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The Associated Press Is a Racist and Ignorant of History

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The Associated Press Is a Racist
and Ignorant of History

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

The Associated Press, one of the most leftist institutions in America, is now also racist.

In fact, it has skipped racist and gone straight to Nazi.

The associated press now capitalizes the word "black" when talking about black people, but does not capitalize the word "white" when talking about white people.1

As a result of the associated press's obsession with race and bigotry against white people, I can no longer capitalize the words "associated press" or its "stylebook" or any other words or initials associated with the a p.

In fact, I will use the abbreviation "ass. press" for the associated press, from now on.

The ass. press started capitalizing black June 19, but did not make a decision on capitalizing white at the time. They wanted to think about it. 2

But in the past few days they have made the deliberate decision not to capitalize white.

Their racist instructions are published in the ass. press's famous stylebook, which has enormous influence in the world of writing and publishing.3

Capitalizing the adjective black, but not white, looks weird in sentences and seems very unliterary and unprofessional, like something Louis Farrakhan would do in his mosque newsletter.

Here are a couple examples from an ass. press story in the Charleston Post and Courier, July 6, 2020:4

That includes white people from other parts of the country, Black families returning generations after the Great Migration north . . . . Harrison noted that even younger native Southerners, Black and white, are less wed to hard-partisan identities . . . .

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were native Southerners who, with whiter, less urban electorates, attracted white moderates and Black voters.

The bias of the ass. press is nothing new. Its reporters are required to have a copy of the Democrat Party Stylebook on their desk next to their copy of Das Kapital, Rules for Radicals, The Communist Manifesto, and their pictures of George Soros, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, so they can portray, what is to them, an "unbiased" perspective.

The concept of unbiased journalism and knowing American history before writing about it, is foreign to the ass. press because that's not how they do it in New York.

In New York, they do it like The New York Times' 1619 Project whose founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, called the white race "the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. . . . Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler."5

She still won a Pulitzer Prize from another bunch of PC northeast liberals for her fake history that asserts that America is so bad, even the Revolutionary War was fought so white supremacist colonists could keep their slaves, even though there is not a shred of evidence of that.

I mean, there is not even a molecule of evidence. There is no writing, no document, no nothing, by a single person.

In other words, it is unsourced fake history, like much of the unsourced fake news in The New York Times.

The intelligence of people in New York is already suspect after twice electing Bill de Blasio mayor.

Unfortunately for Hannah-Jones and The New York Times, a Southerner named Thomas Jefferson wrote this little thing called the Declaration of Independence outlining exactly what the colonists were fighting for and why, and nowhere does it state that they were concerned about the British ending slavery in the American colonies. Not a single word even implies such an absurdity.

The Declaration of Independence says things like:

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.

That was the most widely quoted phrase of Southerners in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to their seceding.

The 1619 Project, while bringing up some good points such as Abraham Lincoln's racism and desire to ship black people back to Africa or somewhere away from America where they'd have a chance to survive, has been heavily criticized by historians and is not credible.

It is highly regrettable that it is in hundreds of schools. That must come to an end without major historical corrections to the 1619 Project, which Hannah-Jones is unlikely to make, especially now that she has Oprah Winfrey and all her money and movie making behind her.

Also, in fairness to Abraham Lincoln, he was a man of his time. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his way of thinking about race.

By the 19th century, the white civilization of Europe that started with the Greeks and Romans, was well established here, based on capitalism, science, technology, freedom and opportunity.

It was just too different from the tribal civilizations of Africa. It would take a while for all Americans to look upon each other as equals. That's just human nature.

Despite slavery, race relations were still better in the South than anywhere in America. Alexis de Tocqueville said, in Democracy in America, that race relations were bad in places where slavery had been abolished, and the worst in places that had never had slavery.

Despite the odds, some free black people did well during the time of slavery and many more did well afterward. William Ellison, the famous black cotton gin maker from Sumter County, South Carolina was well respected and owned over 60 slaves before the war.

Of course opportunity for blacks, with all the turmoil of Reconstruction, was severely limited for a long time, but the promise of the Declaration of Independence was there and today opportunity is unlimited for everybody in America, which is why people from all over the world will risk everything to get here.

I know that doesn't fit with the left's victimology politics but those who reject the false narrative of systemic racism, which Dr. Thomas Sowell said does not exist and is like the propaganda tactics of Hitler and Goebbels,6 can succeed wildly in America.

The only thing holding anybody down is their own mind. As Henry Ford said, whether you think you can do a thing, or not, you are right.

American history has been politicized since the 1960s and Southern history is the worst.

The ass. press is despicable on Southern history. Like the great historian, Eugene Genovese, said, the fake history pushed by the ass. press and other liberals is a "cultural and political atrocity" that has been forced on the public by an academic and media elite.7

The ass. press is not concerned with truth. It is concerned with leftist politics.

Many of the articles on the recent riots are fake news. They portray the demonstrators as peaceful while buildings burn in the background. Much of this mayhem is caused by anarchists who hate America and want it to crumble.

If it really did crumble, they would regret it because at some point, the public is not going to put up with it any more.

Thank God we have a Second Amendment, though the left and Democrat Party hate it and have done everything they can to weaken or destroy it so that the public will be at the mercy of violent Democrat Party mobs.

To the dumb ass. press, everybody who lived before today is a white supremacist even though they were regular people living in their times, working, raising families, fighting in the nation's wars.

Real historians know that you can't use today's standards to judge the people of the past. To the people of the past, it was their present. You have to judge people of the past within the context of their own times.

Anything else is not history but filthy politics.

The woke crowd is at total war with the past. There are unlimited opportunities for the left to dig up instances of hate and abuse from centuries ago and use it to promote hate and abuse today for some political advantage.

Anybody the ass. press wants to slander, they slander, with the most sweeping generalizations you can imagine. The ass. press promotes hate for the political advantage of Democrats.

In an article entitled "Historical figures under attack following death of George Floyd" on June 12, 2020, the ass. press wrote:

Protests and, in some cases, acts of vandalism have taken place in such cities as Boston; New York; Paris; Brussels; and Oxford, England, in an intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries. Scholars are divided over whether the campaign amounts to erasing history or updating it.8

An "intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries"?

What the hell is the mob examining?

Nobody alive today did anything two centuries ago that the mob needs to avenge today.

Nobody alive today did anything to hold black people down. Nobody alive today operated a slave ship. Most people are appalled at slavery.

Many of us just want the truth told. The South gets blamed for slavery but New England Yankees brought all the slaves here with help from the British before them.

Boston's Peter Faneuil, of Faneuil Hall, the Cradle of Liberty, was a major slave trader helping the economy of Boston enormously in its early days. One of his slave ships was the Jolly Batchelor but it wasn't too jolly for the poor Africans he forced into the horrendous Middle Passage and a life of slavery.

And New York City, together with the aforementioned Boston, loved slavery and slave trading so much that they were the largest ports for the slave trade on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States, and 54 years after the slave trade had been outlawed by the United States Constitution.9 They continued slave trading until the last country, Brazil, abolished slavery in 1888.

Six slave states fought for the North the entire war: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state during the war. They were among the last to end slavery, and two had slaves until the 13th Amendment finally freed them in December, 1865, months after the war.

Four of the Southern states that seceded - Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee - in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They did not secede until Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, then Virginia seceded immediately, followed in weeks by the other three.

Doesn't matter anyway.

The South had the right to secede and they did so properly. No historian will deny the right of secession so every accusation you hear that Confederates were traitors is a fraud. Real historians know this. President Eisenhower knew it which is why he had a picture of General Robert E. Lee in his office the whole eight years he was president. Gen. Lee's honor and courage no doubt inspired Gen. Eisenhower to win World War II, as he said.

We are not having an "intense re-examination of racial injustices over the centuries." That is absurd. All we are having is criminal activity that weak Democrat mayors tolerate and encourage, then excuse, by saying it is an "intense re-examination of racial injustices" therefore you better give me what I want politically. All of the cities with riots are liberal cities with liberal Democrat mayors. That's what's in store for the rest of America if Democrats ever rule again.

The ass. press is ignorant of Southern history in most cases, and deliberately tells lies in others. In that same article quoted above, they wrote:

The Davis monument and many others across the South were erected decades after the Civil War during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed tough new segregation laws, and during the Lost Cause movement, in which historians and others sought to recast the South's rebellion as a noble undertaking, fought to defend not slavery but states' rights.

That is a popular technique of the propagandists in the news media and especially the ass. press. They falsely equate monument construction with Jim Crow, which is a fraud.

Over 750,000 people died in the War Between the States and over 1,000,000 were maimed out of a total national population of only 32 million (23 million in the North, nine million in the South, of which 4 million were slaves, so, what you really had was five million Southerners in an agricultural society against 23 million Northerners with unlimited immigration in an industrial society that had an overwhelming advantage in weapon manufacturing, railroads, an army, navy, solid financial system, etc.). Southerners had to start everything from scratch.

Contrast that with World War II when we had a national population of around 150 million, yet only 400,000 were killed, and 650,000 wounded.

That's 750,000 killed out of a population of 32 million verses 400,000 killed out of a population of 150 million.

The South was almost entirely destroyed. It took 75 years for the South to recover, and 94.3% of white Southerners did not own slaves. Would 94.3% of Southerners sacrifice all that so 5.7% could keep their slaves?

Hell no.

Every Confederate monument went up for the most noble reason, to honor war dead after a devastating war. Not a one went up to proclaim the ass. press's fantasy of white supremacy.

What's happened today with Confederate monuments is the most disgraceful period of American history, led by the ass. press and rest of the liberal media. I hope history judges them harshly.

Read any of the 40 years of the original Confederate Veteran magazine and you will see that every single penny that was raised came from school children, raffles, bake sales and such, in an impoverished region. That is how the monuments went up, and both whites and blacks loved them.

Today's hatred is a construct of the hate-monger leftist media led by the ass. press and the Democrat Party.

If slavery was the true cause of the war, it would have ended in a few months because nobody would sacrifice that much death and destruction so 5.7% could own slaves, but all of them would fight to the death for independence just as the colonists were willing to do.

Besides, Southerners could have negotiated an end to the war and kept their slaves anytime within the first two years of the war (and probably after that) if they had wanted to. Lincoln was fine with that.

Southerners were fighting for independence and all that meant, and Northerners were fighting for Union as Abraham Lincoln said over and over. The reason Northerners were fighting for Union was because all their enormous wealth and power was tied to the Union.

They would rather take what they wanted than have to compete against the South with 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet, cotton, and strengthened greatly by military and trade alliances with Great Britain and the rest of Europe.

In such a scenario, the North could not have beaten the South, and Lincoln knew it. That's why he started his war as quickly as he could, then set up a naval blockade.

In two bald-faced lies in one paragraph, the ass. press wrote in an article "Confederate battle flag losing prominence 155 years after Civil War" on July 1, 2020:

Georgia - which added the battle emblem to its state flag in 1956 in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions to desegregate public schools - adopted a flag without a rebel banner in 2003.10

In the first lie, the adding of the Confederate battle flag to the Georgia state flag in 1956 did not have one iota to do with school desegregation. I had some correspondence with the man responsible, Judge John Salmons Bell, who changed the flag because the old Confederate veterans were dying out and he had attended Confederate veteran reunions when he was a boy. He was proud of his family that fought for the South.

Also, the centennial of the War Between the States was coming up and President Eisenhower had directed the states to prepare their commemorations. This was on the minds of people back then.

Those like the ass. press who say the flag was changed in Georgia in defiance to integration can provide no proof of that, and if it was true, there would be a ton of proof because people in those days had no problems making racist statements when they felt like it.

In the second lie, the Georgia state flag adopted in 2003, is not, as the ass. press says, "without a rebel banner" but is almost exactly a rebel banner, the Stars and Bars, the first Confederate national flag. (See pictures of both flags at the bottom of this article, below the endnotes).

The liars in the ass. press and other media have said South Carolina also raised the Confederate battle flag above its State House in the early 1960s in defiance to integration.

It wasn't true. The man responsible for flying the battle flag over the South Carolina State House was John Amasa May, a legislator from Aiken County and a World War II hero, a Bronze Star winner, lawyer, historian, and head of the Confederate War Centennial Commission in South Carolina.

The battle flag went up over the South Carolina State House to honor the 40,000 out of 60,000 South Carolina Confederate soldiers who were killed or wounded in the war. Around 20,000 were killed.

Again, the ass. press is a filthy liar as are most in the media when it comes to Southern history. Just like Genovese said, a media and academic elite have turned the history of the South into a "cultural and political atrocity."

The ass. press is a racist.

They know by capitalizing black, and not capitalizing white, they are building up black people who vote Democrat as they do, and they are demeaning whites, which is revenge for what Northern slave traders, and slaveholders in the North and South did 150 years ago, but nobody who has lived in the past century has done.

In a June 30, 2020 article "Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in black. Here are some of the people who made that happen", Aly Colon is quoted from 2003 saying:

To me, it's an issue of respect, fairness, equality, and parity. When we use a lowercase letter it makes the word less visible, less prominent, and maybe less important. It's the diminutive form. My name is written with an upper case 'A' and 'C' for "Aly Colon." I consider that a sign of respect.11

Only a virulent, vile racist would divide our country over a racial issue like this at a time when we are already so divided.

The ass. press doesn't care. They think it helps the Democrat Party politically and that's enough.

Capitalizing black is fine as long as white and brown are also capitalized so it shows proper respect for all Americans.

You saw earlier in the two examples from the newspaper how stupid it looks to have black capitalized and white in lower case in the same sentence. It is improper English to capitalize adjectives like that but if everybody is treated the same, then fine.

However, capitalizing black and deliberately not capitalizing white is a racist statement, which makes the ass. press a racist as well as an historically ignorant purveyor of fake news.

When you see black capitalized in an article, and white not capitalized, you know that article is written by virtue signaling racists and that is the viewpoint it is written from.

Newspapers don't have to follow the ass. press's lead.

Fox News will capitalize both black and white.

Others like me will continue to use proper English and not capitalize either.

If I do decide to capitalize something in the future, all will be capitalized, black, white and brown, because I believe all Americans are equal, and we should come together as a great nation whenever we can.

All decent people should encourage that, and not do like the ass. press and promote racial hate and division.

 

1 "ap changes writing style to capitalize "b" in Black", June 19, 2020, https://apnews.com/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a, accessed 7-14-20; "The decision to capitalize Black" by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, June 19, 2020, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black, accessed 7-20-20; "Why we will lowercase white" by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/why-we-will-lowercase-white, accessed 7-22-20; "The associated press announced it will not capitalize W in white" by Eliana Miller, July 20, 2020, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/the-associated-press-announced-it-will-not-capitalize-w-in-white, accessed 7-20-20.

2 "The decision to capitalize Black" by john daniszewski, vice president for standards, June 19, 2020, https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black, accessed 7-20-20.

3 ap stylebook, 55th edition, https://store.stylebooks.com/2020-ap-stylebook-print-edition.html, accessed 7-22-20.

