin Billie [who was actually W. C. Boring, Shreveport, La.] who lived in the western part of the parish. He was also a lusty lad, a little

hall. Lying on these rough beds and lulled by the roar of wind and rain, they fell asleep. What an experience---the ride, the storm, the bed! What a fitting introduction to the career of the Dixie soldier! Was it an accident or a harbinger? God only knows.

After a sound two-hour nap they mounted their mules, continued their journey, and had the joy and honor of being enrolled as members of the "Claiborne Rangers," of which Thomas M. Scott was captain.

The first day of July, 1861, was fixed as the time for the company to assemble in Homer and start to the war. These were now busy and exciting times. Every soldier was to have a uniform---a round-about coat with large horn buttons---and all the ladies joined in to help make them. The ladies met, in groups at different places and there was a great deal of planing, measuring, sewing, and chattering. The young people lived in a fever of excitement. Uncle Wash made Nick a great bowie knife that was nearly a foot long. On the night before the day of departure, Nick was so wrought up in mind that he could scarcely go to sleep. He rose early the next morning, put on his uniform and also his belt, to which was attached a scabbard carrying his big knife. "Ah," thought he, "Mr. Yank had better keep out of my way." His little sister dashed into

was simply a part of the natural optimism of the people. Nick almost prayed that the war would not close before he got into one battle; but after he got into one he then prayed that it would close before he got into another.

It was sixty miles to the nearest railroad. This distance was to be traveled by the Claiborne Rangers in wagons or on foot. They knew nothing of drilling; this was the first time many of them had ever seen one another. But few had even heard of "fall in." So there was no attempt to form or march them in military order. When they started every fellow went as he pleased.

When the order was given to march there was much cheering and shaking of hands, and good wishes were showered upon the departing soldiers. Oat said it was really a relief when they had gone so far that friends and relatives could no longer say to them "good-by" and "God bless you." The poor fellow did not dream that many a long day was to pass before they again saw faces so beaming with looks of love and good will. With Aunt Martha's last embrace of Nick there came a far-away, dreamy look into her eyes. She was staring at him, but he felt himself almost outside the range of her vision. Nick never forgot that look, piercing as it were the realms of the future, and in after years wondered if she then had a premonition of her own passing away before his return from the war. While her beautiful eyes bespoke fear, anxiety, and sorrow, there was no dimming of the indomitable light that lived in their clear depths.

There were enough wagons and hacks to haul the entire party, their baskets of food, and their luggage. Some of the men rode and others walked, and when tired of the one they did the other. All along the road, people cheered them with their smiles, kind words, and good wishes, the men waving their hats and the women their handkerchiefs.

Late in the afternoon they reached the Gee Place, and there they pitched camp for the night. Most of the men had been on camp hunts and camp fishings, and were more or less familiar with camp life. They knew what to do and how to do it to make themselves quite comfortable. There was a great stir and bustle in feeding and watering the stock, preparing and eating supper, and making pallets of blankets and comforts. After that the men became more quiet; they sat in groups on logs or pallets and told stories, cracked jokes, and sang familiar songs. As the night wore away they went by ones or twos "to bed," until none were left. On their rude couches they slept as soundly and as sweetly as if they had been in their soft beds at home. While they slumbered, the stars shone brightly in the skies as if keeping watch over them, and the stillness of the night was broken only by the whippoorwill as in the deep shadows of the forest, it poured forth its plaintive call, "chuck, will-widow."

The men rose early the next morning, fed the stock, prepared and ate breakfast, and continued the march. The scenes and events along the road did not differ much from those of the day before. One mile west of Vienna they passed the old Wafer Place, the home of Nick's maternal great-grandfather. The second night they camped at the "Gum Spring," and the third night, in the courthouse yard of the beautiful city of Monroe.

A new railroad ran from Monroe to Vicksburg, and this was the first one many of the Rangers had ever seen. Some platform cars were provided with seats made of rough planks, and on these the soldiers were transported from Monroe to Vicksburg. The terminal of the road at that time was DeSoto, a small village just across the river from Vicksburg. It has long since been destroyed by the changes in the channel of the great river. From DeSoto they were ferried across the river to Vicksburg. Here they stopped a few hours, during which time Nick went to an art gallery and had his "ambrotype" taken, a copy of which faces page 18.

From Vicksburg the company went by rail to Jackson, Mississippi, and thence journeyed to Camp Moore, Louisiana.

Camp Moore

In the piny woods of Tangipahoa Parish there is a certain old field neglected and overgrown with pine bushes. Thousands have seen it from the passing trains of the Illinois Central without suspecting that it was the site of a great military encampment in the stormy days of '61. Here Camp Moore, named after the governor of Louisiana, was located. Hardly could a more appropriate place for the purpose have been found---seventy-five miles from New Orleans, sufficiently rolling for easy drainage, and level enough for military evolutions. Situated as it was in the ozone belt, the air was pure and sweet, and redolent with the odor of fresh pine straw. On one side was Beaver Creek and on the other the Tangipahoa River, both running streams of clear sparkling water.

Here the sons of Louisiana went to enlist in the army and to be trained in the duties of soldiers. When the war began these sons knew nothing of drilling, guard mounting, and many other duties which alone make men efficient in the camp and on the march and the battle field. Camp Moore was

arms!" "Forward, guide right, march!" "Company, left half wheel, march!" The welkin rang with these and other commands, each having something of the clear crack of a rifle.

When the Rangers received their tents they at once put them up in two rows, facing one another, and Captain Scott said, "They look as well as any on the ground." The next day officers were elected, and the company mustered into service for one year. Then they drew guns---all kinds, scarcely any dozen of them being of the same pattern. Thus equipped, they entered upon all the duties of soldiers; namely, drilling, guard mounting every morning, dress parade every afternoon, policing, inspections, cleaning quarters, washing clothes, drawing rations, cooking and eating the frugal meals.

When a regiment was formed and sent to the "front" its place was soon filled by new companies coming in from all parts of the state. A few of these were Irish, more French, and still more English. Ten of the English companies from North-Central Louisiana, including the Claiborne Rangers, were formed into a regiment, known as the 12th Regiment, Louisiana Infantry. Of this regiment Captain Scott, of the Rangers, was elected Colonel.

The 12th was formed of a thousand young men---stalwart, muscular, dauntless hobbledehoys. They were the sons of lawyers, doctors, business men, and farmers, and having been reared largely in Christian homes they had that pride and morale which make men towers of strength in peace and in war. Of course their military potency could not be estimated before training and trial, but there was the assurance in advance that "blood will tell" for there flowed in their veins the blood of the heroes of Hastings and Marston Moor, Valley Forge and Yorktown, Horse Shoe Bend and New Orleans, Buena Vista and Chapultepec.

It was a short walk from camp to the Tangipahoa River, and early in the morning and late in the afternoon the soldiers were permitted to go there to bathe and swim. This was much enjoyed by all, and every day the river was lined with the jolly and noisy swimmers. Indeed, throughout the war, the range of their pleasures being so narrow, the men went in the creeks, mill ponds, and rivers whenever they had a chance, even in pretty cold weather, that being about their only pastime. They often took their soiled clothes, washed them, and spread them on the bushes to dry, while they bathed and played in the water.

It was at Camp Moore that Nick learned to swim. That was queer, for, as a rule, Louisiana boys take to water almost as soon as they can walk. But after that, Nick made up for lost time by swimming in, if

punished for drunkenness by being put under guard with a chain and ball attached to his ankle. Kelly had been a steamboat roustabout, and was a giant in size and strength. Nick happened to be on guard that day and had to guard Kelly. Now the big Irishman, moved by a spirit of humor or desperation, seemed to be watching for a chance to spring on Nick and beat the life out of him. So every time he moved down would come Nick's gun. It was loaded with an ounce ball and Kelly knew it. When the corporal of the guard came, Kelly said to him in a whisper: "Would ye be after putting a man in the place of that spalpeen of a lad? The little cuss has got so he won't let me turn over."

Nick was as glad to go as Kelly was to have him go.

Exposure and other causes produced much sickness among the troops. At the beginning of the year each camp was supplied with a hospital in which the sick were cared for. In it were clean beds, medicines, and nurses, and many ladies came with flowers and delicacies for the patients. But year by year, as the war went on, camp hospitals became poorer and the medicines scarcer, until they really disappeared altogether. At first the chief kind of sickness was measles, which is usually a harmless disease, but a very fatal one when the subject is exposed. More men died of it during the war than of all other dis-

now hears the "mournful song" of the pine straw as it is swept by the passing breeze.

Many years after the war the Daughters of the Confederacy induced the legislature to appropriate enough money to buy the old graveyard, clean it off, build a strong iron fence around it, and erect a monument in memory of the men, living and dead, who served there. When the monument was unveiled (1907) Nick, then a professor in the state university, made the dedication speech.

Two large beech trees were left standing in the inclosure on account of the many names of the soldiers cut into their bark. Among these old carvings Nick's attention was called to his own initials, "J. W. N.," which were probably cut by him just forty-six years before.

In the latter part of August, the 12th was ordered to "the front." With what a thrill of excitement was the order received by the men! At last their hopes of getting into a battle were to be realized! Up to his time they had had no news to write home except the details of camp life. Now they were to go far away into Kentucky, where the storm of war would soon be raging.

There was a great hurry and bustle in preparing to move---taking down tents, packing luggage, and cooking three days' rations. When they boarded the train each man carried a knapsack, a haversack, a canteen, two blankets, and a gun and cartridge box. It was a long freight train that was to carry them, and some took passage in and some on top of the box cars. When it "pulled out" a long and loud hurrah was shouted by a thousand jolly fellows. Poor boys! They little dreamed of the hardships and privations in store for them.

NOTE: [from the story's author]
It is not the intention of this book to give any account of the battles and conflicts of the War between the States. As to how the Dixie boys acquitted themselves as soldiers is briefly told in the following tribute to them by General Early:

The 1776 Report by The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission

Posted on February 4, 2021February 4, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

The 1776 Report
by The President's Advisory 1776 Commission

Accurate Identification of Today's Hate-America Enemy

Identity Politics and Academia Called Out

References to the South Are Incorrect

Lincoln, Who Destroyed the Republic of the Founders, Glorified

Despite Flaws, Report Is Definitely Worth Reading and Following

The Emphasis on Our Magnificent Declaration of Independence
and Constitution Is Excellent

Many Other Excellent Solutions

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

The 1776 Report by The President's Advisory 1776 Commission.

President Trump had the very best of intentions with The President's Advisory 1776 Commission and its 45 page report that came out in January, 2021 and was the first thing removed from the White House website by Joe Biden.

The Democrats don't want anybody thinking America is a great country as in MAGA. The hate that holds the Democrat Party together is not only hate of most of the "deplorable" United States population (which must be diluted by the foreign hordes of new Democrat voters that Biden waved through on day one), but hate of the founding of America, itself, as a place where all men and women are created equal.

After all, academia and the news media have told us that America was founded on slavery and stealing land from the natives (who had been stealing it from other natives from the beginning, but I guess they didn't know that or they would have said it, because academia and the news media never lie).

The New York Times's 1619 Project lays it all out: The Revolutionary War was fought by those bad old white guys because the British were about to abolish slavery.

Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for the 1619 Project, which proves it must be true because the NY Times also won a Pulitzer reporting that Trump colluded with Russia, and that was true too.

Oh, wait! That wasn't true! Mueller proved there was no Trump collusion with Russia! I guess if you get a Pulitzer today it proves your work is a fraud.

The strength of The 1776 Report is its showing, analytically and in depth, how our history has been politicized for decades now, and how horrible that is for America's future. It points out that we are as divided today as the Colonists were with the British in 1776, and the North was with the South in 1860.

The points it makes about America's founding and especially our magnificent Declaration of Independence and Constitution are outstanding.

It exposes the deliberate hate coming from the left and the left's institutions such as academia, the news media and the Democrat Party with its racist identity politics. They have let our country down enormously. Our history should be a source of cohesion and pride for everybody.

Despite what the left says, we are a great nation founded on solid rock and nobody is held down these days. There is opportunity galore for everybody.

The report takes on slavery, head on.

It does vilifies the South, in some places, though that is not the main focus. It does show its Northern bias and cheats readers by leaving out the fact that the North with its slave trading that went on until 1878, brought all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process

The report acknowledges that we have fallen short at times, as all nations have, but, by and large, everybody on the planet still wants to come here and will often risk death to get here. Go to a naturalization ceremony and look at the pride and happiness in the faces of new American citizens. That tells you all you need to know.

President Trump's speech last summer at Mount Rushmore was inspirational and this report has a similar voice, but, as stated, it is much more analytical about the forces aligned against America, our defeat of Fascism, Communism, and the dangerous, unjustified hatred of our country being taught today for the political advantage of the left.

It might be good for the left politically but it is terrible for the people who buy into that loser narrative that tells them they are being oppressed when they are not. The only thing holding them back is the Democrat Party and their own minds.

We are a nation and people who worship success like the pioneers who came here for freedom and conquered a continent, building great states all along the way. Any one of our states could stand on its own as a nation on this earth, and many may choose to do so, if we don't correct the massive election fraud that took place in November. That absolutely has to be corrected in the next couple years despite Democrat plans to make it permanent. They will not succeed because nobody wants our country to fall apart.

We want it to be strong, united and happy, with unlimited opportunity for everybody, and we will settle for nothing less.

Below, I have included five sections from the report, in their entirety, because they are eye-opening and important:

Racism and Identity Politics

A Scholarship of Freedom

The American Mind

Conclusion (Part VI)

Appendix III: Created Equal or Identity Politics?

I also have a few short quotes from early on. There is a link to a PDF of the entire report that you can save, at the end of this post.

The 1776 Report begins with a literary flourish: "In the course of human events there have always been those who deny or reject human freedom. . . . ".

They should have written "When in the course of human events" so they'd match up with the Declaration of Independence, but I'm sure they were concerned about being censored by dopy Facebook, which one time listed the Declaration of Independence as "hate speech."

The Introduction states:

The declared purpose of the President's Advisory 1776 Commission is to "enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union."

It wisely encourages the study of primary sources:

The principles of the American founding can be learned by studying the abundant documents contained in the record. Read fully and carefully, they show how the American people have ever pursued freedom and justice, which are the political conditions for living well. To learn this history is to become a better person, a better citizen, and a better partner in the American experiment of self-government.

Under III. A Constitution of Principles:

It is one thing to discern and assert the true principles of political legitimacy and justice. It is quite another to establish those principles among an actual people, in an actual government, here on earth. As Winston Churchill put it in a not dissimilar context, even the best of men struggling in the most just of causes cannot guarantee victory; they can only deserve it.

Churchill must have been thinking about the South because there was never in the history of the world a people more deserving of their independence. That's why it took four bloody years and 750,000 deaths for the North with four times the white population, 100 times the arms manufacturing, a navy, and an army of which 25% were foreign born, to, not beat, but wear out the South.

Here's Ronald Reagan famous quote that especially has meaning today because we are seeing what he warned about before our very eyes:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

A Constitution of Principles continues:

Our first freedom, religious liberty, is foremost a moral requirement of the natural freedom of the human mind.
Like religious liberty, freedom of speech and of the press is required by the freedom of the human mind. More plainly, it is a requirement for any government policy. To choose requires public deliberation and debate. A people that cannot publicly express its opinions, exchange ideas, or openly argue about the course of its government is not free.
Finally, the right to keep and bear arms is required by the fundamental natural right to life: no man may justly be denied the means of his own defense. The political significance of this right is hardly less important. An armed people is a people capable of defending their liberty no less than their lives and is the last, desperate check against the worst tyranny.

In Section IV. Challenges to America's Principles, are sections on Slavery, Progressivism, Fascism and Communism. This part, under Communism, nails academia:

Led by the Soviet Union, Communism even threatened, or aspired to threaten, our liberties here at home. What it could not achieve through force of arms, it attempted through subversion. Communism did not succeed in fomenting revolution on America. But Communism's relentless anti-American, anti-Western, and atheistic propaganda did inspire thousands, and perhaps millions, to reject and despise the principles of our founding and our government. While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of Socialism, while less violent than Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit.

