The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Three: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three of Four

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Three

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Three of Four

(Continued from Part Two)

GREAT BRITAIN was the dominant economic and military power on earth in the 1860s. The cotton gin, short for “cotton engine,” had revolutionized cotton production, which had led to an ironclad relationship between the South and Great Britain:

By the eve of the Civil War, Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown, slave-picked cotton.¹

All Southerners had to do was establish formal trade and military treaties with Great Britain, with whom they already had an “ironclad” relationship because of cotton, and the North would not be able to beat the South in a war.

Lincoln knew all this and was not going to allow the free-trade Confederate States of America to rise to power on his southern border.

He knew that the future of the American nation for at least the next century, maybe forever, was at stake right then.

That’s why, with four times the white population of the South, enormous weapon manufacturing capability, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world with which to feed Union armies (25% of the Union army was foreign born), an army, navy and other advantages at that point in history, he sent five hostile military missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861 to start a war.²

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled “WHY?” published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

The New York Herald eight days earlier wrote:

We have no doubt Mr. Lincoln wants [President Davis] to take the initiative in capturing . . . forts in its waters, for it would give him the opportunity of throwing [to the South] the responsibility of commencing hostilities.³

One gets little debate in Woke academia or the idiot news media on the cause of the war because vigorous debate is impossible. Those institutions are virtually 100% liberal and tow the Woke liberal line so the enraged mob doesn’t show up at their office or, God forbid, accuse them of being a racist.

Forty years ago, historian Joe Gray Taylor wanted to examine the causes of the war but quickly concluded that esteemed historian David H. Donald was “correct when he said in 1960 that the causation of the Civil War was dead as a serious subject of historical analysis” and that “A ‘Southern’ point of view on the secession crisis no longer exists among professional historians.”⁴

Without a “‘Southern’ point of view on the secession crisis” you can never get to the truth of American history. You can not have a debate with only one side presented. The Bible in Proverbs 18:17 says “The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.”

In the 1960s, academia and the news media went from truth as their standard, to the political advantage of the left as their standard, because, as stated, they are virtually 100% liberal.

Like the political operatives they are, so much of their history is filthy politics, not truth. They want to control the past so they can control the future, like Orwell said:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.⁵

To have a debate and get at the truth both sides need to be represented 50/50 so they can challenge each other to the full extend of their intelligence, knowledge and passion and see who has the stronger argument.

Politicized academia and the idiot news media are 100/0 so truth is impossible yet if you don’t agree with their Woke history, you are a racist hatemonger who deserves to die and certainly not have a career.

Esteemed historian Eugene Genovese (Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made, et al.) said 30 years ago that to speak positively about the Old South

is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage . . . ⁶ (Bold emphasis added)

The destruction of century old historic monuments to Southern war dead is also a cultural and political atrocity, and it is immoral.

Those monuments are gifts from the people of the past to the people of the future. Their destruction denies the people of the future the opportunity to gaze on them and read the inscriptions and ponder for themselves what happened in the past.

Much has been written in the past 40 years on the politicization of our history and its unavoidable result, the falsification of our history. Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, confirms that “humanities and social science departments within universities [where History resides] had abandoned objectivity and truth and become hopelessly politicized.”⁷

David Harlan, in his book The Degradation of American History, explains how it began. He says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist. He writes that academia 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.”⁸

Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, writes that most young people today are “taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture – equality, freedom, democracy, human rights – as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful. This teaching, Bloom argued, had bred a cynical, amoral, self-centered younger generation who lacked any sense of inherited wisdom from the past.”

Windschuttle points out that for 2,400 years history has ranked “with philosophy and mathematics as among the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species as a whole.” History’s “essence” has been to “tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened” but today, in much of academia and the news media, “these assumptions are widely rejected.”⁹

Many in the humanities and social sciences “assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past” because “we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us.”