4 "Democrats, Biden look to accelerate Southern political shift", associated press story by Bill Barrow in the Charleston Post and Courier, July 6, 2020.

5 "In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'Bloodsuckers,' Columbia 'No Different Than Hitler'", June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.

6 Fox News, Life, Liberty and Levin, July 12, 2020, "Thomas Sowell on 'utter madness' of defund the police push, wonders whether US is reaching point of no return" https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/thomas-sowell-on-utter-madness-of-defund-the-police-push-wonders-whether-us-is-reaching-point-of-no-return, accessed July 14, 2020.

7 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.

8 "Historical figures under attack following death of George Floyd", June 12, 2020, ass. press story in the Charleston, SC Post and Courier.

9 W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 179.

10 "Confederate battle flag losing prominence 155 years after Civil War", July 1, 2020, ass. press article in the Charleston, SC Post and Courier.

11 June 30, 2020 article "Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in black. Here are some of the people who made that happen" by Kristen Hare, June 30, 2020, https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/many-newsrooms-are-now-capitalizing-the-b-in-black-here-are-some-of-the-people-who-made-that-happen/, accessed 7-22-20.

The Confederate First National Flag also known as the Stars and Bars.
The Confederate First National Flag also known as the Stars and Bars.
The current Georgia state flag since 2003, exactly like the Confederate First National Flag, the Stars and Bars.
The current Georgia state flag since 2003, exactly like the Confederate First National Flag, the Stars and Bars.

“Systemic Racism” Is an Invention; Serious Questions About the Pulitzer Prizes Won by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, and the Washington Post

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"Systemic Racism" Is an Invention; Serious Questions About the Pulitzer Prizes "Won" by Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, and The Washington Post

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

On July 12, 2020, Mark Levin, on his show Life, Liberty and Levin on Fox News, said to Dr. Thomas Sowell, "You hear this phrase systemic racism, systemic oppression. You hear it on our college campuses. You hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars. You hear it from media types. You hear it - first of all, what does that mean? And whatever it means, is it true?"1

Dr. Sowell answered:

It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one test hypotheses. It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels during the Age of the Nazis, in which he is supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it's repeated long enough and loud enough, and that's what we're getting.

I don't think - it's one of many words that I don't think even the people who use it have any clear idea what they're saying. The purpose is served by having other people caving in.2

Dr. Sowell is exactly right.

Ever since Barack Obama became a two-term black president, which would be impossible in a racist nation, the left has been scrambling to find racism and hate behind every bush. When they can't find it, they invent it, and that's what the charge of "systemic racism" is about.

For years now, the American public, made up of mostly good, decent people, have had to endure for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the Nazi-type false accusation of "systemic racism," as Dr. Sowell states, because the left needs to tell the big lie and repeat it over and over: America is racist and needs to change into the left's idiotic vision where the police are defunded and Democrat mayors in big cities allow crime against law-biding citizens.

All the riots and violence we have had in the past two months are not the result of an organic movement. They are the result of one thing and one thing only: Weak Democrat mayors allowing crime to happen.

Many of these Democrats (some aren't evil, they are just incompetent) don't give a damn about the good people who work every day and try to raise their families to be good people and citizens, the folks who love their country and serve in the military and respect law enforcement. Those people are racist hatemongers according to the left, cloaked in white privilege. The media are obsessed with it.

The left needs hate because it is not interested in ideas that benefit all Americans such as a great economy with unlimited opportunity for all to make money and succeed.

In fact, the left hates capitalism. They are mostly big-government socialists so that they can control everybody and everything. They want to give out the rewards and punishments.

The left hates the rugged individualism, the Horatio Alger tales of working hard and succeeding in a capitalist economy, of building a business. Remember Obama's "you didn't build that," though you did build it. You busted ass to build it. You maxed out your credit cards and went deeply into debt to build it. You didn't need Obama. You will never need somebody as mediocre as Obama and Biden.

The left is invested in racist identity politics, in tribalism, in skin color. They have done the math and are convinced that non-whites have a higher fertility rate than whites. To those non-whites, add Hispanics pouring across the southern border, and the future will belong to the Democrats. All they will have to do is pass a bill legalizing illegal immigrants and instantly bring millions of new Democrat voters into the fold.

Nancy Pelosi's House has already passed a statehood bill for Washington, D.C. which will give them two more Senate seats.

The possibility of being able to rule America forever as a one-party government has the left giddy with anticipation and in a white heat of desire. They know they can do this and now is the time. Even if they lose in four months, the future is still theirs. They no longer have to be civil. They can claim what they think is their birthright with violence and intimidation. That's why they've got Antifa and BLM.

As long as they can keep black people and other non-whites on the Democrat Party plantation, they got this.

Hate and racism work so it is OK for them to hate everything about America's founding.

Mark this in your diary because this is the first year in American history that the 4th of July is racist. Those bad old white people stole the land from the Indians, though the left never mentions that the Indians stole the same land from other Indians.

America was founded so white people could own slaves, says the left.

They don't understand that slavery was not an end in itself. It was 100% economic. It was a way to get the cotton picked because the wealth and power of antebellum America was based on King Cotton. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860 and the South controlled it all.

That does not excuse slavery in the least, but it does help explain it.

Besides, New Englanders had been making huge fortunes on slavery from the beginning. They brought all the slaves here, and the British before them. Northerners were slave traders all the way until the last nations on earth abolished slavery: Cuba, in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.3

In 1862, during the War Between the States, 54 years after the United States Constitution outlawed the slave trade (1808), Boston and New York were still the largest slave trading ports on the planet.4

The North shipped Southern cotton and got filthy rich in the process, and it manufactured for the growers of that cotton and made even more money through federal tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopolies given to Northern business and industry by the Federal Government. No wonder Northerners loved the Federal Government. They were the "Federals" in the war. The South was providing employment, wealth and power to the North.

Southern money filled the federal treasury but three-fourths of that money was spent in the North. How long do you think Yankees would stay in a Union in which they were paying three-fourths of the taxes, but three-fourths of the tax money was spent in the South?

The left never mentions that blacks owned slaves too. One of the largest slaveholders in South Carolina was the famous black cotton gin maker, William Ellison, of Sumter County who owned over 60 slaves.

The left never mentions that slavery started with blacks themselves in Africa, the result of tribal warfare. Black tribal chieftains had their poor captives lined up in places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and in the barracoons mentioned by the famous African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in her book Barracoon.5

The left never mentions that slavery was dying out and would not have lasted another generation. Machines to pick cotton were on the horizon with automobiles, airplanes and telephones. Southerners wanted to do like Yankees and hire and fire according to business demands, rather than taking on the birth to death commitment of slavery.

The left wants you to believe that white people would have owned slaves to this very day. With that kind of narrative it makes hate a lot easier.  That's why Confederate monuments are low hanging fruit to them, even though those monuments were put up a century or more ago to honor war dead in a horrific war in which 750,000 people died, and over a million were maimed.6

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."7 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."8

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."9

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."10

You have to ask yourself, would 94.3% of white Southerners, who did not own slaves, sacrifice that much so that the 5.7% who did could keep them?

Basil Gildersleeve answers that question for us. He is still known today as the greatest American classical scholar of all time. He was a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina. He sums it up nicely in The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

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.11

The lie that Confederate monuments went up to proclaim white supremacy is easily disproven by reading any of the 40 year run of the original Confederate Veteran magazine. Every penny raised for Confederate monuments is in Confederate Veteran, penny by penny, and all of those monuments went up with pennies from school children, and such, in an impoverished region that suffered until World War II.

Talk about prejudice! How about the Yankee shipping differential that made it expensive to ship goods from the South to the North, but cheap from North to South. The shipping differential fertilized Northern industry but paralyzed Southern industry.

Maybe Southerners should dig that out of the past and start rioting and looting since that is the way to get what you want in today's America.

Since the riots, nobody has stood up the mob. Anything the mob wants it gets. It got the 125 year old John C. Calhoun monument here in Charleston after the city was vandalized and looted by a violent mob on May 30th and Democrat mayor John Tecklenburg got in political trouble.

The Charleston Post and Courier, which is part of the mob, agitated to remove the Calhoun monument at the mayor's behest. They made a hero out of the mayor for a few days but voters won't forget that Tecklenburg destroyed a big part of Charleston's history when he could have chosen the option to add another monument to celebrate some aspect of African American history.

That would have been inclusive and added to Charleston's history but he chose destruction instead, and it was the most dishonorable, disgraceful hour in Charleston history. It was completely unnecessary because we had the monument debate a year ago and had decided to leave all our monuments alone.

One good thing about the destruction of Ulysses S. Grant's monument. It proves the War Between the States was not fought to free the slaves because if it was, Grant's monument would have been spared. I mean, the mob knows about these things.

Luckily, the New York Times' 1619 Project will establish the truth of American history for us. The 1619 Project did have a rocky start when it claimed the American Revolutionary War was fought so the colonists could preserve slavery. That is an absurd proposition but that's how Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project founder, thinks. She has been called out on it but that doesn't matter.

She won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for the 1619 Project and now Oprah is involved to give the project the "full Hollywood treatment":12

Under the deal, the controversial series of articles that sought to reframe American history around slavery will be adapted for the big and small screens - feature films, television series, documentaries, and various forms of unscripted content. Lionsgate will serve as the studio while Winfrey has come aboard as a producer.13

Hannah-Jones said last month it would be an "honor" if the murderous violent riots after the death of George Floyd "were remembered as the '1619 Riots'".14

Krystina Skurk writes that "The purpose of the [1619] project is to reframe American history by claiming that America's founding is based on racism instead of equality and liberty."15 She goes on:

[O]ne of the project's key historical claims, that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the slave system, had to be corrected . . . numerous renowned historians have criticized the project for relying more on an ideological narrative than on historical fact. Like Howard Zinn before her, Hannah-Jones chose a narrative and then bent bits and pieces of facts to fit into it.16

Skurk makes an excellent point when she writes:

It is fascinating that two of the most privileged women in America, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hannah-Jones and media empire queen Oprah Winfrey, are advancing the claim that black people are still systematically oppressed. No reasonable person denies that there are still instances of racism and pockets of people with provincial racist attitudes, but to call fundamentally oppressive a country that has provided its citizens more opportunity than any society in history is nonsensical. Winfrey and Hannah-Jones' own success are a testament that, although there might be obstacles, success in this country is possible for anyone.17

And, of course, Barack Obama's election two times as a black president, regardless of how mediocre he was, proves America is not a racist country.

A Pulitzer Prize does not mean much these days.

The New York Times and The Washington Post both won one for "'deeply sourced' stories were phony" writes Peter Lucas in the Boston Herald18 last year:

It was all a hoax hatched by anti-Trump, pro-Hillary/Obama rogues at the FBI and the Justice Department. Unfortunately for President Trump and the country, the Trump-hating left-wing media con job of collusion by the papers set the tone for the media outlets across the country. They tried to bring down a president on fabricated stories all based on questionable leaks and anonymous sources. It almost succeeded. And in retrospect, it might have brought down a lesser man, but not Trump, the counter puncher.19

He says "the two papers were able to jointly win journalism's highest honor in 2018 for reporting as fact something that did not happen. And that was the hoax of Trump's collusion with the Russians . . .".20

How could this happen! How could The New York Times and Washington Post win Pulitzers for reporting on something that did not happen?

They won Pulitzer awards because "the two papers control the board that makes the awards, that's how. Talk about collusion."21

And corruption.

Look carefully at what's going on with Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times' 1619 Project. The Pulitzer Center is "The 1619 Project's official education partner."22

As The 1619 Project’s official education partner, the Pulitzer Center has connected curricula based on the work of Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms since August 2019.23

Highlights of the Center’s 1619 Project education work include:24

* Tens of thousands of students in all 50 states engaged with the curricular resources, which include reading guides, lesson plans, and extension activities.

* Tens of thousands of copies of the magazine were shipped by The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center to students and educators at K-12 schools, community colleges, HBCUs, and other campuses.

* Five school systems adopted the project at broad scale: Buffalo, New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Does this pass the smell test?

The Pulitzer organization gives The New York Times and Washington Post a Pulitzer Prize because, according to Peter Lucas of the Boston Herald, The New York Times and Washington Post control the board that gives out the awards.

Next up is Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times who wins a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, while the Pulitzer Center is an "official education partner" and involved intimately with the 1619 Project.

Then, Oprah and Lionsgate show up and now there will be films, TV series and a host of other things that will go on in perpetuity that will generate millions upon millions of dollars across the country. The New York Times will make a ton of money and have the prestige of having founded the 1619 Project.

The prestige of Pulitzer Prizes unquestionably helps Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project and The New York Times, every step of the way.

Tucker Carlson or Peter Lucas or somebody like that should look into these incestuous goings-on and report on them thoroughly.

It might all be perfectly fine, but it doesn't look that way to me.

 

1 Fox News, Life, Liberty and Levin, July 12, 2020, "Thomas Sowell on 'utter madness' of defund the police push, wonders whether US is reaching point of no return" https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/thomas-sowell-on-utter-madness-of-defund-the-police-push-wonders-whether-us-is-reaching-point-of-no-return, accessed July 14, 2020.

2 Ibid.

3 Reuters, Chronology-Who banned slavery when?, March 22, 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery/chronology-who-banned-slavery-when-idUSL1561464920070322, accessed July 15, 2020.

4 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 179.

5 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo' (NY: Amistad, 2018).

6 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.

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

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii.

11 Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27.

12 "Oprah Winfrey, Lionsgate Team to Bring New York Times' '1619 Project' to TV and Film", https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/07/08/oprah-winfrey-lionsgate-team-to-bring-new-york-times-1619-project-to-tv-and-film, accessed 7-8-20.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 "Oprah Joins Plot to Convince Americans Their Country Is Racist" by Krystina Skurk, The Federalist, July 14, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/14/oprah-joins-plot-to-convince-americans-their-country-is-racist, accessed 7-14-20.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 "Robert Mueller report not good news for N.Y. Times, Washington Post" by Peter Lucas, Opinion/Op-Ed, Boston Herald, March 30, 2019, https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/30/mueller-report-not--good-news-for-ny-times-washington-post, accessed 7-15-20.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 "Nikole Hannah-Jones Wins Pulitzer Prize for 1619 Project" by Jeff Barrus, Pulitzer Center, Pulitzer Center Update, May 4, 2020, https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/nikole-hannah-jones-wins-pulitzer-prize-1619-project, accessed 7-8-20.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

George Orwell and the NY Times’ 1619 Project

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George Orwell
and the NY Times' 1619 Project

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

George Orwell gave us, perhaps, the most profound truth in all of human history when he wrote in his masterpiece, 1984:

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project, gave us a long, racist, anti-white screed that is published in its entirety at the end of this essay and includes:

The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. . . . Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler.1

We are in the midst of a serious situation in America that I never would have thought could happen here.