Here is the entire section, Racism and Identity Politics:

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed after the Civil War, brought an end to legal slavery. Blacks enjoyed a new equality and freedom, voting for and holding elective office in states across the Union. But it did not bring an end to racism, or to the unequal treatment of blacks everywhere.
Despite the determined efforts of the postwar Reconstruction Congress to establish civil equality for freed slaves, the post bellum South ended up devolving into a system that was hardly better than slavery. The system enmeshed freedmen in relationship of extreme dependency, and used poll taxes, literacy tests, and the violence of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent them from exercising their civil rights, particularly the right to vote. Jim Crow laws enforced the strict segregation of the races, and gave legal standing in some states to a pervasive subordination of blacks.

[Publisher's Note: With all due respect, the postwar Reconstruction Congress was more concerned with its political power than helping the newly freed blacks. They were some of the most despicable people ever to serve in American government, like the hatemonger Thaddeus Stevens. During Reconstruction, former Confederates came home to a devastated country where even feeding themselves and their families was almost impossible. Their families were in constant danger. Radical Republicans, to keep blacks voting Republican, told black that their former masters were going to put them back in slavery. Corrupt Republicans such as the Union League members threatened blacks and made them violent toward their former white masters and friends. A man's barn could be burned in the night and he'd have no recourse or law to help him. Many former Confederate soldiers said Reconstruction was worse than the war. Many lost all hope. As to Jim Crow, it started in the North according to esteemed historian C. Vann Woodward in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. It was up North a long time before moving into the bi-racial, non-segregated South. The Supreme Court that affirmed "separate but equal" in 1895, was composed of all Northerners except for one justice. So to mischaracterize and slander Southerners is low, dishonest, and extremely historically inaccurate.]

Back to Racism and Identity Politics:

It would take a national movement composed of people from different races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions to bring about an America fully committed to ending legal discrimination.
The Civil Rights Movement culminated in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights. It presented itself, and was understood by the American people, as consistent with the principles of the founding. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every America was to fall heir," Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his "I Have a Dream" Speech. "This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
It seemed, finally, that America's nearly two-century effort to realize fully the principles of the Declaration had reached a culmination. But the heady spirit of the original Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders forcefully quoted the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of the founders and of Lincoln, proved to be short-lived.
The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many area of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of "group rights" not unlike those advance by Calhoun and his followers. The justification for reversing the promise of color-blind civil rights was that past discrimination requires present effort, or affirmative action in the form of preferential treatment, to overcome long-accrued inequalities. Those forms of preferential treatment built up in our system over time, first in administrative rulings, then executive orders, later in congressionally passed law, and finally were sanctified by the Supreme Court.
Today, far from a regime of equal natural rights of equal citizens, enforced by the equal application of law, we have moved toward a system of explicit group privilege that, in the name of "social justice," demands equal results and explicitly sorts citizens into "protected classes" based on race and other demographic categories.
Eventually this regime of formal inequality would come to be known as "identity politics." The stepchild of earlier rejections of the founding, identity politics (discussed in Appendix III) values people by characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old. This is the opposite of King's hope that his children would "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," and denies that all are endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Identity politics makes it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream for America and upholding the highest ideals of our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence.

Here is the entire section, A Scholarship of Freedom:

Universities in the United States are often today hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.
The founders insisted that universities should be at the core of preserving American republicanism by instructing students and future leaders of its true basis and instilling in them not just an understanding but a reverence for its principles and core documents. Today, our higher education system does almost the precise opposite. Colleges peddle resentment and contempt for American principles and history alike, in the process weakening attachment to our shared heritage.
In order to build up a healthy, united citizenry, scholars, students, and all Americans must reject false and fashionable ideologies that obscure facts, ignore historical context, and tell America's story solely as one of oppression and victimhood rather than one of imperfection but also unprecedented achievement toward freedom, happiness, and fairness for all. Historical revisionism that tramples honest scholarship and historical truth, shames Americans by highlighting only the sins of their ancestors, and teaches claims of systemic racism that can only be eliminated by more discrimination, is an ideology intended to manipulate opinions more than educate minds.
Deliberately destructive scholarship shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans. It silences the discourse essential to a free society by breeding division, distrust, and hatred among citizens. And it is the intellectual force behind so much of the violence in our cities, suppression of free speech in our universities, and defamation of our treasured national statues and symbols.
To restore our society, academics must return to their vocation of relentlessly pursuing the truth and engaging in honest scholarship that seeks to understand the world and America's place in it.

Here is the entire section, The American Mind:

Americans yearn for timeless stories and noble heroes that inspire them to be good, brave, diligent, daring, generous, honest, and compassionate.
Millions of American devour histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War and thrill to the tales of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin, Lincoln and Grant, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglas. We still read the tales of Hawthorne and Melville, Twain and Poe, and the poems of Whitman and Dickinson. On Independence Day, we hum John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" and sing along to Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." Americans applaud the loyalty, love, and kindness shared by the March sisters in Little Women, revere the rugged liberty of the cowboys in old westerns, and cheer the adventurous spirit of young Tom Sawyer. These great works have withstood the test of time because they speak to eternal truths and embody the American spirit.
It is up to America's artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians, social media influencers, and other culture leaders to carry on this tradition by once again giving shape and voice to America's self-understanding--to be what Jefferson called "an expression of the American mind."
To them falls the creative task of writing stories, songs, and scripts that help to restore every American's conviction to embrace the good, lead virtuous lives, and act with an attitude of hope toward a better and bolder future for themselves, their families, and the entire nation.

Here is the entire section, VI. Conclusion:

On the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, President Calvin Coolidge raised the immortal banner in his time. "It is often asserted," he said, "that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776 . . . and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions."

[Publisher's Note: Of course, President Coolidge was right but the consent of the governed in the South made no different to Abraham Lincoln when his money and power were threatened. The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year leading up to states actually seceding, 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.]

Back to VI. Conclusion:

America's founding principles are true not because any generation---including our own---has lived them perfectly, but because they are based upon the eternal truths of the human condition. They are rooted in our capacity for evil and power for good, our longing for truth and striving for justice, our need for order and our love of freedom. Above all else, these principles recognize the worth, equality, potential, dignity, and glory of each and every man, woman, and child created in the image of God.
Throughout our history, our heroes---men and women, young and old, black and white, of many faiths and from all parts of the world---have changed America for the better not by abandoning these truths, but by appealing to them. Upon these universal ideals, they built a great nation, unified a strong people, and formed a beautiful way of life worth defending.
To be an American means something noble and good. It means treasuring freedom and embracing the vitality of self-government. We are shaped by the beauty, bounty, and wildness of our continent. We are united by the glory of our history. And we are distinguished by the American virtues of openness, honesty, optimism, determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard work, courage, and hope. Our principles did not create these virtues, but they laid the groundwork for them to grow and spread and forge America into the most just and glorious country in all of human history.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we must resolve to teach future generations of American an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again. We must renew the pride and gratitude we have for this incredible nation that we are blessed to call home.
When we appreciate America for what she truly is, we know that our Declaration is worth preserving, our Constitution worth defending, our fellow citizens worth loving, and our country worth fighting for.
It is our task now to renew this commitment. So we proclaim, in the words our forefathers used two and a half centuries ago, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor."

Here is the entire section, Appendix III, Created Equal or Identity Politics?

Americans are deeply committed to the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and equally endowed with natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This people everywhere, no matter their race or country of origin. The task of American civic education is to transmit this creed from one generation of Americans to the next.
In recent times, however, a new creed has arisen challenging the original one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This new creed, loosely defined as identity politics, has three key features. First, the creed of identity politics defines and divides American in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental rights.
Second, the creed of identity politics ranks these different racial and social groups in terms of privilege and power, with disproportionate moral worth allotted to each. It divides Americans into two groups: oppressors and victims. The more a group is considered oppressed, the more its members have a moral claim upon the rest of society. As for their supposed oppressors, they must atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors.
Third, the creed of identity politics teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression. America's "electric cord" is not the creed of liberty and equality that connects citizens today to each other and to every generation of Americans past, present, and future. Rather, America's "electric cord" is a heritage of oppression that the majority racial group inflicts upon minority groups, and identity politics is about assigning and absolving guilt for that oppression.
According to this new creed, Americans are not a people defined by their dedication to human equality, but a people defined by their perpetuation of racial and sexual oppression.
The Historical Precedent for Identity Politics
Whereas the Declaration of Independence founded a nation grounded on human equality and equal rights, identity politics sees a nation defined by oppressive hierarchies. But this vision of America is actually not new. While identity politics may seem novel and ground-breaking, it resurrects prior attempts in American history to deny the meaning of equality enshrined in the Declaration. In portraying America as racist and white supremacist, identity politics advocates follow Lincoln's great rival Stephen A. Douglas, who wrongly claimed that American government "was made on the white basis" "by white men, for the benefit of white men." Indeed, there are uncanny similarities between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.
John C. Calhoun is perhaps the leading forerunner of identity politics. Rejecting America's common political identity that follows from the Declaration's principles, he argued that the American polity was not an actual community at all but was reducible only to diverse majority and minority groups. Calhoun saw these groups as more or less permanent, slowly evolving products of their race and particular historical circumstances.
Like modern-day proponents of identity politics, Calhoun believed that achieving unity through rational deliberation and political compromise was impossible; majority groups would only use the political process to oppress minority groups. In Calhoun's America, respect for each group demanded that each hold a veto over the actions of the wider community. But Calhoun also argued that some groups must outrank others in the majoritarian decision-making process. In Calhoun's America, one minority group---Southern slaveholders---could veto any attempt by the majority group---Northern States---to restrict or abolish the enslavement of another group. In the context of American history, the original form of identity politics was used to defend slavery. (their emphasis)

[Publisher's Note: Apparently, the 1776 Report writers are referring to Calhoun's doctrine of the concurrent majority. In defense of Mr. Calhoun, here's what Margaret L. Coit, editor, says in John C. Calhoun, Great Lives Observed [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970, 10-11:

During his last years, when his intellect was at its most incandescent, he wrote the two books upon which his reputation as a political philosopher rests: A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution of the United States. In these books he discussed in full his revolutionary doctrine of the concurrrent majority, of which nullification was but one aspect---his concept of a government, not "of a part over a part," but of "a part made identical with the whole," each division or "interest" armed with either a voice in making the laws, "or a veto on their execution." He recognized that "only a few great and prominent interests could be represented," but even Richard Hofstadter acknowledges that "Calhoun's analysis of American political tensions certainly ranks among the most impressive intellectual achievements of American statesmen." [Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, 1948), 87-88]. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the other hand, while conceding that Calhoun's theory was devised to protect a special group, denies that it was any mere lawyer's brief "to advance the pretensions of slavery, but a brilliant and penetrating study of modern society, whose insights remain vital for any minority." [Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston and New York, 1945), 405.|
As for slavery, the more Calhoun saw its doom, the more passionately he argued for its preservation. He knew that the North was rapidly outnumbering the South, that simple majority rule was ever more the law of the land. He knew that, whipped on by the abolitionist minority, more and more people were coming to see slavery as a sin and any compromise with slave-holders as treason. The South was at bay, her way of life and her "peculiar institution" doomed.
Yet, for all the power and clarity of his thinking, Calhoun saw no way out of the dilemma. Even had he seriously considered abolition as a possibility---an act which would have ended his public life and fame---there seemed to be no feasible answers. Colonization was impractical; the freedmen did not want to go back to Africa. The life of a freed black could be miserable, as Calhoun discovered for himself when he freed a shoemaker who later came back from the North and begged to be reinslaved. [The incident of the returned slave was observed by the Calhoun family governess, Mary Bates. See Mary Bates, The Private Life of John C. Calhoun (Charleston, 1852), 21]. Even some of the new "free" states denied settlement to freed men. The North had no plans beyond abolition; the South had even less, because the Southerners saw no way out of what, even more than an economic question, was a social one. How, other than by slavery, were the relations between the races to be regulated?]

Back to The Historical Precedent for Identity Politics:

As American history teaches, dividing citizens into identity groups, especially on the basis of race, is a recipe for stoking enmity among all citizens. It took the torrent of blood spilled in the Civil War and decades of subsequent struggles to expunge Calhoun's idea of group hierarchies from American public life. Nevertheless, activists pushing identity politics want to resuscitate a modified version of his ideas, rejecting the Declaration's principle of equality and defining Americans once again in terms of group hierarchies. They aim to make this the defining creed of American public life, and they have been working for decades to bring it about.
Intellectual Original of Identity Politics
The modern revival of identity politics stems from mid-20th century European thinkers who sought the revolutionary overthrow of their political and social systems but were disillusioned by the working class's lack of interest in inciting revolution. The setback forced revolutionaries to reconsider their strategy.
One of the most prominent, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, argued that the focus should not be on economic revolution as much as taking control of the institutions that shape culture. In Gramsci's language, revolutionaries should focus on countering the "Hegemonic Narrative" of the established culture with a "Counter-Narrative," creating a counter-culture that subverts and seeks to destroy the established culture.
Gramsci was an important influence on the thinkers of the "Frankfurt School" in Germany, who developed a set of revolutionary ideas called Critical Theory. Herbert Marcuse, one member of the Frankfurt School who immigrated to the United States in the 1940s, became the intellectual godfather of American identity politics. With little hope that the white American worker could be coaxed to revolution, Marcuse focused not on instigating class conflict but on instigating cultural conflicts around racial identity. He saw revolutionary potential in "the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors."
These ideas led to the development of Critical Race Theory, a variation of critical theory applied to the American context that stresses racial divisions and sees society in terms of minority racial groups oppressed by the white majority. Equally significant to its intellectual content is the role Critical Race Theory plays in promoting fundamental social transformation. Following Gramsci's strategy of taking control of the culture, Marcuse's followers use the approach of Critical Race Theory to impart an oppressor-victim narrative upon generations of American. This work of cultural revolution has been going on for decades, and its first political reverberations can be seen in 1960s America.
The Radicalization of American Politics in the 1960s
Prior to the 1960s, movements in American history that sought to end racial and sexual discrimination, such as abolition, women's suffrage, or the Civil Rights Movement, did so on the ground set by the Declaration of Independence.
In leading the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was aware that other, more revolutionary groups wanted to fight in terms of group identities. In his "I Have a Dream" speech, King rejected hateful stereotyping based on a racialized group identity. The "marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people," he warned. King refused to define Americans in terms of permanent racialized identities and called on Americans "to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustices to the sold rock of brotherhood" and see ourselves as one nation united by a common political creed and commitment to Christian love.
"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir," King wrote. "This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
As the 1960s advanced, however, many rejected King's formulation of civil rights and reframed debates about equality in terms of racial and sexual identities. The Civil Rights Movement came to abandon the nondiscrimination and equal opportunity of colorblind civil rights in favor of "group rights" and preferential treatment. A radical women's liberation movement reimagined America as a patriarchal system, asserting that every woman is a victim of oppression by men. The Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a white supremacist regime. Meanwhile, other activists constructed artificial groupings to further divide Americans by race, creating new categories like "Asian American" and "Hispanic" to teach Americans to think of themselves in terms of group identities and to rouse various groups into politically cohesive bodies.
The Incompatibility of Identity Politics with American Principles
Identity politics divide Americans by placing them perpetually on conflict with each other. This extreme ideology assaults and undermines the American principle of equality in several key ways.
First, identity politics attacks American self-government. Through the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances, American constitutionalism prevents any one group from having complete control of the government. In order to form a majority, the various groups that comprise the nation must resolve their disagreements in light of shared principles and come to a deliberative consensus over how best to govern. In the American system, public policy is decided by prudential compromise among different interest groups for the sake of the common good.
Identity politics, on the other hand, sees politics as the realm of permanent conflict and struggle among racial, gender, and other groups, and no compromise between different groups is possible. Rational deliberation and compromise only preserve the oppressive status quo. Instead, identity politics relies on humiliation, intimidation, and coercion. American self-government, where all citizens are equal before the law, is supplanted by a system where certain people use their group identity to get what they want.
Second, by dividing Americans into oppressed and oppressor groups, activists of identity politics propose to punish some citizens --- many times for wrongs of their ancestors allegedly committed --- while rewarding others. Members of oppressed groups must ascend, and members of oppressor groups must descend. This new system denies that human being are endowed with the same rights, and creates new hierarchies with destructive assumptions and practices.
On the one hand, members of oppressed groups are told to abandon their shared civic identity as Americas and think of themselves in terms of their sexual or racial status. The consequence is that they should no longer see themselves as agents responsible for their own actions but as victims controlled by impersonal forces. In a word, they must reject, not affirm, the Declaration's understanding of self-government according to the consent of the governed. If members of oppressed groups want to become free, they must rely upon a regime of rewards and privileges assigned according to group identity.
On the other hand, members of oppressor groups merit public humiliation at the hands of others. Diversity training programs, for example force members of "oppressor" groups to confess before their co-workers how they contribute to racism. Education programs based on identity politics often use a person's race to degrade or ostracize them.
These degradations of individuals on the basis of race expose the lie that identity politics promotes the equal protection of rights. Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their purported oppressors. This leads to a "cancel culture" that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.
Third, identity politics denies the fundamental moral tenet of the Declaration, that human beings are equal by nature. This founding principle provides a permanent and immutable standard for remedying wrongs done to Americans on the basis of race, sex, or any group identity.
Repudiating this universal tenet, activists pushing identity politics rely instead on cultural and historical generalizations about which groups have stronger moral claims than others. They claim this approach offers a superior and more historically sensitive moral standard. But unlike the standard based on a common humanity---what Lincoln called "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times"---their historical standard is not permanent. Rather, it adjusts to meet the political fashions of a particular moment. By this standard, ethnicities that were once considered "oppressed" can in short order turn into "Oppressors," and a standard that can turn a minority from victim to villain within the course of a few years is no standard at all.
Fourth, identity-politics activists often are radicals whose political program is fundamentally incompatible not only with the principles of the Declaration of independence but also the rule of law embodied by the United States Constitution. Antagonism to the creed expressed in the Declaration seems not an option but a necessary part of their strategy. When activists are discussing seemingly innocuous campaigns to promote "diversity," they are often aiming for fundamental structural change.
Conclusion
Identity politics is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experience at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them. While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities. The very idea of equality under the law---of one nation sharing King's "solid rock of brotherhood"---is not possible and, according to this argument, probably not even desirable. [Publisher's Note: The "old hierarchies of the antebellum South" were often not fair but neither were the many Northern and Western states that did not even allow free blacks to visit for more than a few days, much less take up residence. In Lincoln's Illinois, a free black staying too long would find his new residence the country jail. Perhaps the writers of this report should have included some knowledgeable Southerners to give the report more accuracy rather than taking cheap shots at the South when nobody is there to refute them.]
All Americans, and especially all educators should understand identity politics for what it is: rejection of the principle of equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As a nation, we should oppose such effort to divide us and reaffirm our common faith in the fundamental equal right of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Click Here to download a PDF of the entire 45 page report.

