Reconstruction (typically 1865-1875) is probably the least-discussed topic in American history. It’s like the drunk uncle who crashed into the side of the church, or the niece who works the pole down at the jiggle joint. It’s one of those shameful things that many would prefer to not discuss, like “Stumpy Joe” Childs of Spinal Tap choking on someone else’s vomit.


And with good reason. It was a shameful, shabby nasty episode. The headline is lifted from James Truslow Adams, a historian of the 1920s and 1930s. Charles Bowers, an Indianan who was a popular historian in the 1920s, said that the Southern people were “put to the torture chamber… never have American public men in respectable positions, directing the destiny of our nation, been so brutal, hypocritical or corrupt.” (Thanks to Dr Clyde Wilson for the quotes; my Reconstruction box is unpacked.) The Gilded Age which followed – also known as the “Progressive Age” – is much more fun. It was also funded largely by the wholesale looting of the defeated South. The Northern industrialists and banking interests did very well, thank you. Down in Dixie, its fruits included poverty that lasted nearly a century; the introduction of the sharecropper system, under which former slaves and former Confederate soldiers were reduced to debt-slaves to the “company store”; a hatred of the republican party which I wish would be recovered. The rancor between black and white began with Reconstruction, I’d argue, as the GOP did the usual “divide and conquer” to pit black against white. Blacks were elected to state legislatures – remember, former Confederates were largely disenfranchised (depends on the state) – and at the bidding of the GOP votes for higher taxes, bond issues and the like which left the South not only impoverished, but deep in debt.


Reconstruction, by Columbia professor Eric Foner, is the standard regime narrative. Foner is a Marxist, which in itself does not disqualify one from being a historian. Eugene Genovese, Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hill are brilliant historians. (Of course, Marxists can be horrible professors, like the ghoulish Eric Hobsbawm). Foner is a Marxist but with a racial slant: he’s a full-on radical egalitarian, much like the lunatic abolitionists and Radical Republicans. The subtitle of his book is something like “the unfinished revolution.” So you get the idea. His theory serves both sides of the U.S. regime: radical egalitarian/higher law crap for the Ds; the despicable Rs get to pat themselves on the back for suppressing “Southern terrorism” aka the Klan, electing blacks to office, “defending the union.” During the last bought of iconoclasm (2020), the Faux Watchers over at Instapundit, the neocon distributor of whatever their bosses in Tel Aviv tell them to distribute, brayed loudly that it was stupid to give the “losers” (that’s the Confederates) “participation trophies.” This is the view advanced by the likes of Dennis Prager at Prager U, or its somewhat more high-toned but equally vile and dishonest Claremont.


Yeah? How’s that Grand Republic of y’alls working out?


Anyway. One gets the sense in by early 1870s that many in the North were appalled by the rapacity of the looting. It also happened that the freed blacks did not turn out to be the Rousseauian (sic?) noble savages of Abolitionist imagination, and most of them fled back to Boston or Oberlin. And it was a Yale man, no less, who offered up the best account of Reconstruction: William Archibald Dunning. A native of New Jersey, he got a PhD from Columbia in 1885 and studied for a year in Germany under Helmut von Treitschke, interesting in his own right.


Dunning presented his views in a survey called Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877. More importantly, though, he oversaw the dissertations of students who went on to produce scholarly studies of their own. Dunning and his students, or School, are now viewed as the most desperate sort of white supremacist punchable Nazis.


Dunning’s basic thesis: Reconstruction was the work of Radical Republicans who with malice and vengeance looted and sought to crush the South with bayonets wielded by carpetbaggers (Northern profiteers), scalawags (traitorous Southerners who joined them) and freedmen, who were unprepared for such sinister machinations on part of their ostensible liberators. I suggest that the facts and original sources sorta suggest that is closer to the truth of the matter than whatever’s fed into the Faux-Watcher’s brain by the jowly Prager or the fantasists of Claremont.


So I’d start with Dunning’s book: Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877 as a broad overview; also an excellent overview (and superior to Dunning’s, truth be told) The South During Reconstruction by E. Merton Coulter, part of the History of the South series published by LSU Press. One of the first things you’ll learn is that Reconstruction was state-by-state. Some were more recalcitrant that others, depending on which gangster was placed in charge. Louisiana had it tough because the sachem there was none other than “Little Phil” Sheridan. There’s also Reconstruction: Punished with Poverty by the redoubtable Kennedy brothers of Louisiana. The best short overview is likely Southern Reconstruction, by Philip Leigh.


Walter Fleming wrote Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. He edited a two-volume collection of documents related to reconstruction and more than most, looked at how the freedman managed. W.E.B. Debois even said that while “anti-negro in spirit” (whatever that means) Fleming was always fair.


J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton wrote Reconstruction in North Carolina.


Charles Ramsdell wrote Reconstruction in Texas.


C. Mildred Thompson: Reconstruction in Georgia, which is first rate even though she’s a new deal Democrat and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt (lol).


J.W. Garner covered Mississippi; J.S. Reynolds South Carolina; W.W. Davis did Florida.


Two contemporary accounts are The Southern States Since the War, by Robert Somers, an Englishman, and The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, by a journalist from Maine named James Pike. Dixie After the War by Myrta Avary, who grew up in Virginia during Reconstruction.


How about dat ebil Klan? The Invisible Empire by Stanley Horn, which covers the first Klan and suggests that in some cases it was necessary. (He also wrote the first good study of the Army of Tennesee.) This view is kinda supported by Washington’s KKK: The Union League, by John Chodes, which states outright that Southern whites were ready to peacefully accept emancipation but GOP/Union League fuckery ruined it.


And yes, there’s Gone With The Wind – but a much better novel about Reconstruction is And Wait For the Night by John Corrington, which shows how it happened in north Louisiana. And excellent vignettes throughout William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 


And last, but certainly not least: a thank-you to the legendary Dr. Clyde Wilson of South Carolina, editor of John Calhoun’s papers and who has performed the labors of Hercules keeping alive Southern memory. A number of these titles I discovered via Dr. Wilson’s Essential Books series — there’s 60 Essentials on the War Between the States and 50 essentials on Reconstruction and the New South. 


Ah, if only Abe Lincoln was still alive! He would have been gentle! Nice theory. Lincoln was first and foremost a party man desiring nothing more than power. If stomping on the South was necessary for a few electoral votes, he’d have done it with gusto.


Note: most of the books mentioned are available via Archive.org. Save them on a local drive while you still can. This is samizdat, man!

​On July 4, 1863, the Confederate Army of Mississippi, commanded by Lieutenant-General John Pemberton, surrendered to the U.S. Army of the Tennessee, commanded by Major-General U.S. Grant, after a 47-day siege. It was the conclusion of a campaign that began in October of the previous year and included a failed landing by Major-General William T. Sherman at Chickasaw Bayou (“I reached Vicksburg at the time appointed, landed, assaulted, and failed"), an effort to divert the Mississippi River by digging a canal across DeSoto Point an expedition down the Yazoo River in which U.S. gunboats found themselves hopelessly entangled in foliage. Grant himself sailed up the Yazoo in June of 1863, but maybe doesn’t remember as he was on a drunk, as attested by journalist Sylvanus Cadawaller and other. Like Charles Dana, a journalist appointed assistant secretary of war who was bobbing around at the time: Grant, he said, was “as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow.”

Some find inspiration at the bottom of a bottle; perhaps it was in such a moment of distilled enthusiasm that Grant Eureka’d and hit on the idea of chemical warfare: he ordered dead horses flung into the Vicksburg water supply. Nevertheless, Grant did “win,” America is about winning; America loves a winner because it’s the winningness nation ever. All the winning! The bookstore at the National Park Center celebrates U.S. Grant as an incandescent military genius. Well, he is, but not the way they think. Grant is the very figure of a modern American general: skilled at cultivating the right sorts of friends in politics and the media (Dana and Cadawaller, as above); a skilled practitioner of bureaucratic infighting (eg, his shivving of McClernand during the Vicksburg campaign and maligning of General Rosecrans, who may well have been the most talented U.S. commander). His over-lauded memoirs are an exercise in historical falsification. Military genius? Debatable, but I maintain that Napoleon Bonaparte would have taken Vicksburg in a week. Read up on his Italian campaign of 1796-1797, where at Lodi and Arcola he displayed the genius for the “indirect approach” that makes him the greatest military commander of all time. Big Serge sums it brilliantly here.


U.S., we’re told, came to mean “Unconditional Surrender,” because the Quiet Little Man from Galena, Illinois – with the aw shucks salt-of-the-earth plainspoken modesty of a true huwhite Midwesterner, unlike that mean racist white supremacist General Robert E. Lee. Okay, but in the case of Vicksburg, it isn’t true.


This is the “Surrender Oak,” where Pemberton and Grant met. Pemberton came dressed in full regalia; Grant in his usual slob-ware. The generals agree that Grant presented Pemberton with his trademarked demand for Unconditional Surrender which so thrilled Northerners after Fort Donelson. From there the accounts diverge.


Grant claims in his memoirs that a stiff and nervous Pemberton stood and said snappishly: “If this is all you have to offer, the conference might as well end.” Pemberton, for his part, recalls standing and stating: “I can assure you, sir, that you will bury many more of your men before you enter Vicksburg.”


Grant, as is known, was rather freewheeling with the truth in his memoirs, knocked together in a hurry and published with the help of Samuel Clemens; dying of cancer, dead broke and deep in debt, he sought to raise money to provide for his family. He tells a story that assures Americans they acted from the best of intentions, they meant well, it was all about muh fucking eternal Union. I’d recommend General Grant and the Verdict of History, by Frank Varney or Grant Under Fire: An Expose of Character and Leadership in the Civil War, by Joseph Rose.


Whatever the case (personally I think Grant, or whoever ghosted his memoirs, was lying through his teeth) Grant “reconsidered” his demand for Unconditional Surrender. He didn’t want to feed nearly 30,000 prisoners and muck about with prison camps, we’re told. Okay. But the Confederate Army of Mississippi was paroled in its entirety and allowed to march out of the city with full military honors.


U.S. Major General John Logan claimed it was all 5D chess by the wily Grant: “God damn them, we wanted to demoralize them the whole lot; let them get full of good bread, coffee ham, sugar &c, and when they again come down to pea meal coffee, mile beed and black bread, every one of them will desert and go home.”
But that’s not what happened, is it, General Logan? Because they weren’t mercenaries, like the flood of the New Americans ol Abe summoned to drown us. The soldiers of the Confederate armies were not fighting to earn “citizenship” in a monstrous Leviathan; they weren’t fighting for plunder or power or to repair the world by imposing on it a bullshit inhuman ideology tarted up with Enlightenment abstractions. They fought for the land they loved and they fought their people and its right to live as their fathers had and to be left alone.


They fought to be left alone by you, Major General Logan, and the wretched empire you represent. They fought against the United States, and their cause has been completely and utterly vindicated.


Most didn’t desert. Some sought out General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Even more marched in their regiments to the Army of Tennessee, where arrived in time for the hollow victory of Chickamauga and the long tragedy of the Western Confederacy from Atlanta to the bloodbath of Franklin and the final surrender in North Carolina. That’s what mine did. Of the five ancestors I identified who served at Vicksburg, one died and is buried in Soldiers’ Rest. The rest went to the Army of Tennessee. One was wounded at Adairsville on the Atlanta campaign. One died in the charge at Franklin.


Looks like they preferred death to your “good bread,” General Logan. They preferred death to being forced back into your union at the point of bayonet wielded by an immigrant.


There is a national cemetery, where the invading army and occupation forces buried their dead. It’s maintained at taxpayer expense, as well it should be. They “saved the Union,” after all.

​
We laid ours to rest in the old Cedar Hill Cemetery, a section known as Soldiers Hill. They were buried by J.Q. Arnold, a local undertaker, as they fell. Arnold kept detailed records, which were lost after the war, but partially rediscovered in the 1960s. 1600 of the dead have been identified, but 3500 remain unknown. The United Daughters of Confederacy raised the money and placed the monument

As for the military park: over 1800 monuments, tablets, plaques and memorials in the Vicksburg military park. The Northern monuments, supported by taxpayer funds, came first. Ours took decades of bake sales and penny drives. Come for a visit and the U.S. Park Service will hand you a map illustrated with Grant and his is doughty Midwesterners and New Americans cheering the crushing of the traitors.



But Vicksburg is a Southern city. Vicksburg’s ghosts are Southern ghosts. A Southern Rivendell, one might say: a place that preserves and defends the memory of all that was fair.

​

Those memories are ours, just as Vicksburg is ours. Grant and the Americans are gone. Their squalid empire, an enemy of peace and humanity, is in ruins.. The Americans are gone, but we remain, and the flag of the South flies over the Old Court House, from whose cupola the Confederate commanders observed the U.S. gunboats steaming down the Mississippi River. The gunboats are gone too, but the Southern banner and its memory of defiance, will fly forever.

​
My people served in regiments from these states:

​May the memory of the Confederate soldier be eternal.

U.C.V. is the United Confederate Veterans. But what’s the deal with the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Emmet Society. Huh? The AoH is the Irish Catholic fraternal organization best-known for organizing the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York. The Emmet Society is named for Robert Emmett, the Irish revolutionary who led the Uprising of 1803.