We are in an uncharted territory of hate with massive forces arrayed against those of us who have always loved America and been proud of our country, whose main desire was to go after "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" by getting the education or training we needed, working hard, living in peace and contentment with friends, family, neighbors, voting, supporting our military, our police, our communities, and raising families to carry on that tradition.

I doubt if many on the left realize what they have done by unleashing the dark forces of hate and racism into American life, though, like President Trump said at Mount Rushmore, many know exactly what they are doing.

It has gone way beyond legitimate grievance. It is now political hate and intimidation.

This is one reason why the left hates the Second Amendment. Imagine if we had no Second Amendment and could not defend ourselves against the mobs we have all seen now for weeks terrorizing citizens with murder, beatings, arson, looting and vandalism.

Here in Charleston, run by Democrat Mayor John Tecklenburg, on the night of May 30, 2020, hundreds of calls to 911 went unanswered as downtown Charleston was terrorized by violent mobs shattering windows, business owners begging the howling mob not to destroy their businesses, terrified people hiding in the meat coolers of restaurants and for hours being put at risk of death and injury with no help from the police.

I don't care what a person thinks their historical grievance is, or what they think it entitles them to, they have no right to break the law. They have to abide by the law whether they like it or not. There is a political process for change.

It is a disgrace that here in Charleston the monument to our greatest South Carolina native son, John C. Calhoun, was removed by Mayor Tecklenburg and 12 cowards on Charleston city council, several of whom previously said they supported our monuments.

The worst, most dishonorable thing about what happened in Charleston was that we debated our monuments and especially the Calhoun monument over a year ago.

We had a public debate that started with Robert R. Macdonald, a transplanted New Yorker, writing a hit piece on Confederate monuments.

It was followed by much discussion, many appearances before city council by a lot of good people, a history commission with recommendations for a plaque for the monument, though it is hard to imagine anything better than "Truth, Justice and the Constitution," which was what the monument said.

How do you get better than that?

The Calhoun monument stood for Truth, Justice, and the Constitution, but that is not enough today.

In fact, that is why Calhoun had to go, because, of course, the United States Constitution and our country itself are racist to the core, founded on racism and the taking of other people's land (though those same people had taken it from others).

Our country has got to be radically transformed, as was Barack Obama's goal, and is now the goal of Joe Biden, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party.

They have all affirmed that Washington, DC will be a state, giving them two more senators, and illegal immigrants will be made citizens and voters as quickly as possible.

Calhoun was one of the five greatest American senators of all time, as proclaimed by the United States Senate in 1957. Calhoun's other accomplishments besides vice president of the United States are too many to list here. He is a Founding Father. His monument had stood for 125 years.

The extensive debate we had over a year ago ended with historian Robert Rosen's excellent piece that looked at every monument here in Charleston and reached the conclusion that they were constructed by an impoverished, kind of sad, people, to pay tribute to their war dead.

Charleston endured one of the longest sieges in the history of warfare, some 587 days. The monument at the Battery is To the Confederate Defenders of Charleston and Fort Sumter, and it portrays a young man with sword and shield protecting a woman who represents his family and also the city of Charleston itself.

The issue of the Calhoun monument was tabled over a year ago and had not come up since. Everybody was happy in Charleston.

But Democrat Mayor Tecklenburg was in political trouble for allowing Charleston to be terrorized and looted for hours on May 30th so he used the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to resurrect his political career.

He agitated to have the monument removed, and the seething, rabid Charleston Post and Courier, basically a Democrat Party hate-sheet that is insufferably politically correct, supported him all the way and whipped up this hysteria of hate and anger that intimidated city council into voting to remove the 125 year old monument.

This is Charleston's most disgraceful hour thanks to John Tecklenburg.

In Charleston, we don't remove monuments. We build more monuments.

I told that to City Councilman Ross Appel when I saw him at the rally to preserve the Calhoun monument before the council vote. I was walking out with the speaker, Dr. Michael Kogan, and I called the councilman's name.

He turned and I said, "Mr. Appel, in Charleston we don't remove monuments. We build more monuments."

He seemed very sympathetic and said something like, "I know. I agree." He definitely said "I agree."

But he was not being truthful. He voted to remove Calhoun shortly thereafter, and there were others who made promises like that who did not keep them.

They should all be voted out of office because they are untrustworthy. Every one of them and especially Tecklenburg.

The pathetic disgrace that is happening to American history today by the left has been going on against Southern history since the 1960s. Esteemed historian Eugene D. Genovese,2 one of America's greatest historians before his death in 2012, wrote this in 1994:

Rarely, these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. . . . To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.3

Dr. Genovese goes on to say that this cultural and political atrocity is being forced on us by "the media and an academic elite."4

President Trump said in his July 3, 2020 Mount Rushmore address:

Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical  view of American history is a web of lies - all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.5 (Bold emphasis added.)

This is exactly what the left has done to Southern history. Now, as predicted, they are doing it to all of American history.

The New York Times' 1619 Project is a perfect example. It is breathtaking in its inaccuracy and perspective (it has tried to say the American Revolution was fought so we could keep slavery). The current desire of its founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is reparations.

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a racist screed a few years ago. Her anti-white feelings have probably not changed.

The New York Times likes to hire white-hating racists. Remember Sarah Jeong who wrote on her Twitter account December 23, 2014:

Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins6

Before that, on November 28, 2014, Jeong wrote:

Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants7

While studying slavery is an important part of our history, I hate to tell Hannah-Jones but it is not the central focus of American history.

Slavery existed, not as an end in itself, but as a way to get the cotton picked. It was 100% economic.

That does not excuse it in the least, but in the harsh world of the nineteenth century and before, it helps explain it.

With the advent of technology and machines to pick cotton, slavery would have ended peacefully within a generation of the War Between the States without 750,000 people dying and over a million being maimed, and a century of second class citizenship for African Americans.

It is a near-certainty that Nikole Hannah-Jones will not focus on the blacks in Africa who are the beginning of American slavery by selling other blacks, captured from tribal warfare, into slavery.

Those black tribal chieftains had those poor captives waiting on the beach for Yankee slave traders, and British before them, in places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and in the famous barracoons, the slave forts referred to by African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in her book, Barracoon.8

Hannah-Jones ought to study Jim Downs' book, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction9 about the hundreds of thousands of blacks who suffered and died during and after the war because the Union Army really didn't give a damn about them. Yankees were primarily concerned with winning the war.

The poor ex-slaves "frequently begged for scraps of uneaten food, worn-out boots, and unused tents."10

These facts were deliberately covered up by the army, Northern journalists and the Federal Government because they did not fit the narrative the North wanted to put forward of happy ex-slaves. Federal Government agents "did not tell the stories of the tens of thousands of emancipated slaves who suffered and died during the Civil War from the explosive outbreak of epidemic disease. The names and experiences of these freedpeople were too politically problematic to be recorded."11

A typical example was "Chattanooga, Tennessee in January of 1865, [when] a military official reported that former enslaved people were 'dying by scores-that sometimes thirty per day die & are carried out by wagon loads, without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench.'"12

In Helene, Arkansas the "bodies of emancipated slaves were placed in the same carts with carcasses of mules and horses to be buried in the same pit."13 Collecting dead bodies of former slaves shows that "Northerners, allegedly fighting for the freedom and dignity of those subjected to human bondage, were transporting black people like animals."14

I hope Hannah-Jones includes this part of the story because it is history too.

The fake news New York Times, hard left in its politics, completely committed to the Democrat Party, is now the chief arbiter of American history. The 1619 Project has spread all over the country as a curricula for American schools and children. It brags that it is in all 50 states.

Below, is the 1995 racist screed in Notre Dame's The Observer by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Nikole Hannah back then).

She has more power and reach than any American historian in all of American history, because she knows that history today is not history. It is 100% political, and 100% the politics of the hard left and Democrat Party.

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Of course, if you disagree with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times, you are a racist pig.

 

Modern savagery

Dear Editor,

I was shocked and disgusted when I read Fred Kelly's article in the November 9 issue of the Observer. What responsible editor would print an article that applauds and dignifies the white race's rape, plunder, and genocide of a whole race of people?

I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. Europeans have colonized and destroyed the Indigenous populations on every continent of this plant. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture.

Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil. Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans. The difference is that Africans had the decency and respect for human life to learn from the Native Americans and trade technology with them. The pyramids of the Aztecs and the great stone heads of the Olmecs are lasting monuments to the friendship of these two peoples. But as David Walker wrote in his Appeal in 1829, the white men acted "more like devils than accountable men. . . whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious, and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority." It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn, they looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated. Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people.

Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity. Not only did they rape and murder the indigenous people of America, but they killed off many more by introducing diseases which came from filth and uncleanliness to the native people. The white race used deceit and trickery, warfare and rape, to steal the land from the people that had lived here for thousands and thousands of years. Over and over again whites made peace treaties with the Native Americans telling them that if they moved just this one last time and gave up their land to the greedy settlers just this one last time they would never had to move again. It was common knowledge that the white man's word could not be trusted.

Even today, the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities. Yes, it was Columbus that set the platforms for these racist America institutions. A devil calling someone a savage is like the pot calling the kettle black.

But after everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them or their descendants. I understand that because of some lacking, they need to constantly prove their superiority. Kelly felt threatened by NASA-ND's exposure of the true Columbus, so he felt it necessary to degrade their whole culture to maintain his security. Fred Kelly, I pity you for feeing that just because you are white and Christian, you can celebrate the destruction of another human being. In closing, a famous American, who was beat down by members of the Christian society, once said "Why can't we all just get along?" Why? because white America's dream is colored America's nightmare. To Kelly I say: It does not feel good to have your culture put under a microscope, does it?

Nikole Hannah
Sophomore
Breen-Phillips15

 

1 "In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'Bloodsuckers,' Columbia 'No Different Than Hitler'", June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.

2 Genovese was a brilliant historian as the following paragraph illustrates. It is the opening paragraph of an essay in The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXX, No. 2, May, 2014 entitled "Eugene Genovese's Old South: A Review Essay" by J. William Harris: "The death of Eugene D. Genovese in September 2012 brought to a close a remarkable career. In the decades following his first published essay on Southern history, Genovese produced an outstanding body of scholarship, based on a rare combination of deep research in primary sources; a mastery of the historical literature, not only in Southern history but also in many complementary fields; a sophisticated command of methodological issues; and often sparkling prose. And Genovese's reputation reached far beyond specialists in Southern history, and even beyond the academy. In 2005 a reviewer in one magazine for a general readership called Genovese the 'Country's greatest living historian' and his Roll, Jordan, Roll 'the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.'"

3 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.

4 Ibid.

5 "Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota's 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration, Keystone, South Dakota, July 3, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas-2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/, accessed 7-5-20.

6 "In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'Bloodsuckers,' Columbia 'No Different Than Hitler'", June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.

7 Ibid.

8 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo' (NY: Amistad, 2018).

9 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.

10 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 4. The next three paragraphs of this essay come from the final draft of a great new book by historian Michael Bradley of Tennessee to be published soon by Charleston Athenaeum Press. It is entitled: The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States. Please visit www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com in July, 2020 for more information.

11 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 6, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.

12 Maria R. Mann to Elisa, February 10, 1863, Maria Mann to Miss Peabody, April 19, 1863, Maria Mann Papers, LOC, quoted in Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861-1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 121, in Downs, Sick from Freedom, 27, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.

13 Ibid.

14 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 27, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.

15 "In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'Bloodsuckers,' Columbia 'No Different Than Hitler'", June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.

President Trump’s Executive Order Protecting American Monuments

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President Trump's Executive Order
Protecting American Monuments

 

A Word from Gene Kizer, Jr.,
Charleston Athenaeum Press

I can not WAIT to celebrate the 4th of July this year!

I have always loved the 4th but this year it has special meaning as my personal protest against the hate-America mob that has wreaked havoc across the country in recent weeks.

I am going to think about every veteran who has ever served and especially our Confederate veterans who had the right to secede from what was, at that time, a tyrannical wealth-sucking government dominated by a region that sent terrorists into the South to murder Southerners.

They seceded with the greatest expression of democracy and self-government ever conducted on American soil, by conventions of the people which, like the ratifying conventions of the Constitution, were there to debate one issue: Secession.

I am so proud of the democratic republic they set up which was a true federal republic in which states were sovereign. In their government, the president served one six-year term so that he could concentrate on governing and not be constantly running for reelection.

Their constitution required bills to be labeled accurately and state exactly what the law was they were voting on.

Their constitution allowed free and slave states to join. It was up to the state what to do about slavery. This worried Lincoln to death because several states, especially along the Mississippi, would likely have joined the Confederacy because of its free trade and low tariff philosophy. Protective tariffs were unconstitutional in the South.

Below is the entirety, verbatim, of President Trump's June 26, 2020 "Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence."

Many thanks to the Georgia Division, SCV, for their press release June 29th publishing this important Executive Order, and to President Trump for issuing it.

It has teeth and quotes many different laws that can be used to prosecute vandals attacking not just monuments on federal property but in many cases on state property as well.

It appears that Democrat run cities, states and police departments that do not enforce the law as we have seen recently when police, under orders from Democrat mayors, stand around and watch violent mobs destroy monuments and other property, will face the loss of federal funds. Criminals will face prosecution for serious crimes.

The mob is specifically defined as "Anarchists and left-wing extremists" who "have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation."

You may want to have legal people in your camps study this order and the various laws quoted, and see how they apply to your area then use it to make sure Democrat mayors and city councils know what they face if they acquiesce with the mob.

In fact, keep an eye on these spineless "leaders" and report them to the Department of Justice if you have a good reason for doing so, and are on solid ground, then let these so-called leaders know they have been reported.

There are also many state and federal laws against destruction of headstones and monuments in cemeteries, and destruction of church property.

National SCV Headquarters should study this order as well as other laws protecting monuments and graves and tell us what we can do to be more aggressive in the fight.

I know SCV Divisions in several states are doing an outstanding job empowering their camps and compatriots. I appreciate and benefit from the press releases sent out by the Georgia Division and the things they do such as filing law suits and offering rewards for criminals.

Camp 129 in Waco, Texas assembled 200 compatriots at Belton Courthouse to guard the Confederate monument there, and with Texas's open carry law, many were legally armed and looked like they were ready to ride with Forrest and take on the entire Yankee army! Don't mess with Texas!

SCV Camp 129 of Waco, Texas at Belton Courthouse June, 2020.
SCV Camp 129 of Waco, Texas at Belton Courthouse June, 2020.

Fort Sumter Camp in Charleston, South Carolina has spearheaded the guarding of the Confederate Defenders of Charleston and Fort Sumter monument at the Battery with compatriots taking daytime shifts, and a security guard hired for the night. Secession Camp is contributing.

 

Confederate Defenders of Charleston and Fort Sumter Monument at the Battery, Charleston, South Carolina June 2020.
Confederate Defenders of Charleston and Fort Sumter Monument at the Battery, Charleston, South Carolina June 2020.

Camps should communicate with each other so they can assemble men when needed and the more the better.

