Our Marxist Revolution, Guest Post by H. V. Traywick, Jr.

It might be asked that if these States were considered out of the Union under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and under martial law, how could they ratify an amendment to the Constitution of a Union they were not in; and if they had never been recognized as being out of the Union, how could they be compelled to ratify it? The answer, of course, is Federal bayonets. Reconstruction was nothing short of a revolution on the same order as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Our Marxist Revolution

Guest Post by
H. V. Traywick, Jr.

[Publisher’s Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : I’m proud to publish this article by Bo Traywick, which was published earlier this week by the Abbeville Institute Blog, and on historian and author Phil Leigh’s blog, Civil War Chat. Phil also produced it as a podcast. There are links to the Abbeville Institute and Phil Leigh at the end of this article, as well as a link to Bo’s website.

Everybody who wants to win this Marxist war on American history should subscribe to the Abbeville Institute Blog and Phil Leigh’s Civil War Chat. Abbeville sends out scholarly articles daily, as well as videos, podcasts, and notifications of events and conferences. Phil sends articles, podcasts and videos several times a week.

Anytime you are arguing history or doing research, both of these sites are invaluable. Abbeville is loaded with some of the finest scholars and writers in the world, and Phil Leigh is one of the best analytical historians out there, especially on economic issues.

But back to Brother Bo: His writing always has a pleasant literary quality to it along with powerful, thoroughly documented history.

H. V. “Bo” Traywick, Jr. : A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, H. V. Traywick, Jr. graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot.

In 2018 he published The Monumental Truth: Five Essays on Confederate Monuments in the Age of Progressive Identity Politics, and is author/editor of five other books: Empire of the Owls: Reflections on the North’s War against Southern Secession (2013), currently in its third printing; Road Gang: A Memoir of Engineer Service in Vietnam (2014); Virginia Illiad: The Death and Destruction of “The Mother of States and Statesmen” (2016); A Southern Soldier Boy: The Diary of Sergeant Beaufort Simpson Buzhardt 1838-1862 (2016); and Starlight on the Rails: A Vietnam Veteran’s Long Road Home (2018).

Two of his book have been awarded the Jefferson Davis Gold Medal for History by the Virginia Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, one of which, Empire of the Owls, has also been commended by the Virginia General Assembly for its scholarship.

by Bo Traywick

THOMAS CARLYLE SAID that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men.¹ Among the many worthy men who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was the savior of Western Civilization. Sir Winston Churchill said Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals of war.² But now the Lee Monument in Richmond has been taken down. Our groveling scalawag Governor says Lee no longer represents the values of Virginia. Judging by the filthy graffiti that has desecrated the Lee Monument ever since the rioting of last summer, I would say no truer words have ever been spoken. We are in a Marxist revolution. Critical Race Theory merely replaces traditional class warfare with race warfare, with White people, and particularly Southern White people, the “oppressors,” and the conveniently long-dead Confederacy the scapegoat for all the racial ills in the country.

Ever since the Spring of 1864, we Southerners have been on the defensive. No war was ever won on the defensive, but we have spent barrels of ink explaining the righteousness of the cause our forefathers fought and died for, mistakenly confounding the many causes of secession with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself. That, is what the war was “about,” and what we were fighting for was the defense of our land from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance – just as in 1776, when the thirteen slave-holding³ Colonies seceded from the British Empire. But, rather than taking the offensive and hammering our detractors with this simple Truth, we instead get ourselves into involved defensive explanations that cause their eyes to glaze over, and they calmly look at us and say “Slavery” or “racism” or “White supremacy.”

I take a different approach. I indict the hypocrisy of our detractors and their Myth of American History. The agitation over our Confederate monuments rests upon this fossilized myth, which proclaims that “The Civil War was all about slavery, the righteous North waged it to free the slaves, and the evil South fought to keep them. End of story. Any questions?”