Richard, or “Dick” as he was best known, was born in County Galway in the west of Ireland. His parents, tenant farmers, were evicted so in 1845, the first year of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, Dowling and sister Helena took passage to the U.S. They arrived in New Orleans in 1845; Dick ran a coffeehouse and raised the money to send for his parents and brothers, who arrived in 1851. His parents and a younger brother perished in a yellow fever outbreak two years later.


Dowling moved to Houston in 1857 and opened two saloons. The most popular was the Bank of Bacchus, located in Houston’s courthouse square and it soon became the town’s most popular establishment. Dowling was highly regarded. He helped set up Houston’s first gaslight company, joined a fire company and helped set up a streetcar system. He joined a militia company composed primarily of Irishmen and was elected first lieutenant. Its purpose was primarily social, but when the war broke out, it was mustered into Confederate service. The unit renamed itself the Jeff Davis Guards and was posted to Fort Griffin, an earthen fortification mouth of the Sabine Pass, the body of water separating Texas from Louisiana.


Dowling bought six old smoothbore cannon. He and his men planted range-stakes in the Sabine Pass at various distances. Dowling paid for the powder and shot and the lads got to practicing.


In 1863, the Confederacy sought to establish a trade route through Mexico to bring in much-needed supplies. Lincoln had an idea to stop that, and assigned the job to General Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts politician. His only real military skill was moving his troops into position where they could be more easily killed by Southern soldiers. Banks was, though, very good at plunder, graft and similar schemes; maybe he was busy with that, because he passed it off to General William B. Franklin. Franklin came up with a scheme to silence Downing and his men at Fort Griffin and land 5000 U.S. troops on the Texas side of the channel.

The Confederate Congress offered its thanks and promoted Dowling to major. The “ladies of Houston” had a special medal struck. After the war, he returned to his business ventures and started buying up land in East Texas – early oil-boom speculation, some say -- but died in a yellow fever epidemic.


The monument – again, Houston’s first – was unveiled on St Patrick’s Day 1905 at the Cambridge Street entrance to Memorial Park. Once the Ancient Order of Hibernians would commemorate St Patrick’s Day with a wreath-laying ceremony, but by God, we’ve progressed. We don’t do that any more.


The city of Houston removed the monument in June 2020. KHOU, the local “news” station, dredged up the slander invented by the SPLC that the monuments were installed for the sole purpose of “intimidating Black Americans.” A twaddler from the Houston Press who calls himself a “gifted storyteller” offers up this drivel: “But this being Houston, where 1980 is ancient history, nothing is ever done. Today, Dowling the man is only remembered by Houston's rapidly vanishing (if not downright extinct) coterie of Confederate apologists, military historians, and the local Irish community, who honor him at his statue every St. Patrick's Day.”


Well, he has a point. For all the talk of rock-ribbed Texas conservatism, many of the ones you meet in Houston are pining for the days of the carpetbagging Bushes. Houston isn’t a Southern city anymore. A degraded hellscape of prefab strip malls and shopping complexes, each featuring the same shitty private equity-backed rollups; acre upon acre of suburban squalor, built with the cheapest Chinese materials and guaranteed to start disintegrating after 20 years, to house the wagies at the Amazon warehouses; Californians fleeing the consequences of their stupidity ordering up their vegan meals at restaurants staffed by New Americans.

​

Well, we certainly understand why Houston may wish to protect the delicate sensibilities of all those new additions to the team base, but we don’t much care. Here, for posterity, are the names of Lieutenant Dowling and the brave company men of Company F, Jeff Davis Guards: proud sons of Ireland and soldiers of the South, who with four antique cannon repelled the American invasion of Texas, captured two Yankee gunboats and sent the 5000 Yanks scurrying for safety.

An hour south of Houston is Galveston, which remains a Southern city. Beautiful and dignified, with one of the finest arrays of Victorian architecture anywhere in the world, it remains a Southern city.


It’s best known as the origin of “Juneteenth,” which is when (this is the Americans speaking) U.S. general William Granger “enforced” the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, and the American victory was complete.

That’s correct, of course — the complete victory bit — but allow me to add a footnote. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by King Linkum on January 1, 1863, merely “freed” the slaves in unoccupied Southern states. Not the “border” states, in other words: Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. There were electoral votes, after all.

But the truth of it was Lincoln didn’t care any more for liberating the slaves than he did for the Massachusets hicks that Nathaniel Banks sent to their deaths in Louisiana. Lincoln hoped to provoke a general slave uprising, like the one in Haiti that ended with the slaughter of every white on the island.


Then, as now, the Americans took a weird, even perverted delight in fantasies of real hardcore case-hardened Revolutionaries butchering their “enemies” for Justice. Hence the psychosexual passion so many Americans evidenced toward the lunatic John Brown, from Emerson to Whitman to moronic Harvard kids larping as the John Brown Brigade. Julia Ward Howe, a prototype of the decaying blue-haired Karens who creep along the streets of the West University area in Houston in their Volvos pasted with RESIST! and CO-EXIST stickers, compared his “sacrifice” to that of Christ in her wretched Battle Hymn of the Republic.


So in 2020 the Americans instituted Juneteenth as a Federal holiday; there were big goings-on in Galveston that year. But, this being the United States, it ain’t a celebration until the enemy is mocked, humiliated and scourged.
​

This is Galveston’s Confederate memorial. Called Dignified Resignation, it depicts a Southern sailor. He holds a broken sword. At his feet is a scroll that says Glory To The Defeated.

​The monument was dedicated in 1911 by the Galveston chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The president of the chapter was Mollie Rosenberg, the second wife of Swiss-born local magnate Julius Rosenberg. A native of Virginia, her father and four brothers fought to defend the South from the Americans.
So in 2020, there were the usual demands from the usual people — the blue-hairs of Galveston — to demolish the statue because “that’s not who we are” and so on, but they were unable to convince the city to go along with it. There was a compromise, of sorts. You noticed the blank space on the pedestal? They removed it, I suppose to prevent it from damaging the delicate sensibilities of tourists. There’s still a Confederate seal on the back of the pedestal, where no one can see it.

The plaque reads “There has never been an armed force which in purity of motives intensity of courage and heroism has equaled the Army and Navy of the Confederate States of America 1861-65.”


The horrors! The hypocrisy! Poke around a bit and you’ll find all sorts of reconstructed Texans — no, they’re not Texans; they’re the soulless conspicuous-consuming drones that make the best Americans — bleating about the DoC “re-writing history to promulgate the ‘Lost Cause’ myth.”

Bleat away. Oh, and before I forget: Texas governor Greg Abbott and Lt-Governor Dan Patrick have consistently declined to sign bills to defend historical monuments, including Confederate ones, prepared and submitted by Texas legislators.


Because that’s not who we are. Right, Abbott? Don’t want to scare off foreign investment, do we? Don’t want people to think we’re backward and in the way of progress, do we? Bad for business or hurt the reputation of Texas. George HW Bush understood that.


And that is how the GOP whores after strange gods and betrays our ancestors.

​
One day, we’re going to restore that plaque. And the Dowling monument too – but not in Houston. It’s not who you are. Right? And you don’t deserve it anyway.

Butler was replaced by one Nathaniel Banks, also a political hack from the Bay State. Here’s Banks, a fine figure of a man: ​

Sent to suppress Banks was General Richard Taylor, the son of U.S. president Zachary Taylor and who had commanded a brigade of Louisiana infantry, including the legendary Louisiana Tigers, with Jackson in the Valley.   
 
General Taylor staged his troops in Keatchie. Here’s an antebellum house in Keatchie, typical of antebellum architecture in this part of Louisiana:  ​

There’s a flagpole in the front yard. I came prepared: ​

Taylor marched his troops to Mansfield. Outnumbered by more than two to one, he set an ambush for Banks and his rabble at the Sabine Crossroads just south of town.
​  ​

Quite the bloodbath: Banks added 2,235 American patriots to his body-count.  Less than 1,000 for General Taylor. Banks scurried away in disorder. Some Confederate dead were buried in Keatchie, some in Mansfield: ​

​My heart has ever been a parched and stony ground on which the seeds of Patriotism found no purchase. The empire’s civic rituals left me with the taste of wormwood. As a child I quietly declined to pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the “republic” for which it claimed to stand. In this, as in so much else, my father provided valuable instruction. For sixth-grade assignment I asked his favorite president. He looked up from the baseball scores (this was the era of the Big Red Machine). Millard Fillmore, he said. Why? I asked. My father stared at me for an extra beat before replying: Because he didn’t do anything.


That made no sense to my tender ears. So I tried again in 1980, the election year. The speech class teacher asked us to “endorse” a candidate: Carter, Reagan or Anderson? I had no idea, so asked my father.


He looked up from the baseball pages (by then the Reds weren’t doing so well). His jaw literally dropped. He stared at me, his head cocked slightly, like one of the dogs (we had German shepherds) puzzling out some weird noise from the TV (which was frequent: it only caught a signal if I stood on the roof and rotated the antenna).

Perhaps, in that moment, he thought he had failed as a father.


Millard Fillmore, he said finally, and went back to the league standings.


He hadn’t failed; I was merely slow.

I last exercised “the sacred duty and obligation of the citizen” in 1988 or thereabouts. A friend, back from the Army and laid off from the local plant, decided to run for some bullshit county job. I volunteered as campaign manager. His daughter drew a bunch of Vote For My Daddy! posters. I spent an afternoon hanging them in little country stores along the rural routes. To our amazement, he won. Something of a landslide, I recall. He had much to learn about public service: There ain’t but four hours of actual work in a god-damn week, he whispered to me incredulously. And they’re paying me for forty. He looked around furtively. Man, this has got to be illegal. God damn sheriff’s gonna come and impound my ass. He asked around the courthouse: what should I do? His fellow county employees looked at him with pity. Finally he figured it out, and spent those 36 “free” hours/week collecting fallen brush from the local golf course. Fridays he’d build a bonfire between holes 11 and 12 and ruminate on the Great Questions with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes I’d join him. I’d discovered Solzhenitsyn around that time (the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were on my father’s shelves, as were the Dostoevsky novels I’d discovered four years earlier) and had a sense of what the Russians endured under the Bolshevik regime. One of those Fridays (I was young and foolish, so the Wild Turkey likely helped) it struck me: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.



That was 1988, remember. I was young and foolish; the amazing promise of American life wide open before me. But there were already strange things afoot. I had considered a scholarly sort of career: the history of ideas, the history of Christian doctrine, Russian history or literature, the sort of thing that would require multiple advanced degrees. A recruiter from an Ivy League grad school came and pitched its school’s doctoral programs. She spent forty minutes talking about “inclusive language” in the Bible; all this Mists of Avalon type shit about how the Patriarchy Oppressed Strong Women. I decided grad school was not for me and chose what was then called “white man’s welfare”: the U.S. military, in whose combat arms Southerners have until recently been overrepresented[1].



Also in 1988: the publication of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Intellectual types (my father subscribed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, among others) touted it “the definitive history.” I was young and dumb, but I knew an “agenda” when I saw one. McPherson’s first book was a laudatory account the New England abolitionists. His second argued that Emancipation was a “second American revolution.” He’s correct there too, but not in the way he thinks.


More on McPherson in a subsequent chapter, but here’s the TL;DR. McPherson is not a historian. McPherson worked for Princeton, which is a finishing school for the empire’s missionaries. What they teach is what the empire wants you to think. McPherson is an evangelist of the Exceptional Nation, his gospel the eternal righteousness of the American state and its mandate from heaven to advance the cause of freedom by any means necessary. We will drag humanity to outer space kicking and screaming if necessary because we are Americans, it’s who we are because Lincoln. In that he merely revived and put fresh lipstick on the Holy Cause myth invented by the Republicans after the war: Father Abraham a literal prophet, leading “his people” to a New Birth of Freedom, which by necessity demanded the “terrible swift sword” of Sherman and Grant’s armies burning and looting across Georgia and Mississippi.

More on that later. In 1988 Back my primary interest – no, it was a haunting, an obsession – was “the Good War.” My father was drafted in 1942. He trained as a medic and landed at Anzio, fought up the boot of Italy, including Monte Cassino.
He had nightmares about the war sometimes. I would sit outside the bedroom door and listen. He shouted things from the war: stretcher bearers, pressure bandages, god damn it he’s gone.


He spoke only once of the war to me. I was young, maybe in my teens. I still believed much of what I was told. I said Hanson could have written: the courage and sacrifice and heroism of those young men, fighting for ideals, fighting for Freedom.


My father stared at me. It was a strange look: sadness, slight contempt - and something different, something dark that I did not and do not understand.

Finally he snorted. Bullshit, he said. Nobody thought that. It was stoic duty. Get the damn thing done. He made to say more, then stopped.

I waited. He was staring at nothing, his lips pursed, one finger tapping the table. I cleared my throat.

Incomprehensible, my father said. I can't... Then he looked at me. That dark emotion possessed him completely. I would never again see that look in his eyes. That darkness, a black fury, bottomless grief, the abandonment of hope.

What they tell you, he said. Is a lie. It's a goddam lie.



I didn’t realize it, but Providence at that moment assigned me my life purpose: I wanted to know what happened to my father. What is the goddam lie and what is it to do with what he saw in the war; who told the lie and who is repeating it.