The Southern Legal Resource Center has filed a Writ of Certiorari with the United States Supreme Court "asking that the Court recognize heritage groups as having standing to sue to defend threatened monuments AND that the class of persons with standing be broadened to allow someone to be able to fight to protect monuments in court." This would be a GREAT thing if they can get it. We should try to pass state laws that help in this way too.

Get on the Southern Legal Resource Center newsletter list and keep up, and support them financially: https://SLRC-CSA.org.

Ultimately we need political power and lobbying that can strengthen heritage laws. I know of the SCV's restrictions as a 501 (c) (3) but a lot of politicians need to be targeted for DEFEAT and are vulnerable because the public is fed up with the hate and violence these Democrats are promoting by coddling and encouraging the mob.

God Bless President Trump for issuing his Executive Order Protecting American Monuments and God Bless America!

Happy 4th of July!

Deo Vindice!

Gene Kizer, Jr.
Charleston Athenaeum Press

Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments,
Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent
Criminal Violence

Issued on: June 26, 2020

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Purpose.

The first duty of government is to ensure domestic tranquility and defend the life, property, and rights of its citizens. Over the last 5 weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies - such as Marxism - that call for the destruction of the United States system of government.

Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy. During the unrest, innocent citizens also have been harmed and killed.

These criminal acts are frequently planned and supported by agitators who have traveled across State lines to promote their own violent agenda. These radicals shamelessly attack the legitimacy of our institutions and the very rule of law itself.

Key targets in the violent extremists' campaign against our country are public monuments, memorials, and statues. Their selection of targets reveals a deep ignorance of our history, and is indicative of a desire to indiscriminately destroy anything that honors our past and to erase from the public mind any suggestion that our past may be worth honoring, cherishing, remembering, or understanding. In the last week, vandals toppled a statue of President Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco. To them, it made no difference that President Grant led the Union Army to victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War, enforced Reconstruction, fought the Ku Klux Klan, and advocated for the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed freed slaves the right to vote. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the names of 507 veterans memorialized on a World War II monument were painted over with a symbol of communism. And earlier this month, in Boston, a memorial commemorating an African-American regiment that fought in the Civil War was defaced with graffiti. In Madison, Wisconsin, rioters knocked over the statue of an abolitionist immigrant who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Christian figures are now in the crosshairs, too. Recently, an influential activist for one movement that has been prominent in setting the agenda for demonstrations in recent weeks declared that many existing religious depictions of Jesus and the Holy Family should be purged from our places of worship.

Individuals and organizations have the right to peacefully advocate for either the removal or the construction of any monument. But no individual or group has the right to damage, deface, or remove any monument by use of force.

In the midst of these attacks, many State and local governments appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the lawful exercise of rights to free speech and assembly and unvarnished vandalism. They have surrendered to mob rule, imperiling community safety, allowing for the wholesale violation of our laws, and privileging the violent impulses of the mob over the rights of law-abiding citizens. Worse, they apparently have lost the will or the desire to stand up to the radical fringe and defend the fundamental truth that America is good, her people are virtuous, and that justice prevails in this country to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the world. Some particularly misguided public officials even appear to have accepted the idea that violence can be virtuous and have prevented their police from enforcing the law and protecting public monuments, memorials, and statues from the mob's ropes and graffiti.

My Administration will not allow violent mobs incited by a radical fringe to become the arbiters of the aspects of our history that can be celebrated in public spaces. State and local public officials' abdication of their law enforcement responsibilities in deference to this violent assault must end.

Sec. 2. Policy.

(a) It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property. The desire of the Congress to protect Federal property is clearly reflected in section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, which authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years' imprisonment for the willful injury of Federal property. More recently, under the Veterans' Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, section 1369 of title 18, United States Code, the Congress punished with the same penalties the destruction of Federal and in some cases State-maintained monuments that honor military veterans. Other criminal statutes, such as the Travel Act, section 1952 of title 18, United States Code, permit prosecutions of arson damaging monuments, memorials, and statues on State grounds in some cases. Civil statutes like the Public System Resource Protection Act, section 100722 of title 54, United States Code, also hold those who destroy certain Federal property accountable for their offenses. The Federal Government will not tolerate violations of these and other laws.

(b) It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that participates in efforts to incite violence or other illegal activity in connection with the riots and acts of vandalism described in section 1 of this order. Numerous Federal laws, including section 2101 of title 18, United States Code, prohibit the violence that has typified the past few weeks in some cities. Other statutes punish those who participate in or assist the agitators who have coordinated these lawless acts. Such laws include section 371 of title 18, United States Code, which criminalizes certain conspiracies to violate Federal law, section 2 of title 18, United States Code, which punishes those who aid or abet the commission of Federal crimes, and section 2339A of title 18, United States Code, which prohibits as material support to terrorism efforts to support a defined set of Federal crimes. Those who have joined in recent violent acts around the United States will be held accountable.

(c) It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that damages, defaces, or destroys religious property, including by attacking, removing, or defacing depictions of Jesus or other religious figures or religious art work. Federal laws prohibit, under certain circumstances, damage or defacement of religious property, including the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, section 247 of title 18, United States Code, and section 371 of title 18, United States Code. The Federal Government will not tolerate violations of these laws designed to protect the free exercise of religion.

(d) It is the policy of the United States, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to withhold Federal support tied to public spaces from State and local governments that have failed to protect public monuments, memorials, and statues from destruction or vandalism. These jurisdictions' recent abandonment of their law enforcement responsibilities with respect to public monuments, memorials, and statues casts doubt on their willingness to protect other public spaces and maintain the peace within them. These jurisdictions are not appropriate candidates for limited Federal funds that support public spaces.

(e) It is the policy of the United States, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to withhold Federal support from State and local law enforcement agencies that have failed to protect public monuments, memorials, and statues from destruction or vandalism. Unwillingness to enforce State and local laws in the face of attacks on our history, whether because of sympathy for the extremists behind this violence or some other improper reason, casts doubt on the management of these law enforcement agencies. These law enforcement agencies are not appropriate candidates for limited Federal funds that support State and local police.

Sec. 3. Enforcing Laws Prohibiting the Desecration of Public Monuments, the Vandalism of Government Property, and Recent Acts of Violence.

(a) The Attorney General shall prioritize within the Department of Justice the investigation and prosecution of matters described in subsections 2(a), (b), and (c) of this order. The Attorney General shall take all appropriate enforcement action against individuals and organizations found to have violated Federal law through these investigations.

(b) The Attorney General shall, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, work with State and local law enforcement authorities and Federal agencies to ensure the Federal Government appropriately provides information and assistance to State and local law enforcement authorities in connection with their investigations or prosecutions for the desecration of monuments, memorials, and statues, regardless of whether such structures are situated on Federal property.

Sec. 4. Limiting Federal Grants for Jurisdictions and Law Enforcement Agencies that Permit the Desecration of Monuments, Memorials, or Statues.

The heads of all executive departments and agencies shall examine their respective grant programs and apply the policies established by sections 2(d) and (e) of this order to all such programs to the extent that such application is both appropriate and consistent with applicable law.

Sec. 5. Providing Assistance for the Protection of Federal Monuments, Memorials, Statues, and Property.

Upon the request of the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Administrator of General Services, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, personnel to assist with the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property. This section shall terminate 6 months from the date of this order unless extended by the President.

Sec. 6. General Provisions.

(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

(d) This order is not intended to, and does not, affect the prosecutorial discretion of the Department of Justice with respect to individual cases.

The Washington Poop, I Mean Post: Fake News AND Fake History

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The Washington Poop, I mean Post:
Fake News AND Fake History

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

The Washington Post article, "Destroying Confederate monuments isn't 'erasing' history. It's learning from it."1 by African American associate professor Keisha N. Blain of the University of Pittsburgh, proves that not only does the Washington Post peddle in fake news, it peddles fake history.

Professor Blain's contention in the short article is that "Confederate monuments, as well as Confederate-named Army bases, are modern inventions meant to distort history and celebrate a racist past" because:

These symbols serve one primary purpose - to honor figures of the past who upheld an undemocratic vision of America. They were created by white supremacists. And they function as a balm for white supremacists who long to return to a period when Americans regarded black people as property.

This is a silly, self-important view of history by a person obsessed with race.

Whether Prof. Blain likes it or not, the culture and institutions of America came from white Europe. Great Britain is our Mother Country.

We were founded because Europeans were looking for resources and wealth. The Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, we were founded by capitalist companies out to make money and create markets, which creates opportunity for average people.

Europeans were Christians, Jews, Protestants, and their culture was derived from Greek democracy, ancient Athens and Sparta, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Bible, English Common Law, Magna Carta, the philosophy of John Locke, which found its way into Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

There was a scientific revolution to go along with the industrial revolution. This was great progress for mankind.

That was the dominant culture from white Europe. It is more accurately described as American, not just white. White doesn't do it justice.

Professor Blain's characterization is racist. White supremacy? If you go to Africa you have black supremacy. In Central America, Hispanic supremacy. In Asia, Asian supremacy. If you go up by the North Pole, you have Eskimo supremacy.

Whatever the dominant culture is, that is what is supreme.

White supremacy in America when we were founded by white Europeans is not too profound an observation, so big deal.

The problem in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for blacks and whites was the bringing together of two diametrically opposite cultures: the tribal culture of Africa, and the advanced industrializing scientific civilization of Europe that had evolved and become strong and confident and was exploring the world looking for resources, markets, wealth, and opportunity. There was great competition among European nations for expansion, to spread their innovative cultures.

Africans in Africa knew about capitalism too because they knew they could make money selling other Africans into slavery first, to the British, then later to Yankees, mostly New Englanders, who were America's slave traders.

The tribal chieftains of Africa built slave forts like the one on Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and the barracoons Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African American anthropologist, wrote about in her book, Barracoon. It describes African tribal warfare and their slave trade in great detail.2

The goal of white European culture was not to have slaves. It was to build great cities and nations and wealth for all. There was some opportunity for blacks even during slavery because people like William Ellison, the famous black cotton gin maker in Sumter County, got rich and became one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina.

Once slavery ended and the decades long rebuilding of the Southern economy was complete, more opportunity was created. We have continued to evolve until we have, today, unlimited opportunity for everybody from sea to shining sea.

There is nothing holding anybody back in America today. Anybody can achieve anything they want with the right attitude and willingness to work hard. Opportunity is all over the place for blacks, whites, women, men, everybody.

People just have to solve their individual problems, get the education or training they need, develop a strong work ethic then do like Sam Walton said and "get after it." Develop an intense determination to succeed.

Those who buy into the false narrative of the left, that America is a horribly racist place founded on racism and slavery: you ain't going nowhere. You can drown in your misery or you can shake off that nonsense and get to work.

We have had a two-term black president in America, no matter how mediocre and divisive he was. That proves America is not a racist nation in the least.

The Democrat Party's false charge of racism against anybody who disagrees with them, promotes real racism, and so does their war on the past.

Southerners did not secede because of slavery. They seceded because they were fed up with the Northern hate Republicans used in the election of 1860 to rally their votes.

John Brown's terrorist raid at Harper's Ferry had been a wakeup call for the South. It proved Northerners were serious about murdering Southerners since Brown was financed by Northerners, then celebrated in the North as a hero when he was brought to justice. Two Union states, Ohio and Iowa, protected Brown's sons who were wanted for murder in Virginia. Protecting fugitives from justice when wanted by another state was unconstitutional. This was yet another Northern violation of the Constitution.

Brown's mission had been to create a slave revolt like Haiti's that would result in thousands of Southern men, women and children brutally murdered.

Republicans also used Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis, as a campaign document. It called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night.

This was the future for Southerners in the Union.

So, ask yourself, if you were a Southerner in 1860, would you let Lincoln's terrorist, money thieving party rule over you?

Or would you secede and form a new nation more to your liking as was your sacred right laid out in the Declaration of Independence where it states:

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.

Prof. Blain also accuses Southerners of being traitors.

The idea that Southerners were traitors when they had the right to secede and exercised it properly, again, shows Prof. Blain's ignorance of history.

The New England states threatened to secede many times more than Southerners. Horace Greeley believed in the right of secession ("let our erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money then he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Three states - New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia - demanded the right of secession in writing before joining the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, thus giving it to them as well, because all the states are equal with the exact same powers.

Prof. Blain's statement that Confederate monuments, Confederate-named bases, etc. serve "one primary purpose - to honor figures of the past who upheld an undemocratic vision of America" shows that she knows nothing about Southern history and probably has never cared to trouble herself with it.

What Southerners did by calling conventions of the people (their secession conventions) to debate, then vote on the one issue of secession, is the most democratic thing to ever happen on American soil.

It goes straight back to the Founding Fathers when they required that states call conventions of the people to ratify the Constitution rather than having it ratified by their legislatures. This was a far sounder foundation for the country than a legislative vote that could be rescinded by a later legislature.

Each Southern state called a convention, elected delegates as secessionists or unionists, debated the issue thoroughly, then voted.

Seven states seceded and formed a new democratic republic on this earth - the Confederate States of America - very similar to the one formed by our Founding Fathers but with States' Rights thoroughly protected.

Four states rejected secession at first. Prof. Blain skips over this. She says only "By June 1861, four more states had seceded."

The reason they seceded had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery though Prof. Blain does not tell you that because she, herself, does not know it.

The four states that had rejected secession seceded because Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South. They were horrified that Lincoln would use the Federal Government to invade sovereign states and murder their citizens. The Federal Government was supposed to be the agent of the states, not their master.

In those four states - Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina - lived 52.4% of white Southerners, therefore a majority of white Southerners seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They seceded over unconstitutional federal coercion.

Prof. Blain does get one thing right. She says Lincoln "made no such promise in 1860" to end slavery. She's right. Lincoln and the North supported the Corwin Amendment which would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed.

Not a single Confederate monument went up to honor whatever Prof. Blain means by white supremacy.

All went up with pennies from school children, and such, in the war-impoverished South to honor their dead from a war in which 750,000 died, and over a million were maimed. Is that not enough suffering for Prof. Blain to understand that the region wanted to honor those souls who were their blood and kin in a permanent way?

Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina who is today "still regarded as the greatest American classical scholar of all times."3 describes the sentiment well in 1892, 27 years after the war. He writes:

A friend of mine, describing the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in Paris, when the circle of fire was drawing round the city, and foreigners were hastening to escape, told me that the press was so great that he could touch in every direction those who had been crushed to death as they stood, and had not had room to fall. Not wholly unlike this was the pressure brought to bear on the Confederacy. It was only necessary to put out your hand and you touched a corpse; and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of a brother or a friend.4

Not a single Confederate monument went up out of fear that black people were raising themselves up, another of the absurd assertions of Prof. Blain.

If you what to know why Confederate monuments went up, straight from the mouth of Confederates, all you have to do is read the original Confederate Veteran magazine from any of its 40 year run.

The raising of the money for all the Confederate monuments is in it, day by day, penny by penny, a massive work of love and patriotism.

You can read the stories of the veterans organizations, the United Confederate Veterans, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and others.