Lysander Spooner’s “No Treason.” The Georgia SCV’s 10 Law Suits Defending Confederate Monuments and the First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

Posted on January 28, 2021January 28, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

Lysander Spooner's No Treason.

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits
Defending Confederate Monuments and the
First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was a "Champion of Liberty, a lawyer, abolitionist, entrepreneur, legal theorist and scholar" according to the plaque on his birthplace in Athol, Massachusetts. He's known for setting up a post office to compete with the government but it was shut down. He is author of a number of famous works including No Treason., and The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. He is still influential in libertarian circles and was cited in two United States Supreme Court Cases recently. Justice Antonin Scalia cited him in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down Washington, DC's ban on handguns in 2008. Justice Clarence Thomas cited him in McDonald v. Chicago, a 2009 firearms case.

The beginning of Spooner's No Treason., No. 1 is an outstanding summary of the North's reason for fighting the War Between the States, and it definitely was not slavery. Massachusetts-born Spooner would know. He states as one possibility that "the lusts of fame, and power, and money" was why the North fought, and, of course, that is absolutely correct. They were fighting for their tariff money, paid mostly by the South but spent mostly in the North. They were fighting for the bounties, subsidies and monopolies voted in Congress by the Northern majority for their businesses despite the South generating all the wealth of the nation with King Cotton and other Southern commodities.

They were fighting also because they thought they could win easily with four times the white population of the South, maybe 100 times the arms manufacturing capability, an army, navy, merchant marine; there were zero marine engine factories in the South while there were 19 in the North. Lincoln also had access to the unlimited immigration of the wretched refuse of the world to feed his armies while his navy blockaded Southern ports. At least 25% of the Union Army were new immigrants and many had been paid bounties to join after they arrived on ships hungry, broke, with only the clothes on their backs.

Yet it still took four years and 750,000 deaths, over a million wounded and the whole region laid waste for Lincoln's armies of invasion to subjugate the South. That's what happens when you fight men and women who were as committed to independence as our Founding Fathers. For the South, 1861 was 1776 all over.

In the year leading up to South Carolina's secession on December 20, 1860, the most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South 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 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.

As Alexis de Tocqueville said in Democracy in America, if any one state became powerful enough to take over the government, they would make the rest of the country subservient and tributary to their wealth and power. That is exactly what happened and was exactly the goal before it happened.

The human lust for money, power and control is universal, as a South Carolina document acknowledged in December, 1860:

[W]hen vast sectional interests are to be subserved, involving the appropriation of countless millions of money, it has not been the usual experience of mankind, that words on parchments can arrest power.
[From The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States]

The Georgia Division, SCV, has 10 excellent law suits going on, mostly against cities, counties, and public officials who have voted to break the law and remove Confederate monuments, but some involve protecting First Amendment rights.

The synopses and updates on each of the Georgia law suits are INSPIRING and fascinating. They show great determination to hold corrupt public officials accountable.

Finally, we get to kick some ass!

They need money so please donate. Here's how you get back at the mob that has been tearing down sacred monuments to war dead, and get back at corrupt public officials who are part of the mob and think they are above the law. [Click the Donate to the Georgia SCV Heritage Defense Legal Fund link at the very end of this post to help!]

Below is a press release from January 25, 2021 discussing the war they are waging in Georgia for the honor of Confederate soldiers who died and were maimed protecting Georgia and the South when Lincoln's hordes invaded.

The Georgia folks got a constitutional amendment on the ballot in the last election to repeal sovereign immunity and it passed overwhelmingly, so corrupt city and county officials can now be held accountable and not get away with hiding behind sovereign immunity.

Every state in the country ought to get rid of sovereign immunity so that groups and citizens have standing to sue cities, counties AND individual councilmen and women. That will get their attention and be good for government at all levels.

A few victories like that, the word gets around (we will SPREAD it around with vigor!) and the removal of monuments will be stopped dead in its tracks, forever.

We can then increase the building of new monuments so future generations will know our glorious American, Southern history.

We also need to focus on shaming characterless legislators who would even consider removing monuments from battlefields. We should appeal to veterans and veterans groups.

The fight over the U. S. Army base names in the South such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg needs to continue with research on how the bases came to be named as they are. There is no question it was a grand gesture of reconciliation by our newly reunited country and as such are important statements as they are.

They have nothing to do with white supremacy as the dope Elizabeth Warren, one of the most characterless people in Congress who gamed the affirmation action system for years pretending to be an Indian, says. She knows nothing about history and could care less about American military honor.

If there are any old laws and some way we can sue to stop the base name changes, we should.

Maybe some old agreements are in place between the states where the bases are located and the Federal Government that would give us a chance. Maybe the state attorneys general or governors can help.

It is going to take two years, supposedly, to change the base names and all the streets, buildings, military assets such as ships and weapons named for Confederates, and to remove all Confederate monuments. If Republicans were in power, we could maybe do something with next years NDAA.

I do not think we should give up on the bases. We need more research. This is a ridiculous waste of millions of taxpayer dollars to change the names of 100 year old bases from where we won two World Wars. Surely veterans groups would be incensed and join us.

Please let me know of other law suits defending monuments and other situations going on around the country. Please write me anytime.

Publishing the beginning of Lysander Spooner's excellent No Treason. followed by the synopses of the Georgia SCV law suits protecting monuments, shows what the North was fighting for, which was not to end slavery. It was for their own wealth and power. Over 750,000 died so Yankees could enrich themselves and control the rest of the country.

Southerners were fighting for independence and the principles of the Founding Fathers. Basil Gildersleeve, the greatest American classical scholar of all time, was a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina. He sums up our reason for fighting in his book, The Creed of the Old South:

All that I vouch for is the feeling: . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

The Georgia SCV synopses and updates follow Spooner, along with a Donate to the Georgia SCV Heritage Defense Legal Fund link.]

No Treason.
No. 1

by Lysander Spooner.

(Boston: Published by the Author,
No. 14 Bromfield Street. 1867.)

Introductory

The question of treason is distinct from that of slavery; and is the same that it would have been, if free States, instead of slave States, had seceded.

On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.

The principles, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.

Lysander Spooner, author of No Treason., The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, and many other important works.

No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it be really established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle --- but only in degrees --- between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man's ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure.

Previous to the war, there were some grounds for saying that --- in theory, at least, if not in practice --- our government was a free one; that it rested on consent. But nothing of that kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North, is irrevocably established.

If that principle be not the principle of the Constitution, the fact should be known. If it be the principle of the Constitution, the Constitution itself should be at once overthrown.

I.

Notwithstanding all the proclamations we have made to mankind, within the last ninety years, that our government rested on consent, and that that was the only rightful basis on which any government could rest, the last war has practically demonstrated that our government rests upon force --- as much so as any government that has ever existed.

The North has thus virtually said to the world: It was all very well to prate of consent, so long as the objects to be accomplished were to liberate ourselves from our connexion with England, and also to coax a scattered and jealous people into a great national union; but now that those purposes have been accomplished, and the power of the North has become consolidated, it is sufficient for us --- as for all governments --- simply to say: Our power is our right.

In proportion to her wealth and population, the North has probably expended more money and blood to maintain her power over an unwilling people, than any other government ever did. And in her estimation, it is apparently the chief glory of her success, and an adequate compensation for all her own losses, and an ample justification for all her devastation and carnage of the South, that all pretence of any necessity for consent to the perpetuity or power of the government, is (as she thinks) forever expunged from the minds of the people. In short, the North exults beyond measure in the proof she has given, that a government, professedly resting on consent, will expend more life and treasure in crushing dissent, than any government, openly founded on force, has ever done.

And she claims that she has done all this in behalf of liberty! In behalf of free government! In behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent!

If the successors of Roger Williams, within a hundred years after their State had been founded upon the principle of free religious toleration, and when the Baptists had become strong on the credit of that principle, had taken to burning heretics with a fury never before seen among men; and had they finally gloried in having thus suppressed all question of the truth of the State religion; and had they further claimed to have done all this in behalf of freedom of conscience, the inconsistency between profession and conduct would scarcely have been greater than that of the North, in carrying on such a war as she has done, to compel men to live under the support a government that they did not want; and in then claiming that she did it in behalf of the principle that government should rest on consent.

This astonishing absurdity and self-contradiction are to be accounted for only by supposing, either that the lusts of fame, and power, and money, have made her utterly blind to, or utterly reckless of, the inconsistency and enormity of her conduct; or that she had never even understood what was implied in a government's resting on consent. Perhaps this last explanation is the true one. In charity to human nature, it is to be hoped that it is.

. . .

**Here is the end of No Treason. by Lysander Spooner:**

George the Third called our ancestors traitors for what they did at that time. But they were not traitors in fact, whatever he or his laws may have called them. They were not traitors in fact, because they betrayed nobody, and broke faith with nobody. They were his equals, owing him no allegiance, obedience, nor any other duty, except such as they owed to mankind at large. Their political relations with him has been purely voluntary. They had never pledged their faith to him that they would continue these relations any longer than it should please them to do so; and therefore they broke no faith in parting with him. They simply exercised their natural right of saying to him, and to the English people, that they were under no obligation to continue their political connexion with them, and that, for reasons of their own, they chose to dissolve it.

What was true of our ancestors, is true of revolutionists in general. The monarchs and governments, from whom they choose to separate, attempt to stigmatize them as traitors. But they are not traitors in fact; inasmuch as they betray, and break faith with, no one. Having pledged no faith, they break none. They are simple men, who, for reasons of their own --- whether good or bad, wise or unwise, is immaterial --- choose to exercise their natural right of dissolving their connexion with the governments under which they have lived. In doing this, they no more commit the crime of treason --- which necessarily implies treachery, deceit, breach of faith --- than a man commits treason when he chooses to leave a church, or any other voluntary association, with which he has been connected.

This principle was a true one in 1776. It is a true one now. It is the only one on which any rightful government can rest. It is the one on which the Constitution itself professes to rest. If it does not really rest on that basis, it has no right to exist; and it is the duty of every man to raise his hand against it. . . .

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits
Defending Confederate Monuments and the First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

Georgia Division Pending Litigation

City of Cuthbert, Randolph County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

On December 14, 2020 the City of Cuthbert City Council voted to remove the Randolph County Confederate Monument. The Georgia Division will be filing for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and filed a lawsuit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1. All the City Council members will be listed individually as defendants.

Status:

On January 19, 2021 the Georgia Division filed for a Temporary Restraining Order and filed a lawsuit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1against the City of Cuthbert and the City Council Members as individuals. We are currently awaiting a court date.

City of Brunswick, Glynn County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

On November 18, 2020 the City of Brunswick City Council voted to remove the Glynn County Confederate Monument. The Georgia Division has filed for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and filed a lawsuit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1. All the City Council members will be listed individually as defendants.

Status:

The city of Brunswick file a motion to dismiss our case. Then offered an temporary motion to stay to place a hold on any action to remove the monument. The SCV agreed to the terms of the motion to stay and the Superior Court Judge issued a consent order.

Newton County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

The Newton County Board of Commissioners voted to remove the Newton County Confederate Monument. The Georgia Division filed for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and filed a lawsuit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1. While the Newton County Superior Court Judge did not issue a TRO, he ruled that nothing would happen to the Confederate Monument until the final ruling was issued.

As expected, the Newton County Superior Court Judge John Ott issued an order in favor of the County Commission’s action stating that the doctrine of sovereign immunity applied. The Georgia Division, SCV immediately filed a motion to appeal. The next day the County Commissioner Chairman attempted to have the Confederate Monument removed. This action, violation of the understanding reached at the earlier hearing, prompted Judge Ott to issue an Order to stay and forbid the removal of the Confederate Monument until the final decision is made.

Status:

The Georgia Court of Appeals has set a court date on April 13, 2021 and has agreed to hear oral arguments.

Rockdale County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

Chairman Oz Nesbitt, Jr., Chairman of the Rockdale County Board of Commissioners made an “executive decision” to remove the Rockdale County Confederate Monument. No formal discussion or vote was obtained from the Rockdale County Board of Commissioners. The Monument was removed that night under the cover of darkness. Georgia Division filed a suit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 in Rockdale County Superior Court. We have sued the Chairman both as an individual as well as Chairman of the Commission.

Status:

Rockdale County Superior Court issued a ruling in favor of the county on the basis of sovereign immunity. The Georgia Division has filed the case to be heard by the Georgia Court of Appeals. The Georgia Court of Appeals set the date of January 11, 2021 for the SCV to file their pleadings to the Court of Appeals, and it was filed on January 7, 2021. We are currently waiting on a ruling from the Georgia court of Appeals.

Henry County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

The Henry County Board of Commissioners voted to remove the Henry County Confederate Monument. The Georgia Division filed for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and filed a lawsuit for the actions proposed in violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1.

The Henry County Superior Court Judge did not issue a TRO. He accepted the County’s defense based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The Georgia Division filed a motion to reconsider after finding a lease agreement between the County and City showing the property where the Monument was standing was leased by the City of McDonough. Therefore, the County had no standing to remove the Monument.

Status:

Henry County Superior Court issued a ruling in favor of the county on the basis of sovereign immunity. The Georgia Division has filed the case to be heard by the Georgia Court of Appeals. Our Attorney is currently working on the pleadings for the Georgia Court of Appeals.

City of Athens/Clarke County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

City of Athens Clarke County Consolidated Government (ACCG) stood by and permitted "mostly peaceful protestors" to vandalize the 1871 Clarke County Confederate Monument located at the intersection of Broad Street and College Avenue. The ACCG voted to remove the Confederate monument to an obscure location in Clarke County at the end of a dead-end, rubbish-strewn road. They claim the move is necessary for a pedestrian walk-widening project that has been the works since 2019. The plans received under an open records request clearly shows that proposed relocation of the Confederate monument was not considered until May 2020. The Georgia Division filed for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) and filed a lawsuit for ACCG’s violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1. The Superior Court of Clarke County denied the Georgia Division a TRO based on the doctrine of sovereign immunity.

Status:

The Georgia Division lawsuit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 is awaiting a court date. The Georgia Division filed an amendment adding the mayor and city commissioners to the lawsuit as individual defendants.