That was thirty-seven years ago. This is where my hunt for the goddam lie led me: to my great-great-grandfather, one of General Lee’s men, a soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia who like hundreds and thousands of Southern soldiers fought with a courage and fortitude unmatched by any U.S. Army – to defend their land, the land of my fathers, my father’s land, my land, from the Americans. They fought with unmatched hopeless perhaps because they knew what America would become.


I did not vote for Trump, simply because I do not vote. I am not particularly shocked or outraged by what Musk and his lads have unearthed, and I cannot imagine I’m the only one. The internet has done horrible things, but their crimes cannot be hidden. None of it can be unseen or unheard or buried on page seven because it confirms what we already knew or at least intuited: it’s fake, it’s a fraud, it’s bullshit; the United States is a chaos agent ruled by demons.


Lincoln refounded the “republic,” his cultists claim. Indeed he did. But not as a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” As H.L. Mencken noted, the Confederates fought for self-determination. Not Abe and his conscripts. Abe sought tariffs and taxes to shift to the railroads and banks for Internal Improvements: a public-private partnership, in other words, and if 700,000 had to die, so be it. Yes, Lincoln and the Republicans gave us a “new nation” founded on radical egalitarianism and the belief that God assigned it the task of imposing it on the world at the point of the bayonet.

Dangerous Nation, in the words of Robert Kagan, one of the Kagan neocon clan that has ruled American foreign policy for at least thirty years. “A lot of what the United States wants to do is to bring what we regard as, you know, the blessings of liberty to other peoples.”



This, Kagan and the neocons claim, is what makes America “exceptional”: it, and it alone, has the prerogative of imposing its system upon the rest of the world. Another word for that is “empire.”


America did have a chance to be exceptional. The United States could have remained these United States, a loose confederation small farmers and craftsmen who would prefer to be left alone.


But Lincoln chose empire.


And for all my scathing remarks about “Americans” – I’ll explain what I mean by that in a future chapter – Americans did not want empire. Lincoln won with a minority of the vote in 1860, was reviled throughout the war and may have on in 1864 only by cheating, but was lionized ex post facto by the republicans seeking political advantage. Americans were firmly isolationist after that: majorities, featuring a coalition of poor Southern whites and Scandinavian progressives in the Midwest – opposed U.S. entry into the first world war. In 1940, a poll found that 96% of Americans had no interest in a war with Germany.


But neither Wilson nor FDR liked the sound of that. How dare these Americans decline to fight, die and suffer for our ideals! Fortunately, Lincoln was there to remind us of our duty to fight and kill people we do not know in the name of abstractions tossed about by lying politicians and ideological fanatics.


Perhaps that’s what haunted my father: the sheer volume of lies, their distortion of language, their inversions of meaning and their draining the world of beauty and truth; the way they made it a howling waste where demons now dwell.

Here’s hoping that this really is a “revolution,” as people, and not just the MAGA people, are saying. Both Trump and Vance have stated the U.S. is out of the chaos, war and murder business. That also means an end to the lies.


Defeat can be the impetus for reflection, and reflection to repentance.

For this, Trump deserves some thanks. Because he, alone of the Republicans and the political class in the “West”, had the courage to admit the obvious: Russia won.

Russia won. I’ll repeat that: Russia defeated the Americans. Russia and the United States met on the field of battle and the Americans lost. It’s true. The Ukrainian Army was an American army. Maintain the NATO fiction if you like – and enjoy it while you can -- but the Ukrainians were trained by Americans and supplied by Americans; the Americans planned their operations, the Americans fed them intelligence. Americans sent Boris Johnson to crash the peace deal Zelensky cut with Putin; American vassals like Germany chose to disregard the Minsk agreements. Every drop of blood, every grieving widow, every fatherless child, every freezing apartment block and every acre of that ruined nation: that’s you, Uncle Sam. The same as you did to us, but on a far greater scale. And let’s not even discuss Gaza yet.

The empire of the goddam lie has caused enough misery and thank God Trump stopped it.

And it’s encouraging that Trump, less than a month into his term, is seeking to repair one of the empire’s more odious lies. In 1991 James Baker III, George Bush’s secretary of state, told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not proceed “one inch eastward.”

It only took eight years for the Americans to break Baker’s promise: NATO admitted the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary in 1999 when Clinton was president. Here he tries bullshitting his way out of it via The Atlantic. Here is a more accurate account. The neocon-dominated administration of the hapless George W. Bush first floated the jaw-droppingly stupid idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO in 2007. Obama, it appears, empowered the noxious Victoria Nuland of Team Kagan to organize the color revolution of 2014. Once Biden was installed, the neocons got their heart’s desire: death. Lindsay Graham chortled that it was a great way to “weaken” Russia; what are a few hundred thousand Ukrainian dead to us? And don’t worry about those hillbillies in western North Carolina, what about Israel?

The cynicism, nihilism and outright evil of these American exceptionalist neocons beggars belief.


Baker, born in Houston when it was still a Southern city, was a Texan of the old school. An honorable man, he understood the importance of keeping one’s word for both nations and individuals.

As do the Russians. Not that you’ll learn this at Harvard or Yale, but Russia is known for honoring its obligations, from the time of the Czars until now. As for the Americans?

The United States is notorious for breaking treaties -- wantonly, arrogantly, joyfully. Grant, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, sent George Armstrong Custer to look around. That violated a treaty with the Sioux. Custer and the 7th paid for that at Little Big Horn. Sad! Many such cases.

Trump and Vance’s tacit admission of American duplicity and dishonesty is a most commendable first step to repairing America’s soiled image. And there’s much more that the Trump Administration can, or should, do. Especially on the domestic front.

​I’ve somewhere alluded to the “Great Compromise” or “pact” between the U.S. and the South after the war. Shelby Foote talks about it here:

The TL; didn’t watch is like this: the South agreed to say it was better that their “union” remain “indivisible.” The U.S., for its part, would graciously admit that we fought with courage in a cause we believed was just.


It took a while, but the Americans finally got around to it discarding that one. South Carolina governor and fanatical Republican warmonger Nimrata “Nikki” Haley used the tragic murder of churchgoers as an excuse to remove the Confederate battle flag from where it flew before the State House. Nikki used the “inclusion” argument. The Republicans applauded; they had a winner.


There’s no need to review what happened after the death of George Floyd; other than to note neocons like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal wrote “opinion pieces” slandering General Lee, and the Americans removed the “Reconciliation” monument from Arlington Cemetery.

Which was and is fine by me. The Americans broke the deal, and I am perfectly happy and would prefer to remain unreconciled. Just as is the case with the Russians: there’s an issue of trust and honor.

Trump in his first term refused to strip the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military (e.g., Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Bragg in North Carolina). Biden made it happen, which to be honest was fine with me. I did not want our commanders associated with the U.S.’s mercenary hordes.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (I’m a member) is seeking to right that wrong and have made their case in a letter to Secretary of Defense Hegseth. (Their letter notes “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina — the name ironically assigned by the Americans, has been changed back to Fort Bragg. But not the Confederate general. I’ve been told the U.S. Congress passed a law banning Confederate names from military bases. Like I said, I’m fine with that. The Americans should use names more aligned with their propositions, like The Azov Battalion in Ukraine maybe, or ISIS.

But anyway. Who was it that said there’s always a “second act” in America? Or the opportunity for one? Okay, Uncle Sam. I’ll allow you an undeserved “second act.” You admitted your dishonesty to the Russians. Certainty you will do the same for us, considering we were your first conquest. Here’s my ask:

​

1. Immediate restoration of Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, which USAID-funded rent-a-mobs desecrated in 2020.
2. Immediate replacement of the Charlottesville statue of General Lee, melted down by U.S. activists;
3. The immediate return of the Reconciliation Memorial to Arlington Cemetery;
4. The Arlington Estate returned to the Lee family, and the United States pay back rent, with interest, from 1861 onward, for those portions of the estate used for the veterans of America’s wars;
5. The City of Memphis fund a proper grave memorial for General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Columbia, Tennessee after their desecration of his grave in 2017;
6. The City of Dallas restore the statue of General Lee it removed in 2017 and the Confederate War Memorial removed in 2020;
7. San Antonio restore the Confederate monument it removed from Travis Park in 2017;
8. Houston restore the statue of Col. Richard Dowling it removed in 2020; and with regard to the Texas cities, a public apology from Governor Greg Abbott. He, like too many Texans in those cities, has too much of the Bushie carpetbagger and thinks like the Chamber of Commerce;
9. The City of New Orleans restore Lee Circle and the Beauregard monument;
10. David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal and Ty Seidule publicly stripped of rank and decorations, dishonorably discharged and pensions revoked; they will become employees of the National Park Service and serve as janitors at the tomb of U.S. Grant.

​The mayors and governing assemblies who approved these desecrations will fund the restorations from their own pockets. Liens will be attached to the entirety of their personal estates until the restorations are complete and all damages paid. Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia who spearheaded the destruction, will bear responsibility for the entirety of Monument Avenue; if any remains of his estate, it will be used to restore other monuments destroyed during his governorship.

​
So there’s your beginning. When you’re done, come back for another ten. This isn’t going to be easy. Repentance never is. The damage you’ve done is great. We want it all restored. Everything.

​I was born on the fifth anniversary – or was it the third? Or second? It doesn't matter – of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law. You and Freedom are twins! My parents used to say that. They were in Washington for the signing. Both were born in the Deep South but met at Yale, that finishing-school for the missionaries of Americanism. When better to launch a new one than after the great triumph of World War II, with FDR scamming Churchill out of the British Empire? We must continue the great work of Father Abraham! So my parents returned to the South, on fire to lift the South from its Stygian darkness of racist oppression.


I am not old (or that's what I am told). But I have always felt out of place, out of time, and even more so now. I am ancient, lost, alien. I do not like the "American Century." Kennedy's assassination and the elevation of LBJ broke something, I am convinced, or rendered the U.S. unfixable; it is as though governance of the nation passed to those who hate it. Vietnam; stagflation; the "false dawn" of Reagan, whose great "achievement" was the unleashing of Milton Friedmanism, aka the neoliberal economic order. Capital must be free to cross borders – provided it is denominated in U.S. dollars -- freedom of cross-border dollar-denominated capital flows; it is the duty of the corporation to prioritize shareholder returns; if margins must be bolstered by wholesale layoffs, so be it. Reagan's "revolution" also unleashed the private equity/private credit industry to practice some of that neoliberal-approved "creative destruction." Buy a company with junk bonds; load it with debt; pay oneself a dividend and fire workers to support cash flow; strip and sell the assets; and shift any remaining operations to a low-wage domicile. Citizens are no more than units of economic consumption – "consumers," they are called, like cattle. The business of America is business, and business requires "growth," and if mass layoffs are needed to show "growth," then that's what the C-suite shall do. If your job got sent to China or Vietnam – well, numb your pain with Oxycontin, approved by the FDA.


Sorry to be a downer, Uncle Sam, but I don't think you've deployed your "talents" wisely.

Grandma once told me a story that she had from her mother. It was the summer of 1864. A Confederate officer galloped up the plantation drive. Sherman and the Americans were coming, he said. And indeed, they could see, just on the horizon, the flags fluttering in the breeze. They – all of them, the women that would be my great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother and the twenty-nine slaves – fled to the forest to hide.


They heard shouting, gunfire, the screams of horses. Soon smoke and the reek of the burning drifted through the trees drifted through the trees and the reek of the burning. When they returned two days later, it was all gone but for charred timber and blackened bricks.


The Americans, Grandma said, killed the livestock. All of them, or such as remained: a milk cow, two hogs, the team of mules, the horses, the pony my great-grandmother rode. They just shot them, Grandma said. Shot them and left them to die. Mama said her pony was wheezing, she held the poor thing's head. Why? I asked Grandma. I was ten or thereabouts. We were on the porch looking toward the pond. Early evening in August, when the setting sun seemed to gild the air itself. They were just mean people, she said. Maybe the war made them mean. Something sour in them. Well, Grandma. Conservative "intellectual" Victor Davis Hanson would like a word with you. Hanson LARPs as a farmer but IRL he is the Martin and Allie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in California. His focus is classics and military history, and he considers himself an "expert" on "the American way of war." He, like the odious Reynolds, came to prominence during the neocon salad days, banging his fists for regime change. Remember when Bloody Bill Kristol had that cruise ship scam going? Hanson was a regular. He would say things like this: "In this new age the American military does not like fascists, and it thus will unleash horrific power to eliminate autocrats like Noriega, Molosevic, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein." Here is an example of Hanson's wretched prose: he is aping Churchill, or Churchill's ghost-writers, who themselves were aping the Georgians:

That is a little dated, obviously (it's also on National Review, to which I won't link).  Perhaps you noticed Hanson beating the drums for Trump recently?  He even made The Case for Trump – that's a book, and no link from me.  Page after page of bombastic bullshit, an ex-warmonger sucking up to the new boss – who, if nothing else, has made the right noises about the wars Hanson cheered on with passion.  Well, Trump is from New York, so he knows whores. 

 
So, Hanson. These fascists.  How shall we know them?  Anyone who opposes American power.  Unleash horrific power on a girl's pony?  War is hell.  Americans approve. Recently, in Vicksburg, I struck up a conversation with a retired autoworker from Toledo, second-generation Polish, a Civil War buff.  Favorite general? Sherman. He showed the traitors that war is hell. I thought of my grandmother's story. I reminded myself that he was only repeating what he'd learned from the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. Then I remembered an urgent doctor's appointment and apologized to my new friend. I had to hurry! First, though, I gave him directions to the Port Gibson battlefield.  The "scenic route," of course.  He should be near Amarillo by now.  
 