Read original stories of battles, speeches at dedications, look at pictures, read a lot of poetry. It is the most warm and wonderful thing  you can imagine, exciting, dignified, extremely patriotic, by wonderful, decent people, and you can see that there is nothing the least bit racist about them.

Prof. Blain has no idea what she is talking about. Her understanding of history is abysmal, bless her heart.

What has happened to Southern history since the 1960s is a national disgrace, it is a "cultural and political atrocity" as Eugene Genovese said, especially what has happened in the past month with the Democrat Party's violent mobs and riots destroying historical monuments around the country.

But unlike flighty liberals, Southerners know our history and are solidly grounded. We will immediately begin a new round of monument building across America so we end up with a net increase, and the new ones will be more magnificent than ever.

We have one of the greatest historical records of all mankind, and throughout all of history, especially of valor, bravery and self-government. Here's how Basil Gildersleeve sums it up and is why we will make our history more known to the future than ever before:

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.5

 

1 Washington Post, "Destroying Confederate monuments isn't 'erasing' history. It's learning from it." by Professor Keisha N. Blain, June 19, 2020, https://www.WashingtonPost.com/outlook/

2020/06/19/destroying-confederate-monuments-isnt-erasing-history-its-learning-it/, accessed June 22, 2020.

2 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (NY: Amistad, 2018).

3 Clyde N. Wilson, Abstract, The Creed of the Old South by Basil L. Gildersleeve, Society of Independent Southern Historians, http://southernhistorians.org/the-societys-southern-life-recommended-reading/11-southern-literature/11-09-southern-literature-southern-view-of-southern-culture/11-09-04/, accessed 10/11/2014.

4 Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South (Baltimore: The Johns hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27.

5 Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower Loved Robert E. Lee; Gen. Jack Keane Is Clueless.

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Eisenhower speaks with some of the 101st Airborne Division June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion.
Eisenhower speaks with some of the 101st Airborne Division June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower Loved Robert E. Lee;
Gen. Jack Keane Is Clueless.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

I want to make it clear that I have the greatest respect for Gen. Jack Keane, both for his service to our country, and as a commentator on military matters for Fox News. Gen. Keane is astute and highly credible to me. When he is on, I know I am getting good analysis. I have never disagreed with Gen. Keane on anything until a week ago.

On the evening of June 11, 2020, Gen. Keane was on The Story with Martha MacCallum on Fox News discussing the renaming of the 10 U.S. Army bases named for Confederate generals such as Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Gen. Keane was against renaming the bases for basically the same reason President Trump is, because all of those bases have a long and distinguished history in our country by helping us win two World Wars and training our best for a century.

I thought Gen. Keane, a native New Yorker, would be knowledgeable of history and show great respect, as a soldier, for the valor and bravery of those Southern boys fighting for independence who, badly outnumbered and outgunned, were fearless in battle and killed as many of their enemies as their enemies killed of them. Gen. Keane has commanded a lot of their descendants.

But Keane said Confederates in the War Between the States were traitors who were not tried after the war because of a spirit of reconciliation. He said that same spirit of reconciliation led the Federal Government to name the 10 Army bases in the South after Confederate leaders, but that had gone too far. He said today nobody gets any inspiration from those Confederate leaders.

President Donald J. Trump presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to retired four-star U.S. Army General Jack Keane, Tuesday, March 10, 2020, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
President Trump presents retired Gen. Jack Keane the Presidential Medal of Freedom, March, 2020.

Let me correct the good general by pointing out that the reason there were no treason trials after the war was because Southerners had not committed treason and Yankees knew it. Imminently practical Yankees were not about to lose in a court of law what they had won on the battlefield.

A better case could be made for Yankee treason against the Constitution, along with crimes against humanity, since Southerners were defending their homes, wives, children and firesides from an unconstitutional barbaric murderous thieving invasion. Nowhere in the Constitution in 1861 did it allow or require the Federal Government to invade a sovereign state for any reason whatsoever. The Federal Government was supposed to be the agent of the states, not their master.

If you want to talk about treason and war crimes, the Yankees compare well with other subjugators in world history such as the Romans and Germans who invaded peaceful nations to steal their wealth and control them.

The official White House portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower by James Anthony Wills.
The official White House portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower by James Anthony Wills.

History is so pathetic in this day and age that I'd be willing to bet Gen. Keane has no idea that the Northern economy of Abraham Lincoln (who 61% of Americans voted against in the election of 1860) was dependent on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. We were most of the North's manufacturing market and we were fed up with high prices from Northern tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopolies that were suctioning money out of the South and depositing it in the North constantly.

Gen. Henry L. Benning, for whom Fort Benning is named, was a justice on the Georgia Supreme Court before the war. He had analyzed the economic interaction thoroughly and said in 1860:

The North cut off from Southern cotton, rice, tobacco, and other products would lose three fourths of her commerce, and a very large proportion of her manufactures. And thus those great fountains of finance would sink very low. . . . Would the North in such a condition as that declare war against the South?1

We all know the answer to that is yes.

Lincoln was clever but, as Charles W. Ramsdell proved in his famous treatise, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," Lincoln manipulated events in Charleston Harbor to get the war started because it was not in his interest to wait a second longer. Several Northern newspapers agreed that Lincoln started the war because he saw a chance to get it going without appearing as the aggressor.

Lincoln's commander in Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, also stated that Lincoln started the war.

Lincoln's economy was headed for annihilation in April, 1861. Hundreds of thousands were unemployed and in the streets. He was petrified of the disintegration of the new Republican Party. He had to act, plus he wanted to announce his blockade and chill European recognition of the Confederacy.

European trade and military treaties would have meant the North could not beat the South. It would have been like the French in the Revolutionary War who helped us mightily to win it.

Southerners had always wanted free trade, anyway, so they could buy from Europe at much cheaper prices than those inflated by Yankee tariffs that enriched Northerners at the expense of the South.

Gen. Keane went to Fordham, so he probably wasn't aware that at West Point, where Lee, Grant, and so many antebellum military leaders went, the right of secession was taught in books such as William Rawle's A View of the Constitution of the United States of America.

There is overwhelming evidence of the right of secession, way beyond the reservation of the right of secession by New York (Gen. Keane's own home state), Rhode Island and Virginia before acceding to the Constitution.

The acceptance of the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia by the other states, also gave that right to them because all the states were and are equal with the exact same rights.

The right of secession was unquestioned throughout most of the antebellum era and, in fact, it was New Englanders who threatened to secede many more times than Southerners.

I might remind Gen. Keane that his native city, New York City, was the "principle port of the world" for slave trading during the War Between the States, a half century after the slave trade was outlawed.2 It was outlawed in 1808 but Yankees still carried it on around the world.

Boston and Portland were second only to New York in slave trading during the war. This distinction is noted in W. E. B. Du Bois's book, The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870.3

Maybe New York's name should be changed to satisfy the liberal mob, along with Boston and Portland's and all the other New England cities that were America's slave traders, because just about all of them were in New England.

New York also has the stain of the New York City Draft Riots when New York hate and racism were on full display and scores of blacks were lynched and murdered.

Here are some statistics on what Gen. Keane's "traitors" endured during the War Between the States. This is extremely important because Gen. Keane himself commanded a lot of their descendants.

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.4

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."5

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."6

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."7 Sounds like a pretty brave lot of Americans to me, Gen. Keane.

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."8

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:9

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.

How dare you, Gen. Keane, call these American soldiers from the South, "traitors." Your predecessor in the Union Army, Gen. Henry Van Ness Boynton, who fought against them in the War Between the States, calls them heroes, and you have commanded a lot of their descendants. Surely you owe respect to the men you command and whom you might have to send to their deaths.

To prove your inerudite claim that Confederates were traitors, you need to prove that the right of secession was illegal, and that the Declaration of Independence, where it states the following, is invalid:

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. (Bold emphasis added.)

You can't do either, Gen. Keane.

Secession was a legal right, and there was no "consent of the governed" in the South for a government that was robbing them blind and controlled by a region that sent terrorists into the South to encourage hate and murder of Southerners.

Southerners were fighting for independence and self-government.

Northerners were fighting for their wealth, power, and control of the country, so their cities and people would be rich and dominate the culture, just as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted.

It is provable beyond the shadow of a doubt that Northerners were not fighting to end slavery. The War Aims Resolution, the Corwin Amendment, the six Union slave states that fought for the North the entire war, the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and many other things prove that it was Union they were fighting for, like Lincoln said over and over, because all their wealth and power was tied to the Union.

Southerners just wanted to be free to govern themselves. They seceded peacefully and would have continued in peace if Lincoln hadn't started the war, and Southerners would have ended slavery soon.

Slavery was dying out and would not have lasted another generation with the automobile and telephone entering our lives. There were machines to pick cotton, and Southerners wanted to do like Yankees and hire and fire as business dictated without a birth to death commitment. Almost a million men died and another million were maimed for nothing.

For African Americans, there was a century of second class citizenship, and before that, horrible treatment by the Union Army.

Hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves got sick from disease, starvation and exposure, during and after the war because of Yankee neglect, and tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, died.

We don't know the exact number because the Federal Government falsified the record and didn't count thousands of them because it made the government look bad. Dishonest Northern journalists helped cover it up but it is well documented in books such as Jim Downs' Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.10

Downs writes that in Helene, Arkansas the "bodies of emancipated slaves were placed in the same carts with carcasses of mules and horses to be buried in the same pit."11

This terrible disrespect for the dead bodies of former slaves who had come to them for protection shows that "Northerners, allegedly fighting for the freedom and dignity of those subjected to human bondage, were transporting black people like animals."12

That shows what Yankees really thought of the newly freed slaves. That goes along with the many rapes of black women by Union soldiers recorded throughout the Official Records.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1st Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in World War II, later president of the United States for eight years, had a picture of Gen. Robert E. Lee on his wall in the White House his entire time there.

Like President John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower had great respect for Gen. Lee and his cause, and he appreciated Lee's efforts to bind up the nation's wounds after our bloodiest war.

On August 1, 1960, a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, wrote an angry letter to President Eisenhower excoriating him for having that picture of Lee in his White House office.

Scott wrote: "I do not understand  how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me. / The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes."13

President Eisenhower wrote back on the 9th:

Dear Dr. Scott:

Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.

General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.

From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation's wounds once the bitter struggle was over, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

Sincerely,

Dwight D. Eisenhower14

Gen. Keane, I know you are a damn good man. President Eisenhower outranks you. Pay attention to your superior and learn from him.

 

Some of the last part of this article comes from a previously published article by me, "We are in a political fight and not a history debate," published in Confederate Veteran magazine May/June, 2018, and also published on this blog. All the original sources are footnoted.

 

1 Henry L. Benning, "Henry L. Benning's Secessionist Speech, Monday Evening, November 19," delivered in Milledgeville, Georgia, November 19, 1860, in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, Secession Debated, Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132. Gen. Benning became one of Gen. Robert E. Lee's most able brigadier generals in the Army of Northern Virginia.

2 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 179.

3 Ibid.

4 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.

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

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii.

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

10 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

11 Maria R. Mann to Elisa, February 10, 1863, Maria Mann to Miss Peabody, April 19, 1863, Maria Mann Papers, LOC, quoted in Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861-1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 121, in Downs, Sick from Freedom,

12 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 27.

13 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

14 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

Gen. Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville by H. A. Ogden, painting in the LOC.
Gen. Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville by H. A. Ogden, painting in the LOC.

Defund Academia, Not the Police

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Defund Academia,
Not the Police

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Since 1960, the racist identity politics of the left has politicized and degraded American history in academia and the news media. One of the problems with academia is that, in a metaphorical sense, it is inbred.

It is so liberal, the 33 wealthiest colleges in the last election gave Hillary Clinton $1,560,000. They gave Donald Trump $3,000.1

Over 90% of professors in the humanities and social sciences, which include history, are liberals, and it has been this way for decades.2

Those with differing opinions, if they even get hired, do not dare speak up. If they do, they will not get tenure and will often lose their jobs. There is no real debate on many topics, no challenge to liberal dogma.

The hypocrites in academia scream about diversity but have none themselves, yet diversity of thought is the most important kind of diversity.

When the views of half of the country are not represented, and, indeed, are deplored by most in academia (remember Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables"), then what comes out of academia and their accomplices in the news media -- especially with regard to history -- is the liberal party line: political propaganda preached by liberals without fear of criticism or examination.

There is also rampant discrimination in hiring in academia.

People are discriminated against because of their political views. How could it be any other way when academia is overwhelmingly liberal -- in some fields 30 to 1 -- as stated by Horowitz and Laksin in Footnote 2.

It has been this way for the past 50 years. Liberals discriminate against non-liberals in hiring. Liberals hire only other liberals.

It is obvious that academia is a hostile work environment for everybody but liberals, and increasingly hard left liberals, because of diversity departments that demean white people, speech codes that treat conservative views as hate, anti-Christian rhetoric, etcetera, ad nauseam.

This also makes much of academia extremely hypocritical -- again -- because in addition to screaming about diversity, which is non-existent in academia, they also scream about discrimination, yet they discriminate openly against the views of over half the country.

Conservatives and other non-liberals need not apply to academia, though much of academia is funded by taxpayer money from conservatives and non-liberals.

I know from personal experience that some liberals in academia are fine people who, despite their liberal bias, try to be fair. But many others are rigidly doctrinaire and definitely not fair, and they have the power structure and majority to impose their will with impunity.

These doctrinaire liberals preach their views constantly by weaving them into their classes -- comments, smirks, rolls of the eyes here and there -- which intimidate young students and coerce them into writing things they don't believe in order to pass.

As every honest scholar knows, to understand the past, one must view the past the way the people who lived in the past viewed it. The world of the past was not today's middle class America but that is the standard ignorant liberals want you to judge it by.

David Harlan in his book, The Degradation of American History, says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist.

They said it "focused our attention on great white men at the expense of women and minorities, that it ignored the racial and ethnic diversity of national life, that it obscured the reality of class conflict."

They wanted to expose the complicity of white men "in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history." They "feel no need to say what is good in American history."3

It's worse for Southern history.

Eugene D. Genovese,4 one of America's greatest historians before his death in 2012, wrote this is 1994:

Rarely, these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. . . . To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.5

Dr. Genovese goes on to say that this cultural and political atrocity is being forced on us by "the media and an academic elite."6

In the 2016 presidential campaign, 96% of money donated by journalists went to liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Most of the news media are so biased7 it makes them untrustworthy and even more dishonest than academia.

In campaign coverage, the fraudulent media colluded with Clinton and gave her debate questions in advance, allowed her campaign to edit stories, asked her campaign for advice and quotations they could use to attack Donald Trump, and made no effort to hide their contempt for objectivity.

Too bad it backfired and greatly damaged the credibility of the media -- perhaps beyond repair -- just as political correctness has made academia shallow, ignorant, authoritarian, hypocritical and nothing deserving of respect.

This ain't your grandfather's academia. It's more like a leftist indoctrination center, a reeducation camp in Russia or China, than a place of learning and light where open debate and the First Amendment are sacrosanct.