Gwinnett County - Motion to intervene

Synopsis:

The Gwinnett County Solicitor Brian Whiteside filed a lawsuit claiming the that the Gwinnett County Confederate Monument at the old historic County Courthouse was a "nuisance" and is a public safety issue and could cause injury or even death. The Georgia Division and the Major William E Simmons Camp #96 filed a motion to intervene to be a party to the suit.

Status:

Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge issued a ruling in favor of the SCV to grant the motion to intervene. Currently, the Camp and Gwinnett County are negotiating a settlement.

City of Alpharetta - Old Soldiers Day Parade- 1st Amendment violation

Synopsis:

The Georgia Division filed for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The TRO was denied by Judge William Ray and Georgia Division then filed a suit against the City of Alpharetta for violation of their 1st amendment rights.

The City's defense was that since the City was the primary sponsor the parade was considered to be “governmental speech” and therefore not a First Amendment violation. The City argued that permitting the Confederate Battle Flag in the City-sponsored parade might cause viewers to believe the City was endorsing the Confederacy or the SCV. The SCV provided proof the VFW was the primary sponsor and there were other participants in the parade. The Democratic party of Fulton County was one such group. It displayed a banner. Other businesses advertised their trade with signs and banners. The SCV argued that the City was not concerned about endorsing the Democratic Party or these businesses and was therefore censoring the SCV for its viewpoint.

Judge William Ray again ruled against the Georgia Division citing that the parade was governed by the concept of governmental speech. The SCV has filed a motion for reconsideration with the United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia based on the issue of forum analysis.

Status:

Judge William Ray ruled against the motion to reconsider. The Georgia Division has filed an appeal with the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Attorney Walker Chandler has filed an entry of appearance and pleadings with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

City of Columbus - Linwood Cemetery - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Synopsis:

General Henry Benning Camp #517 entered into an agreement formally adopted by resolution with the Mayor and City Council of the City of Columbus on October 4, 1994. The SCV was permitted to erect two 35 foot flag poles flying the Confederate Battle Flags in the Confederate Sections of the Linwood Cemetery. Sometime in 2016 the Battle Flags were removed and replaced with 1st National Flags. The Camp made various attempts to resolve the issue with the Mayor by rotating the flags with the many different flags of the Confederacy, but the Mayor refused. The Camp then placed, as clearly permitted under the Agreement, a Battle Flag back on one pole. The Mayor and Council responded by having the Memorial Flag poles cut at the base, destroying and removing them.

Status:

Georgia Division filed a suit for violation of O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 in Muscogee County Superior Court, awaiting a court day to be set. The Georgia Division filed an amendment adding the mayor and city commissioners to the lawsuit as individual defendants.

Cotriss Case - 1st Amendment violation

Synopsis:

Silvia Cotriss was a police sergeant with the Roswell city police. She was fired for flying a Confederate Battle Flag in front of her home. A black pharmacist complained because she had a city police car parked at her home. According to her attorney, the car was in the shop on the day in question. She sued based on the city firing her when she was exercising her 1st amendment rights at her home.

The case went before United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia and Judge William Ray ruled against her.

Status:

The case was appealed and now is awaiting a ruling from the US 11th circuit court of appeals. The SCV has assisted in expenses in this vital case. If upheld, the precedent could be set that no Confederate heritage supporter has a right to a government job.

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Strike Back at the Hate-America Mob!

The Georgia SCV’s New Suit Against the City of Cuthbert and Individual Council Members

Posted on January 21, 2021January 21, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

The Georgia SCV's New Suit Against the
City of Cuthbert and Individual Council Members

Entire Suit Is Published Below so Others Can See this Tactic in Action

We Are Living in a Tyranny

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

We are living in 1984, in an American tyranny.

That is proven by attacks on free speech, censorship across the board, massive deplatforming of people because of their political beliefs, cancel culture that destroys careers-lives-families, and racist identity politics, all underpinned by the constant hatred of American history.

President Trump's 45 page White House 1776 Commission Report was the first thing Biden canceled off the White House website because his voters don't want to see anything that portrays America honorably. The fraudulent 1619 Project is more to their liking.

There is also the labeling of 75 million Trump voters as potential domestic terrorists so the government can spy on them like Obama's FBI did to Trump when he first took office.

When I read in George Orwell's 1984

'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

I understood what he was saying but it was hard to imagine exactly how that would work.

It's not any more.

It is going on clearly before our very eyes. It is so shocking that one is paralyzed with disbelieve and can only stand there with their mouth open wondering if this is not some kind of bad dream.

Is there really tyranny in America?

There was tyranny in 1776 but was taxation without representation worse than having your life destroyed by cancel culture because you voted for Trump or went to the rally in Washington, DC on January 6 with a half million other patriotic Americans?

Was taxation without representation worse than having all the social media accounts used by the president of the United States to communicate with the country, shut down by big tech? Google promised in 2016 never to let a Republican win again and in 2020, all of big tech acted on that promise with life or death urgency.

Was taxation without representation worse than big tech censoring the New York Post's excellent reporting on Hunter and Joe Biden's corruption and influence selling to the Chinese? The Post had the credible Tony Bobulinski story which polls show would have caused 10% of Biden voters not to vote for him, which would have, right there, given President Trump the win; but big tech suppressed the Post story so Trump would not win. Most people did not see that story until after the election.

We are clearly living in a tyranny today that is worse than 1776. People are afraid to speak up, and that is the purpose of cancel culture, the ultimate technique of political bullying and violence.

Thanks STUPID REPUBLICAN PARTY for protecting us against this horror when you had the chance.

You were too busy promoting Elizabeth Warren's plan to rename all the U. S. Army bases in the South such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg even though those base names are a century old and were named after Confederates as a grand gesture of reconciliation after a war that killed 750,000 soldiers and wounded over a million.

Jim Inhofe and Mitch McConnell are national disgraces, and Inhofe lied to us and President Trump. He alone, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, could have prevented the renaming of the bases, and he promised he would, but he is a liar. He joined with Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats to screw his own voters, and Mitch McConnell supported him.

Of course, Inhofe and McConnell's stupidity contributed to the loss of the two Senate seats in Georgia, where two of those bases are located including legendary Fort Benning, Home of the United States Army Infantry.

The Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, secretly tapes a phone call with the president of the United States then releases it to the Washington Post hours before the Senate runoffs in Georgia, guaranteeing the national headlines coast to coast, hours before the most important Senate runoffs in Georgia history, would be extremely negative against President Trump and the Republicans.

And Raffensperger is a Republican?

For the good of the party, couldn't he have waited a couple days to release his phone call?

Why did Raffensperger make such a horrible settlement with Stacey Abrams in the first place lowering voting standards, which enabled Democrats to win across the board in Georgia? The Georgia legislature better get that corrected and quick, and Georgia voters need to vote Raffensperger out with a vengeance.

The national Republican Party is so stupid. I know Trump made his mistakes but he was one man, surrounded by traitors and a hostile press, against the massive DC swamp.

Trump's appeal is that: He is the first Republican to fight for what he believes in and campaigned on, and fight hard. EVERY other chickensh_t Republican turns tail and joins the enemy. When one does fight, it is so surprising you almost fall over.

I thought Sen. Tom Cotton was a good guy but he did not stand up for President Trump and object to the obvious voting irregularities in the battleground states as Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz , and many others did, or planned to.

Democrats have objected every year when Republicans win, but Republicans backed off after the riot. Kelly Loeffler was going to object but took back her objection after the riot as if the riot made massive voting irregularities disappear. That shows her lack of character but, sadly, she is a typical Republican.

For daring to exercise his constitutional right to object as Democrats do every election, Sen. Hawley lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster, though he quickly got another deal with Regnery, which is a much better publisher. So that worked out well.

There are a lot of great Republicans. Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes -- Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida -- and others who will fight, but all of them better pick it up or they will never win another national election.

Republican legislatures in the battleground states had better get a grip on their election laws and make damn sure Democrats can't cheat with massive mail-in ballots as it appears they did in 2020.

But don't hold your breath.

We are not going to give up our country or our country's history. We should never, ever remove a century old monument, especially those to war dead. The people doing that today are ignorant and utterly misguided, but, like cancer, they will not stop. They plan to mindlessly destroy every last vestige of Southern history.

We should always build more monuments, not less. That way we send a fuller message into the future for those who are not yet born, to one day contemplate.

They don't need the woke hate of arrogant people today who think they know more than anybody in human history. Let people in the future decide for themselves.

In America, we don't burn books, nor forbid them to be published as some on the left want to do. Frankly, we must watch closely the inclinations of those on the left, chief among them, censorship. What are they afraid of?

Are they afraid that more people will find other ideas, besides woke ideas, more to their liking?

The good folks in Georgia are leading the way in this fight to preserve American and Southern history for future generations. They are doing our country a huge service and everybody should follow their lead.

Below, is the January 19, 2021 press release of the Georgia Division, SCV, followed by their law suit in its entirety against the City of Cuthbert, Georgia and Cuthbert's city council members, individually, for voting to violate Georgia state law.

Confederate monument in Cuthbert, GA, town sq, erected in 1896 by Randolph Cty UCV and Ladies Mem Assoc of Randolph Cty.

We should all innovate, publish, write, make films and videos, speak, do whatever we want except give in to hate and tyranny. We are still the greatest nation in history, and the South is still the best part, by far, of that great nation.

Donate – GA SCV (georgiascv.org)

Secession, North and South

Posted on January 14, 2021January 17, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 Comments

Secession, North and South

Address by Col. E. Polk Johnson at U.D.C. Convention in Louisville, April, 1919 (from Confederate Veteran magazine, Vol. XXVII, No. 5, May, 1919)

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. :

It was this time of year, one hundred and sixty-one years ago, that seven Southern states, believing with every ounce of their being that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," seceded from the old Union and formed a new nation on this earth: the Confederate States of America.

For over a decade, those seven states along with the rest of the South, had endured abject hatred and violence encouraged by a political party that was determined to rally its voters in the populous North. They wanted political control of the country so they could continue to enrich themselves with high tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopoly status for their businesses (not unlike the tyrannical monopoly status Google, Facebook and Twitter enjoy today).

That party was the first sectional party in American history, "a party of the North pledged against the South," as Wendell Phillips proudly stated.

Hate works, in politics, as we see today, and the Republican Party had used it brilliantly. Their nominee, Abraham Lincoln, won but with only 39.9% of the popular vote, meaning 60% of the country voted against him.

So, the consent of the governed in the South was not there for continuance in a Union that hated them and was robbing them blind. They seceded peacefully and expected to live in peace but were promptly invaded because the North could not stand a low tariff nation on its border, especially one that promised to be a formidable competitor with 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet: King Cotton.

The North faced economic annihilation without the South as free trade Southerners sought to buy better goods from Europe rather than the overpriced North.

There was also the astronomical Morrill Tariff, the epitome of Northern greed and economic stupidity. It threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry overnight as ship captains beat a path from the high tariff North to the low tariff South where protective tariffs were unconstitutional.

Lincoln needed his war before Europeans recognized Southern independence and gave military aid along with the trade agreements they both sought. With European military aid, the North would not have been able to beat the South, and Lincoln knew it. Thus, he sent warships, troops and supplies to Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola Bay, and Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, to get the war started.

Before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Lincoln announced his blockade, which chilled European recognition of the South and caused Europe to take a wait and see attitude.

By the time Lincoln's war was over, 750,000 were dead, and over a million, wounded.

The Republic of the Founding Fathers was dead too, and in its place, the Northern dominated federal leviathan we have today.

Northern anti-slavery was in no way pro-black. It was anti-black. They didn't like slavery because they did not like blacks and didn't want blacks anywhere near them in the West.

"Anti-South" is a more accurate term than anti-slavery because most of Northern anti-slavery was political and economic, designed to rally votes for the Republican Party, not to help black people.

Several Northern and Western states had laws preventing free blacks from residing there or even visiting for more than a few days including Lincoln's Illinois. If blacks stayed too long, they could be arrested and in some cases, whipped.

People like Horace Greeley and many others were what is known today as virtue signalers. They agitated to end slavery but did not put forth a single plan to phase out slavery such as the gradual, compensated emancipation that most countries on earth used effectively and easily to end slavery.

The Northern states used gradual compensated emancipation to end slavery in the North though their record is miserable because in most cases, before the poor slave was to be free, ever thrifty Yankees sold him or her back into slavery in the South. Alexis de Tocqueville said the North did not end slavery but just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one.

The following is an excellent historical analysis of the causes of the war, the North's carrying on of the slave trade, the right of secession, the horror of federal coercion as stated by Alexander Hamilton, and ultimately, reconciliation. It was written by a former Confederate, Col. E. Polk Johnson, 54 years after the war, when memories were fresh. It would be like someone today writing about events in 1967.]

IT HAS BEEN THOUGHT APPROPRIATE by the Program Committee that a part of the evening's proceeding shall be devoted to the question of secession and the withdrawal of the Southern States from the Union in 1860, and to me has been assigned the preparation of a paper on that subject.

In the North it was and is thought that the South was prompted in the movement of 1860-61 by the sole desire to perpetuate slavery.

This we deny.

The Southern States have been persistently misrepresented as the propagandists of slavery, and the Northern States as the defenders and champions of universal freedom. It has been dogmatically asserted that the War between the States was caused by efforts on the one side to extend and perpetuate human slavery and on the other to resist it and establish human liberty.

Neither allegation is true.

To whatever extent the question of slavery many have served as an occasion, it was far from being the cause of the war.

As a historical fact, negro slavery existed in all the original thirteen States. It was recognized by the Constitution. Owing to climatic, industrial, and economical--not moral nor sentimental--reasons, it had gradually disappeared in the Northern States, while it had persisted in the Southern States.

The slave trade was never conducted by the people of the South. It had been monopolized by Northern merchants and carried on by Northern ships.

Men differed in their views as to the abstract question of the right or wrong of slavery, but for the two generations after the Revolution there was no geographical line of such differences. It was during the controversy over the Missouri question that the subject first took a sectional aspect, but long after that period abolitionists were mobbed and assaulted in the North. Lovejoy, for instance, was killed in Illinois in 1837. The above statements are from a short history of the Confederate States by Jefferson Davis.

The object of the war on the part of the North was ostensibly "to save the Union," but before it had ended it had become an open crusade to free the slaves of the South.

It may be of some interest to inquire at this point how the negro came to be here. Let Matthew Page Andrews, an impartial historian, answer: "Ships engaged in this traffic [the slave trade] had regular routes from several of the New England States to the West Indies, whither they took merchandise to exchange for tropical products, especially sugar and molasses.

They then returned to New England, converted the molasses of their cargoes into rum, and went from there to Africa. With the rum and beads and trinkets they bought the ignorant savages of Africa. The slave vessels now returned to America and sold their cargoes in the Southern slave markets. * * * Clergymen in the North would return thanks for the safe arrival of these slave ships."¹

"In 1619 slavery was not recognized in English law nor in the laws and customs of Virginia; and although previously referred to in Virginia court records as in existence, slavery was not regulated by statutory laws until 1661, several years subsequent to such action in Massachusetts (1640) and Connecticut (1650)."²

"As late as February 12, 1853, Illinois enacted legislation making it a crime for a free negro to come or be brought into the State."³

"The New England States desired the continuance of this traffic (slave trade) for the reason that their ships were making large profits from it."⁴

"In answer to a memorial from Pennsylvania praying the abolishment of slavery, Congress declared that under the Constitution the question could be decided by the States only and that the Federal government had no authority in the matter."⁵

"The moral question involved in the extension of slavery was by no means predominant. The conflict was fundamentally a political and economic one."⁶

The Narraganset Indians in December, 1675, were attacked by a force of colonists, who destroyed their fort and killed more than a thousand of them. "By the summer of 1676 the three Indian tribes were utterly crushed and their chieftains, Philip and Cananchet, killed. The captured Indians were sold as slaves."⁷

Referring to the Emancipation Proclamation, Andrews says on page 293: "if the proclamation had aroused the slaves in resistance throughout the Confederacy, the Southern armies could not have been maintained in the field. That the slaves remained faithful to the trust committed to their care by the men who went to the front is not only a tribute to the training and character of the Southern negroes, but an enduring memorial of the kindly relations between the master and servants."

This is but a grouping of facts known to all who have a knowledge of the earlier history of our country. They are collected here for easy reference by those who may not have paid attention to the events which culminated in the War between the States.