 
The Toledo man is a soulmate to Hanson, who cherishes Sherman.  Somewhere in Hanson's "Private Papers" on his website is a nasty screed describing the American sack of Columbia, South Carolina.  Hanson describes the burning and destruction carried out by those "brave midwestern farmboys" like a degenerate pornographer would an orgy.  There's a book called The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny.  Uncle Billy is a "great liberator." Then there's this one, called The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost. "Cump" is one, needless to say.  Another is David Petraeus.  You remember Petraeus.  He emerged as the "hero" of the Iraq disaster in that he put enough lipstick on the pig to carry Bush II across the line for his second term.  Petraeus was talked up as the second coming of Grant.  We agree; both are utterly overrated by the Americans, but we understand they don't have a deep bench of military heroes. 
 

Back to Petraeus, the Savior General. That appellation did not age well, did it, Hanson? We think Hanson was whoring himself after Savior Dave. Maybe he wanted to be invited to lunch at some Pentagon command center. Anyway, Savior Dave got named head of the CIA. But then he got himself into trouble – lined up a little piece of ass on the side or was a bit loose with security procedures or some stupid bullshit.  The CIA found that problematic and fired him.  Was it a #MeToo thing? We neither know nor care; it's probably some stupid bureaucratic infighting.  But fear not,  Savior Dave landed at KKR & Co., the legendary private equity shop that can always find a home for an American patriot.  Savior Dave is Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a properly pompous title for a man of Savior Dave's accomplishments. So, what's he doing for KKR? He makes introductions. He provides access. He is a bridge between the American killing machine and the pools of capital needed to fund it.  What's in it for Dave?  What could there be after the excitement of commanding men in battle?  "The upside of joining KKR is obvious: mad stupid loot."  

 
But that's the American way, that's what Americans do, and so it's okay. But some stuff is not okay. Petraeus considers General Lee a "traitor." As does Stanley McChrystal and Mark Milley, and who knows how many more of the fifth-rate losers, shitasses, nonentities, flunkies and degenerates who command what Hanson calls the "the world's finest military." The architects of farces like the Afghanistan bugout, the disaster of Iran and the ultra-expensive weapons systems that haven't been working all that well against the Russians.  

 
Petraeus also demands the names of "traitor" Confederates be stripped from American military bases.  Well, Savior Dave. That's one place where we agree.  Ain't it good to talk these things out?  Here's what it is: I do not want the names of our men, of Southern men associated in any way, shape or form with the mercenary hordes that are the American armed forces, which have never in their history fought to defend the interests of the people that live here.  What do you think of that, Dave?  Something else, Dave: Got this new thing I'm doing. Do you want to hear it?  You heard of Antifa? Got this thing called AntiRec. I'm gonna part the pickup outside the recruiting office and every time I see a kid even glancing at the door – I'm gonna pop out of my truck and convince him otherwise. And I'll start by telling him what a piece of shit you are, Savior Dave, and no way he should fight for a commander like you for a nation that hates him.  

 
I mentioned my father, the Yale man.  You may have intimated he was not the Skull & Bones, Boola Boola type, which he wasn't.  His father was a railroad man on the old Louisville & Nashville.  He was the first of the family to go to college.  He used to say that were it not for "the war" he would have been an auto mechanic in the sawgrass of Alabama. 

 
He was drafted in 1942, trained as a medic.  His divison fought in Italy: he was at Anzio, Monte Cassino.  Sometimes he had nightmares, shouted in his sleep: terrible things. The "Greatest Generation" stuff infuriated him. So did "Company of Heroes" and the "Saving Private Ryan" stuff.  He did not like Italians: too noisy, the hand gestures. But he admired Germans. His closest friends were a German, who spent the war in South America (a family of brewers) and an Austrian, whose father, a Lutheran pastor, vanished into the maelstrom of the Russian front.  

 
He spoke only once of the war to me. I was young, maybe in my teens. I still believed much of what I was told. I said Hanson could have written: the courage and sacrifice and heroism of those young men, fighting for ideals, fighting for Freedom. 

 
My father stared at me. It was a strange look: sadness, slight contempt – and something different, something dark that I did not and do not understand.  

 
Finally he snorted.  Bullshit, he said.  Nobody thought that.  It was stoic duty.  Get the damn thing done.  He made to say more, then stopped.  

 
I waited.  He was staring at nothing, his lips pursed, one finger tapping the table.  I cleared my throat.  

 
Incomprehensible, my father said. I can't. . . Then he looked at me. That dark emotion possessed him completely. I would never again see that look in his eyes.  That darkness, a black fury, bottomless grief, the abandonment of hope.  

 
What they tell you, he said.  Is a lie.  It's a goddam lie.  

 
"The Good War" is one of the High Holies of America, just like Lincoln's war.  America the good, America the liberator, America granted the divine right to impose its universal values on the entire world, and by the bayonet if needed.  The South's role in its ridiculous fantasy? We are the cautionary tale, the road less travelled, the "original sin" that must be expunged from the body politic; we must die so that America might live and fully realize its promise.  When the Americans say, "That's not who we are," Southerners are who, or what, the Americans desperately do not want to be. 
 

Again, grounds for agreement.  I do not want to be an American. 
 

Shelby Foote once said we struck a deal with the Americans. We would fight in their wars, slave in their factories, pump the oil and keep the machinery working and putting up with their stupid insults with good humor – provided they kept their disgusting fingers from our monuments and our memories.  
 

And they broke the deal. They lied. Has America ever honored an obligation?  Americans break treaties with abandon, justifying themselves with the same abstractions used for all of their monstrous deeds: freedom, justice, equality.  The Americans have not only drained those words of meaning: they have positively inverted them. Was it Kissinger who said it's dangerous to be an ally of the Americans?  Ask the English, or the French.  Or the Germans, de-industrialized by that mysterious Nordstream explosion.  Is someone seeking to reduce Germany to a nation of peasant agriculturalists. 
 

It does, though, remove me from an obligation to them.  I do realize it's ridiculous; I cannot change my passport.  But I want nothing to do with any "polity" whose national myth is a bullshit defamation of the Southern people.  I want nothing to do with your flag, and your Air Force flyovers at the football games, your Black Friday sales, your endless movie remakes and whatever else it is that makes you Americans.  A "nation of ideas," you say.  A "propositional nation"; assent to these four points and you and your family are and will forever be, Americans.  
 

That is not a nation.  That's a political party.  I don't assent to your bullshit propositions.  Am I now officially not an American?   
​

I am, as it happens, nobody in particular.  Several years ago, I cut loose from a long career on or adjacent to Wall Street. I had the sense of a bad moon rising.  I sold out and made myself scarce pre-Trump's first term and pre-covid.  It's been a long drift sense then, much of it untangling family history and identifying those in my woodpile who wore the gray.  There's quite a few once you get into cousins and whatnot, but with both branches of the family here since the 1660s they've spread out a bit. 

 
I landed first in Odessa, on the Staked Plain of West Texas; one ancestor ended there after the war; a street bears our surname.  Odessa itself is in Ector County, named for General Matthew Ector, CSA; a separate ancestor served under him in the 10th Texas Cavalry (dismounted).  Then Comanche County, Texas; two families fled the ruins of North Georgia and ended here; their descendants remain.  Trinity County, Texas: some of my folks came here from Mississippi in the 1840s; some of them enlisted in the 5th Texas Infantry, the "Bloody Fifth" of the Texas Brigade.  Louisiana: a very distant relation to Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the commander of the Louisiana Tigers; the Cajun branch of the family is around New Iberia and St Mary Parishes.  The Anglo branch, which settled in Rapides Parish on a Spanish land grant, disappeared during the war. 

 
I am now in Mississippi. Vicksburg drew me, one might say. My people were here: regiments from Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Americans try to make Vicksburg about Grant.  The quiet man from Galena, an "everyman" sort of hero; you can easily imagine him staggering into a gas station in Crocs for a case of Bud Light.  But it is not.  This is not Grant's city.  There is a statue of Grant in the military park, and he can stay there.  

 
Vicksburg is no longer the prosperous hub of commerce it was in the days of King Cotton. Cross Clay Street into the historic district, and there is no detritus of Americanism.  There is no neon, no fast food, no strip malls and none of the cheap, prefab ugliness that characterizes the modern American landscape. It's a Southern Rivendell, in a way.  Here the memory and beauty of old things is preserved.  

 
Vicksburg is ours.  It is and will forever be a Southern city, anointed with the blood of the men and women – black and white, Southerners all – who fought, suffered, died and endured there.  The state of Mississippi will be the last to surrender, I think, to the ugliness of Americanism, and Vicksburg will be the last to fall.  And if the Americans come again, I'll post myself at the Railroad Redoubt, where the Texans beat back the last American attempt to storm the city.  
 
 
And so here I am, a ghost among ghosts.  But a ghost with a memory; one that has seen, and read the forbidden things, and noticed.  

 
This memoir, then, is my small act of resistance.  I will make known my lineage to all of you, as did the Saxon warrior in the opening poem. I will make known my lineage to all of you, and explain, to the best of my ability, what happened when the Americans came. 
​
 
Consider it a work of comparative demonology, if you will.   ​

AND SO CAME THE DAY I LONG EXPECTED: THE AMERICANS, LIKE THE RAMPAGING PIRATES OF THE OLD ENGLISH POEM, MADE TO BREAK OUR KINSMAN AND LORD.  Workmen – anonymous, imported from abroad as Lincoln did so much of that mercenary hordes who secured their citizenship in this "the last, best hope of earth" by their murder of our people and the plunder of our lands – took up their torches and cutting tools and set to work.
 
First the Americans beheaded him.  Then they ripped away his limbs, tore his arms from his shoulders and his legs from his torso.  They piled his parts like so much garbage.  A special desecration was reserved for his head.
 
The American newspaper serving the imperial capital and its legions of bootlickers, lackeys, thugs, murderers, cowards, thieves, fanatics and liars, all of the Americans who flooded the administrative district once known as Northern Virginia.  (I do note that the state is no longer "blue"; it's now administered by a Republican private equity bro, which is almost as bad.) The story profiled the two "activists" and their long struggle through the iron dark of racist oppression to achieve this, to witness and celebrate this . . . what is this?  Revenge?  Payback for a lifetime of microaggressions?  The photographer posed the activists, gazing somberly into the middle distance.  One, as I recall, was leaning against a tree.
 
They were Southerners, like me, from the African branch of our people.  Both are near my age, with faces worn and mournful.  Familiar faces, then, born of the same earth as me, an earth soaked with our sorrow and blood and mourning.  Yes, there was darkness and horror but there was kindness, decency and millions of small graces unremarked by all but God.  I felt no anger, no rage, only sorrow: Forgive them, Lord.  They know not what they do.
 
There are others, though, who knew what they were doing.  The spite, the hatred, the petty malice.  The South's purpose in the ugly arcana of American power is to be mocked, humiliated, scourged.  Rapid-reaction historians, expert at reducing the complexity of history to a simple Manicheanism that supports American power; "thought leaders" assigned to re-write "narrative" to align with America's inhuman aspirations; lies larded with hatred and amplified able to summon shrieking covens of college-educated hags who gibber and prance around our monuments, frothing and spitting with rage.  A college professor instructs how best to topple an obelisk commemorating our dead.  A speaker of the Virginia house of Burgesses – not a Virginia native – orders a statue of our chief evicted from the old statehouse in Richmond.  A congresswoman from another district inserts language into a bill requiring the removal of our monuments from the fields where our people died defending our land from those people – the Americans.  The "new people" of the "new nation" summoned into being by Abraham Lincoln's incantation of a few stupid Enlightenment abstractions.
 
Americans.  Here's an American: the former administrator of Virginia who selfied himself and his wife smirking like the shit-tier goblins while behind them, great cranes ripped the statues from Monument Circle in Richmond.  Or Louisiana native Rod Dreher,  a deeply sensitive man who cares profoundly for the feelings of others.  He soberly concluded that our monuments must come down because former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said in this speech that feelings were hurt, and there's nothing more precious to America than feels.  Or Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the founder of Instapundit, a blog popular among the Fox News/Christian Zionist boomer demographic.  He came to prominence as a rapid supporter of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and any exercise of American power; he was an early cheerleader for Ukraine and promulgator of the "Russia is a gas station with an army" notion.  His specialty, by the way, is "space law" and "constitutional law." Reynolds is a conduit for the agitprop created by Dennis Prager, whose PragerU is a reliable dispenser of brain-hammering stupidity: Dems r the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln; our monuments are "participation trophies" for losers; Sherman showed how to win wars, he showed you traitors and all you enemies of the USA watch our, or you're gonna get Shermaned. USA!  USA!  USA!
 
So the Americans threw the head of our chief into the furnace.  The photographer captured the moment.  You may have seen the picture.  The molten bronze coursed from the hollow eyes, over his cheeks, and mingled with his beard.  Weeping for a fallen America, some said.  I was struck by the sheer petty viciousness and spite of it all.  Something surreal and Old Testament about it, Amalek eradicated: all of our works bulldozed away, the earth plowed with salt.  To make it as though he – and we – had never existed.
 