Because of this, supposedly, the entire point of history is no longer valid therefore “there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth” or between “fiction and non-fiction.”¹⁰

In other words, nothing exists except what Woke political liberals in academia and the idiot news media tell us exists.

Academia’s hate is having their desired effect. Dr. Edward M. Gilbreth noted in his Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) column on July 15, 2021 that in the demographic of 18-24 year olds, a recent Issues and Insights poll finds that only “36 percent of them say they are very or extremely proud to be Americans.”

In contrast, that same poll finds that “68 percent of adults say they are ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ proud to be an American, with another 15 ‘moderately’ proud.” The 18-24 demographic was the only one less than 50%.

Dr. Gilbreth concludes that “attempts to describe the country as corrupt, racist, unfair and in need of ‘transformation’ have not had much impact on the general population” but it has on young people.

Distinguished professor emeritus of History of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Clyde N. Wilson, states:

[D]espite the thirst for history and the centrality of historical thinking in our consciousness, academic historians have never been more irrelevant, incestuous, and unreadable.¹¹

We are living in Orwell’s Oceania, where, as James S. Robbins writes in Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past:

Progressives seek to demean and demolish, elevating the victims of the past as an indictment of the present. They wield history as a weapon on behalf of the aggrieved, never gratified by the progress made. Indeed, as one supposed injustice after another is rectified, their attacks become fiercer, their complaints more numerous, . . .¹²

Somebody needs to tell race-obsessed academia that this is 2022 and not 1922 or 1822. We have had a Civil Rights Movement in America. There is unlimited opportunity for everybody. If you fail in America, it’s your own fault.

There is not a single law in the entire country discriminating against non-whites because of skin color, which is why millions break our laws every month to come here.

In fact, there is often discrimination against whites and Asians in such things as college admissions (of course, where else but academia would you find such obvious discrimination).

We don’t want academia’s identity politics and racist hate like Critical Race Theory, or the news media’s fake history like the 1619 Project.

The primary theme of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery. That is a complete fraud, an invention without a shred of evidence. Not a single letter, speech, document, nothing.

Peter W. Wood states in 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:

The 1619 Project aligns with the views of those on the progressive left who hate America and would like to transform it radically into a different kind of nation.¹³

Wood points out that Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, has stated many times her goal is reparations. He concludes there is “only bitterness and anger” in the 1619 Project, that it “is a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics.”¹⁴

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Four

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Four of Four, Conclusion

NOTES:

¹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10. Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin in 1794.

² Mitcham, It Wasn’t About Slavery, 142. Mitcham states that by the first of April, 1861, the following five military expeditions were “in, steaming toward, or about to sail for Southern territorial waters:

1) the Welles-Fox Expedition, heading for Charleston;

2) the Rowan Expedition, also heading for Charleston;

3) Captain Adams’ ships, lurking off Santa Rosa Island;

4) Colonel Brown’s Expedition, heading for Pensacola;

5) Porter’s Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola.”

³ Editorial, New York Herald, April 5, 1861, in Mitcham, It Wasn’t About Slavery, 147.

⁴ Joe Gray Taylor, “The White South from Secession to Redemption,” in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, Interpreting Southern History, Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 162-164.

⁵ George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1950), 32. This was one of the slogans of Big Brother’s English Socialist Party of Oceania, INGSOC.

⁶ Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii.

⁷ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 10.

⁸ David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv. This paragraph, written by me, comes verbatim from the Introduction to my book, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, Volume One: His Best Work (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017).

⁹ Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 1-2.

¹⁰ Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 2, 7.

¹¹ Clyde Wilson, February 12, 2019 Review of Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past by John Lukacs (Schocken Books, 1985) in The Abbeville Review, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/historical-consciousness, accessed February 12, 2019. Dr. Wilson taught in the History Department at the University of South Carolina for over 30 years. He is primary editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun and author or editor of over 30 books and over 600 articles, essays and reviews.

¹² James S. Robbins, Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018), 3.

¹³ Peter W. Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 3.

¹⁴ Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, 172.