Today's academia, at least with respect to history, is a silly caricature to laugh at. It is not the least bit interested in historical truth.

It is interested in America-hate and liberal activism. It hires activists and not historians, but if you disagree with that, you are a racist.

Our current mayhem started after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25, 2020 by some bad cops who are not typical of the vast majority of good, decent, hard-working police officers nationwide. There have been calls by violent leftists to defund the police.

Can you imagine what that would lead to?

Instead of defunding the police, let me suggest defunding academia, then taxing fake-news. The one would promote historical truth, and the other would erase the federal budget deficit in no time.

 

1 The 33 wealthiest colleges in the United States also gave Bernie Sanders $648,382, so, adding Hillary Clinton's $1,560,000 to Bernie's $648,382 gives a wopping $2,208,382 that academia gave to two extremely liberal Democrat candidates (99.9%) while giving $3,000 to Donald J. Trump (.136%), who won the presidency. See "Donald Trump Campaign Lacking In Support From Academic Donors" by Carter Coudriet, August 16, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/

sites/cartercoudriet/2016/06/16/donald-trump-campaign-lacking-in-support-from-academic-donors, accessed January 25, 2017.

2 See Horowitz, David and Jacob Laksin, One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America's Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine Our Democracy (New York: Crown Forum, 2009). From the Introduction: "A 2007 study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, two liberal academics, reported a ratio of liberal to conservative professors in social science and humanities of 9-1. In fields such as Anthropology and Sociology, these figures approach 30-1." http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/
onepartydhjl.html, accessed January 26, 2017.

3 David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv.

4 Genovese was a brilliant historian as the following paragraph illustrates. It is the opening paragraph of an essay in The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXX, No. 2, May, 2014 entitled "Eugene Genovese's Old South: A Review Essay" by J. William Harris: "The death of Eugene D. Genovese in September 2012 brought to a close a remarkable career. In the decades following his first published essay on Southern history, Genovese produced an outstanding body of scholarship, based on a rare combination of deep research in primary sources; a mastery of the historical literature, not only in Southern history but also in many complementary fields; a sophisticated command of methodological issues; and often sparkling prose. And Genovese's reputation reached far beyond specialists in Southern history, and even beyond the academy. In 2005 a reviewer in one magazine for a general readership called Genovese the 'Country's greatest living historian' and his Roll, Jordan, Roll 'the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.'"

5 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.

6 Ibid.

7 In numbers of journalists giving, 50 gave to Republican Donald J. Trump, while 430 gave to Clinton. That means 10% of journalists donated to Republican Trump, and 90% to Democrat Clinton. See David Levinthal and Michael Beckel article, October 27, 2016, "Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash", https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/10/17/20330/journalists-shower-hillary-clinton-campaign-cash, accessed January 25, 2017.

Gen. Stephen D. Lee’s 1906 Address that Contains the SCV Charge

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A Series on the Daring Exploits of Our Confederate Ancestors in the War Between the States.
UCV Medal, Sixteenth Reunion, April 25-27, 1906, New Orleans.
Gen. Stephen D. Lee's 1906 Address
to the UCV that Contains the SCV Charge
Gen. Stephen Dill Lee, Commander-in-Chief, United Confederate Veterans.
Gen. Stephen Dill Lee, Commander-in-Chief, United Confederate Veterans, 1904-1908.

Below is the full text, verbatim, of Gen. Stephen D. Lee's speech as commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans at their Sixteenth National Reunion, April 25-27, 1906 in New Orleans. The speech was delivered that first day, Wednesday, April 25th. This was 41 years after the War Between the States, eight years after the Spanish-American War, and eight years before World War I. Teddy Roosevelt was president. As stated on the Stephen D. Lee Institute website: "Stephen Dill Lee was an exceptional soldier and important leader in the Confederate Army and, after the war, a leading American educator, historian, and commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans...". He was one of the three Confederates who rowed over to Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 in a futile effort to prevent the war. He was a West Point graduate and became the Confederacy's youngest lieutenant general. In this speech, he begins passing the baton from the UCV to the SCV. He died in 1908, two years later.

From "Gen. S. D. Lee's Address at New Orleans," Confederate Veteran magazine, Vol. XIV, No. 6, June, 1906.

Gen. Stephen D. Lee on the left with other Confederate veterans.
Gen. Stephen D. Lee on left. Not sure when or where this photo was taken.

[When the greetings and welcomes of the hospitable New Orleans authorities had been expressed at the opening of the last great U. C. V. Reunion in New Orleans, Gen. Stephen D. Lee, upon taking the chair as presiding officer, said:]

The United Confederate Veterans are again met in the city of their origin. We are once more the guests of those patriotic and energetic men, into whose labors we have entered and to whom the thanks of all surviving Confederates are due.

Again and again we have returned to taste of the inexhaustible bounty of your hospitality, to be refreshed by the patriotism and enthusiasm of this generous and beautiful city.

The flags of France and of Spain, of the Union and of the Confederacy, have floated over the soil upon which we stand; but always over brave men and lovely women, loyal to the best they knew, faithful alike to the living and to the dead; a civilization transplanted like a rare flower of France, blossoming in the New World and bearing exquisite fruit.

The Confederate cannot forget the city of the gallant and accomplished Beauregard, the brave and unfortunate Hood, the city where Jefferson Davis loved to walk, and which honored him in his death with an outpouring of loyalty and grief which did honor to the Southern heart.

Here is Metairie, where Albert Sidney Johnston speaks in imperishable bronze, and the monument to the Army of Northern Virginia rises, tall and white, like the soul of its great chieftain.

We love you, Louisiana, where the stern blood of the Anglo-Saxon has been touched with the grace and the genius of France.

Here amid the very chivalry of patriotism there is welcome for all who prize noble and generous deeds, and most of all a welcome for him who loved his country best and bore her cross of pain--the Confederate soldier.

We who grieved for this unhappy city in the hour of its capture and humiliation rejoice in its pride today--standing second only to New York among American ports of export, your mighty river filled with the ships of all nations, your historic streets alive with the commerce of the world.

We behold with satisfaction great railroad systems struggling to enter your gates and the merchants of a thousand cities listening for the murmurs of your markets.

We wait the coming of the day when the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific shall mingle together, and on both alike shall float the commerce of this imperial city, when the sons of those who struggled in vain for Southern supremacy shall here behold a peaceful victory more magnificent than those of their great armies, a commercial supremacy more splendid than their noblest visions, and here beside the Father of Waters shall be realized the capital of their dreams.

UCV 16th Reunion parade, Canal Street, New Orleans, April 27, 1906.

We have lost dear friends and comrades since we met together, none more beloved and more honored than the soldier who was recently laid to rest at Arlington.

Joe Wheeler won his spurs by true and honorable service. He was a superb cavalry leader, and earned on many a hard-fought field the right to lead where brave men follow.

When the heart of our common country yearned to express to her Confederate sons that their welcome home was complete, to Wheeler it was given to show on our behalf that every star on the flag was now dear to us, and that we were ready to follow it to the very "Isles of the Sea."

It was Southern hands that set star after star in that blue field of glory; and if any more stars are ever planted there, it will be strange if Southerners are not found assisting at the service.

Comrades, there is one thing committed to our care as a peculiar trust--the memory of the Confederate soldier.

So far as lies in our power, we have striven that history many not lack the evidence of his purity of motive, his fortitude, his heroism.

I, for one, do not fear that justice, however long delayed, will not ultimately be done to one of the grandest bodies of men who ever battled for independence or, triumphing over defeat, bound up the bleeding wounds of their country.

Gen. Stephen D. Lee during the War Between the States.
Gen. Stephen D. Lee during the War Between the States.

There are three things peculiarly left for our concern.

One of these is the erection of public monuments to our Confederate dead; not only to our leaders, but, above all, to those private soldiers who made our leaders immortal.

We must not overtask posterity by expecting those who come after us to build monuments to heroes whom their own generations were unwilling to commemorate.

The South has reached a position of material prosperity which justified both State and private beneficence to honor the faithful dead.

In all human lot, there has nothing better been found for man than to die for his country. If there be any virtue, if there be any praise, this fate is to be preferred above all others.

We feel it is well with those who have thus fulfilled the highest of all trusts, the duty of a citizen to his native land. Whatever may have been their private faults, their public service on the field of battle has rightly given them a place with the immortals.

Theirs was the martyr's devotion without the martyr's hope.

Their generation and their country imposed upon them this high service. They fulfilled it without flinching. They felt that the issue of the battle was with God; the issue of their duty was with themselves.... [sic]

I urge monuments to the Confederate soldier, first for the sake of the dead, but most for the sake of the living, that in this busy industrial age these stones to the Confederate soldier may stand like great interrogation marks to the soul of each beholder.

Let us pass the remainder of our days in such ways that nothing we shall do will bring shame and regret that we also were Confederate soldiers.

As we shared with them the glory of their sufferings, the fame of their victories, the tragedy of their overthrow, and that sympathy of their countrymen which covered the defeated with a mantle of imperishable love, let us also share as best we may their simplicity of heart, their scorn of all ignoble actions, their dignity of soul, that our descendants may say of us with swelling hearts: "He also followed Johnston; he also fought with Lee."

To this day there stands carved upon the graves of our English ancestors the symbol of the Crusaders. Their names are forgotten, but the cross remains. So let it be with the Confederate soldier!... [sic]

And is there any message we would give to the States we loved and on whose behalf we drew our swords more than a generation ago?

As we have sorrowed over your devotion, we now rejoice in your prosperity.

We chose for you the fortune of war rather than a shameful peace. We battled for your principles rather than yield them, not to conviction but to force. With breaking hearts we bowed beneath the stroke of fate.

We chose the only course worthy of Americans. Better defeat than dishonor; better the long, bitter story of reconstruction than tame surrender of the convictions we received from our fathers, the principles which we cherished as the basis of our liberties.

We leave our motives to the judgment of posterity. In the choice we made we followed the dictates of conscience and the voice of honor.

We sacrificed all that men hold dear for the land of our birth; and, while we have no fear that history will record our deeds with shame, we do not regard even the verdict of posterity as the equivalent of a clear conscience; nor ought we to have been false to our convictions even to win the eternal praises of mankind.

If our children shall praise us, it is well; if our own hearts tell us we have fulfilled our duty, it is better.

Last of all, let us remember our less prosperous comrades. If we can perhaps sweeten the last years of those old men, bring back, maybe, the light of other days in their fading eyes, awake in their hearts the great memories, they will bless us by our receiving more than we are giving.

Many of the States whom they so nobly served are gathering them in soldiers' homes, institutions which combine the beauty of charity with the grace of gratitude. But there are many other old veterans who will never be brought within such hospitable walls and who are left to our personal charge for such sympathy and assistance as are honorable alike to them and to us.

Let each Camp continue its special care for this beneficent labor, and see to it that true comradeship shall cease only when all of us have passed beyond human power to relieve.

To you, Mothers of the Memorial Association, will be given the service of commemorating the soldier's virtues in the hearts of those who come after us by the story of the illustrious dead, of comforting the hearts of those who mourn our lost heroes with such ministrations as bespeak the sympathy of the patriot and the loving-kindness of those who are familiar with the same sorrow.

To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we will commit the vindication of the cause for which we fought. To your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier's good name, the guardianship of his history, the emulation of his virtues, the perpetuation of those principles which he loved and which you love also, and those ideals which made him glorious and which you also cherish.

Are you also ready to die for your country? Is your life worthy to be remember along with theirs? Do you choose for yourself this greatness of soul?

"Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
But in ourselves are triumph and defeat."

To you, Daughters of the Confederacy, will be given the loving service of remembering the Confederate dead and of ministering to the living who were dear to him and are in need of your help and tenderness.

Worthy daughters you shall be of the immortal women, your mothers, who gave to womanhood a new perfection of heroism and a more divine expression of sacrifice and devotion.

To you, brave people of the South; to you, true-hearted Americans everywhere; to you, world-conquering race from which we sprung--to all men everywhere who prize in man the manliest deeds, who love in man the love of country, who praise fidelity and courage, who honor self-sacrifice and noble devotion, will be given an incomparable inheritance, the memory of our prince of men, the Confederate soldier.

[At the conclusion of General Lee's address the bright and beautiful young daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Madison presented him an exquisite group of flowers.]

About Gen. Stephen D. Lee, by the National Park Service.
Vicksburg National Military Park, Gen. Stephen D. Lee, CSA. Lee was chairman of the park at one time.
Vicksburg National Military Park, statue of Gen. Stephen D. Lee, CSA. Lee was chairman of the park at one time.

(No words or sentences were changed in Gen. Lee's speech but some paragraphs were broken up to make it easier to read online.)

The Right of Secession, Part Two of Two

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The Right of Secession
Part Two of Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

The Southern States unquestionably had the right to secede from the Union. That Southerners lost a catastrophic war, which, if it occurred today, would count 8.7 million dead and 10 million wounded, only glorifies and enshrines in the annals of human history, the courage of Southerners and their commitment to democracy, self-government, the Founding Fathers, and especially the Declaration of Independence with its assertion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Other direct evidence of the right of secession abounds.

Albert Taylor Bledsoe wrote in 1866 what is thought to be the best book ever written on the right of secession: Is Davis a Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861?

Richard M. Weaver, who was during his lifetime a professor and author of several noted books on the South, called Is Davis a Traitor "the masterpiece of the Southern apologias."1 Weaver described it as a "brilliant specimen of the polemic" out of the entire "extensive body of Southern political writing."2

Clyde N. Wilson, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun, and author of many outstanding books, essays and articles, goes even further.

In the Introduction to a 1995 reprint of Is Davis a Traitor, Dr. Wilson lists the top seven books defending the South and the right of secession and says "Bledsoe did it first and best," his argument for the right of secession being "absolutely irrefutable to any honest mind."3

Bledsoe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky in 1809. He graduated from West Point in 1830 and had been there part of the time with Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Leonidas Polk and Albert Sydney Johnston.

He loved mathematics and theology, but practiced law for nine years in Springfield, Illinois as part of a bar that included Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.

Bledsoe faced Lincoln in court several times and "it was said that Bledsoe won six out of eleven cases tried against Lincoln." Also, Bledsoe had given Lincoln lessons, at one point, on using a broadsword because Lincoln had been challenged to a duel.4

After his legal career, Bledsoe taught astronomy and mathematics at the University of Mississippi, acquiring a "legendary" genius for mathematics. In 1854, he began teaching mathematics at the University of Virginia.

During the war, Bledsoe served briefly as the colonel of a regiment of infantry from Virginia, then later in the Confederate War Department, and finally he was sent to Europe by President Davis on what is thought to have been a secret diplomatic mission to influence public opinion in Britain.

After the war, until his death in 1877, Bledsoe published The Southern Review in which he continued to argue the justice and truth of the Southern cause.5

Bledsoe began working on Is Davis a Traitor while in England and published it just after the war "as a part of the campaign of Davis's defense."