It is not necessary to read between the lines to learn that our very patriotic brethren of new England had a very healthy and ever-present affection for the mighty dollar and nice elastic consciences, which they never permitted to interfere with the collection thereof.

One recalling the pretended holy horror of the North at the thought of secession may be misled into the belief that it was a plant of purely Southern growth which could neither germinate nor exist in any other climate or locality. Permit a glance at the utterances of some of the leaders of thought in the North prior to the war.

Joshua R. Giddings: "I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South, when the black man, armed with British bayonets and led by British officers, shall assert his freedom and wage a war of extermination against his master. And though we may not mock at their calamity nor laugh when their fear cometh, we shall hail it as the dawn of a political millennium."

Rufus P. Spalding: "In the alternative being presented of the continuation of slavery or a dissolution of the Union, we are for a dissolution, and we care not how quickly it comes."

Charles Sumner: "The fugitive slave act is filled with horror. We are bound to disobey this act." Sumner was a Senator from Massachusetts, sworn to support the laws of the country, yet he taught their nullification when they did not suit him. Andrew Jackson called this treason when South Carolina sought to nullify an act of Congress.

Portland (Me.) Advertiser: "The Advertiser has no hesitation in saying that it does not hold to the faithful observance of the fugitive slave law of 1850." This journal was an apt and ready pupil in the school of disunion taught by Charles Sumner and the other extremists in the North.

Horace Greeley: "I have no doubt but the free and slave States ought to be separated. The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the South." When several of the States had withdrawn from the Union, he said: "Let the erring sisters go in peace."

Wendell Phillips: "There is merit in the Republican party. It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It is not national; it is sectional. It is the North against the South. The first crack in the iceberg is visible. You will yet hear it go with a crack through the center."

The Independent Democrat, a New Hampshire newspaper which belied its name, said: "The cure for slavery prescribed by Redpath is the only infallible remedy, and men must ferment insurrection among the slaves in order to cure the evils. It can never be done by concessions and compromises. It is a great evil and must be extinguished by still greater ones. It is positive and imperious in its approaches and must be overcome with equally positive forces. You must commit an assault to arrest a burglar, and slavery is not arrested without a violation of law and the cry of fire."

In October, 1859, John Brown, of a memory almost as infamous as the cowardly crew in the background outside the line of fire who supplied the money that armed his marauding murderers, made an attack upon Harper's Ferry, Virginia, his object being the stirring up of an insurrection among the slaves and the murder of the whites. Of this event the Hon. J. L. M. Curry, in his "Civil History of the Confederate States," says: "In October, 1859, John Brown, a bold and bad man, made his bloody foray into Virginia, fraught with the most terrible consequences of spoliation of property, arson, insurrection, murder, and treason.

This raid was a compound of foolhardiness and cruelty. Conservative and respectable journals and all decent men and women denounced at the time the arrogant and silly attempt of the murderer to take into his destructive hands the execution of his fell designs.

Sympathy with those purposes and his methods was vehemently disclaimed by the representatives of all parties in Congress, and conspicuously by John Sherman. Few, except redhanded and dastard fanatics, lifted voices against his execution after a fair trial and a just verdict by a Virginia court. A Senate committee, after laborious investigation submitted a report, accompanied by evidence, and said: 'It was simply the act of lawless ruffians under the sanction of no public or political authority, distinguishable only from ordinary felonies by the ulterior ends in contemplation by them and by the fact that the money to maintain the expedition and its large armament they brought with them had been constituted and furnished by the citizens of other States of the Union under circumstances that must continue to jeopardize the safety and peace of the Southern States and against which Congress has no power to legislate."

Andrews says of the affair, on page 261: "No one prominent in political life in the North seems to have been directly concerned with this proposed servile insurrection, but a number of well-known abolitionists contributed money and supplies. The most noteworthy of these was Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The distinguished philosopher and author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, declared: 'The new saint (Brown) will make the gallows glorious like the cross.'"

Mr. Curry concludes as follows: "So much for the Senate. Now John Brown inspires a popular song and poetry and eloquence, almost a national air, and Northern writers and people compare him to Jesus Christ and put him in the Saints' Calendar of Freedom."

Among other canonized saints in the North in the period before the war was Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the most mendacious of all the literature of that day, did more to fan the fires of hatred and keep them burning in the North than all the utterances of the half-mad fanatics whose object was the goading of the South into acts of reprisal for the John Brown raid. The list could be extended indefinitely, but enough has been said to show the menace which faced the quiescent South.

Touching the rights of the States to control their own affairs, upon which the South insisted and still insists, it is interesting to note the expressions of several of the States made at the time of their acceptance of the Constitution, showing, as they do, beyond any doubt the same construction of that instrument that was and is to-day the sentiment of the South.

Virginia, the mother of States and of Presidents, declared that "The powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression," and that "every power not granted thereby remains with them (the people) and at their will."

New York with equal candor resolved: "That the power of the government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness; that every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by the said Constitution clearly delegated to the Congress of the United States or the departments thereof remains in the people of the several States or to their respective State governments to whom they have granted the same; and those clauses in the said Constitution which declare that the Constitution shall not have nor exercise certain powers do not imply that the Constitution is entitled to any powers not given by said document, but such clauses are to be construed either as exceptions to certain specifications or as inserted merely for greater caution."

Rhode Island declared in 1790 that "the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness."

Maryland declared that nothing in the Constitution "warrants a construction that the States do not retain every power not expressly relinquished by them and vested in the general government of the Union."

A public meeting of citizens of Boston, Mass., in Faneuil Hall in 1809 in a celebrated memorial states that they looked "only to the State legislature, which was competent to devise relief against the unconstitutional acts of the general government; that your power is adequate to that object is evident from the organization of the Confederation."

Proceeding now to an expression of personal opinion, William H. Seward, Secretary of State in the cabinet of Mr. Lincoln, is found saying: "There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our authority over the domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it." It was a common expression during the war that the Constitution was laid away during the struggle, an expression corroborated by Mr. Seward's sentiment.

Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, wrote: "The time is fast approaching when the cry will become too overpowering to resist. Rather than tolerate national slavery as it now exists, let the Union be dissolved at once, and then the sin of slavery will rest where it belongs."

Mr. Lloyd Garrison defiantly declared from every Northern platform that "the Union is a lie. The American Union is an impostor, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. We are for its overthrow. Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious republic of our own!"

Where did secession have is birth? Was it at the North or at the South? Let Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, answer. He regarded the purchase of Louisiana by Mr. Jefferson as invalid until each of the original thirteen States had signified its assent, and on the bill for the admission of Louisiana into the Union in 1811 he declared: "If the bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and as it will be the right of all, so will it be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must."

In 1844 Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, introduced into the legislature of that State a resolution of reference to the annexation of Texas almost identical with that of Mr. Quincy in 1841, declaring that Massachusetts was "determined to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth."

In 1857 a State Disunion Convention was held at Worcester, Mass., at which it was resolved to seek "the expulsion of the slave States from the Confederation, in which they have ever been an element of discord, danger, and disgrace." It was also proposed to organize a party whose candidates should be publicly pledged to "to ignore the Federal government, to refuse an oath to its Constitution, and to make the States free and independent communities." These quotations indicate the views of the North in regard to the perpetuity of the Union and the free and easy manner in which they declared for its immediate dissolution.

A word from the South is now in order on the same subject. In "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" Mr. Davis calmly and in a statesmanlike manner, devoid of that passion which so marked the disunion sentiment of the North, summarizes the following proposition:

"That the States of which the American Union was formed from the moment they emerged from their colonial or provincial condition become severally sovereign, free, and independent States, not one State or nation."

"That the Union formed under the Articles of Confederation was a compact between the States in which these attributes of sovereignty, freedom, and independence were expressly asserted."

"That in forming the more perfect Union of the Constitution afterwards adopted the same contracting powers formed an amended compact without any surrender of those attributes of sovereignty, freedom, and independence, either expressed or implied; that, on the contrary, by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, limiting the power of the government to its express grants, they distinctly guarded against the presumption of a surrender of anything by implication."

"That political sovereignty resides neither in individual citizens nor in unorganized masses nor in fractional subdivision of a community, but in the people of an organized political body."

"That 'no republican form of government' in the sense in which that expression is used in the Constitution and was generally understood by the founders of the Union, whether it be the government of a State or a confederation of States, is possessed by any sovereignty whatever, but merely exercises certain powers delegated by the sovereign authority of the people and subject to recall and reassumption by the same authority that conferred them."

"That the 'people' who organized the first confederation, the people who dissolved it, the people who ordained and established the Constitution which succeeded it, the only people, in fine, known or referred to in the phraseology of that period, whether the term was used collectively or distributively, were the people of the respective States, each acting separately and with absolute independence of the other."

"That in forming and adopting the Constitution the States, or the people of the States--terms which, when used with reference to acts performed in a sovereign capacity, are precisely equivalent to each other--formed a new government, but no new people, and that consequently no new sovereignty was created, for sovereignty in an American republic can belong only to a people, never to a government, and that the Federal government is entitled to exercise only the powers delegated to it by the people of the respective States."

"That the term 'people' in the preamble to the Constitution and in the Tenth Amendment is used distributively; that the only 'people of the United States' known to the Constitution are the people of each State in the Union; that no such political community of corporate unit as one people of the United States then existed, has ever been organized, or yet exists; and that no political action by the people of the United States in the aggregate has ever taken place or ever can take place under the Constitution."

John Marshall, the famous Chief Justice of the United States and one of the most prominent members of the Federalist party, who cannot be accused of sympathy with States' rights views, delivered an address in the Virginia Convention of 1798 from which the following quotations are made: "The State governments did not derive their powers from the general government, but each government derived its power from the people, and each was to act according to the power given. Would any gentleman deny this? Could any man say that this power was not retained by the States, as they had not given it away? The State legislature had power to command and govern their militia before and have it still undeniably, unless there be something in the Constitution that takes it away."

In another instance the special subject was the power of the Federal judiciary, of which Mr. Marshall said: "I hope that no gentleman will think that a State can be called at the bar of a Federal court. Is there no such case at present? Are there not many cases in which the legislature of Virginia is a party and yet the State is not sued? Is it rational to suppose that the sovereign power shall be dragged before a court."

Daniel Webster, in a speech in Virginia in 1851, said: "If the Senate were to violate any part of the Constitution intentionally and systematically and persist in so doing year after year and no remedy could be had, would the North be any longer bound by the rest of it? And if the North were deliberately, habitually and at fixed purpose to disregard one part of it, would the South be bound any longer to observe its other obligations? How absurd it is, then to supposed that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard any one provision and expect, nevertheless, the other to observe the rest! I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the Northern States refuse willfully and deliberately to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provides no remedy, the South would be no longer bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still blind the other side."

Alexander Hamilton, the father of the Federalist party, said in the New York convention: "To coerce a State is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a noncomplying State, Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another. Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can exist only by the sword? But can we believe that one State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream. It is impossible."

Unhappily our generation and that which preceded us have seen come to pass the very thing that to Hamilton was a dream, an impossibility. We have seen States willingly used for the wicked purpose of coercing their sister States and counting it unto themselves as righteousness. We have seen the South crushed beneath the feet of the soldiery of her sister States and heard the ribald laughter of the Northern politicians as they mocked us in our calamity. But, thanks to a just God, we have survived the worst that ever befell a people, and the South, regenerated, true to its every plighted word, stands foursquare to every wind that blows.

As a Kentuckian and a former Confederate soldier, my heart beats in unison to-day, as it beat half a century ago, with that of the brave old Governor of Kentucky who, in reply to Mr. Lincoln's call for troops, said: "I say emphatically that Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States." Nor did she furnish any while brave old Beriah Magoffin was Governor.

Quoting again from Mr. Davis, he is found saying: "We have seen how vehemently the idea of even political coercion was repudiated by Hamilton, Marshall, Webster, and others. The suggestion of military coercion was uniformly treated as in the quotations from the authorities just named, but with still more abhorrence. No principle was more fully and firmly settled on the highest authority than that under our system there could be no coercion of a State."

Nor had any one with authority to speak denied the unalienable right of a State to withdraw from the Union at the moment when its rights were infringed and its freedom of action denied. Indeed, this paper, if it proves anything, has proved by the testimony of Northern witnesses that it was entirely proper, legal, and justifiable for a Northern State to secede from the Union at any moment, but it was illegal, unjust, and not to be thought of that a Southern State should exercise a like action.

After all, the highest proof of the correctness of the Southern view was shown by the failure of the government to press the trial of Mr. Davis for treason on the indictment returned against him at Richmond, Va. The foremost legal minds of the North knew that he was not a traitor, nor could he be proved so under the law. Hence the dismissal of legal proceedings against him and his ultimate release from the charge.

This action was a high testimonial to the position the South through its leaders had taken before, during, and after the war. Mr. Davis and the men who followed the flag of the South during four years of a heartbreaking struggle were not traitors nor rebels, but patriots from their point of view, and not one of the living men of that struggle but is proud of his participation therein and of the southern cross pinned to his ragged gray jacket by the hands of a Daughter of the Confederacy.

The war was inevitable. In no other way could the differing views of the North and the South be brought to a conclusive settlement. Every patriot heart beats more warmly to-day at the thought that it has been settled and can arise no more to disturb our happily reunited country.

Mr. Davis, in concluding the history of the Confederate government, uses these words: "In asserting the right of secession it has not been my wish to incite to its exercise. I recognize the fact that the war showed it to be impracticable, but this did not prove it to be wrong; and now that it may not again be attempted and that the Union may promote the general welfare, it is needful that the truth, the whole truth, should be known, so that recrimination may forever cease and that on the basis of fraternity and faithful regard for the rights of the States there may be written on the arch of the Union, Esto perpetua."

(This article is verbatim, with spelling and text, from the original in Confederate Veteran magazine. Some longer paragraphs were broken up for ease of reading but nothing was left out or changed.)

NOTES

¹ Matthew Page Andrews, History of the United States, footnote on page 177.

² Andrews, footnote, page 23.

³ Andrews, footnote, page 210.

⁴ Andrews, page 153.

⁵ Andrews, page 162.

⁶ Andrews, page 212.

⁷ Andrews, page 61.

Sue Public Officials Personally, and Fight for Fort Benning, Fort Bragg et al.

Posted on January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

Sue Public Officials Personally,
and Fight for Fort Benning, Fort Bragg et al.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

I have written about this before because it is an extremely good idea, and the Georgia Division, SCV, is leading the way.

They are suing more mayors and council people as "individuals" (meaning they are being sued personally) for voting to remove Confederate monuments in direct violation of Georgia's monument protection law. The Georgia Division, SCV, press release of December 22, 2020 is below in its entirety.

The Georgia Minutemen have been promoting this approach too.

Those arrogant mayors and council people who knowingly vote to break the law obviously have contempt for the citizens of Georgia, the Georgia legislature, Georgia's history and the rule of law.

This is a GOOD move by the Georgia Division, SCV, and EVERY SCV division in the country should follow suit and do the same thing.

Imagine the satisfaction when you can sue those SOBs personally on behalf of our Confederate ancestors.

The Republican Party in the states, statewide, and locally -- unlike congressional Republicans -- is great and should help. Republicans in South Carolina have introduced legislation, H. 3326, and H. 3249, to strengthen our Heritage Act and enable us to sue public officials as individuals when they vote to break our law, just like in Georgia.

Suing public officials personally does have a deterrent effect when the word gets around, and as Sun Tzu said, beating the enemy without having to fight, is supreme excellence.

Arranging things in your state through your legislature so private citizens and heritage groups have the legal right to sue those law breaking public officials personally, should be the highest priority of every state in the country. That is the only way this Nazism against Southern history is going to be stopped.

A lot of states are doing effective things to preserve their history and many of our people are leading the way. Let's please share that information with people who will write about it and promote it across the country, like me. We will promote it when advantageous, and be discrete when advantageous. The point, though, is to accumulate the knowledge, capability and helpful contacts so that we can take action and beat those horrible people who think it is OK to remove monuments to war dead.

Our enemies mean to destroy the history of the South totally. They fully intend to wipe it off the map and teach all future generations that the Old South was an evil place that stood only for slavery.

They don't want it known that America was founded in the South, at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, or that the South provided America's most beloved leaders and Founding Fathers whose descendants all fought and bled for our country like the great patriots they are.

This mindless political hate must be beaten one way or another. Southern history is the best part of American history.

I know most people on this list know all this, but here's a select summary for those who don't.