So if the righteous North went to war to free Southern slaves, why didn’t the righteous Northerners first clean up their own back yards and free the rest of their own slaves? And why did Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – issued halfway through the war when the South was winning it – say that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government?⁷ And why did he admit West Virginia, a so-called “slave State,” into the Union six months later? And why did he – a documented White Supremacist⁸ – choose to inaugurate the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to, in effect, drive Southern slavery back into the Union? In his Second Inaugural, he claimed that the South was fighting to expand slavery into the Territories,⁹ but with the South out of the Union, the Confederacy had already given up all claims to any and all United States Territories, making Lincoln’s specious claim just another smelly “red herring” to cover the tracks of his murderous usurpation of power in waging war against the secession of the Southern States. Since Lincoln did not recognize the Southern States as being out of the Union,¹⁰ by his own definition he was committing treason under Article III, section 3 of the Constitution by waging war against them.

Secession is merely freedom of association writ large. There were many causes of secession, not least of which that Southerners no longer wished to be associated with those people who slandered and despised them so. But that begs the question of why those people waged the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to prevent their departure. To hear their vitriol, one would think they would have been happy to be rid of these Southern Apostates polluting what the New England Pilgrim Fathers called their “Citty upon a hill.” But they weren’t, for running like a river beneath their bigoted pieties was their avariciousness. With the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and set up as a free trade confederacy on the North’s doorstep, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse!¹¹ So Lincoln rebuffed every Southern overture for peace and launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot.¹² South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation at Charleston just as Massachusetts had responded to George III’s provocation at Lexington and Concord, giving Lincoln the war he wanted,¹³ but putting himself in the shoes of George III.

Virginia, “The Mother of States and of Statesmen,” stood solidly for the Union she had done so much to create, but when Lincoln called for her troops to subjugate the “Cotton Kingdom,” Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war,”¹⁴ seceded from the Union, and joined the Confederacy. Four other States – including occupied Missouri – followed her out. But after four years of arduous service, as General Lee said at Appomattox, the South was compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources,¹⁵ and Lincoln drove the Southern States back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. Although John Wilkes Booth made a martyr out of America’s Caesar, Reconstruction cemented his conquest. With an Army of Occupation and the pretense of law, and with the Union Leagues stirring up racial hatred, a corrupt Northern political party transformed the voluntary Union of sovereign States into a coerced Yankee Empire pinned together by bayonets.

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the ten Southern States into five military districts, with Virginia being designated as “Military District Number One.” It stipulated that each Southern State frame a new constitution that met with Yankee approval. This was to be done by a convention consisting of male delegates “of whatever race, color, or previous condition” – with the exception of all Confederate soldiers and most other Southern White people, all of whom were disfranchised. Then, when the legislature elected under this new constitution had ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, that State would be declared “entitled to representation in Congress” – or, in other words, “readmitted into the Union.”

It might be asked that if these States were considered out of the Union under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and under martial law, how could they ratify an amendment to the Constitution of a Union they were not in; and if they had never been recognized as being out of the Union, how could they be compelled to ratify it? The answer, of course, is Federal bayonets. Reconstruction was nothing short of a revolution on the same order as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Results? For the North? “The Gilded Age.” For the South? Grinding poverty in a land laid waste until the Second World War, and the curse of being ruled by little men. For the Blacks? A recent study of military and Freedman’s Bureau records has revealed that between 1862 and 1870 perhaps as many as a million ex-slaves, or twenty-five percent of the population, died of starvation, disease, and neglect under their Northern “liberators”!¹⁸ Freed from their master’s care, “Father Abraham, The Great Emancipator,” had told them to “root hog, or die.” Black enfranchisement in the South, and the disfranchisement of Southern Whites, were merely cynical Northern political tools to cement the North’s conquest, and once she had achieved it with her so-called “Reconstruction,” the North abandoned her Black puppets – or “useful idiots” as the Communist Vladimir Lenin would have called them – to the upheaval she had wrought in Southern society and turned her attention to the Plains Indians, who were in the way of her trans-continental railroads. But that’s another story – let the Indians tell you that one.