The Americans failed.  They failed because we do not forget.  His face and his name and his deeds are burned into the memory of every Southerner, hard-coded into our DNA.  Perhaps it is ill-remembered or buried beneath the garbage and stupidity of Americanism.  I would know him anywhere; I would know him if I were blind.
 
I would follow that old man into hell.  That's what our folks said then, and I say it now.
 
On May 17, 1861, my great-great-grandfather signed his name on the muster roll of a regiment organizing in his state's capitol.  He was twenty-four, married with a son who became my great-grandfather one day.  His brother, 18, enlisted the same day.  Their term: for the duration of the war.
 
The regiment traveled by train to Richmond and was mustered into the service of the Southern states in June.  It was posted at Yorktown and in May 1862, "won its first laurels" at Williamsburg, blocking the Americans under McClellan from advancing on Richmond.  Another tough fight came in early June at Seven Pines.  Joseph Johnstone, the commanding general, was wounded.  Jefferson Davis appointed General Robert E. Lee to replace him.  General Lee named his new command the Army of Northern Virginia.
 
For four my great-great grandfather followed Marse Robert.  He was one of Lee's men, a soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia: one of those hard and wolfish Southerners who at Gaines Mill unleashed – perhaps for the first time, and maybe because they were fighting for General Lee – the fearsome, terrible Rebel Yell, that battle-cry unique to the Southern soldiers, derived from some ancestral memory of Saxon and British and Irish war-bands.
 
General Lee and his army cleared the Peninsula of McClellan, then turned west to "suppress," as General Lee put it, the "miscreant" Pope. Pope's "Army of Virginia" was flicked aside almost contemptuously.  My great-great grandfather's regiment came under heavy fire but stood in reserve for the battle.
 
During the Maryland campaign, my great-great-grandfather saw General Lee.  The army was on the march toward a town called Sharpsburg.  They passed General Lee, who stood on a stone beside the turnpike watching them pass.  The regimental commander remembers:

​The regiment took part in the capture of Harper's Ferry, then quick-marched to Sharpsburg.  Their arrival with the corps of A.P. Hill was fortuitous – the Southern line was bending.  The regiment was deployed to the Bloody Lane and beat back the American attacks.  He was granted sick leave after Sharpsburg.  The complaint was "phthisis." His daughter was conceived on that visit.  He never met her.  She did not survive the war.  Nor did he see his son or his wife or his home again.  He returned to Virginia in April 1863 as the Army of Northern Virginia maneuvered against an Army of the Potomac, this time commanded by "Mr. F.J. Hooker."
 
At Chancellorsville, General Lee split his outnumbered army not once but twice in defiance of every maxim of military science; no American has ever matched the audacity of Jackson's march around the American flank and that attack on the evening of May 2, 1862.  It is easy to conjure the picture.  The evening sun winds down.  The soldiers of the American 11th Corps – primarily German immigrants, as it happens, are frying up their bacon and hardtack.  Then, mysteriously, woodland creatures streak from the thickets: chipmunks, bobwhites, rabbits.  Fritz and Hans trade puzzled looks.  Was ist das?
 
Then, all at once – bugles, bugles, bugles; the Rebel Yell erupts as Jackson's men burst from the woods.  The attack shattered the American 11th Corps, though at terrible cost, and scattered Hooker's army.  Charles Marshall, an aide to General Lee, describes the following day:

Then came the march to Gettysburg.
 
My great-great grandfather's regiment, part of Longstreet's corps, took part in the July 2 attack on Cemetery Ridge.  The Southerners broke the American line but could not exploit it without reserves.  Half of the regiment fell.  An American cannonball carried away his brother's foot.  My great-great-grandfather was captured.  Perhaps he was trying to carry his brother to safety.
 
But that was the last time they saw each other: the carnage of Longstreet's attack.  My great-great-grandfather escaped and rejoined the army in Virginia.  His brother endured three amputations: the first at the ankle, the second at the knee and finally the upper hip.  A shot of whiskey, a bullet between the teeth and three men to hold him down; they cauterized the wound with a torch.  He survived and raised my great-grandfather.  

In May 1864 a fresh Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan.  The ostensible commander was George Meade, but the new overall commander of the American armies came along.  This was, of course, U.S. Grant, the "quiet man from Galena." In Mexico, Grant served with the quartermasters in a "rear with the gear" sort of role.  So he understood logistics and the importance of accumulating mountains of supply and moving them most efficiently from point A to point B.  He would have made a first-rate regional VP for UPS.  But he was an innovator in his way: he pioneered germ warfare by pitching dead horses into the Vicksburg water supply during the siege.  More importantly, he grasped the iron logic of attrition, as Lincoln did.  Neither cared how much blood was shed, provided their "union" was "preserved."
 
Plenty of new Americans in the ranks, too.  The eager volunteers of Lincoln's first call-ups were dead or at the end of their three-year enlistments.  There were a good number of fanatical, New England abolitionist types among them, the sorts that would be pussy-hat wearing male feminists or whatever the current thing may be.  Plenty of draftees, despite the carnage of the New York City draft riots the prior year; more than a few were the sweepings of the New York and Boston gutters.  One-third were foreign-born; Lincoln sent agents to Germany and Ireland or recruited sergeants to greet the immigrant ships.  It's remarkable how many of the American generals were habitually drunk; a few even experimented with opioids, the new miracle drug.
 
This was the "Grand Army of the Republic" that Grant led across the Rapidan to commence the brutal Overland Campaign.  First, the Wilderness, a tangled wasteland where the skulls of the Chancellorsville dead protruded from shallow graves.  My great-great grandfather's regiment was "hotly engaged" there; it "suffered greatly" at Spotsylvania, where it spent a night in the "Bloody Angle." The regimental history records that it was under fire daily as Grant tried to flank the Army of Northern Virginia.  The North Anna, Cold Harbor, where Grant threw musicians into the slaughter.  He finally managed to get across the James, at the cost of 50,000 men, the size of General Lee's army.  But Grand failed to take Petersburg.  So he fell back on the one thing that had worked.  A siege.  That was the beginning of the end.
 
My great-great-grandfather died on January 20, 1865, in Howards Grove Hospital in Richmond.  The cause of death was phthisis, the complaint that got him the sick leave in 1863.  The contemporary name is tuberculosis.  He must have had it when he enlisted.
 
And he enlisted for the duration.  Did he, at some point, kick himself for making a terrible mistake?  Did he consider trying to wrangle a medical discharge?  Did he try?  Did he consider, when on that sick leave, just staying?  Did he consider just going home when he escaped the Americans after Gettysburg?  Collecting his wife, son, and daughter he had never seen and fleeing somewhere new?  California?  Mexico?  Canada?
 
Whatever he may have thought: he did not abandon his comrades nor his oath of service to General Lee.
 
Perhaps he had some premonition of the fruits of American victory.  Maybe he saw the demons Lincoln had summoned with his abstractions and how Lincoln fed them with the blood of those murdered in his war of conquest.  Perhaps he saw that the Americans would realize the fantastic, incredible profits that could be accrued by war and conquest, that an all-powerful central government most efficiently manages wars.  And that this "new nation" of Lincoln's would, in short order, become aggressive abroad and despotic at home; and that the Americans had discovered the secret of tarting up the most wicked of crimes with high-minding abstractions: freedom, justice, "all men created equal." That America would become an exporter of degenerate perversion – OnlyFans, pornography – and an importer of low-wage serfs to keep the profit machines humming.
 
Perhaps he saw the desecration of the monument to General Lee.  And maybe he saw all of this in the last days of his illness, shivering in the trenches of Petersburg, barefoot and wrapped in a thin blanket, maybe a chunk of fatty bacon and a handful of parched corn in his belly.
 
Better death than submit to these people, he may have thought.  Better to die than to be an American.
 
He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, the location recorded in a book.  Once the state budgeted a minuscule amount for its upkeep.  That was cut by the Democratic governor and legislature cut that: another display of the nasty, petty, mean-spirited viciousness that characterizes the American national character.
 
The Sons of Confederate Veterans now maintain the cemetery and keeps the record book.  They helped locate his grave and plant a headstone.

Regarding Afghanistan. There is nothing to say that has not been said better by those, both believers and heretics, better versed in the theology of the “American century,” the “rules-based world order” over which the “indispensable nation” has presided since the largely peaceful dismantling of the godless authority in Russia. And with what such shambolic and shameful consequence: the collapse of a bargain-bin Roman Empire as imagined by a screenwriters with the mental horizons sense of pornographers. That the “last, best hope of mankind” is incompetent, ineffective, corrupt, vicious, stupid, cowardly before foes and treacherous to friends should come as no surprise, particularly to that portion of the population – a not-insignificant one, perhaps even a plurality – whose memories and monuments it is desecrating.  And upon whom it has declared war.

For the record: I was in the financial district on the morning of 9/11. A trading desk on the 47th floor of a skyscraper; it shuddered when the planes struck the Trade Center. I saw the gaping axe-wound in the side of the South Tower and reams of paper, gilded by the bright late-summer sun, spiraling against a sky of perfect blue. Like millions in America, I bellowed for the head of bin Laden, cheered on the invasion of Afghanistan, “stood with” our heroes in camouflage. A cousin was killed in Iraq, at the second storming of Fallujah; another cousin, his brain literally shaken by Taliban IEDs that burst beneath his Bradley Fighting Vehicle, still struggles with PTSD. And twenty years later I “stand with” the Biden collective’s decision  to scurry, like roaches in the kitchen when you turn on the lights, from the “grave of empires.” And God forgive me, my soul swims in a swamp of “schadenfreude” as murky and grim as the Atchafalaya in winter, if I may deploy that wonderful German word describing the satisfaction that comes from the humiliation of a contemptible foe. It would seem that the imperial haruspices – I mean you, Walter Russell Mead, and you as well, V.D. Hanson, Bill Kristol, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, all of you – misread the entrails on the altar, the divine mandate to “trample out the vintage” of democratic capitalism against foes sneeringly described as stone-age goatherds. 

Looks like the antique traditions of these tribal primitives, and their devotion to Allah, girded them with a courage, strength and resolution utterly unimaginable in the United States.

The pathetic spectacle, and the quivering jellylike caruncles of American military men (let us recall that the likes of David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal solicited Twitter likes by denouncing General Robert E. Lee as a “traitor”) must be seen in the context of the “national holiday” that still lands (but for how long?) in the first week of July. Between advertisements for once-in-a-lifetime savings on flat-screen TVs, Chinese lounge chairs and i-devices “designed in California” the general public was ecstatically informed by the usual lot of hectoring commissars that the American flag – “Old Glory,” the “Stars and Stripes” – is as racist, white supremacist and all the other unspeakable “ists” as the banner of the Confederacy.  It must needs be replaced, post-haste, just as Francis Scott Key’s hoary jingle was largely discarded for “Let Every Voice Sing.”  And why not? Times and values change, do they not? “There is no resting place, no final destination for this process. The real goal of Anglo-American civilization is to get the permanent revolution well and truly underway. We are launching a space ship, not building a rest home.” 

That flag, their flag – beneath which Sherman’s hordes plundered, burned and raped their way through Georgia, beneath which the ruined South became a captive producer of raw materials and a nursery of infantrymen for the schemes of Washington and New York – never commanded my allegiance. Its degradation troubled me not in the least. The revolution – Lincoln’s revolution, the revolution of equality, of the propositional abstractions, of the word-games of the intellectuals – is devouring its own; that flag of theirs is just an amuse-bouche. 

And yet, and yet. I’ve got perfectly good reasons to reject their flag. But it’s another thing entirely when Old Glory is trampled underfoot by those who have benefited the most from its “dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And for hundreds of millions – no few of which are here in the South – that banner doesn’t represent an invading army, a colonial oppressor, a Tupperware of warmed-over John Locke that smells a bit suspicious. No, it stands for the primordial loyalties of family and home. One remembers New York’s Hard Hat Riots of the early Seventies, when construction workers waved it defiantly against leftist anti-war protestors, Columbia and Yale and Harvard students pandered to and cheered on by Republican Mayor John Lindsay. The hard hats were primarily Irish and Italian, the “wretched refuse” of the outerboroughs, held in utmost contempt by their Northeastern private school overlords, who with rural Southerners dominated the combats units deployed into the steaming deltas of the Mekong. 

My closest friends during my time in New York City – and they remain my closest friends – were Irish. They, and the Irish in general, are as brave, loyal, noble, charitable, honorable and hospitable a people as God has ever created. My friends, like me, were a generation or two separated from the backbreaking, dirty work of the factory and the farm; their fathers had been tradesmen or cops or firemen; they’d been the first of the family to go to college and many had memories of what brought them to these shores: the “Great Hunger,” the famine of the 1840s. For them, the American flag meant, literally, life, and a better life for their posterity. For them, the “American dream” was not the invention of Edward Bernays or Voice of America propagandists. It would be uncharitable to sneer at their devotion to the Stars and Stripes and to the nation that opened its arms to them. Just as one cannot easily dismiss the American flags that decorate millions of front yards and porches throughout the conquered South. 