From Virginia alone, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, James Madison is the Father of the Constitution, and George Washington commanded our victorious Revolutionary War armies and was our first president who was "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

Those words are part of a eulogy for Washington given by Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, "a major general in the Continental Army, member of the Continental Congress, governor of Virginia" and father of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Robert E. Lee's estate, Arlington House, owned by his wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, has been our nation's most sacred burial ground -- Arlington National Cemetery -- for a century-and-a-half.

Southerners won all of America's wars before the War Between the States.

The Revolutionary War was won in the South with patriot victories at Kings Mountain and Cowpens, South Carolina, culminating in the surrender of British Gen. Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia in October, 1781.

Southerners won the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans while treasonous New Englanders were slinking around in their Hartford Convention.

Southerners added much territory to our country with the Louisiana Purchase over which New Englanders again threatened to secede.

Southerners won the Mexican War with more Southern blood and treasure than from any other part of America, and we supported every other American war with much higher percentages of military recruits than our percentage of the population.

We wrote the book on American valor, decency and love of country with Southerners like Alvin York of Tennessee, the most highly decorated American soldier of World War I, and Audie Murphy of Texas, the most highly decorated American soldier of World War II.

Alvin Cullum York, a/k/a Sgt. York, highly decorated WWI soldier from Tennessee.

Audie Leon Murphy, from Texas, the most highly decorated American soldier of WWII.

Our country has benefited mightily from Southern patriotism and blood.

But Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, and stupid Republicans in Congress who go along with her, don't care.

The War Between the States is the central event in American history. Over 750,000 Americans died, and over a million were wounded out of a national population of 31 million. We lost 400,000 in World War II out of a national population of 150 million.

None of that matters to the racist identity politics of most Democrats who, once again, have legislation out there to remove Confederate monuments that currently sit on some of the bloodiest battlefields in history.

James McPherson says in Drew Gilpin Faust's book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War:

[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.

Suing public officials personally is the exact right thing to do. If we have the legal ability to do it, we'll go after every one of them with relish.

Anybody who is successful suing a public official personally, please share that information so we can all learn and profit from it.

If there is a way to sue people who have removed monuments illegally in the PAST, we should look at that too and do it.

If there are legal experts who can advise us on how to do some of these things, please contact me and I will spread the word.

It would be an extreme pleasure to donate money toward suing public officials personally who vote to break the law and remove sacred monuments to Southern war dead.

When we have successes suing these characterless public officials, we should spread the word far, wide and relentlessly.

We should fight Elizabeth Warren's provision in the NDAA
to rename Forts Benning, Bragg and others

It is extremely regretable that STUPID REPUBLICANS voted with Elizabeth Warren to rename the U.S. Army bases in the South though most are a century old and helped us greatly to win World Wars I and II. There was no reason whatsoever to do this.

The abject stupidity and contemptuous behavior of Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Jim Inhofe, unquestionably helped Democrats defeat the two Republican senators in the January 5th runoff in Georgia, thus taking the majority in the Senate away from the Republican Party.

Legendary Fort Benning, near Columbus, is a major century old fort in Georgia, Home of the United States Army Infantry. There is also Fort Gordon, near Augusta, that dates to 1941.

Inhofe's idiotic support of Elizabeth Warren, against the wishes of President Trump, will change not only the names of Fort Benning, Fort Bragg and all the others, but it will change all the street and building names, change the names of weapons and military assets, remove every monument to a Southerner, and remove every vestige of the Confederacy despite oceans of Southern blood being spilled defending our great nation all over the planet.

Just like Stacey Abrams owns weak cowardly Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Elizabeth Warren owns Jim Inhofe and the dumb Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee where they will no longer have the majority.

Here are the prophetic words from my article December 17, 2020 entitled "BETRAYAL: Republicans in the Senate Guarantee U.S. Army Base Names in the South WILL Change":

Republicans won't win the Senate runoffs in Georgia in just over two weeks because STUPID Republicans have done NOTHING to correct the situation in Georgia that allowed Stacey Abrams and her ilk to steal the general election from President Trump in the first place.
Where is the GBI and FBI questioning the woman caught on camera scanning the same ballots over and over? She knows about the corruption and all the players involved.
Where is the GBI and FBI questioning of the person who lied and said a water main break is why they quit counting ballots the wee hours of November 4th? That person is the tip of a line that goes into an ocean of Georgia corruption.
The Georgia governor is a Republican (supposedly) and the Georgia legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. How about assert yourselves and take command and rectify the horrible deal made with Stacey Abrams that promoted widespread election fraud in Georgia and disenfranchised millions of legitimate Georgia voters.
If you don't, mark my words, Republican Senators Loeffler and Perdue have no chance of winning in two-and-a-half weeks.

The utter incompetence of Inhofe, Kemp, Raffensperger and their disgusting ilk has now caused Republican defeat and removed all Republican influence in the United States government. It has negated the votes of 75 million Trump supporters.

The national Republican Party, unless President Trump can perform a miracle, is over.

By the time corrupt Democrats get through with us, we will be a one-party country like California and New York are one-party states.

As I said, local and state Republicans are strong and doing good (with the exception of Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia whose careers as Republicans are over, and good riddance. With friends like that, who needs enemies!).

We should be looking for ways to defeat Section 377 of the NDAA, Elilzabeth Warren's sick provision.

We should look into the original agreements between the Southern states and the Federal Government when the bases were constructed.

We should get public support from veterans organizations.

We should look at state and local laws, and technicalities that can prevent the slaughter of Southern history at U.S. Army bases in the South.

Perhaps the revulsion at potentially having to rename Arlington National Cemetery and/or parts of it will cause this horrible provision to be rethought.

Of course, those Southern bases were part of our country's reconciliation after our bloodiest war. We came back together like the great nation we used to be. Naming those bases after Confederates was a gesture of respect by Northerners who had fought against us. It showed appreciation that we were now all one nation again.

All of that is lost on a characterless individual like Elizabeth Warren who gamed the affirmative action system for years pretending to be an Indian when she is as white as Frosty the Snowman (though much less intelligent and certainly with less personality).

She is, however, more intelligent that Jim Inhofe.

She got Inhofe to severely damage the two Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, in the runoff January 5th, and they lost to Elizabeth Warren's Democrats, who now have the majority in the U.S. Senate.

Republican traitor Brad Raffensperger's releasing to the Washington Post his phone call with President Trump, which was spread all over the fake news media the day before the election, also damaged the Republican candidates; but then, Raffensperger's sell-out settlement with Stacey Abrams allowed widespread Democrat Party cheating and fraud in Georgia in the first place.

Jim Inhofe is a dope and so is Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger. We deserve better.

Here's the Georgia Division, SCV's, excellent press release of December 22, 2020:

Click Here to Donate – GA SCV (georgiascv.org)

For the Sake of the Second Amendment, and State and Local Republicans, We Should Still Vote Republican

Posted on December 31, 2020December 31, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

For the Sake of the Second Amendment,
and State and Local Republicans, We Should
Still Vote Republican

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

[PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Also included with this article is a brilliant piece entitled "Overcoming the Court's Abdication in Texas V. Pennsylvania" by conservative attorneys William J. Olson and Patrick M. McSweeney" dated December 24, 2020. It was first published in The Western Journal under title "TWJ Exclusive: New Legal Memo Brings Hope to Trump Supporters This Christmas". It is relevant to this article.]

The national Republican Party is as STUPID as you can get. Their poster child for stupidity is Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma.

Inhofe, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave Elizabeth Warren a huge victory over millions of Republican voters in the South when he allowed her Section 377 into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which requires that the names of century old U.S. Army bases in the South, such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, be changed.

Inhofe didn't need to do this. He has a Republican majority on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and President Trump is vehemently against it, but, again, Inhofe is an idiot.

Republicans desperately need voters to come out and vote in the Georgia Senate runoff in one week, which will determine who controls the U.S. Senate, yet Inhofe just spit in the faces of Republicans by guaranteeing that the two U.S. Army bases in Georgia — Legendary Fort Benning, Home of the Infantry, near Columbus, Georgia; and Fort Gordon, near Grovetown — will be forced to change their names, remove all monuments, change street and building names, and remove any mention of the Confederate ancestry of Georgians and other Southerners.

That ancestry means a great deal to tens of millions of Southerners who always vote Republican.

How are Republicans in Georgia supposed to get fired up to go vote in the runoff when Inhofe and the Republican Party has just spit in their faces and humiliated them?

Elizabeth Warren hates Republican voters. They are "Deplorables" to her and Hillary and the rest, ad nauseam.

To Warren's Massachusetts Puritan sensibilities, Republicans are all racist hayseeds for her to look down on, yet Inhofe just sided with her against President Trump and Republican voters.

The stupidity of the Republican Party knows no bounds.

Here's what President Trump said about Inhofe this past July:

Trump tweeted July 24th that he had spoken to Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "who has informed me that he WILL NOT be changing the names of our great Military Bases and Forts, places from which we won two World Wars (and more!)."¹

Inhofe LIED to President Trump and he lied to us when he said:

We're going to see to it that provision doesn't survive the bill. I'm not going to say how at this point.²

Elizabeth Warren is proud of her victory over Inhofe as she degrades him and millions of Republican voters who cherish their ancestors for fighting, sacrificing, bleeding and dying by the hundreds of thousands when the South was invaded.

That invasion occurred so that Elizabeth Warren's New England and the other Northern States could establish their economic control over the country. It had nothing to do with ending slavery.

It was about the same money and power that all wars are fought over as the North's War Aims Resolution clearly states. It was about preserving the Union, the source of Northern wealth and power, not ending slavery.

It was also about the Corwin Amendment for which Lincoln lobbied the states hard. It left blacks in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress.

Of course, I don't even need to mention the six slave states that fought for the Union the entire war. If it was a war to end slavery, Lincoln would have started with his own slave states but he deliberately exempted them from the Emancipation Proclamation.

Elizabeth Warren gloats and rubs stinking manure into the faces of Inhofe and Republican voters:³

An intelligent person would know that ANYTHING from Elizabeth Warren would be revolting to the Republican base, but, then, there's Jim Inhofe, Elizabeth Warren and the Democrat Party's best friend. He is certainly no friend of President Trump or Republican voters.

What an insult to the patriotism and Southern blood spilled winning all of America's wars since the end of the War Between the States.

Around 44% of the United States Army today are Southerners, though the South is only 36% of the American population.⁴

President Trump has been the strongest supporter of Southern history, heritage and culture maybe in all of American history, and he has paid a price for it by the fraud and lies of the fake news media.

The Charlottesville violence shows how utterly corrupt the news media is because President Trump was perfect, and it is on video. Every word he said was perfect.

He said there were good people on both sides and he meant good people among the leftist protestors, and good people there to support the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Trump was crystal clear and it is irrefutable. There is no other way to interpret it.

The mainstream media in American in this day and age is the enemy of our country and democracy. They are abject liars, censors and suppressors of important news if it hurts the Democrat Party. Nobody should believe anything in the media without intense scrutiny.

The local news is sometimes accurate and non-biased but everything else is a horror designed to support the race-obsessed Democrat Party.

The associated press leads the way with its capitalization of the B in black, for black people, while leaving the w in white, for white people, lower case.

The associated press (which nobody should capitalize) is a propaganda organization that is in most newspapers across the country every day regurgitating the racist, woke identity politics of the Democrat Party.

We Should Still Vote Republican

As despicable as the Republican Party is (not counting President Trump, of course), we should still think clearly about the current situation and not shoot ourselves in the leg, though the temptation is mighty to lash out and punish national Republicans.

First, REPUBLICANS ARE GREAT ON THE STATE LEVEL and in state positions such as governor (with the exception of the cowardly Brian Kemp of Georgia, who is owned by Stacey Abrams).

There are Republican legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, and they still may play a big role in delivering the election of 2020 to the legitimate winner, President Donald J. Trump. Republicans have a majority of the State Houses nationwide.

Republican state legislatures have written good legislation in many places in the country protecting Confederate and other important historical memorials, statues, monuments, street names, etc.

Think about Virginia when in the hands of a Republican legislature. There was glorious Monument Avenue and all the Confederate statues, and Gen. Lee in the Capitol.

Today, since Democrats have taken over, woke Richmond is a bloodbath of destruction and anarchy, a horror of hate that will never heal, a true American disgrace.

We can be proud of the good Republicans in state legislatures and state offices across the country and should enthusiastically support them, vote for them, and force ourselves to vote for the national party because of them and President Trump.

Another HUGE thing is the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, which national Republicans support. They get it right on this one and will strongly defend the Second Amendment, while Democrats will destroy it.

Democrats will continue attacking gun and ammunition manufacturers and everybody associated with firearms. Their frivolous law suits will bankrupt the industry and they will destroy the Second Amendment that way.

Can you imagine how horrible it would be if you could not own a gun with which to protect your wife and children, your loves ones?

What if you had to rely on the government to protect you as political as it is today? You could end up like Mark and Patricia McCloskey in St. Louis, prosecuted, instead of rescued by the government. We would live in an even greater tyranny than we have now.

People in Europe and other places don't have firearms with which to defend themselves, even though self-defense and the defense of one's home and loved ones is the most basic human right.

How can you do that without a firearm in this violent world we live in as leftists defund the police, do away with bail, and let millions of criminals (and good Democrat voters) out on the street?

A few years ago, there was a terrorist attack on, if I recall correctly, the London Bridge, in London, England. Some of the terrorists ended up hiding in a pub but the patrons could do nothing but throw beer bottles at them. Good British citizens were at the mercy of filthy murdering terrorists when in a sane country, the terrorists would be at the mercy of armed British citizens.

Republicans empower citizens and not criminals. Democrats make no distinction.

Republicans will strengthen the Second Amendment so that American citizens can defend themselves and their loves ones with lethal force if necessary. There is no question about Republican commitment to the Second Amendment, and that is huge.

Other good things that Republicans will defend are the unborn. Republican legislation nationally and in states, keeps evil Democrats like Ralph "blackface" Northam, governor of Virginia (but more like fuhrer than governor) from killing babies after they have been born, as he has advocated; or killing babies as they are being born, as the New York legislature approved.

The strong support for our military and capitalism are other good reasons to keep voting Republican despite their enormous shortcomings.

We just have to hold them more accountable with Southern history. We should raise money and lobby them and make it clear, we do NOT change Confederate names of anything in the South, EVER.

Those names represent honor and valor, and if you don't understand that, you are a politically correct, woke fool who is unworthy of arguing with. You must be defeated politically. Period.

Actually, the base names are a rare exception where we have to defend Southern history on a national level. Most Southern history is preserved in state legislatures where Republicans rule and are an outstanding party. They deserve strong support from us.

Right now, we should definitely vote for the two Senate candidates in Georgia's runoff, January 5th, Georgia's current senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

President Trump is holding a rally in Dalton, Georgia on Monday, January 4th, and he wants us to support Loeffler and Perdue, and we should.

It ain't over for President Trump, who is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.

If he is able to prevent Democrat Party and media corruption from disenfranchising his 74 million American voters, then Trump might be able to get Elizabeth Warren's Section 377 taken out of the NDAA for 2021, or somehow change it.

The following outstanding article by William J. Olson and Patrick M. McSweeney first appeared in The Western Journal December 24, 2020. It may be found at: https://www.westernjournal.com/twj-exclusive-bombshell-new-legal-memo-giving-trump-supporters-hope-christmas-eve/. I accessed it 12-30-20.

Here is an Editor's Note from The Western Journal that precedes this excellent article:

The Western Journal is presenting this memorandum, written by two prominent conservative legal scholars, essentially verbatim, with only enough editing to format it for the Op-Ed section of our website. This is the second memo by Messrs. Olson and McSweeney to be published exclusively by The Western Journal, and it, like the first, outlines a possible legal strategy for the Trump campaign to follow in the coming weeks. Prior to its publication here, it was sent to President Trump. — Ed. note

Overcoming the Court’s Abdication
in Texas v. Pennsylvania

William J. Olson & Patrick M. McSweeney
December 24, 2020

In refusing to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, the U.S. Supreme Court abdicated its constitutional duty to resolve a real and substantial controversy among states that was properly brought as an original action in that Court. As a result, the Court has come under intense criticism for having evaded the most important inter-state constitutional case brought to it in many decades, if not ever.

However, even in its Order dismissing the case, the Supreme Court identified how another challenge could be brought successfully — by a different plaintiff. This paper explains that legal strategy. But first we focus on the errors made by the Supreme Court — in the hopes that they will not be made again.