The gradual peace and reconciliation after Reconstruction came in part from the South’s “acceptance of the situation,” and in part from the North’s recognition of the South’s difficulty in suddenly assimilating millions of Africans into a European population that had been steeped in Western civilization for thousands of years. As such, since the North had gotten what she wanted out of the war and Reconstruction – which was control of the Federal Government and its finances – she was content to let the South deal with her own domestic problems in peace. However, when hopeful Southern Blacks started moving North to the Promised Land in the Great Migration, they found themselves relegated by a cold Northern racism into segregated ghettoes, and discovered that the Northern rhetoric about social equality was a political sham.

The invention of television gave Northern politicians and demagogues a way out of this embarrassing situation by giving them the means to divert Black attention from de facto Northern segregation onto the codified segregation in the South, but their demagoguery provoked racial agitation that broke into urban race riots up North. Desperate, guilt-ridden Northern White Liberals were driven to devise further crusades upon which to divert the attention of their credulous and unwanted Black population onto Southern scapegoats. First came the self-righteous “Freedom Riders” protesting Southern segregation – locked arm-in-arm with Black protest marchers – and posting their Progressive virtues before the TV cameras for all to see. But while they were delivering tutorials on proper race relations to the benighted Southerners, the Blacks up North were burning their cities down – and they have been doing so ever since, forever compelling Desperate White Liberals to devise new crusades upon which to post their virtues.

Their latest crusade is against Confederate Monuments. But when all of the Confederate monuments have been vandalized and torn down, who will their next targets be? Be assured that these self-righteous, Latter-Day Puritans will not rest, for crusading, witch-burning and virtue-posting is in their DNA. It came over in the Mayflower. Meanwhile, Monument Avenue in Richmond is a desecrated and vandalized shambles; Thomas Jefferson is under assault at UVA; W & L has repudiated General Lee; and VMI has repudiated “Stonewall” Jackson, while her Cadets who fought and died at the Battle of New Market and are buried on Post under Sir Moses Ezekiel’s “Virginia Mourning Her Dead” have become an embarrassment – and a rebuke.

As the mania of Identity Politics and Radical Equity for every conceivable definition of race, gender, and species reaches the point of absurdity in the Victimhood Olympics, we have been carried away into Babylon, with women being sent into combat while men push baby buggies around town; with girls becoming Boy Scouts and men “choosing” to be women; with children “deciding” their gender and being given access to the bathroom of their choice in school; with anarchy ruling the classrooms and teachers being assaulted by their students; with history being taught as Marxist indoctrination and Critical Race Theory; with conservative speakers at colleges being hounded off campus by Antifa and Black Lives Matter mobs; with “affirmative action” and race-norming instead of merit and SAT scores determining college admissions; with laws being made to conform to barbaric behavior instead of barbaric behavior being made to conform to the law; with convicts being released to create racial parity in prisons; with the National debt approaching an unimaginable thirty trillion dollars; with the US Government printing money and running riot with it like teenagers with a bottle of whiskey and their daddy’s car keys, while the homeless wander the streets and beg on every corner as the Third World pours in across the open borders;  and on, and on, and on… As one commentator said recently, we have become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out.

Do not hope to reason with these people, for trying to reason with them is like singing hymns to a fence post with a boom box perched on top of it blasting gutter-grunts from some Hip-Hop Rapper. I know whereof I speak, for I was once a Virginia Flagger on the sidewalk before the VMFA and faced these mobs. These are the same people who spat on us at the airport when we returned from Vietnam, so I quit before prison would become my portion, but not before I had gotten one protester arrested and convicted for “curse and abuse.” If Reconstruction was calculated like the Communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, today’s “Woke Revolution” is fanatically mindless like the French Revolution and its bloody Reign of Terror. I am waiting for the Confederate monuments to be replaced with the guillotine.