The Confederate President was in prison at Fort Monroe, a U.S. Army installation in Hampton, Virginia where he spent a miserable two years waiting to be tried for treason.

He was in irons with a bright light shining in his cell twenty-four hours a day with guards marching back and forth. The bright light was an additional measure of vindictiveness since it was known that Davis had never been able to sleep except in total darkness.

Davis wanted to be tried for treason because he was confident he could prove the right of secession. In talking about the effectiveness of Is Davis a Traitor, Richard Weaver writes that

Bledsoe witnessed some practical result of his labor when Robert Oulds and Charles O'Conor, attorneys for Jefferson Davis, made use of the book in preparing their defense; but the Federal government, apparently feeling the weakness of its legal position, allowed the case to be dismissed.6

Here was the North's big chance to prove the South wrong once and for all in a solemn, dignified court of law in the eyes of the world and for all of posterity, but they refused to take it. Why?

They certainly had not suddenly had a change of heart toward the South. It was Reconstruction, the body of the assassinated Lincoln was barely cold in the ground. South-hating radical Republicans held great sway in Congress. Northern troops were in charge of most Southern states while large numbers of former Confederates were disenfranchised.

This was exactly the time the Federal Government would have wanted to convict the Southern president if it had a case. It was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of Southerners on the battle field so there can be no doubt it would have relished humiliating Jefferson Davis in a courtroom.

But the Federal Government knew it would lose so it dropped its case.

The Federal Government, like that embodiment of the North, Horace Greeley, knew there was an absolute right of secession. The Declaration of Independence is very clear.

There were no treason trials against any former Confederates because any one trial would prove the right of secession, and imminently practical Northerners were not about to lose in a court of law what they had won on the battlefield.

Bledsoe's "irrefutable" argument in Is Davis a Traitor begins with the Constitution as a compact or legal agreement among the members to the compact.

The reason Bledsoe starts here is because any member that has acceded to (agreed to) the terms of a compact, can secede from that compact if the terms are broken by one of the other members. This is exactly what Morse said as well.

Bledsoe produces the writings and statements of the strongest opponents of the Constitution as compact -- Daniel Webster and others -- who have admitted that if the Constitution is a compact, then states can secede from it.7

Webster was the great spokesman for the North with the credibility and reputation to go along with it. Bledsoe writes:

Thus, the great controversy is narrowed down to the single question -- Is the Constitution a compact between the States? If so, then the right of secession is conceded, even by its most powerful and determined opponents; by the great jurist, as well as by 'the great expounder' [Webster] of the North.8

If the Constitution was a compact, the North had clearly broken specific terms of the compact.

As Morse stated earlier, Northern states had statutes on their books nullifying constitutional and congressional laws with regard to fugitive slaves.

Many in the North believed, as William H. Seward stated, that they were operating according to a "higher law" than the Constitution therefore the Constitution meant nothing and did not have to be obeyed.

The more radical had long called the Constitution a "covenant with death and agreement with hell."9

How could the North be trusted if they were going to violate the Constitution at will?

The reason for breaking the law does not justify breaking the law. If one doesn't like a law, one has to change the law, not break it. Breaking laws according to a "higher law" is what ISIS and the Taliban do.

Men and women who believe in the rule of law do not break the law. They change the law when it needs changing.10

If somebody breaks the law, they are no longer trustworthy and other parties are not obligated to remain in any arrangement with them.

The North's having clearly broken the compact guaranteed that secession was legal if the Constitution was a compact that was "acceded to" by the original makers.

Did the original states "accede" to a compact?

Webster railed against the Constitution as a compact. He said that saying "the States acceded to the Constitution" was "unconstitutional language."11 Discrediting the single word, "accede," was very important to Webster.

So Bledsoe researched in great detail the words of the Founders and finds that in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, "Mr. James Wilson . . . preferred 'a partial union' of the States, 'with a door open for the accession of the rest.'"12

However, "Mr. Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, was opposed to 'a partial confederacy, leaving other States to accede or not to accede, as had been intimated.'"13

Father of the Constitution, James Madison, "used the expression 'to accede' in the Convention of 1787, in order to denote the act of adopting 'the new form of government by the States.'"14

Virginia Governor Randolph, also at the Convention of 1787, said "That the accession of eight States reduced our deliberations to the single question of Union or no Union."15

Patrick Henry had said that if the Constitution "be amended, every State will accede to it."16

Mr. Grayson asks if Virginia will gain anything from her prominent position "by acceding to that paper."17

Benjamin Franklin, whom Bledsoe says was next in importance at the Constitutional Convention to Washington, later said "Our new Constitution is now established with eleven States, and the accession of a twelfth is soon expected."18

George Washington, as he watched states join the Constitution, said "If these, with the States eastward and northward of us, should accede to the Federal government . . .".19

Chief Justice John Marshall used the word "accede" in reference to joining the Constitution, and even Mr. Justice Story, a staunch opponent of the belief in Constitution as compact, said "The Constitution has been ratified by all the States; . . . Rhode Island did not accede to it, until more than a year after it had been in operation;".20

Webster had attacked the word "accede" as something invented by proponents of the Constitution as compact.

Bledsoe points out that Webster's attack on "accede" by calling it a "new word" was totally incorrect because "accede" had been exactly "the word of the fathers of the Constitution" led by Washington. They had all used the word "accede" in reference to states joining the Constitution, and, of course, the converse of "accede" is "secede."21

Over and over Bledsoe demolishes each and every argument that maintains secession was not legal or a right.

He produces the words of the Founding Fathers specifically calling the Constitution a compact starting with the Father of the Constitution, James Madison. In the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, Madison states:

That this assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the Federal Government as resulting from the compact, to which the States are parties.22

Bledsoe further mentions a letter from Madison to a Mr. Everett in 1830 in which Madison says that the Constitution is "'a compact among the States in their highest sovereign capacity.'"23

Bledsoe then convicts Webster using Webster's own words.

Webster had admitted that the Constitution was a compact in a debate three years earlier on "Foote's resolutions." Bledsoe says "that Mr. Webster himself, had, like everyone else, spoken of the Constitution as a compact, as a bargain which was obligatory on the parties to it." Webster had said:

[I]t is the original bargain, . . . the compact -- let it stand; let the advantage of it be fully enjoyed. The Union itself is too full of benefits to be hazarded in propositions for changing its original basis. I go for the Constitution as it is, and for the Union as it is.24

Perhaps the strongest argument against the right of secession is based on the words "We the people" in the Constitution's Preamble.

Those who argue that the Constitution is not a compact but is a national document, believe that "We the People" means all of the American people in one body and not in their sovereign states.

This, says Bledsoe, "is the great stronghold, if it has one, of the Northern theory of the Constitution. The argument from these words appears in every speech, book, pamphlet, and discussion by every advocate of the North. It was wielded by Mr. Webster in his great debate with Mr. Calhoun, in 1833, . . .".25

If the Constitution was written as a document for all of the American people in one body, then individual states had no right to withdraw from it.

The Committee on Style of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was headed by Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania. Here's what Gouverneur Morris said is meant by "We the people," which he authored:

The Constitution . . . was a compact not between individuals, but between political societies [states], the people, not of America, but of the United States, each [state] enjoying sovereign power and of course equal rights.26

Morris himself believed in the right of secession and supported New England's move to secede during the War of 1812, which culminated in the Hartford Convention.27

Bledsoe quotes The Madison Papers and refers to some 900 pages of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which are recorded the debate over method of ratification.

He points out that nowhere in that vast record is there a discussion of the "people" as meaning the entire American people outside of their states.

The big debate was over whether the legislatures of each state would ratify the Constitution, or the "people" of each state in special convention.

It was decided that since a later legislature might rescind the ratification of an earlier legislature, it would be a more sound foundation to have the people of each state ratify the Constitution in special conventions called for the single purpose of ratification.28

That is exactly why the Southern States used conventions to secede.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 had set the precedent when it decided that states should use the convention method to ratify the Constitution, and, as Mr. H. Newcomb Morse said in the Stetson Law Review, "not one [Southern] state was remiss in discharging this legal obligation" to use a convention of the people when it seceded from the Union.

The reason there is no listing in the Preamble of specific states ratifying the Constitution as had been done in the body of the Articles of Confederation is because nobody knew how many states, or which ones, would ratify the Constitution.

If all the states had been listed and one refused to ratify, then the document would be invalid. The number "nine" was decided on, as the number of states necessary to put the Constitution into effect, but, in debating the issue, it was brought up that the Constitution could only apply to those states ratifying it, therefore no references could be made to "all" of the American people.

Bledsoe writes that Rufus King suggested adding "between the said states, so as to confine the operation of the government to the States ratifying the same."29 The words were cleaned up and found their way into the Constitution in Article VII which starts out:

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

Bledsoe further clarifies:

[W]hen it was determined that the Constitution should be ratified by 'the Conventions of the States,' and not by the legislatures, this was exactly equivalent, in the uniform language of the Convention of 1787, to saying that it shall be ratified by 'the people of the States.' Hence, the most ardent friend of State rights, or State sovereignty, saw no reason why he should object to the words, 'We, the people of the United States,' because he knew they were only intended to express the mode of ratification by the States . . . in their sovereign capacity, as so many political societies or peoples, as distinguished from their legislatures.30

Bledsoe goes on by pointing out that the Federal Government had no legal right whatsoever to coerce a state into following its laws, therefore it had no right to force a seceding state back into the Union.

President Buchanan had stated in his lame duck period between Lincoln's election of November 6, 1860, and March 4, 1861, when Lincoln would be inaugurated, while state after state was seceding, that as president of the United States, he had no power to coerce a state, even though he denied that secession was legal.

Bledsoe notes the contradiction in Buchanan's position and writes "if we say, that coercion is a constitutional wrong, or usurpation, is not this saying that the Constitution permits secession, or, in other words, that it is a Constitutional right?"

He says "Coercion is unconstitutional . . . wrong . . . strikes down and demolishes the great fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence: The sacred right of self-government itself."

About secession, he says "Secession, on the other hand, asserts the right of self-government for every free, sovereign, and independent State in existence."31

Bledsoe discussed the views of credible foreign observers and writes that Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, said:

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States choose to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.32

To Tocqueville, Bledsoe adds "Mackay, and Spence, and Brougham, and Cantu, and Heeren," then he goes on "as well as other philosophers, jurists and historians among the most enlightened portions of Europe, [who] so readily adopt the Southern view of the Constitution, and pronounce the American Union as a confederation of States."33

Bledsoe continues with more persuasive argument, the words of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, who assert, beyond doubt, that the Constitution is a compact and the states, sovereign.

He discusses William Rawl of Philadelphia and his book, A View of the Constitution of the United States, which stresses the right of secession and was used as a textbook at West Point for a while during the antebellum era.

He also mentions the States' Rights Hartford Convention of New England states, which strongly supported the right of secession, though it went way beyond its legal right to secede and actually aided the British in the War of 1812 thus becoming the most treasonous assembly in American history.34

As stated earlier, Horace Greeley, as the embodiment of the North, had thoroughly believed in the right of secession.

He had written in his New-York Daily Tribune on December 17, 1860, just as South Carolina's secession convention was starting, a brilliant editorial entitled "The Right of Secession." Here again, is most of it:

We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and 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 a new government," &c., &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And, if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? . . . -- we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-government sacred, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others . . . if ever 'seven or eight States' send agents to Washington to say 'We want to get out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to Human Liberty to say, Let Them Go! And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous.35

Horace Greeley and the North had it right until they realized their "devotion to Human Liberty" and belief in "those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements" meant nothing to them when compared to their money and power.

The "shedding of seas of human blood" was OK with them, and that is exactly what they got.

The Southern States unquestionably had the right to secede from the Union, as Horace Greeley just reiterated.

That Southerners lost a catastrophic war, which, if it occurred today, would count 8.7 million dead and 10 million wounded, only glorifies and enshrines in the annals of human history, the courage of Southerners and their commitment to democracy, self-government, the Founding Fathers, and especially the Declaration of Independence with its assertion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

 

This article comes from The Right of Secession, Part II of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. by Gene Kizer, Jr. (Charleston, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) available on this website.

End of Part Two of Two

Click Here to go to Part One

 

1 By "apologia," Weaver means a formal explanation and defense of a position, not an apology.

2 George M. Curtis, III, and James J. Thompson, Jr., eds., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1987), 152. Richard M. Weaver graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1932, earned an M.A. degree at Vanderbilt University, and a doctorate in English from Louisiana State University in 1943. He taught at the University of Chicago until his death in 1963. He wrote scores of essays and published several books. He is best known for his books Ideas Have Consequences, and The Ethics of Rhetoric.

3 Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866; reprint, North Charleston: Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing, 1995), Introduction to the 1995 reprint by Clyde N. Wilson, i-ii. The other six works that best defend the South and right of secession according to Dr. Wilson are the two-volume work A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States by Alexander H. Stephens; The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis; A Defence of Virginia and Through Her of the South by Robert L. Dabney; The Creed of the Old South by Basil L. Gildersleeve; The Southern States of the American Union Considered in their Relations to the Constitution of the United States and the Resulting Union by Jabez L. M. Curry; and The Lost Cause by Edward A. Pollard.

4 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, Introduction to the 1995 reprint by Clyde N. Wilson, i-viii.

5 Ibid.

6 Curtis and Thompson, eds., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1987), 153-154.

7 Taking on Webster also takes on most of the others who did not believe the Constitution was a compact because most of them quoted Webster and used his argument.

8 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 6.

9 Statement by the famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator, who burned a copy of the Constitution and Fugitive Slave Act on the 4th of July, 1854, to cheers and hisses. Robert Toombs might have disagreed with Garrison but he respected Garrison. Toombs said Garrison believed what he said unlike the "political abolitionists" of the North who were in anti-slavery to vote themselves a farm or a tariff. Quotations from Garrison, Seward and others come from Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 151-153.

10 And certainly the Fugitive Slave Law and similar laws were unfair with huge areas of unfair potential abuse, and they needed changing.

11 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 16, 12.

12 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 12-17.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 17.

22 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 25.

23 Ibid.

24 Daniel Webster, on Foote's resolutions in Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 25.

25 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 61.

26 Gouverneur Morris, Life and Writings, Vol. iii, p. 193, as quoted in Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 64-65. Morris would have been even more clear if he had not capitalized "United." It is not capitalized in the Declaration of Independence which reads "The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America." Clearly that is what Morris is saying, that the individual sovereign states are "united" with equal rights and sovereign power.

27 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 64-65.

28 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 66-73.

29 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 72.

30 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 73.

31 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 154.

32 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, as quoted in Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 155. The reference to Democracy in America footnoted by Bledsoe is Vol. i, Chap. xviii., p 413.

33 Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor;, 157.