Indeed, the American flag has become nothing less than a symbol of defiance – a sign of the realization that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Could it be that the sons of Confederate veterans and Union privates, the descendants of the peasants of Georgia and Alabama and Louisiana and of Galway, Cork and Tipperary – and Northumberland, and East Anglia, and Mercia and Wessex and Wales and Cornwall, and of Lazio, Campania and Sicily, of Bavaria and Saxony and the Rhineland, all the men of the West – will unite against that that horned beast in Washington?

Many on the “right” – our friends and neighbors, who contribute dutifully to the campaign coffers of Jon Cormyn, Ted Cruz, Dan Crenshaw, Lindsay Graham – sincerely believe that (as suggested by various polls) that the Democrats, the party of the “real racists,” will be wiped out in the midterms, that an inevitable backlash will cleanse the Augean stables of Congress. And that a “restoration of the republic” will then commence. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing to restore. Some of our friends are beginning to conclude, as many have many Southerners, that the state of these United States in the current year is the inevitable and entirely predictable consequence of the demon discovered in the “Founding Documents” and unleashed – first on the South, and since then upon the world – by Lincoln, and amplified first by America’s industrial might, and more lately and with far more baleful effect, by its totalitarian control of what was once known as “culture.”

Wilmore Kendall is quite correct that Lincoln’s elevation of “equality” as the teleological purpose of the American nation represented a derailment of what the Founders had in mind. But the assumptions of the Enlightenment larded throughout their various compositions provided him with the necessary tools. 

In Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, the socialist Liputin – a “miser and moneylender,” a “crude family despot” who “locked up candle ends and the leftovers from dinner” and who is yet a “fierce sectarian of God knows what future ‘social harmony,’” bleats of the “universal human language,” “the language of the universally human social republic and harmony.” Stavrogin, the icy nihilist, laughs in his face. “Pah, the devil, but there is no such language!”

“There is no such language.” Dostoevsky meant the Enlightenment’s toxic phantasmagoria that made corrupt, sinful and arrogant man the measure of all things, the smirking atheism of the philosophes that thought to show God the door and liberate mankind from the idiocies of Tradition and make him a “citoyen du monde civilise” – in other words, reconstitute the being of man and the foundations of the life in the world. We should be grateful that the Founders’ Enlightenment was the English version, and thus less bloodthirsty than that of the French, or of the Marxist derivatives imported to Russia.  Yes, there is much to admire about the Founders; but we must admit that the “founding” was the production of men educated in and reliant upon the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment.  We can joust with footnotes until we’re blue on the question of the Founders’ embrace, or rejection, of the Calvinist Protestantism they brought from England, but it is undeniable that the God of the Founding Documents – “nature’s God” – is the God of the philosophers, the encyclopedists, the God of the watchmaker, the God of human abstractions. 

Men have forgotten God, Solzhenitsyn said. And nowhere has God been more forgotten and with more apparent success than in the brutalist concrete and steel and bulletproof glass of American economic and cultural power, a process that began with Lincoln’s gnostic proposition of equality in the name of a “new nation” leavened by the blood and destruction of the South. Lincoln replaced God with an Enlightenment fiction, and made a God of the “Union,” a God that would, supported the wealth of the continent and the ingenuity of the people, bend that arc of History toward Justice. “Teleocratic politics,” in the words of Michael Oakeshott, an indefinable abstraction the highest “moral law.” With justice defined as the herding of humanity, at the point of bayonet or the lure of lucre and convenience provision of consumer products, toward the triumph of unfettered individual desire over duty, family, homeland and all of the old loyalties. 

The American God – the invention, the idol, the Moloch of Enlightenment philosophes – is unnatural, unhuman, anti-human. It rejects the hard-won wisdom of the ages; it sneers at tradition; its Jerusalem is the neon-lit City of Man, a sort of Supermall of America. The Pilgrim’s Progress of the United States is the coming of Christian to the City, where, cheered on by Mr. Diversity, Mr. Inclusion and Mr. Equity, he casts off the old gods and the old ways, changes his blood and reconstitutes his being according to the prevailing perversions and degeneracies. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”  Is the growing popularity of Satanism in the United States any surprise at all?

“What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything he has not planted?” Oliver Cromwell once said. The Puritans get a lot of grief, much of it undeserved – their New England Unitarian and Transcendentalist descendants, deluded by Hegelian notions of the World-Spirit, are the proper objects of ire – but one cannot accuse the colonel of the Ironsides and Lord-General of the New Model Army of lacking humility before the majesty and honor of God. 

I humbly suggest that a return to the “principles of the Founders” is no solution. 

​We cannot, we are told, recover the past, return to some old Arcadia. But we can recover the old wisdom, the virtues of our fathers. 

An Anglo-Saxon poet, one of our distant fathers, described a battle between the his people and the Vikings in 991 at Maldon near the Blackwater River in Essex. Byrhtnoth, the Saxon Ealdorman of Essex, is cut down by Viking swords. The shield-wall breaks; the Saxons begin to flee. Then the warrior Aelfwine stands and rallies the warriors. Aelfwine speaks:

“I will make known my lineage to all of you.”

Aelfwine does not thunder abstractions; he does not urge his Saxon comrades to fight in the name of liberty, justice, equality, freedom, diversity, inclusion, equity or individual rights and personal autonomy. He rallies them by reminding them of who they are, and of the loyalties and duties owed to their lineage, and to their posterity. To their homes, to their land, to their people.

“I will make known my lineage to all of you.” This would be incomprehensible to the likes of Mark Milley, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. But not to General Robert E. Lee, nor for the soldiers he led in battle. It’s no wonder they want to desecrate their monuments and dishonor their memory.

“I will make known my lineage to all of you.” This is tradition and it speaks to the mystic means by which we are composed of our past, guided by it, and owe a debt of honor to it – not the least of which is its transmission to our children When God spoke to Moses, He identified himself as the God of the Fathers. When Christ transfigured before the Disciples on Mount Tabor, with Him were Moses and Elijah – men, not principles, propositions or abstractions, but the prophets of the God of the Fathers. 

​Aelfine’s words are a trumpet-peal of clear and almost unimaginable purity over the wreck, ruin and corruption of this dark, murderous and disgraceful age. 

​We need to have done with abstractions, with ideals, with principles and propositions. First and foremost, we need the recovery of what the great beast has sought to take from us. There is darkness in the Old English poetry – a confession, with all humility, that “life is on loan”. In the words of The Wanderer:

​​But there is honor and duty and courage, there is loyalty to our ancestors and to our posterity, and there is the God of our fathers, who stands in judgment over all of history and all of our deeds. And although darkness may seem to prevail, it too is fleeting and it too shall pass. As General Lee wrote:

​​Let us, like Aelfwine, make known our lineage, and let us, with General Lee, maintain our hope. 

Having concluded some affairs in nearby Bristol, I drove to Asheville, there to observe the desecration of the century-old memorial to Zebulon Vance, governor of North Carolina during the War of Northern Aggression. Asheville, known to some as the “Paris of the South” is one of the few cities in the South with global name-recognition. Once, stuck in an elevator between floors eight and nine of Mumbai office tower, I struck up a conversation with a fellow sufferer, a Dutchman from The Hague. He and his partner were planning a summer “trek,” he said, there to sample the craft beers (Asheville has more breweries per capita than any other U.S. city). What could I please recommend?

Alas, I was unable to illuminate my Dutch friend. I’ve passed through Asheville any number of times, but never surrendered to its charms, as did the robber baron Vanderbilts, who there threw up the Biltmore, a counterfeit French chateau and “America’s Largest Home ™.” (“No other residence in America offers a more authentic and inspiring view of Gilded Age life,” the website breathlessly proclaims; tickets are $96 for the “Enhanced Experience” and $304 for the “Executive Experience.” That extra $208 lets you inspect the servant quarters.) Tourism (the minor league baseball team is called the Tourists) has been the lifeblood of Asheville since at least 1880, when the railroads came through, providing urbanites with a means of trading the "dark Satanic mills” of the then-industrial North for the clean air of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Those weekends have stretched into lifetimes over the last decades.  The population has exploded some 25% since 2000, driven largely by a uniquely American type.  Asheville is the “Fourth Most Hipster City “ in America, according to a web site called Thrillist, “where you’re likely taking a long hike in the mountains to ‘find yourself’ or sitting on your front porch in a handmade rocking chair you whittled while watching Girls on your iPad.” “Delicious local craft suds” and “Asheville’s solid beer scene” are also celebrated. What goes unmentioned is the horrible highway system. Each road in, around and through Asheville carries three to five numerical and two to three directional designations. Perhaps the intention is to force the passer-through into one of Asheville’s more than 100 hotels and relieve stress with a growler of hoppy IPA.

So I didn’t make it to Park Square, where at the time of writing the disassembled monument rests on pallets, an appeals court having ordered the city to cease its desecration. And realizing that a fresh gut of loathing toward the American system was not the best companion for a long drive through the backroads of the Deep South to Louisiana, I pulled into a fairground to get my bearings.

There were booths selling artisan jewelry, craft pickles, hand-dipped candles, gluten-free, dairy-free kosher/halal organic fudge, hand-thrown pottery, spirit catchers, wooden spoons. The Asheville Yoga Center, Asheville Community Yoga, West Asheville Yoga, Primal Studios and Namaste in Nature offered demonstrations and classes. The Bhrarami Brewing Co. poured suds, as did the Burial Beer Co., Catawba Brewing, Wedge Brewing and Wicked Weed Brewing. Black Lives Matter manifestos were available at a table overseen by a scowling critter (pronouns she/her, I think) with a Marine Corps haircut, Birkenstocks and a “Keep Asheville Weird” t-shirt beneath a pair of crisp overalls. Outside the fairway, an old farmer provided a demonstration of sheep shearing. I squeezed into a stereopticon of smart phones to observe.  

The farmer, one of those bony, hard-muscled and bearded men who still define rural Appalachia, wore a sweat-stained Farm Credit ballcap, a Dickies short sleeve workshirt and worn workboots. He deployed double-bowed shears with practiced skill and answered questions, delivered by the videographers in characterless American newscaster English, in an accent thick with tobacco-bottoms and benchland cornfields. No, shearing did not hurt the sheep; no, the sheep did not die after shearing; yes, that pile of fleece is indeed wool; no, it has to be spin into yarn before it can be turned into your sweater; no, I do not personally knit; no, I can’t recommend the best local knitting workshop.

He lifted the sheep to his truck and pocketed his shears. The audience fled for the next sensation. He began bagging the fleece.  I lingered. He looked at me wearily.

Do the questions all run that damn stupid? I said. Recognizing a fellow Southerner, he offered a wry half-smile.

Well, he said. He worked a plug of tobacco into his cheek. Well… he spat expertly into the print of a running shoe. Well, yes. They do.  

What’s the dumbest? I said.

Well, he said. He spat again. Get a lot of people asking how long I been here. I tell them, Forever. They say, No, when did you move here; we’ve been here for ten years now. I tell them I didn’t move here, I was born here. My kids are seventh generation here. They still don’t get it. Still want to know when I moved here and where I came from. I finally tell them I came from England in 1628, but I didn't remember much of it. Had some woman tell me she was a native because she’s been here 17 years. Born in Massachusetts.

So where are they from? I asked.

He shrugged. Up North? Nowhere? I don’t know. They ain’t from here. Nobody here is from here any more.
 

I lived for many years in a place that I was not from: New York City, a neighborhood known for brownstone townhouses built as “country retreats” for Gilded Agers. Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed the Biltmore’s gardens, also authored a nearby municipal park.  There were a lot of hipsters and 1968-vintage leftists. One childless couple – he a professor of education, she a social worker – owned the townhouse next to mine. They scowled when I told them I “did something in the bond market.” The professor, who in the evenings sat on his stoop sipping a craft beer from the neighborhood’s burgeoning array of craft beer retailers (police were once called to break up a fight over the difference between “winter” and “autumn” brews) always greeted me with “How much money did you make today?” in an exaggerated Southern accent. I answered him politely and, before he could escape, bored him senseless with the technical details of my day: triparty repo with the New York Fed, setting the spread for newly issued corporate debt with Treasury notes, arranging an MBS hedge with synthetic 5/10-year notes after an increase in prepay speeds. Eventually he came to tolerate me. I fed their aged cats and watered the marijuana plants in the upstairs bathroom when they split for weeks or months at their “country place” in, you guessed it, Asheville.

These expeditions were undertaken in a small Volvo sedan papered liberally with bumperstickers: COEXIST; YES WE CAN; OMG GOP WTF; WELL BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY. My favorite was NO TEA PLEASE, I BELIEVE IN PROGRESS. This, of course, referenced the “Tea Party” movement that arose to bleat against Obama’s massive budgets in the first year of his presidency. It was quickly co-opted by the Republican Party and as quickly disappeared.

The bumpersticker amused in that it implied “Progress” is the sole proprietorship of the Democratic Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. Progress was the locomotive of the original Republican Party, forced down the nation’s throat and elevated to the status of an unassailable credo by the Republicans.  It is implicit and more often than not explicit in the Jaffaite “propositional nation” twaddle that Republicans still desperately market despite its embarrassing failure out in the real world. The Democrats were late to the party, so to speak. Despite their former pretended concern for the urban proletariat, and current pretended concern for People of Color, the Democrats are as fanatical for Progress as the GOP. The only difference between the two is who gets robbed to pay for it.