Texas v. Pennsylvania

The Supreme Court declined to hear the challenge brought by the State of Texas against four states which had refused to abide by Article II, § 1, cl. 2 — the Presidential Electors Clause, which establishes the conditions and requirements governing the election of the President of the United States. In adopting that provision, the Framers vested in each State legislature the exclusive authority to determine the manner of appointing Presidential electors. The Framers’ plan was shown to be exceedingly wise, because we have now learned that allowing other state and private actors to write the election rules led to massive election fraud in the four defendant states. Individuals can be bought, paid for and corrupted so much easier than state legislatures.

In refusing to hear the case, the sole reason given was that Texas lacked “standing.” In doing so, all nine justices committed a wrong against: (i) Texas and the 17 states that supported its suit; (ii) the United States; (iii) the President; and (iv) the People.

The Court’s Many Wrongs in Texas v. Pennsylvania.

As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 78, courts have “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” As such, in deciding cases courts have a duty to explain their decisions so the rest of us may know if they constitute arbitrary exercises of political power, or reasoned decisions of judicial power which the People can trust. In Texas v. Pennsylvania, all that the justices felt obligated to do was to state its — “lack of standing” — supported by a one sentence justification: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its election.” Resolving a case of this magnitude with one conclusory sentence is completely unacceptable.

The Supreme Court docket consists primarily of only those cases the High Court chooses to hear. However, just like when it agrees to decide a case, and in disputes where the original jurisdiction of the Court is invoked, it has a duty to decide cases properly brought to them. Two centuries ago, Chief Justice John Marshall construed the obligation of contracts clause in a decision where he wrote: “however irksome the task may be, this is a duty from which we dare not shrink.” Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819). Courts have a duty to resolve important cases even if they would prefer to avoid them. In Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), Marshall described “the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” because “every right, when withheld, must have a remedy, and every injury its proper redress.” Abdication in a case of this sort is not a judicial option.

The Supreme Court’s reliance on standing as its excuse has had one positive result — provoking many to study the origins of that doctrine who may be surprised to learn that the word “standing” nowhere appears in the Constitution. There is compelling evidence to demonstrate it was birthed by big-government Justices during the FDR Administration to shield New Deal legislation, and to insulate the Administrative State from challenges by the People. Those who favored the Texas decision argue that standing is a conservative doctrine as it limits the power of the courts — but the true constitutionalist uses only tests grounded in its text. The true threshold constitutional test is whether a genuine and serious “controversy” exists between the States that could be resolved by a court.

The only reason given by the Supreme Court was: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its election.” In truth, Texas did make such a showing. When Pennsylvania violated the exclusive authority bestowed on state legislators in the Constitution’s Electors Clause, it opened the door to corruption and foreign intrigue to corrupt the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, and as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 68, that is exactly why the Framers created the Electoral College. During the 2020 election cycle, changes to the election process in Pennsylvania were made by judges, state office holders and election officials which would never have been made by its state legislature.

If the process by which Presidential Electors are chosen is corrupted in a few key states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin by rigging the system in favor of one candidate, it becomes wholly irrelevant who the People of Texas support. That political reality presents a real “judicially cognizable interest” no matter what the Supreme Court decided. What happens in Pennsylvania does not stay in Pennsylvania, as electors from all States acting together select the President of the United States.

In the Federalist Papers, both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton recognized the need to combat “the spirit of faction” and the tendency of each State to yield to its immediate interest at the expense of national unity. They reasoned that the Constitution provided a solution to this centrifugal pressure while reserving a measure of sovereignty to each State. When differences arise between States that threaten to lead to disunion, the Republic can be held together, as Hamilton observed, either “by the agency of the Courts or by military force.” A constitutional remedy to enable the States to resolve their differences peacefully is the provision that permits any State to invoke the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to address and settle their differences.

In the vernacular, the Supreme Court blew it, threatening the bonds that hold the union together.

Round Two: The United States Must Enter the Fray

Fortunately, that might have been only the first round in the fight to preserve the nation. A strategy exists to re-submit the Texas challenge under the Electors Clause to the Supreme Court in a way that even that Court could not dare refuse to consider. Just because Texas did not persuade the Justices that what happens in Pennsylvania hurts Texas does not mean that the United States of America could not persuade the justices that when Pennsylvania violates the U.S. Constitution, it harms the nation. Article III, § 2, cl. 2 confers original jurisdiction on the Supreme Court in any case suit brought by the United States against a state. Thus, the United States can and should file suit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Like the Texas suit, that new suit would seek an order invalidating the appointment of the electors appointed by those four defendant States that refused to abide by the terms of the Presidential Electors Clause. That would leave it to the state legislatures in those four states to “appoint” electors — which is what the Constitution requires.

When those four States violated the Constitution by allowing electors who had not been appointed in the manner prescribed by the state legislature, the United States suffered an injury. Indeed, there could hardly have been a more significant injury to the nation than that which corrupted its Presidential election.

The United States has a vital interest and a responsibility to preserve the constitutional framework of the Republic, which was formed by a voluntary compact among the States. As with any contractual relationship of participants in an ongoing enterprise, no party is entitled to ignore or alter the essential terms of the contract by its unilateral action.

The President who has sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution has the right and the duty to order the U.S. Department of Justice bring such an action in the Supreme Court — and should do so quickly.

Reasons for Great Hope at Christmas

In rejecting the invocation by the State of Texas of the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to resolve the dispute between Texas and four other States that refused to abide by the terms of the Presidential Electors Clause, for now, a majority of the Justices foreclosed the use of that constitutional safeguard by Texas to provide a peaceful means of resolving the controversy that has deeply divided States and the citizens of this Republic as at no time since the 1860s.

That consequence is too dangerous to be allowed to stand.

If the same case previously brought by Texas were now brought by the United States of America, there is every reason to believe that the Supreme Court would be compelled to understand it must hear it and decide it favorably.

Although outcomes are never certain, it is believed and hoped that a majority of the Supreme Court could never take the position that the United States has no business enforcing the process established in the Constitution by which we select the one government official who represents all the People — The President of the United States.

NOTES

(from "For the Sake of the Second Amendment, and State and Local Republicans, We Should Still Vote Republican")

¹ "President Trump, GOP ally vow Confederate base names won't change", July 24, 2020, https://fox6now.com/2020/07/24/president-trump-gop-ally-vow-confederate-base-names-wont-change, accessed 7-29-20.

² Ibid.

³ Elizabeth Warren's tweets come from Dissident Mama, "You don't want us? We don't want you!", Friday, December 18, 2020. http://www.dissidentmama.net/you-dont-want-us-we-dont-want-you/, accessed 12-30-20.

⁴ Historian Phil Leigh, "Exploding the Lost Cause Myth," https://civilwarchat.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/exploding-the-lost-cause-myth/, accessed 12/16/20.

Our Confederate Ancestors: The Christmas Raid of Gen. John Hunt Morgan

Posted on December 24, 2020December 24, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

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

The Christmas Raid of Gen. John Hunt Morgan

by Robert L. Thompson
(a Confederate cavalryman who rode with Morgan)

Original article entitled "Morgan's Raid into Kentucky" by Robert L. Thompson, 2904 Pine Street, St. Louis, in Confederate Veteran magazine, Vol. 13, No. 12, December, 1905. Gen. Morgan's Christmas Raid was a non-stop two-week cavalry raid by 4,000 Confederates launching from Tennessee into Kentucky and back, each man carrying only "Horse and gun with forty rounds of cartridges." It took place from December 22, 1862 to January 5, 1863.

"Thunderbolt of the Confederacy," Gen. John Hunt Morgan, born in Alabama in 1825, spent most of his life in Kentucky.

LATE IN DECEMBER, 1862, Gen. John H. Morgan, with nine regiments of mounted troops and one company of scouts, made what was known as his Christmas raid through Kentucky. There were Breckinridge, Chenault, Cluke, Duke, Gano, Grigsby, Johnson, Smith, and Ward, all regimental commanders, and Capt. Tom Quirk of the scouts. During Gen. Morgan's invasion of Kentucky the battle of Murfreesboro, Tenn., was fought between Gens. Bragg and Rosecrans. It was said at the time that Gen. Morgan's purpose for entering Kentucky was to get in the rear of Gen. Rosecrans's army, cut his communication, and otherwise menace him and draw his attention while Gen. Bragg attended to him in the front. Gen. Morgan's part of the work was well performed.

John Hunt Morgan.

I was a private in Company F, 9th (Breckinridge's) Regiment. We left Alexandria, Tenn., in the night. Early next morning we had crossed the State line and were in Tompkinsville, Ky. Another day and night's hard ride brought us to Glasgow, where early in the morning we encountered a foe, who struck back with such force that our chief ordered us to withdraw, and by a rapid flank movement we passed around him and proceeded straight to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad at Munfordville. There we found the enemy strongly posted in a stockade. We had with us a little battery of three or four funs that Gen. Morgan named the "Bull Pups." Our usual method of attack was to drive in the pickets or shoot them down or get shot down, as some of our gallant advance guard did at Glasgow, then dismount, surround the garrison, fire a few shots with small arms, throw in a few shells from the battery, when the enemy, finding it useless to hold out longer, would display a white flag, and the job was finished.

John & Martha "Mattie" Morgan. She gave birth to a daughter after he was killed in 1864, her name, Johnnie Hunt Morgan.

Our next step was to parole the prisoners, destroy their guns, and move on to the next. Accompanying Gen. Morgan there was a young man, George A. Ellsworth, a telegraph operator, who would now and then cut the wire, attach his instrument, and send misleading dispatches to the Federal authorities in Louisville or Nashville. I saw him one day seated on the roadside with his battery attached to a wire fingering the key, while Gen. Morgan and staff sat on their horses about him. They all seemed to be in a good humor, as though they were indulging in humorous messages.

Early on the morning of December 27, our regiment attacked a body of Federals in Elizabethtown, Ky. They had taken refuge in the courthouse and other buildings in the town. The battery was brought forward in a dash and took position on a little hill south of the town. Our regiment followed the artillery double-quick, and formed along the base of the hill between the battery and town, so that the shells thrown into town passed over our heads. We dismounted and advanced in full view and range of the enemy. We had to cross a narrow bottom through which ran a creek that was full to its banks, caused by incessant rain of the night before. We plunged through the water waist deep---at the place I crossed---holding our guns above our heads, and entered the town.

As I passed along a street I remember keeping close to the wall of a house that I might be shielded from bullets, when three Federal soldiers came out of the house with guns and approached me. I said: "Surrender." They put their guns down, and I ordered them to the rear. I then entered the house they came out of, and found it to be a hotel with breakfast on the table, but saw no landlord or guests. Other Confederates came in, and together we ate the breakfast, and during the whole time we were eating the little battery on the hill was being worked to its full capacity. When we had finished our breakfast and went out on the street again, we saw white handkerchiefs tied to ramrods hanging out of the courthouse windows. We then knew that the boys in blue had surrendered, and I was glad. A member of my company told my comrades that when I saw the three Federal soldiers coming toward me with their guns I had thrown my gun down and rushed on them with my fists, demanding their surrender, but that was a joke. However, I never did tell the boys how badly scared I was at the time, but I do not mind telling it now.

Morgan next to his horse, Black Bess.

After the prisoners were paroled and their guns destroyed, together with some other government property in the town, we moved out a few miles north of town, stopped, and fed our horses. If I remember correctly, nearly all of Gen. Morgan's force was bunched there that morning. While we were feeding Gen. Wolford's Federal cavalry came up and attacked our rear guard. Our regiment was ordered to form and assist in holding the enemy in check, while the main part of our little army passed the Rolling Fork, a swift-running stream immediately in our front. We met with some loss that morning, quite a number being wounded. Among the officers there was Col. Duke, who received a wound on his head from a fragment of a shell. We crossed the Rolling Fork in safety, and then went forward at a swifter gait than before. Gen. Wolford followed us, but he never caught up any more.

Morgan's 2nd KY Cav Regmt earlier in 1862, before Christmas Raid.

It was then on to Bardstown, within forty miles of Louisville then to Springfield and Lebanon, then south to Burksville, where we recrossed the Cumberland River, thence back to Tennessee again. I had no personal knowledge of what any of the other regiments did on the trip; I remember only the part that mine took. That the others performed their part well is quite certain, as it is well known that there were no drones or sluggards who rode with Morgan.

Reward poster issued a year later.

With the exception of Gano's and Ward's regiments, quite all of Morgan's men were Kentuckians. Most of Gano's were Texans, and all of Ward's were Tennesseans. With but few exceptions, Morgan's troopers were young men, quite a number being boys under age. Gen. Morgan was only thirty-eight. My colonel was twenty-six, and there was not an officer in the regiment whose age exceeded thirty, except one, and he was not over forty. Capt. Tom Henry Hines, of Company E, who escaped prison with Gen. Morgan one year later, was but twenty-one. In Company H there was little John Kemper, aged thirteen, who rode a pony and carried a carbine. I was sixteen, and the youngest soldier in my company.

Mort Kunstler print of John Hunt Morgan's Ohio Raid, July 14, 1863.

If I am not mistaken, Gen. Morgan's official report of the expedition stated that we had been fourteen days in the saddle, and I can well believe it true; for if we ever stopped for any purpose, except to fight or feed our horses, I have no recollection of the time or place. There was no wagon train followed us loaded with commissary stores and camp equipage, not even an ordnance wagon or an ambulance. Horse and gun with forty rounds of cartridges was what each man started with. I supposed we were expected, if we should run short of ammunition, to capture what we needed, which we did, and more than we had use for. How we were expected to obtain food for ourselves, I do not know. It seems that the soldiers' needs of sleep and food were not considered; only the horse he rode must be fed. If from any cause we halted, night or day, for a few minutes, we slept during the interval. Stops were seldom made. It might be that the guide had lost his way, when we would stop to establish the right direction, etc. At such times we would snatch a moment's sweetest sleep, either leaning over on our horses' necks or dropping down on the cold earth, holding the horse by the bridle. The loss of sleep is very likely the cause of my recollection of its seeming more like a dream than a reality, although the services rendered were quite real and earnest. The command was "Go forward" and "Close up" all the time, night and day, through rain, snow, and mud; no rest or sleep, but a constant prodding forward. I do not remember the results accomplished, the loss or gain or victor's spoils. I only remember the arduous service and that most of us escaped, being thankful now that it is all past and will never happen again and that I am still alive and able to tell the tale.

Morgan's grave, in Lexington Cemetery, Lexington, KY. He was surprised in Greeneville, TN and killed Sept. 4, 1864.

BETRAYAL: Republicans in the Senate Guarantee US Army Base Names in the South WILL Change

Posted on December 17, 2020December 17, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

BETRAYAL:
Republicans in the Senate Guarantee U.S. Army
Base Names in the South WILL Change

No More Fort Benning Thanks to Senate Republicans

No More Fort Bragg Because STUPID Republicans Aligned with Elizabeth Warren Against Their Own Voters

How Stupid Can You Be

Despite President Trump's Brilliant, Strong Leadership,
the National Republican Party Is Doomed

They Are WOKE But Soon Will Be Irrelevant

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

I have been voting Republican for 50 years, and proudly so. I have voted in every election since I was 18, local, state and national. I have only voted for one Democrat in my life, a Senate candidate 45 years ago, and I still regret it.

But, except for President Trump, many national Republican leaders are stupid, cowardly and weak.

The national Republican Party is 100% responsible for the imminent changing of the names of United States Army bases in the South that were named mostly for Confederate generals as a powerful gesture of reconciliation in the years following the War Between the States, after 750,000 had died and another million were wounded.

Below, is Section 377 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, and when you read it, you will be OUTRAGED at Senate Republicans who control the Senate and did not have to do this, whatsoever, yet went out of their way to include a provision by Elizabeth Warren to rename the bases.

Senate Republicans are too stupid to understand that all the red states that give the Republican Party its national power, are in the South.

President Trump understands, which is why he has defended the Confederate battle flag and Confederate monuments over and over, as the symbols of honor, patriotism and tribute to war dead that they are. He adamantly opposes renaming our Southern bases.

Those bases are, in some cases, a century old and helped us mightily to win two World Wars and numerous other conflicts. They train some of our nation's most elite troops. I know some of those troops, personally, and love them all deeply.