34 The New England states had threatened to secede many times such as with the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, anything that added territory to the South that would dilute New England's political power. During the War of 1812, New England was deeply aggrieved over trade issues affecting commerce and shipping. They called the Hartford Convention and made plans to secede. The Hartford Convention (December 15, 1814 to January 5, 1815, in Hartford, Connecticut) quickly became the most dishonorable affair in American history. New England governors had deliberately sabotaged the American war effort by withholding troops and refusing to support the United States against Great Britain. Massachusetts' Gov. Caleb Strong refused to retake part of Maine captured by the British, then later sent a secret Massachusetts delegation to make a separate peace with the British. President James Madison was truly concerned that all of New England would make a separate peace with Great Britain. Shortly after the Hartford Convention, Massachusetts sent three commissioners to Washington, D.C. who arrived in February, 1815 to air their grievances but Andy Jackson and the Southern boys in New Orleans had already whipped the British and the war was over. The commissioners quickly returned to Massachusetts in disgrace. The Hartford Convention, thereafter became synonymous with treason since they had aided and abetted an enemy during war. The Federalist Party, which had supported the Hartford Convention, was all but destroyed, though it continued strong in Massachusetts for some years. See Hartford Convention, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention, accessed August 26, 2014.

35 "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 199-201.

The Right of Secession, Part One of Two

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The Right of Secession
Part One of Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

. . . conceivably, it was the Northern States that acted illegally in precipitating the War Between the States. The Southern States, in all likelihood, were exercising a perfectly legitimate right in seceding from the Union.1

H. Newcomb Morse
Stetson University College of Law
Stetson Law Review, 1986

 

Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana was a brilliant legal mind who was later attorney general, secretary of war and secretary of state of the Confederacy.

In his farewell speech to the United States Senate on February 5, 1861 he went into great detail about the right of secession.

He asserted that the denial of that right is a "pretension so monstrous" that it "perverts a restricted agency [the Federal Government], constituted by sovereign states for common purposes, into the unlimited despotism of the majority, and denies all legitimate escape from such despotism . . . and degrades sovereign states into provincial dependencies."

He said that "for two-thirds of a century this right [of secession] has been known by many of the states to be, at all times, within their power."2

No American who believes in the Declaration of Independence can ever doubt the right of secession.

Our country was born of secession from the British Empire. Secession is defined by Merriam-Webster as "the act of separating from a nation or state and becoming independent."3 The Declaration of Independence starts with:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, . . .

The Southern States unquestionably had the right to secede from the Union. There is a preponderance of direct evidence supporting the right of secession.

Historian Kenneth M. Stampp in his book The Imperiled Union points out that "the case for state sovereignty and the constitutional right of secession had flourished for forty years before a comparable case for a perpetual Union had been devised," and even then its logic was "far from perfect because the Constitution and the debates over ratification were fraught with ambiguity."4

Historians such as Professor Stampp are like lawyers who have clients they know are guilty but they still have to defend them.5

If, as Professor Stampp (along with Judah Benjamin, Horace Greeley, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Massachusetts, and most leaders North and South including Abraham Lincoln in 18476) said -- "the case for state sovereignty and the constitutional right of secession had flourished for forty years" - then that means it was born from the country's founding and created by its Founding Fathers and it existed. Period. It is indisputable. How could it not be?

The Founding Fathers did not say that states had the right to secede for 40 years then they lose that right.

The Founding Fathers did not put a time limit or expiration date on it despite the economic/political needs of the North to promote a perpetual union to justify its war on the South.

Southerners had the right to secede and there is nothing that could take it away from them.

It would be so much more truthful if some historians would call an obvious truth a truth, but they have that guilty client to defend so they cloud the issue and give their client the benefit of the doubt, lest they be accused of being unpatriotic or, God forbid, a racist.

It makes no sense for a group of colonies, designated as individual sovereign states by King George III at war's end, who had just fought a bloody war to escape from a political union with the British Empire, to, so casually, lock themselves into another political union that they could not escape from. They wouldn't and didn't.

The right of secession was assumed but three states specifically reserved it before acceding to the Constitution. It was a condition they demanded, and that demand had to be met before they would ratify the Constitution and join the Union.

Those states are Virginia, New York and Rhode Island.

They specifically put in writing that they had the right to secede from the Union if it should ever become detrimental to their best interests, and they get to decide when that has happened.

All the other states approved of this right of secession of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island's, therefore, since all the states are equal, they had it too.

That is the kind of guarantee of freedom and self-government the Founding Father's bequeathed to us and it is in direct conflict with Lincoln and the North's idea.

Lincoln and the North are often represented in the secession debate in the South by the concept of the "tyranny of the majority" which Judah Benjamin mentioned at the beginning of this essay.

The tyranny of the majority is why the Founding Fathers created a republic and not a pure democracy where 50% plus one vote can hang the other 49%.

The ideas developed by Lincoln and the North were a result of their economic situation. They wanted centralization so they could use their majority to rule the entire country for their own wealth, aggrandizement and commercial gain.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the urge for centralization in the 19th century was a powerful urge worldwide.

That's why the idea that the good North went to war to free the slaves rather than to increase its money and power is a fraud of biblical proportions and easily disproven.

H. Newcomb Morse writes persuasively about the right of secession in the Stetson Law Review, a publication of the Stetson University College of Law.

In an excellent article entitled "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Morse writes that the War Between the States did not prove that secession was illegal because

many incidents both preceding and following the War support the proposition that the Southern States did have the right to secede from the Union. Instances of nullification prior to the War Between the States, contingencies under which certain states acceded to the Union, and the fact that the Southern States were made to surrender the right to secession all affirm the existence of a right to secede . . .7

He adds that the Constitution's "failure to forbid secession" and amendments dealing with secession that were proposed in Congress as Southern states were seceding strengthened his argument that

the Southern States had an absolute right to secede from the Union prior to the War Between the States.8

Morse argues that because the Constitution did not forbid secession, then every state acceding to the Constitution had the implied right to secede from it.

He says that if men of the caliber of Madison, Hamilton, Wilson and the others meant to forbid secession, they definitely would have said so, and the omission of a prohibition on secession in the Constitution is strong proof that the right of secession existed and was assumed.9

He quotes James Madison in The Madison Papers who wrote "a breach of any one article by any one party, leaves all other parties at liberty to consider the whole convention as dissolved."10

Vermont and Massachusetts, he points out, nullified with statutes the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 and those two breaches of the compact alone were enough for the South to consider the compact dissolved.

There were many other violations of the Constitution discussed throughout the secession debate in the South including Northern Personal Liberty Laws that, in effect, nullified the Fugitive Slave Law of the Compromise of 1850 as well as Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, which dealt with fugitive slaves. At least ten Northern states had statutes that nullified the two aforementioned laws.

Other breaches of the Constitution included the harboring of fugitives from justice in the North, specifically two of John Brown's sons who were with Brown at Harpers Ferry and were wanted in Virginia for murder. They were being harbored in Ohio and Iowa.

Brown himself had been backed by Northerners and financed with Northern money.

Fanatical abolitionists with the acquiescence of states like Massachusetts tried desperately to destroy "domestic tranquility" in the South by sending incendiary abolitionist material in the mail encouraging slaves to revolt and murder.

There is also, as mentioned earlier, the Republican endorsement of Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, which called for the throats of Southerners to be cut.

The Republican Party was not a great movement trying to end the difficult slavery problem with good will. Their ranks included murderers and promoters of state-sponsored murder and terrorism.

They knew how to end slavery if that had been their desire. They had ended it in the North with gradual, compensated emancipation, which was Lincoln's strong belief and approach, and the method used by most countries on earth.

Ending slavery was not the Republican desire.

No Republican could be elected suggesting that Northerners spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then come North and be job competition.

Control of the government for their own wealth and commercial empowerment was the Republican desire.

Hate was simply a tool to help them get there.

To prove the right of a state to determine for itself when the Constitution had been violated, Morse quotes Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, which point out that if the government had the right to determine when the Constitution was violated, then the government would be the arbiter of its own power and not the Constitution. The Kentucky Resolutions also reaffirm state sovereignty and independence.11

Morse demonstrates that congressional discussions and proposed legislation during the secession of Southern states indicated that Congress believed the right of secession to exist.

One piece of legislation was introduced to deal with the disposition of federal property within a seceding state as well as a seceding state's assumption of its share of the national debt. Another scrambled to forbid secession unless approved by two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress, the president, as well as all the states.

Morse then points out that thirty-six years earlier, Chief Justice John Marshall, in Gibbons v. Ogden, wrote that "limitations of a power furnish a strong argument in favor of the existence of that power. . . ."12 Morse concludes:

What would have been the point of the foregoing proposed amendments to the Constitution of the United States prohibiting or limiting the right of secession if under the Constitution the unfettered right of secession did not already exist? Why would Congress have even considered proposed amendments to the Constitution forbidding or restricting the right of secession if any such right was already prohibited, limited or non-existent under the Constitution?13

Morse goes on to discuss the aforementioned conditional ratification of the Constitution by three of the original thirteen states, which specifically reserved for those states the right of secession. The states were Virginia, New York and Rhode Island.

Virginia referred to the wording of her conditional ratification of the U.S. Constitution in her Ordinance of Secession.14

Morse points out that since the other states, which had unconditionally ratified the Constitution, consented to Virginia's conditional ratification, then they "ostensibly assented to the principle that Virginia permissibly retained the right to secede."

He adds that with the additional acceptance of "New York's and Rhode Island's right to secede, the existing states of the Union must have tacitly accepted the doctrine of secession."

Further, Morse states that according to the Constitution, all the new states that joined the Union after the first thirteen also had the right of secession since new states entered on an equal footing with the exact same rights as the existing states.15

Southerners during the secession debate knew that Virginia, New York and Rhode Island had reserved the right of secession, thus all the states had the right of secession.

Senator Judah P. Benjamin, in his farewell speech to the United States Senate on February 5, 1861, said:

The rights of Louisiana as a sovereign state are those of Virginia; no more, no less. Let those who deny her right to resume delegated powers, successfully refute the claim of Virginia to the same right, in spite of her expressed reservation made and notified to her sister states when she consented to enter the Union.16

Morse skips forward to Reconstruction and points out that "the Northern occupational armies were removed from Arkansas, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Virginia only after those former Confederate States had incorporated in their constitutions a clause surrendering the right to secede." Morse then argues brilliantly that

by insisting that the former Confederate States surrender their right to secede, the United States government had implicitly admitted that those states originally had the right. How could they surrender a right, unless they had it in the first place?17

To summarize, Morse points out that before the war, under Virginia's conditional ratification of the Constitution, when the people decided that government power had been "perverted to their injury or oppression," they had the right to secede.

When Northern states passed Personal Liberty Bills and other statutes nullifying the fugitive slave laws of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 3), a "perversion" occurred which gave the Southern states the right to secede.

Reinforcing that perversion even further was the federal government's not forcing those Northern states to abide by the Constitution, therefore

the Northern States conceivably "perverted" national law to the "injury or oppression" of the people of the Southern States. Thus, the reassumption of the powers of government by the people of the Southern States was a natural consequence of the Northern States' conduct and the federal government's failure to prohibit that conduct.18

The only other issue, according to Morse, was whether the Southern states conducted their act of secession legally.

Morse points out that the people are the sovereign having supreme, absolute and perpetual power, therefore secession would have to be accomplished by the people of each state rather than their legislatures.

He says "convention delegates elected by the people of the state to decide one question constitute authority closer to the seat of the sovereign -- the people themselves," therefore a convention in each Southern state would be necessary as a "special agent of the people of the state."

Did the Southern States conduct themselves legally and therefore perfect their acts of secession and independence? Morse says:

When the Southern States seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, not one state was remiss in discharging this legal obligation. Every seceding state properly utilized the convention process, rather than a legislative means, to secede. Therefore, not only did the Southern States possess the right to secede from the Union, they exercised that right in the correct manner.19

Morse's conclusion is that

conceivably, it was the Northern States that acted illegally in precipitating the War Between the States. The Southern States, in all likelihood, were exercising a perfectly legitimate right in seceding from the Union.20

 

This article comes from The Right of Secession, Part II of Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. by Gene Kizer, Jr. (Charleston, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) available on this website.

End of Part One of Two

Go to Part Two of Two

 

1 H. Newcomb Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson University College of Law, Stetson Law Review, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1986), 436.

2 Judah P. Benjamin, "Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate" delivered February 5, 1861, in Edwin Anderson Alderman, and Joel Chandler Harris, eds., Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta: The Martin and Hoyt Company, 1907), Volume 1, 318-319.

3 Merriam-Webster online definition of "secession," http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/secession, accessed August 11, 2014.

4 Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union, Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 35-36.

5 The right of secession is like the bright sun in front of Professor Stampp's face but he can't (or won't) see it. He writes on page four of The Imperiled Union that "the Unionist case was sufficiently flawed to make it uncertain whether in 1865 reason and logic were on the side of the victors --" but he adds his obligatory disclaimer to cloud the issue by stating that we really can't tell "in the tangled web of claims and counter-claims" if reason and logic "were indisputably on either side." He says on page 11 that "In truth, the wording of the Constitution gives neither the believers in the right of secession nor the advocates of a perpetual Union a case so decisive that all reasonable persons are bound to accept it." At least Professor Stampp knew better than to deny the right of secession as he defends his guilty client.

6 In 1847, on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, Abraham Lincoln said:

Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

SOURCE: Abraham Lincoln, 1847 Congressional debate in the United States House of Representatives in John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command (Nashville: Bill Coats, Ltd., 1991), xv. Tilley's source, as stated in footnote #4 on page xv, was Goldwyn Smith, The United States: An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871 (New York and London, 1893), 248.

7 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 420.

8 Ibid.

9 There had to be a specific constitutional prohibition on secession for it to be illegal. Conversely, there did not have to be a specific constitutional affirmation of the right of secession for it to be legal because the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

There was no constitutional prohibition on secession, nor was there a constitutional sanctioning of any kind of federal coercion to force a state to obey a federal law. To do so would be to perpetrate an act of war on the offending state by the other states, for whom the federal government was their agent.

10 James Madison, The Madison Papers (Philadelphia: 1840), 895, in Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 420.

11 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 422-427.

12 Chief Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824), 200, in Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 428.

13 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 428.

14 VIRGINIA: AN ORDINANCE to repeal the ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America by the State of Virginia, and to resume all the rights and powers granted under said Constitution.

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States . . . (Bold emphasis added.)

Adopted by the convention of Virginia April 17, 1861.

[It should again be noted that Virginia's secession had NOTHING whatsoever to do with slavery. Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee seceded because of Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, which they viewed as illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. Virginia's action was immediate. A brief chronology is illustrative. The bombardment of Fort Sumter began April 12, 1861. Fort Sumter surrendered April 13th. Major Anderson, with full military honors, saluted his flag and marched out of the fort April 14th. On April 15th, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, and on April 17th, Virginia seceded. She was followed by Tennessee and Arkansas on May 6th and North Carolina on May 20th, thus the completion of the Southern republic.]

15 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 428-32.

16 Judah P. Benjamin, "Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate" delivered February 5, 1861, Library of Southern Literature, Vol. 1, 318.

17 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 433.

18 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 433-434.

19 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 434-436.

20 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 436.