So what is this Progress? Let us turn to Gold and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, authored by Walter Russell Mead and published in 2007. Mead, born in South Carolina, educated at Groton and Yale, is the “Global View Columnist” for the Wall Street Journal, Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York. Mr. Mead once served the Council on Foreign Relations as its Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy.

God and Gold explores the “meaning” of American power, Mead says. If you’re expecting a sober, mediation on the march of history and the fate of empires, look elsewhere. It’s certainly not a piece of historical investigation. It’s the sort of thing that might appear in a Davos or Bilderberg gift bag. Let’s imagine, instead, that fuming from getting hopelessly lost where Highway 19/23/240/28/74 splits into 240/74 and 19/23/28 on the right bank of the French Broad River,  you step into the Bhrarami Brewing Co., 101 South Lexington Avenue, Asheville, NC (“creative lead” Gary Sernack “started home brewing in San Francisco”; “founder/executive chef” Josh Dillard once slung the hash at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago “and believes in community, locality and our environment”) to curse Asheville and your miserable fate. At the bar, a merry Falstaffian character, bearded and chunky, cheeks ruddy from five or more $6.00 pints of Your Zeros Look Like Sevens (Berliner Weisse with watermelon, cucumber, Meyer lemon, juniper and sea salt), strikes up a conversation. Is he going to bitch about the Tourists? No, your new friend Walter R. Mead – “call me Walt,” let’s pretend -- is going to unburden himself of Deep Profundities
The American system of “democratic capitalism,” old Walt commences, is nothing less than the “invisible hand” of Providence, steering the celestial locomotive of Progress along the tracks of History; Americans are the coal-stokers, blessed as they are with an “optimistic and abiding faith” that The United States is anointed by God to lead the backward-assed old earth “westward and upward.”

“Upward”? The world “is about to become a much better place,” your barroom  buddy swears.  A “higher standard of living,” less work, increased “comfort,” more disposable income to dispose on consumer goods. Westward? Unlike the British, who seemed primarily interested in making money and in their spare time exploring the Himalayas, compiling grammars of native languages, erecting buildings able to withstand the monsoon season and saving priceless antiquities from destruction, God anointed America with a “particular American twist that emphasizes the rise of freedom and equality.” Social change, Walt insists, is a “religious duty.”

“We must spread the principles that our higher power has vouchsafed to us,” Walt jabbers, poking you in the chest with one stubby finger. “We must empower and assist women abroad. The U.S. must ensure that women abroad have the right to family planning information and abortion on demand…”  Now he’s pounding the bar; froth slops from his $6.00 pint of Tenome A Go Go (mixed culture rice farmhouse, lotus hops). “Our economists. . . spread the benefits of Anglo-American economies. . . Our military . . . professionalize and upgrade the militaries of other countries . . . The New Zion of the American university system is a light to the heathen all over the red states.”

As for those red staters – “devotees of tradition, partisans of various forms of cultural and identity politics” – Walt burps that their arguments “lack credibility in Western ears.” Those who resist the “invisible hand,” the “slow, sure and irresistible capitalist process” are “ghost dancers,” like the remnants of the once-mighty Sioux massacred by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee. Don’t worry, old Walt assures you with a cunning wink and 80-proof chuckle. Change will come at a “slow and acceptable pace,” it will be “domesticated,” the “outlandish will become familiar before we must accept it.”

“The revolutionary transformation of the human condition by advancing technology is still in its early stages,” Walt babbles on, as though gaining a fresh head of steam by pounding a $6.00 pint of The Good Fight DDH Sour Pale Ale (hops: Cascade, Citra and Comet). “Hundreds of millions in China and India…  faster and smarter computers…  Tremendous surge in scientific discoveries…. Ever more flexible and deeper capital markets. . .  more productive workforces . .. the cultures that dislike dynamic capitalism or are unable to manage it well will suffer even greater difficulties than they now face.”

The United States “wants a permanent revolution,” Mead roars. He’s starting to get belligerent; maybe it’s that $11.00 Pie Felicia cocktail (vodka, graham cracker, key lime, vanilla, coconut) brawling with the lotus hops down in his tummy. Josh and Gary peek out of the tap room; last thing they need is some souse ruining the environment for the craft beer tour group community. “There is no resting place, no final destination for this process,” Walt rages. “The real goal of Anglo-American civilization is to get the permanent revolution well and truly underway. We are launching a space ship, not building a rest home.”

Well, I don’t know, Walt. Maybe we ought cut that fire water with something? How about this Picked Egg; it’s only three bucks. Comes with hot sauce, orange marmalade, aioli, machismo -- whatever the hell that is – and a saltine cracker. How about it, buddy?

Not for Walt: “America will continue rushing forward!” he thunders. “However steep the slope or forbidding the terrain, bearing its banner with the strange device, Excelsior!”

At which the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute plants his face in the Cajun Spiced Boiled Peanuts ($6.00).
 
Gary and Josh demonstrate their concern for “our community”: bundle Walt into an Uber and dispatch it to the Omni Grove Park Inn (king bed, Cool Mountain Getaway Rate, $426/night). Let’s bid farewell to Bhramari’s staff of pierced and tatted hipsters and hit the streets of the Southern Paris, braving the banks of marijuana smoke, the shoals of threatening panhandlers, the tottering drunks and the brigades of buskers yodeling crappy Americana or, even worse, Bob Dylan. Asheville’s tribunes (the City Council, elected last year and seated in December, is “historic,” being all-female, an achievement attained “one hundred years after women earned the right to vote in America.” I’m sure old Walt’ll applaud once he tumbles from his $476 king bed and does something about that hangover; hair of the dog via room service, maybe) shared its own Deep Thoughts regarding the Vance memorial. Promulgated in February 2021, the PowerPoint can be found on the city’s web site.

The desecration project, we learn, began with “an inclusive community engagement plan focusing on those harmed and/or most negatively impacted by the Vance Monument.” Various electronic media – Facebook and Twitter -- were “established as a means for those most impacted, and other residents, to make sure their voices are heard.”

Should the monument be repurposed, to contribute to “community healing, assembly, unity, re-education, and become part of an African-American museum in Asheville”? No, spake the tribunes: this “may make some people unhappy,” and “fails to respond to the African-American and Black AVL Demands community calls for removal.” How about relocation? Absolutely not, the peoples’ representatives rule. That would “give weight to the power and control white people and the institutions they control have exerted over African Americans and other people of color.”

That leaves removal. Noting that the Buncombe County Health and Human Services Board has declared  “racism a public health crisis,” the Paris of the South has no choice but to declare the monument a “risk to the health and safety of the community.”

“Removing the monument is an acknowledgement of our racist history and will allow our community the opportunity to move forward in unity,” the City prattles. “If the monument is left in its original form rather than completely removed or its materials not altered beyond recognition, it will continue to serve as a symbol of white supremacy to those most affected by its presence.”

And there’s this: “Our local economy relies on the millions of tourists who visit our community each year. If one goal of tourism officials and city and county government is to attract a diverse array of visitors, (and perhaps future residents), a monument to a Confederate general could turn away some, especially considering that population trends suggest the majority of Americans will be people of color within the next 50 years.”

Excelsior!
 
Outside a Victor Davis Hanson essay, I do not think I’ve encountered so much flatulent stupidity in so small a word count. It almost seems ungentlemanly to break Asheville’s rainbow butterfly on the wheel of reaction, but as the Joker said, you get what you deserve.

Where do we begin? The memorial to a Confederate general certainly did not inhibit Mayor Esther Mannheimer, who is Jewish, relocating to Asheville from Denmark; nor Vice Mayor Sheneika Smith, Councilwoman Sandra Kilgore and Council Member Antanette Mosley (all black), from staying and, it would seem, thriving.  As for “those most affected,” blacks make up about 12% of Asheville’s population. This compares to 55% in Natchez, Mississippi; 57% in Montgomery, Alabama; 61% in Monroe, Louisiana. This is not because white supremacist mountaineers undertook a campaign of terror with torches and white hoods, but because the topography of the Blue Ridge Mountains does not lend itself to cotton or sugar production. There is also the unremarked on fact that since 1865, the vast majority of Southerners, black and white, have been “equal” in their poverty.

In its simplest terms, the desecration reflects nothing more than the cynical need of the historic all-female Asheville City Council to Do Something Historic. What could be easier than align with the Democratic and Republican kakistrophy and destroy a monument to a man who refused to buy a ticket on the Republican choo-choo Upward and Westward? The historic all-female City Council cares not one whit for Vance; I’d bet cash money that a plurality would be unable to name the decade in the War for Southern Independence was fought. Desecration of a century-old monument is certainly easier that addressing Asheville’s out-of-control homeless, or the surging crime rate, or drunken drivers attempting to navigate the wretched highways.

But there is something more sinister than opportunistic posturing by vapid, amoral politicians and their childish hipster constituents. One can’t really fault Smith, Mosely and Kilgore – bashing whitey is a clear path to Facebook likes and Twitter retweets (and, as my farmer friend told me, in Asheville it was mostly egged on by the white people).

No, there’s something fundamentally evil here.

It is the destruction of a memorial built by Southerners to commemorate a Southerner that led us as we resisted the locomotive of Progress. It is the erasure of Southern memory, Southern past and the Southern people, the Scots-Irish pioneers who came to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 17th century and carved Asheville out of the wilderness.

Asheville must be remade –  altered beyond recognition, as the city itself put it – to make it as though we never were. There is a technical term for this: “oikophobia.” It is the ideology of the rootless, the hypermobile; it is associated with a hatred of tradition, of history, of people with traditions and history. This is why the Democrats hate the South and Southerners, and why the Republicans never miss a chance to throw the  South and Southerners to the wolves. We stand in the way of the celestial railway. “What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your peoples’ past,” our great friend Paul Gottfried once told us, “which was a profoundly conservative one, based on family and community, and those who created and defended it.”

Perhaps there is an element of jealousy. For all their twaddle about “community,” theirs is fake, manufactured, non-organic, disposable, derived from spreadsheets, business plans and PowerPoints, nothing more than a grab bag of Frankfurt School for Dummies bullet points and fuzzy hipster bullshit that will vanish the minute enough of us get together and tell them to take their crap back to elsewhere. We Southerners have a land, a tradition, a people, a place, a patria that they do not have and will never have. At some level they know it. It violates their safe spaces.

But it is not just a Democratic thing. It is also a Republican thing. And as our old buddy Walt sermonized, it is the American thing. God said so!  Permanent revolution, working ever upward and westward toward an Asheville continent, nay an Asheville planet, swarmed by rootless, hypermobile, cosmopolitan, atomized consumers consuming disposable consumables.

There is a technical term for these people: Americans.  

Excelsior!
 
Fyodor Dostoevsky, the greatest prophet of our dark and murderous age, regarded Progress with loathing. In The Idiot, his great comic character Lebedyev at a boozy dinner party offers himself as an interpreter of the Apocalypse.  “The star that is called Wormwood,” the polluter of the springs of life, Lebedyev holds, is the network of railroads spread over Europe.

The railroads symbolize progress; they represent science, materialism, “social justice”; they hurry with “noise, clamor and haste” for the “happiness of humanity,” carrying bread to the starving. And in doing so, the railroads have polluted the springs of life. They are accursed, Lebedyev says.

“And dare to tell me that the `springs of life’ have not been weakened and muddied beneath the ‘star,’ beneath the network in which men are enmeshed,” Lebedyev roars. “And don’t try to frighten me with your prosperity, your wealth, the infrequency of famine, and the rapidity of the means of communication… there is no uniting idea; everything has grown softer, everything is limp, and everyone is limp! We’re all, all of us, grown limp. . .”

Americanism – the American idea of progress, this process without destination, this Permanent Revolution, this nihilistic fanaticism to alter everything beyond recognition, to reduce man to nothing but a unit of consumption, to make all men Americans – is the star that is called Wormwood. And it must be rejected.
​
“It is history that teaches us to hope,” General Robert E. Lee counseled us. And I am hopeful. Americanism is built on a foundation of sand, on lies about humanity, history and the ultimate purpose of life and the destiny of man. I believe that we are living in the last years of the disastrous American experiment. The springs of life can and will be cleansed and restored. That is the task before is. All that is required is an act incomprehensible to the American mind: remembering. Remembering who we are.

It’s high time we get to work.

As the “Exceptional Nation” totters and pratfalls further toward perdition, some on what is commonly, if not entirely accurately, known as the “Right” are calling for the various factions to unite beneath a single banner – a band of brothers, as it were – to battle shoulder-to-shoulder against the Bolshevik plague-beast.

Several such tocsins have resounded from the San Bernardino Mountains west of Los Angeles, where stand the halls of the Claremont Institute, a think tank with whose precepts you  are excruciatingly familiar, even if not so the name. 

Scofield’s Reference Bible launched the most successful heresies in the history of Christendom; similarly, Claremont’s vision of America, past and future,  has evolved into the unassailable credo of the conservative movement. Do not deviate, lest you be accused of progressivism, socialism, America-hating or, worst of all, “Calhounism.”  The Institute cemented its grip on the Story of America with the participation of several past and current scholars in the 1776 Commission, the Trump Administration’s “patriotic” response to 1619 Project. 