There is a practical and smart reason, too, that Southern bases are named for Confederate soldiers: Confederate soldiers, fighting for constitutional government and the rights of their sovereign states when they were invaded, exhibited valor such as the world had never seen despite being outnumbered four to one and outgunned 100 to one. They are the ancestors of Southerners serving today who were inspired by them to serve in much higher numbers than their peers from other regions, as the following proves:¹

The military valor of the South is unsurpassed in the history of the world, and that's why Confederate named bases need to stay Confederate. That is what President Trump knows.

The death statistics in the War Between the States are now between 650,000 and 850,000. These are the widely accepted statistics of historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University.²

Drew Gilpin Faust in her excellent book, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War, uses the earlier statistics of 620,000 total deaths compiled by William F. Fox, and she writes that those deaths were "approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.³

If you use Hacker's statistics, you'd have to add Vietnam, both Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and the war on terror; in other words, deaths in the War Between the States were higher than all other American wars combined with plenty of room to spare.

Faust says the rate of death "in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities.⁴

Confederate soldiers "died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white Southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.⁵

Faust quotes James McPherson who writes that "the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.⁶

To personalize some of those statistics, Confederate Col. George E. Purvis was quoted in Confederate Veteran magazine, March, 1897, from an article he had written about Union Gen. Henry Van Ness Boynton and the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

Gen. Boynton, with great respect for the courage of the Confederates he faced, wanted to make it a sacred memorial, not just to Union valor, but American valor.

Col. Purvis writes that Gen. Boynton and a friend had visited the Chickamauga battlefield on a quiet Sunday morning in the summer of 1888 and heard singing in a church nearby. The general's thoughts went from those sweet sounds to the hellish and "fearful horrors of that other Sunday, when the very demons of hell seemed abroad, armed and equipped for the annihilation of mankind" almost a quarter of a century earlier:⁷

They saw again the charging squadrons, like great waves of the sea, dashed and broken in pieces against lines and positions that would not yield to their assaults. They saw again Baird's, Johnson's, Palmer's, and Reynolds's immovable lines around the Kelley farm, and Wood on the spurs of Snodgrass Hill; Brannan, Grosvenor, Steedman, and Granger on the now famous Horseshoe; once more was brought back to their minds' eye, "the unequaled fighting of that thin and contracted line of heroes and the magnificent Confederate assaults," which swept in again and again ceaselessly as that stormy service of all the gods of battle was prolonged through those other Sunday hours.

Their eyes traveled over the ground again where Forrest's and Walker's men had dashed into the smoke of the Union musketry and the very flame of the Federal batteries, and saw their ranks melt as snowflakes dissolve and disappear in the heat of conflagration.

They stood on Baird's line, where Helms's Brigade went to pieces, but not until three men out of four - mark that, ye coming heroes! - not until three men out of every four were either wounded or dead, eclipsing the historic charge at Balaklava and the bloody losses in the great battles of modern times.

They saw Longstreet's men sweep over the difficult and almost inaccessible slopes of the Horseshoe, "dash wildly, and break there, like angry waves, and recede, only to sweep on again and again with almost the regularity of ocean surges, ever marking a higher tide."

They looked down again on those slopes, slippery with blood and strewn thick as leaves with all the horrible wreck of battle, over which and in spite of repeated failures these assaulting Confederate columns still formed and reformed, charging again and again with undaunted and undying courage.

Around 44% of the United States Army today are Southerners, though the South is only 36% of the American population.⁸

The patriotic South believes in America and our military, and they are enthusiastic to serve and die for it.

Of course, a liberal like Elizabeth Warren cares nothing about that but the DOD and United States Army should. President Trump does, but idiot Republican leaders like Sen. Jim Inhofe, are traitors to their own party and constituents.

This Southern military tradition goes back to America's founding, to the Revolutionary War, which was won in the South, and to the War of 1812 , also won in the South at the Battle of New Orleans while some traitorous New England States were collaborating with the British and committing treason with the Hartford Convention.

Unted States Army bases in the South, as I said, include Fort Benning, Georgia, Home of the Infantry;

United States Army, Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia - Home of the Infantry.

and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Home of The Airborne and Special Operations Forces.

United States Army, Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Here is Section 377 of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021. It is a good bill except for Elizabeth Warren and Jim Inhofe's horrible, idiotic requirement to rename the Army bases in the South.

Prepare to be OUTRAGED.

Sen. James M. Inhofe is from Oklahoma where there are no Army bases named for Confederate soldiers. He is SOLELY responsible for the base names being changed. Republicans hold the Senate, and Inhofe is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He added the base name change provision then shepherded it through the Senate with Mitch McConnell's help.

Inhofe did not have to do that, but when he did, he GUARANTEED the base name changes would be in the final bill because it was in the House bill. If you have something in both the House and the Senate version of the bill, it has to be left in and reconciled by House and Senate negotiators.

Inhofe knew this but went against President Trump then lied to the public about it. Here's what President Trump said about Inhofe this past July:

Trump tweeted July 24th that he had spoken to Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "who has informed me that he WILL NOT be changing the names of our great Military Bases and Forts, places from which we won two World Wars (and more!)."⁹

Inhofe LIED to President Trump and he lied to us when he said:

We're going to see to it that provision doesn't survive the bill. I'm not going to say how at this point.¹⁰

Inhofe KNEW he was LYING. That's why he didn't say how. He knew there was no "how." It couldn't be done because HE, Inhofe, put the base name change in the bill, then shepherded the bill through the Senate with Mitch McConnell's help.

That kind of lying, backstabbing BETRAYAL is what we get from Republican leaders in Congress, and it was completely unnecessary. Inhofe could have left it out and preserved the base names forever.

Inhofe is worse than Nikki Haley in South Carolina when she was Republican governor and used the Mother Emanuel AME Church murders by Dylann Roof to promote her career. She had no problem with the square, historically accurate Army of Northern Virginia battle flag on the State House grounds commemorating the 40,000 out of 60,000 South Carolina Confederate soldiers who were killed or wounded in the War Between the States when South Carolina was invaded, until she realized she could use them to advance her career. Over 20,000 were killed.

Don't let a tragedy go to waste as Democrat Rahm Emanuel famously said and Nikki Haley was listening.

She had that war memorial removed in disgrace and started the entire chain of Confederate monument removals across the country and the hatred and division that that has caused, but she didn't care. She had important personal goals to achieve.

She knew the battle flag next to the Confederate monument memorialized war dead and widows, orphans and the enormous suffering of Reconstruction. That flag represented the blood of hungry, barefoot South Carolinians who fought and were maimed and died when the state was invaded.

It had NOTHING to do with Dylann Roof, but that didn't matter. Virtue signaling Haley drooled over the media attention she would get by bullying the legislature and removing the flag, and it worked. She got her name out there and advanced her career on the suffering of people, the least of whom had more character than her.

Thank you Sen. Jim Inhofe for helping Elizabeth Warren while spitting in the faces of Republican voters.

Stupid Republicans think Confederate history is what their Democrat colleagues and the fake news media say it is, but they don't believe either of them on any other issue and they shouldn't. The Democrat Party is corrupt to the core as we have see with the first coup d'etat that led to the Mueller investigation and Russia Hoax and before that, the FBI spying on Trump's campaign, and now, with this huge widespread election fraud that has stolen the election from President Trump and given it to the most corrupt, undeserving candidate in history.

If this stands, this is the beginning of the end of our country and everybody knows it.

The 55 to 60% of the country who are non-liberal, non-Democrats, can be beat around for a while but they will sure as hell not take this long term, and not much longer.

Already we live in a tyranny of cancel culture and the obliteration of our First Amendment free speech rights by the fake news media, Google, Facebook and Twitter. They censor us, cancel us, and suppress all the news they don't want us to hear, such as Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's deep corruption with the Chinese and Ukranians and others. Polls show that at least 10% of Biden voters would not have voted for him had the New York Post stories about Hunter Biden's laptop and all the Biden corruption around the world that it revealed, not been deliberately suppressed until after the election.

Thanks to the Democrat Party and weak, STUPID Republicans, our country is now nearly as bad as Communist China. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and their executives who are getting ready to join the Biden administration, have destroyed the United States Constitution and our republic. Free speech is gone. They rule with violence and law breaking in the streets, and Democrats will enshrine mail-in voting in law, and Republicans will never win another election.

Republicans won't win the Senate runoffs in Georgia in just over two weeks because STUPID Republicans have done NOTHING to correct the situation in Georgia that allowed Stacey Abrams and her ilk to steal the general election from President Trump in the first place.

Where is the GBI and FBI questioning the woman caught on camera scanning the same ballots over and over? She knows about the corruption and all the players involved.

Where is the GBI and FBI questioning of the person who lied and said a water main break is why they quit counting ballots the wee hours of November 4th? That person is the tip of a line that goes into an ocean of Georgia corruption.

The Georgia governor is a Republican (supposedly) and the Georgia legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. How about assert yourselves and take command and rectify the horrible deal made with Stacey Abrams that promoted widespread election fraud in Georgia and disenfranchised millions of legitimate Georgia voters.

If you don't, mark my words, Republican Senators Loeffler and Perdue have no chance of winning in two-and-a-half weeks.

Inhofe's bill will cause Arlington National Cemetery to be renamed because Arlington is controlled by the NDAA each year. Arlington National Cemetery is on Gen. Robert E. Lee's estate. If Arlington's name escapes Inhofe's bill, certainly any mention of Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery won't, yet the cemetery is on land once called Arlington House and owned by Mary Anna Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and wife of Robert E. Lee.

I guess mentioning Martha Washington is OK but any mention of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee will have to go.

Do you see how SICK all this is? Thank you Democrat Party hatred of America and war on American history, and thank you Jim Inhofe.

Instead of destroying the history and grand heritage of Republican voters, Republican leaders in Congress, when they had the power, should have broken up Google, Facebook and Twitter.

We all saw the employee meetings of Google where some of them were crying and vowed never to let a Republican win again.

Republicans didn't take them seriously and now Google, Facebook and Twitter have destroyed the Republican Party, stolen a presidency of the United States, and are now more powerful than the United States Constitution.

Republicans have allowed our country to become an abject tyranny and there is no way out.

Before the next four years are over, Democrats will enshrine into law mail-in voting so they can cheat every time like they did this time. This will go nicely with packing the Supreme Court and bringing in new Democrat states. We will be a one party country the way California is a one party state.

What a disgusting thought that is but you can thank chickenshit Republicans for it, and they are getting ready to pay a price.

President Trump is so loved because he is the first Republican to really fight.

A national Republican leader who fights is so refreshing to the Republican electorate because it is so rare in a party with so many who want to be loved by liberals and are willing to dishonor themselves to get there. Think John McCain and Mitt Romney and other RINOs.

The Republican Party SHINED under President Trump with so many brilliant accomplishments but now comes Jim Inhofe to put a black stain on them and weaken the structure so that Republican have to think, why the hell should I vote Republican? They don't represent me. Inhofe represents Elizabeth Warren and people who hate me.

Of course, President Trump is such a fighter and has governed so brilliantly, that the rank and file would follow him across a desert of fire if necessary, barefoot, with no water and with burning glass on the sand for hundreds of miles.

We are with you President Trump.

State Republicans in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and other places better jump into action right now. They better do everything they can to root out election fraud and act according to the Constitution.

We must make sure that every single ballot cast in this election is legitimate, and none were scanned multiple times, no dead people voted, or illegal aliens.

Every time a fraudulent ballot was cast it disenfranchised a legitimate American voter.

We can not allow machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden. The corrupt Dominion machines in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin must be forensically examined and confirmed to be OK, or not, and if not, as a ton of evidence suggests, then electors must be chosen by the legislatures in those states as the Constitution requires.

The Supreme Court better get some guts too and stop acting like a cowardly group of undignified clowns scared of their own shadows. They better learn from Justices Thomas and Alito and stop letting the country down. Texas's law suit was a good one and laid all the corruption out. Every state in the Union has been severely damaged by the election fraud in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the criminals must be held accountable.

This situation is a lot more serious than some are taking it. There is not going to be a shake hands with Biden and try harder next time.

Losing is OK but being cheated and robbed is NOT, and for the future of our country, can not and will not be tolerated under any circumstances.

NOTES

¹ Gene Kizer, Jr., "Republicans, There is No Downside to Defending Southern History," July 30, 2020, https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/republicans-there-is-no-downside-to-defending-southern-history/, accessed 12-17-20.

² See Rachel Coker, "Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead," published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News - Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University, http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html, accessed July 7, 2014. Hacker's range is 650,000 to 850,000. He uses 750,000.

³ Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xi.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii.

⁷ "American Valor at Chickamauga", Confederate Veteran, Vol. V, No. 3, March, 1897.

⁸ Historian Phil Leigh, "Exploding the Lost Cause Myth," https://civilwarchat.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/exploding-the-lost-cause-myth/, accessed 12/16/20.

⁹ "President Trump, GOP ally vow Confederate base names won't change", July 24, 2020, https://fox6now.com/2020/07/24/president-trump-gop-ally-vow-confederate-base-names-wont-change, accessed 7-29-20.

¹⁰ Ibid.

The War Through Women's Eyes

End of Part I.

The Story of the Beginning of the War

The Irrepressible Conflict

From Stories of Dixie NY: American Book Company, 1915. Chapter VI

Nick Goes to War

Camp Moore

The 1776 Report by The President's Advisory 1776 Commission

Accurate Identification of Today's Hate-America Enemy

Identity Politics and Academia Called Out

References to the South Are Incorrect

Lincoln, Who Destroyed the Republic of the Founders, Glorified

Despite Flaws, Report Is Definitely Worth Reading and Following

The Emphasis on Our Magnificent Declaration of Independence and Constitution Is Excellent

Many Other Excellent Solutions

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Lysander Spooner's No Treason.

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits Defending Confederate Monuments and the First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

No Treason. No. 1

Introductory

I.

Here is the end of No Treason. by Lysander Spooner:

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits Defending Confederate Monuments and the First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

Georgia Division Pending Litigation

City of Cuthbert, Randolph County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

City of Brunswick, Glynn County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Newton County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Rockdale County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Henry County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

City of Athens/Clarke County - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Gwinnett County - Motion to intervene

City of Alpharetta - Old Soldiers Day Parade- 1st Amendment violation

City of Columbus - Linwood Cemetery - O.C.G.A. § 50-3-1 violation

Cotriss Case - 1st Amendment violation

The Georgia SCV's New Suit Against the City of Cuthbert and Individual Council Members

Entire Suit Is Published Below so Others Can See this Tactic in Action

We Are Living in a Tyranny

Secession, North and South

Sue Public Officials Personally, and Fight for Fort Benning, Fort Bragg et al.

For the Sake of the Second Amendment, and State and Local Republicans, We Should Still Vote Republican

We Should Still Vote Republican

Overcoming the Court’s Abdication in Texas v. Pennsylvania

Texas v. Pennsylvania

The Court’s Many Wrongs in Texas v. Pennsylvania.

Round Two: The United States Must Enter the Fray

Reasons for Great Hope at Christmas

The Christmas Raid of Gen. John Hunt Morgan

BETRAYAL: Republicans in the Senate Guarantee U.S. Army Base Names in the South WILL Change

No More Fort Benning Thanks to Senate Republicans

No More Fort Bragg Because STUPID Republicans Aligned with Elizabeth Warren Against Their Own Voters

How Stupid Can You Be

Despite President Trump's Brilliant, Strong Leadership, the National Republican Party Is Doomed

They Are WOKE But Soon Will Be Irrelevant

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES

From
Stories of Dixie
NY: American Book Company, 1915.
Chapter VI

The 1776 Report
by The President's Advisory 1776 Commission

The Emphasis on Our Magnificent Declaration of Independence
and Constitution Is Excellent

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits
Defending Confederate Monuments and the
First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

No Treason.
No. 1

**Here is the end of No Treason. by Lysander Spooner:**

The Georgia SCV's 10 Law Suits
Defending Confederate Monuments and the First Amendment: Synopses and Updates

The Georgia SCV's New Suit Against the
City of Cuthbert and Individual Council Members

Sue Public Officials Personally,
and Fight for Fort Benning, Fort Bragg et al.

For the Sake of the Second Amendment,
and State and Local Republicans, We Should
Still Vote Republican

Overcoming the Court’s Abdication
in Texas v. Pennsylvania

BETRAYAL:
Republicans in the Senate Guarantee U.S. Army
Base Names in the South WILL Change

Despite President Trump's Brilliant, Strong Leadership,
the National Republican Party Is Doomed