Progressives consider the march of history to be a linear march towards a secular Utopian perfection, where the oppressive Laws of God have been repealed. It began with the New England Puritans. While Southerners were following Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, these Yankee Utopians were burning witches in John Winthrop’s “Citty upon a hill”; and while Southerners were five hundred miles west of the Mississippi in Texas defending the Alamo, these Yankee Utopians were a hundred miles west of the Hudson in New York, establishing their collectivist, Free-Love communes, and setting themselves up as the standard by which all true Americans should be measured. In this they have been remarkably successful, to the point where today they have the inmates running the Equality Asylum. But as the Preacher says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “Consider the works of God, for who can make that straight which He hath made crooked?”

The Reverend Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney, one-time Chief-of-Staff of “Stonewall” Jackson, wrote that Southerners know in due time they will be avenged through these same disorganizing heresies which will redound upon the North. Are we not seeing it now, with the godless anarchy that radicals have wrought, and with their blasphemous demands for Equity to “correct” the works of God? In Classical Greek mythology, Icarus in his hubris flew too close to the sun, but Nemesis brought him down. The Social Justice Warriors with their “Woke Revolution,” their “Equity,” their mob rule, and, most of all, with their hubris, forget that man is merely the Master, not the Creator of the world. So let these arrogant and successful wrongdoers flout their disdain for our Confederate monuments and all they stand for. As Dr. Dabney said, “we will meet them with it again, when it will be heard; in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of Judgement”.²¹ Meanwhile, keep your powder dry, and when they come to your door to take you away in the tumbril to the guillotine, let them be in for a surprise.

¹ Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, IV: “The New Downing Street” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 12 vols., Library ed. (New York: John B. Alden, 1885) 8: 134.

² Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1958) IV: 170-3.

³ See the 1790 US Census in Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits (New York: George W. & John A. Wood, 1860) pg. 120.

⁴ “First Inaugural Address” (1861) in Charles W. Eliot, LL D, Ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910). Vol. 43, American Historical Documents, 43: 334.

⁵ See Article XIII of the US Constitution, ratified December 18, 1865.

⁶ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) The Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) I: 381-2.

⁷ “Emancipation Proclamation” (January 1, 1863), Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 345.

⁸ Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000) pgs. 183-214.

⁹ “Second Inaugural Address” (1865). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 451.

¹⁰ —. “First Inaugural Address” (1861). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 336-7.

¹¹ Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument (Charleston and James Island, S. C.: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 56-69.

¹² Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Ft. Sumter,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August 1937) pgs. 259-88, in Kizer, pgs. 197-248. See also John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command (Chapel Hill: U of N. C. P, 1941) pgs. 179-87, 266-7, 306-12, with documentation from original sources, including the Official Records.

¹³ “If the Union were to undertake to enforce by arms the allegiance of the confederate States by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of England at the time of the War of Independence,” quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) II: 425.

¹⁴ Gov. John Letcher, letter to Sec. Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, in the Richmond Enquirer, April 18, 1861, pg. 2, col. 1. Microfilm. The Daily Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 1, 1861 – June 29, 1861. Film 23, reel 24 (Richmond: Library of Virginia collection).

¹⁵ “Lee’s Farewell to His Army” April 10, 1865. Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 449.

¹⁶ Thaddeus Stevens, “The Conquered Provinces,” Congressional Globe, 18 December 1865, 72, in Walter L. Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to 1906, 2 vols. (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906) I: 148.

¹⁷ Acts and Resolutions, 39 Cong., 2 Sess., 60, in Fleming, ed. Documentary History, I: 401-3.

¹⁸ Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) passim. See also John Remington Graham, The American Civil War as a Crusade to Free the Slaves (South Boston, VA: Gerald C. Burnett, M. D., 2016) pg. 11.

¹⁹ Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm.

²⁰ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Merlin and Vivien,” The Works of Tennyson, Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Ed. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932) pg. 386.

²¹ Prof. Robert L. Dabney, D. D., A Defense of Virginia, [and Through Her, of the South,] in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (1867; Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1977) pg. 356.

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