Claremont recognizes that something deeply unwholesome is unfolding in “this fair land of freedom.” Senior Fellow Glenn Ellmers, in a remarkable piece titled “Conservatism” is Not Enough, states what many of us have been saying for . . . well, in my case, at least since Bush the First: there is virtually nothing left to conserve. “What is actually required now is a recovery,” Ellmers writes, “or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.” I unironically could not agree more. 
 
There’s also Senior Fellow Michael Anton, who in September 2016 published anonymously a prophetic essay  called “The Flight 93 Election.” In it, he argued that Trump was likely America’s last chance to forestall a collapse into a degenerate kakistrophy lorded over by shrieking undergraduates, snarling professors and smirking vice-presidents of Human Resources. Anton followed this in September 2020 with The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, which (again unironically) offers one of the best analyses I’ve yet read on the degenerate malevolence of the Last Best Hope of Mankind. Any number of Anton’s recommendations on issues including trade and immigration are ones with which we Southerners can and should concur (if for no other reason than we thought of them first). 

So, one hearty cheer, maybe one and a third for Ellmers and Anton; and I recommend their writings to fellow Southerners. Ditto The Claremont Review of Books, published quarterly, and two associated web sites: American Mind and American Greatness. There is an impressive roster of writers (including our friends Paul Gottfried and Ilana Mercer). There’s a good deal to learn from them and the other Claremont scholars: some good, and some bad. 

And much that is very, very bad. 

The Institute on its “About” page describes its mission as “teaching and promoting the philosophical reasoning that is the foundation of limited government and the statesmanship required to bring that reasoning into practice.” And the Platonic ideal of statesmanship – for Claremont, ditto the 1776 Commission, and needless to say, most of American conservatism itself – is none other than the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. 

The Railsplitter manifests on the “About” page in the form of this profundity:  “No policy that does not rest on some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained.” In accordance with this pensée from Uncommon Friend of the Common Man, Claremont’s philosophical principles “include the foundational doctrines of natural rights and natural law found in the Declaration of Independence.” Rather, that bit of the Declaration where Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal.” As you have doubtless been instructed by (e.g.) nationally syndicated radio showman Dennis Prager’s eponymous online university or Tucker Carlson (otherwise admirable) on Fox News, “equality” is the principle by which the Constitution should be read; “equality” stands as the stern judge over the works of man. 

And this is so, because that is the Proposition delivered by Honest Abe said at Gettysburg (“dedicated to the proposition that all men” et cetera and et cetera). If your faith is wobbly, and your foot sliding toward the heresy of Calhounism, you are advised to consult the voluminous writings of Harry V. Jaffa, distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute, the Henry Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, and the author of ten books, including Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, and Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution.

Claremont is in the Professor Jaffa business, if I may be permitted to speak in crudely commercial terms. Claremont wholesales and retails the thought of Professor Jaffa throughout the body politic. In this they’ve been successful beyond the wildest dream of avarice, attaining a mind-share monopoly that would be the envy of Rockefeller in the Standard Oil days. 

Claremonters’ reverence of Professor Jaffa approaches the rapture of the medieval mystic. Professor Jaffa, Robert Samuelson testifies, discovered in the words of The Prairie Sage the reason and morality inherent in the American political order, qualities obscure to every other exegete of the holy documents (not to mention their authors). Here is David Tucker, reviewing a book of the Professor’s essays by Claremonters Ed Erler and Ken Masugi: “Harry V. Jaffa published Crisis of the House Divided in 1959. The book established him as the foremost interpreter of the American political tradition, because it established him as the foremost interpreter of Lincoln, our foremost politician.”

Here is Michael Anton, from an appreciation of the Professor in the Winter 2014/2015 issue of the Claremont Review: “Before I discovered Claremont and what it stands for, I had no faith and few friends, in the highest sense of souls sharing a love of the good. Because of Claremont—because of Harry V. Jaffa and the people he taught, inspired, and influenced—I have had both in abundance for 20 years and counting.” 

Samuelson again: “Jaffa was known to say: the fate of the West depends upon America; the fate of America depends upon the Republican Party; the fate of the Republican Party depends upon the conservative movement; and the fate of the conservative movement depends upon it rededicating itself to the truths of 1776.”
 
Which truths would those be? Self-determination? Wrong. Back to Anton:  “Jaffa liked to quote Lincoln’s remark that the idea of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is the ‘father of all moral principle’ among us.”’ One cannot but imagine Professor Jaffa, like Moses, ascending the rugged peaks of the San Bernardinos, entering the divine darkness described by St Gregory of Nyssa and there obtaining the tablets of the law from Father Abraham. 

Any such metaphysical system requires a juxtaposing wickedness, a dragon to slay, heretics to burn. That, my fellow Southerners, is our role in the divine economy. As hinted, Calhoun is a particular object of Jaffaite ire; none is worse than the “Calhounite” (did you know that wicked old John is the father of identity politics? Now you do, and you will be tested). Glenn Ellmers authored a tome scheduled for September release called The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa and the Fight for America (“a pathbreaking study of Ellmers’ teacher, Claremont McKenna Professor Harry V. Jaffa, Claremont’s intellectual godfather”).  In an excerpt published on American Mind, Ellmers ponders secession from the Professor’s perspective. At times, Ellmers does seem to be tiptoeing edge toward granting secession an imprimatur. That does not mean, he hastens to add, that the South is thereby vindicated. Confronting “at least least one of the several myths which contaminate discussion of the Civil War on both the Left and Right,” Ellmers declaims:  

Anton, in The Stakes, graciously grants that he does not support the removal of Confederate statues, despite their commemoration of men with the absolute cheek to defy King Linkum. He gives us Southerners a nice pat on the head for our “patriotism,” which I suppose means our consistent votes for a Republican Party that largely despises us and certainly does not defend us. He concurs with Ellmers that  South’s bid for freedom was illegitimate, wicked and against truth and order. Follow this reasoning to its bitter conclusion, and you’ll find yourself in agreement with despicable propagandist VD Hanson, the Ilya Ehrenburg of the neocon movement, that “the South had it coming.” (Ehrenburg, who one might call Stalin’s director of strategic communications, encouraged the Red Army to rape their way from East Prussia to Berlin, which they did – two million, by some estimates.)

So, my fellow Southerners: while you may not know Jaffa at first hand, you know Jaffaism. 

“Propositional nation”? That’s Professor Harry V. Jaffa.  “Nation of immigrants” – that too, is Professor Jaffa. How exactly did the Communist-leaning, Incarnation- and Resurrection-denying Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King become, with The Abolition Emperor, the second sun in the bright sky of American conservatism? Because Professor Harry V. Jaffa placed him there. (Professor J. also holds Churchill in high esteem; one must conclude that for the Henry Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus, the harangue is the measure of the man.) One can only assume, based on the Republican Party’s traditional role as the shadow that chases after Progressivism, that Caitlyn Jenner will in short order join the pantheon. He – sorry, she – has the proper ideology. For this we may also thank Professor Jaffa. 

Proposition, principles, ideology. 

Anton recently thundered against “Cracker Jack Claremontism,” the “fake, pulpy, distorted thumbnail version” (Who did this? Prager? Mark Levin? I want names, give me names!) He writes in an essay called “Americans Unite” (illustrated with a photo of Confederate veteran “uniting” with a U.S. Army soldier via handshake) that “to the extent that my school (or myself) had anything to do with propagating this garbage—and that extent is not zero—I sincerely apologize.”  Furthermore, “some of us have been trying to make amends by telling a fuller account of the story, emphasizing those points left out of the Cracker Jack comic, correcting old errors, and making new friends.” Nevertheless, he says, his “commitment” to the “core tenets” of Claremont’s teaching “has never shaken.”

On that note, Anton directs a barrage of ire toward Brion McClanahan of the Abbeville Institute. McClanahan had the temerity, you see, to challenge, in a recent Chronicles article, the historiography of the 1776 Commission (including the unfortunately factual observation that He Who Saved the Union won with only 39% of the vote in  the 1860 election). McClanahan’s “attack on it is harmful,” Anton says. McClanahan engaged in “deliberate fratricide.” He gives aid and comfort to those who “hate America.”

How dare you question the Professor, you… you… Calhounite. 

“I still hope to gain more paleo friends and help broaden the pro-American populist-nationalist coalition on the Right,” Anton sniffs. “I hope this piece serves that end. Clearly McClanahan and Chronicles won’t be coming along for the ride.”

At this, I must confess, I burst into peals of sardonic laughter.

My dear Mr. Anton. Professor Jaffa and the Claremonters made careers out of demonizing the South, declaring our Confederate ancestors as heretics far beyond the pale of civilized society. And you’re surprised we decline to share shiraz and canapes in Claremont’s common room? I doubt you like it when grubby peasants cast doubt on the brilliance of Professor Jaffa or the world-historical significance of The Man Who Read the Bible by Firelight. 

The great M.E. Bradford had a lot to say about Jaffa’s metaphysics, including the following (“The Heresy of Equality,” published in 1976): “Behind the cult of equality (the chief if not only tenet in Professor Jaffa’s theology, and his link to the pseudo-religious politics of equality) is an even more sinister power, the uniformitarian hatred of providential distinctions which will stop at nothing less than what Eric Voegelin calls ‘a reconstitution of being.’”

The theology of Professor J., and by extension the teachings of Claremont are, as Bradford and Willmore Kendall observed, nothing less than a call for permanent revolution, an eternal crusade toward an unattainable utopia. And one does not need philosophical training to conclude that egalitarian ideology,  whether founded in “natural law” or a materialist interpretation of history, always end in terror, blood and fire. Expertise in John Locke is not required to conclude the end of every egalitarian rainbow stands the Grand Inquisitor. You could read Solzhenitsyn. Or look out the window at the accelerating disaster that’s the U.S.A today. 

One only needs to consider, without ideological blinders, the history of the Propositional Nation since 1865, and the rapid onset of egalitarianism that began after World War II and accelerated in the 1960s. Much if not all of this can be laid at the feet of Abraham Lincoln and his devilish “proposition,” and its relentless promotion by Claremont.   

As Oliver Cromwell wrote to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland in 1650: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken?  

​Glenn Ellmers says in his essay that “most people living in the United States today – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the word.” 

If Ellmers means Professor Jaffa’s definition of “American,” then I certainly do not qualify. I am a Southerner. I am a proud son of a small region in the Deep South. 

Anton is right that the South was, is and remains the most conservative region of this failed nation. But I don’t think either Ellmers or Anton understand the South or our conservatism any more than Jaffa did. We are not “people” to them; our history is irrelevant except as a philosopho-theological principal to be (literally) destroyed

The South is not a “proposition.” It is not an ideology. It is not a political religion. It is not Gnosticism tarted up in the language of Natural Law. The conservative, Russell Kirk once put it, “detests Abstraction, or the passion for forcing men and societies into a preconceived pattern divorced from the special circumstances of different times and countries.”

The South is, in the words of Edmund Burke,  “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Again, not abstraction, not an ideology derived from Aristotle and Locke and filtered through the stump speeches of a diabolically clever railroad lawyer and Republican political hack with a gift for fooling most of the people all of the time, but real men, real generations, in a particular time, space and community. 

William Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom!, describes Shreve McCaslin, a Canadian, in conversation with Quentin Compson, a Southerner, in the “iron dark” and cold of their room at Harvard in New England:

Our conservatism is what we learn from the old folks – the old ways and the old stories we pass down to our children, the history that happened to us and the blood we spilled. 

We may conclude that this is something Professor Jaffa and the Claremonters do not have. They have abstractions and a philosophical scheme. We have the memories of living breathing men, with our feet rooted in the ground of the land they fought for.

My daughter knows that she is descended from a Confederate soldier who fought for four long years in the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee, and who died at Richmond in the winter of 1865. My daughter and I have stood together at Gettysburg, on Cemetery Ridge and walked the grounds of Pickett’s Charge and Little Round Top and the Wheat Field and the Peach Orchard. Other ancestors fell at Perryville, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Petersburg. And I have told her, this ground is sacred to us because it is where our people fought and died. 

Our people did not for an ideology. They fought for the one thing that an inscrutable Providence gives us to fight for: our land and our people and our memories.

And no, not for slavery, the always-deployed trump card. I would be happy to “have a conversation,” as Americans like to put it, about the institution. Provided you first remove “slavery” from Professor Jaffa’s philosophical ether and consider it in its time and place and relative to, say, slavery in Brazil, serfdom in Russia and Poland, and industrial factory labor in the enlightened North. Start with the thirty-odd volumes of the Slave Narratives. I’ve read them. Have you? 

Anton and Ellers are absolutely correct that a recovery of old things and old traditions is necessary. And of course the founders should be re-considered, but without the lenses of Professor Jaffa. And you should consider that the Southern tradition is completely different from the ideological strawman of Jaffa’s scheme. If you can’t bring yourself to study Calhoun, consider the Agrarians and their critique of financial and industrial capital and of the American notion of Progress. Christopher Lasch and Jacques Ellul can be helpful; so too the heirs of the Agrarians, including Wendell Berry and the brilliant English writer Paul Kingsnorth. 

And yes, we do share a common enemy. And yes, we can and should be friends; there is much we agree on. And perhaps we will one day do battle together. 

But not under your flag. Under our flag, the Southern flag. And not for your philosophizing, but for our Southern traditions. 

And never, ever again for a “proposition,” nor a nation “founded” on one.