 This is the text of a speech delivered by the author at the 129th Annual Reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Charleston, South Carolina, July 16, 2024. The United Confederate Veterans had held their Ninth Reunion in Charleston May 10-13, 1899, and the July 16-20, 2024 SCV Reunion was its proud descendant. Some words which were capitalized for emphasis in his speech notes have been left capitalized. Good evening and WELCOME to God's Holy City of Charleston, South Carolina, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to FORM the Atlantic Ocean! It's also where the FIRST Ordinance of Secession passed 169 - 0 on December 20, 1860, and where our great War for Southern Independence started a few weeks later, on April 12, 1861! My name is Gene Kizer, Jr. of Charleston Athenaeum Press, member of Secession Camp No. 4, author of several books including: Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. It's AN HONOR to talk to you this evening about one of the most important battles of the War Between the States, the Battle of Secessionville. First, let me say that you could not be in a more enchanting place than right here in Charleston! Last week Travel + Leisure magazine announced the results of their annual survey and they awarded Charleston the TOP DESTINATION to visit in our entire country for the 12th consecutive year. Here is what the Post and Courier wrote July 10th:
Charleston was also the only place in the United States "named among the 25 best cities in the world." So plan on enjoying every second of your visit to the city that Lord Proprietor Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, called his "Little Darling!" There are some folks here from the organization Defend Arlington who, along with the SCV, fought HARD this past year-and-a-half to keep the Confederate Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The monument was removed late last December in the most DISHONORABLE, DISGRACEFUL ACT in American history. Its removal has DEFILED the graves of 518 Confederate soldiers and family that are arranged in concentric circles out from the former monument and it has DESECRATED Arlington National Cemetery itself. Those Confederate graves were invited into Arlington National Cemetery by President William McKinley, a former Union soldier, as part of the reconciliation of our country after the War Between the States. Their placement in Arlington was approved by Congress, and several contemporary presidents participated in the establishment of the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial. A century of other presidents sent annual memorial wreaths including Barack Obama. Veterans, North and South, spoke at its dedication. The removal of the Confederate Monument has added greatly to our military recruiting crisis since traditionally, 44% of the United States military is recruited in the South where Confederate ancestors and military service are revered. Of course the American military is inspired by examples of valor, especially when it comes from the blood of ancestors, which is the SAME blood coursing through OUR veins. Men like Audie Murphy of Texas, the most highly decorated American soldier of World War II, whose grandfather was a Confederate soldier. I could go on all day with examples like Nathan Bedford Forrest, III, who joined the United States Army Air Force in World War II and rose to the rank of Brigadier-General. He was killed in action over the North Sea after a bombing raid in Germany in September, 1943. In the War Between the States, there was no greater valor in the history of the world than that displayed by Confederate soldiers. Historian James McPherson writes in his book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam:
I want to read that again:
Think about that. The presidents supporting the Confederate Monument started with McKinley who, right after the Spanish American War set the stage:
President William Howard Taft spoke and was warmly received at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid. President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication address June 4, 1914.[3] President Theodore Roosevelt sent the first memorial wreath that started an annual tradition. President Warren G. Harding sent a long message of condolence that was read at the funeral of the monument's acclaimed Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, who was a VMI Confederate soldier. Here is an excerpt published Wednesday, March 30, 1921:
That soil is not sacred today. It has been desecrated by hypocrite Elizabeth Warren, fake Indian from Massachusetts, whose Boston, in 1862, DURING the War Between the States, was the SLAVE TRADING CAPITAL of the earth along with New York according to W. E. B. Du Bois. New England had been slave trading just about the entire existence of the country. Much of the infrastructure of Old New England was built by profits from the slave trade. In 1862, when Du Bois wrote about it, Boston and New York had been slave trading ILLEGALLY for 54 years since the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808. But in 1862, Boston and New York were the slave trading capitals of the earth. We can not allow Arlington National Cemetery to remain desecrated. The Confederate Reconciliation Memorial must be restored. It is clear that Elizabeth Warren, Ty Seidule of the naming commission who submitted a historically fraudulent report on the Confederate Memorial, have hurt military recruiting. Go by and talk to Defend Arlington in the vendor's area and join the fight. They have some great items including commemorative coins and medals. I'm wearing one here that says Deo Vindice, the Latin phrase on the Great Seal of the Confederacy. The Battle of Secessionville took place exactly 162 years and one month ago today, on June 16, 1862. It is one of the most important battles in the War Between the States. It kept the Yankees out of Charleston in mid-1862 and, had Charleston fallen then, it unquestionably would have changed the course of the war and of American history. The battle site at Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve on James Island, which is on the way to Folly Beach, is well preserved though somewhat grown up. You can still walk all around it and see the front parapet of the earthen battery where bloody hand-to-hand combat took place. It is the second most historic site in South Carolina, second only to Fort Sumter. You can do a Google search and pull up directions. Your GPS will get you there. Brigadier General Johnson Hagood, in charge of Confederate Advanced Forces in the battle as a colonel, wrote after the war that the Battle of Secessionville was "one of the DECISIVE engagements of the war."[4] The battle covered Charleston in GLORY for all time because it was one of the most savagely fought battles despite smaller numbers of troops engaged. A Confederate soldier IN the battle, R. deTreville Lawrence of Marietta, Georgia wrote in Confederate Veteran magazine:
Many of the defenders were native Charlestonians. The prize being fought over - magnificent Charleston - which the North hated and wanted to conquer as bad as Richmond, made the stakes astronomical. Charleston was important to both sides as a symbol, since both secession and the war had started here, but it was also a critical Confederate port for shipping cotton and importing arms, and it was a vital railroad connection to the rest of the South. Charleston was NOT CONQUERED in the War Between the States, despite the South being outnumbered four to one and massively outgunned. The brand new Confederate States of America was up against what distinguished historian Paul Kennedy said was "an economic giant" and what became "the greatest military nation on earth before its post-1865 demobilization." [6] But there was NO military surrender in Charleston. In February 1865, Confederate authorities ordered Charleston's defenders to evacuate the UNCONQUERED city and head off to other battlefields to continue the war. Charleston was turned over to the Union Army by a city alderman.[7] B. A. O. Norris of Graham Texas, a member of the Confederate 1st South Carolina Regiment who was in action in Charleston, said in Confederate Veteran magazine after the war:
Some 750,000 died and over a million were maimed in the War Between the States. The industrial North with its enormous shipping and manufacturing capability had unlimited resources.[9] There were dozens of marine engine factories in the North, ZERO in the South. Toward the end, Gen. Robert E. Lee's sick, emaciated horses could barely pull the artillery, so, OFTEN, he was not able to factor it into battle plans. Confederate cavalry horses were fed on ONE-TENTH what Yankee horses were fed,[10] and Confederate soldiers were often hungry and ragged while the Union Army, of which 25% was FOREIGN BORN, was always well fed, well clothed and well armed. The South, with 100% control of King Cotton, threatened the North's economic domination. Secession meant no more Southern tariff money for Northern industry, but more importantly, it meant that that same money would now be turned inward on the South to grow its own industries. Southerners were as driven to succeed and make money as Northerners but the enormous success of Southern agriculture kept the focus on that, and not industrializing, until the late antebellum period. Per capita income in the South and North was roughly equal. Southerners had long been supplying the federal treasury with most of its revenue. Cotton alone, in 1860, was 62% of American exports and that was before adding in other Southern commodities. The world's economy in 1860 was plantation based and agricultural. Southerners were producing the wealth of the country yet three-fourths of the federal treasury was being spent in the North. The most prominent national economist in 1860 was Thomas Prentice Kettell. He proves that the South was producing the wealth of the country in his famous book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits.[11] Without the North, the South had a shining future able to buy better, lower-priced, non-tariffed goods from Europe and to start manufacturing for itself. Southerners believed in free trade, and established in the Confederate Constitution a low tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States Rights nation. They also made protective tariffs UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and they prohibited spending money out of the federal treasury for internal improvements in individual states. Confederates believed if a state wanted to spend money, good, spend it yourself. Same with slavery. It was not required and Southerners encouraged free states to join the Confederacy. That petrified Lincoln, of course. Without the South, the North was dead. It would lose its manufacturing and shipping markets overnight. Great Britain was the greatest manufacturing country on earth in the antebellum era, not the North. The North grew to great wealth and power manufacturing mostly for the South and shipping Southern agricultural products. Southerners had great warm water ports and the Mississippi. They had a great trade relationship with Great Britain. They did not need the North and were sick of New England hatred and hypocrisy, just like we, today, are sick of fake Indian Elizabeth Warren's hatred and hypocrisy. The South was an integrated, bi-racial society. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with good will and help for newly freed slaves. Most blacks knew that they were HATED in the North. Several Northern and Western states had laws prohibiting blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois. Alexis de Tocqueville made it clear in Democracy in America that despite slavery, race relations were better in the South than anywhere in the country. He said they were WORST in New England. It was not ending slavery that caused the war, but the North's desire for economic domination of our country with all the Western lands and markets WAITING to be conquered and exploited. Lincoln and Northern leaders knew of their enormous advantages at that point in history, not just their population and pipeline of poor immigrants from Europe to serve in their armies, but their ability to manufacture rifles, cannons, ammunition, uniforms, saddles, ships, etc. Paul Kennedy writes:
Lincoln was a man 40 feet tall armed to the teeth with modern weaponry facing a man five feet tall carrying a musket. Of course Lincoln was going to goad the South into a fight so he could use his enormous advantages. That why he did not remove his troops from Fort Sumter in Charleston, and Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida. By April, 1861, with the Confederacy getting stronger every day and the Union facing massive economic problems, Lincoln sent five military missions into the South to get the war started. [13] He had lied to Confederates for months and misled his own commander in Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, implying that he was soon going to remove the fort's garrison and disarm the explosive situation in the country. When Anderson was informed by letter dated April 4, 1861 from Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he would be resupplied and possibly reinforced, he knew immediately what that meant. He wrote back to Cameron and said he had been strongly assured that Fort Sumter would be evacuated and "a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country." Anderson ended with:
Anderson SEES that the war is to be THUS COMMENCED by Abraham Lincoln. Several Northern newspapers agreed with Anderson including the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post that wrote the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter: "We are to have civil war . . . because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to INAUGURATE CIVIL WAR without appearing in the character of an aggressor." [15] The directives to defend Charleston were clear. Gen. Lee summed it all up when he wrote in early 1862 to Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton, then in command of the area, and said that the city is "to be fought street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand upon." [16] Both sides realized that James Island was the key to taking Charleston so by 1862, Confederates had tightened their lines. They evacuated the area around Stono Inlet and the mouth of the Stono River except for pickets, and built a battery near the little community of Secessionville, approximately two miles further inland. The Secessionville community was so named, not because of anything to do with secession from the Union, but, as legend has it, because a group of younger planters seceded from the older planters and built summer homes there. John Johnson in his great book The Defense of Charleston Harbor, writes that the battery on the Secessionville peninsula was Col. L. M. Hatch's idea "who also constructed it with the labor of his regiment of Rifles." [17] It was strategically chosen because little Secessionville is at the seaward end of a peninsula shaped like an oblong hourglass and flanked by saltwater pluff mud creeks. Hatch chose the narrowest part of the hourglass, which was only 125 yards across, for his battery. A 75 foot observation tower was built, so the battery became known as Tower Battery. Most of James Island was cleared for agriculture so an observer could climb the tower with field glasses and see all over the entire area including the mouth of the Stono River. Confederates built a defensive line of batteries across James Island from Battery Pringle on the Stono River to Tower Battery. Further up the Stono near Wappoo Cut in today's Riverland Terrace, was powerful Fort Pemberton. Tower Battery was a mile in advance of the main Confederate line. A FOOTBRIDGE was constructed perhaps a mile across the marsh to connect the main Confederate line with Secessionville. The footbridge was capable of men and horses and was far enough back that it was protected from Yankee shelling, though they tried to hit it during the battle. Confederate reinforcements stepping off the footbridge had a straight sprint 600 yards into the back of Tower Battery. This was a brilliant bit of planning that won the battle for the South. Badly outnumbered Confederates received JUST enough reinforcements across the footbridge in JUST the nick of time to turn the tide of the battle. When the battle began, it was 6,600 Yankees against 300 Confederates later reinforced to a grand total of 750, yet the Yankees were soundly beaten by those 750 Confederates and suffered 683 casualties compared to 204 Confederate. [18] The priest-cap design of the front of the fort was two redans, side by side, so together they looked like the letter "M." Imagine a giant M in front of you then push it forward onto the ground. That's what the front of the fort looked like. It was as high as 16 feet in some places with a ditch fronting the walls. That design forced attackers into the center of the M so defenders could shoot an enfilading fire on them from both sides. Two other two-gun batteries were positioned a mile away to enfilade the approach to Tower Battery. The two batteries were extremely effective in the battle enfilading attackers in the front of the fort and later pouring fire into the Third New Hampshire after it took up a position across Simpson's Creek. [19] The ground was already difficult for attacking troops because it was farmland and had furrows every foot or so. The approach to the fort narrowed steadily as it got closer to Tower Battery, which would slow an attacker's advance and make it hard to maneuver. Confederates had also felled trees and used abattis, and dug a huge ditch across the front approach so that attacking troops would be bunched together and perfect targets for grapeshot and canister. Another big part of Charleston's defenses was the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. It's tracks ran along today's West Ashley Greenway, which is a long linear park for running and walking. Confederates never had enough men so whichever city needed men, the other was to send them on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. A hundred miles of track had to be defended the entire war and it WAS despite being attacked constantly by Union troops including the day before the battle. Robert E. Lee himself had designed much of its defenses. Tower Battery was armed with one 8" Columbiad in the center flanked by two 24 pound rifled cannons. On each side of the fort were two 18 pounders. There was one mortar, which was further back. A magazine, bomb proof and rifle pits were in that area too. From early on, Tower Battery shelled everything that moved at the mouth of the Stono River. No question that this constant shelling gave the artillerists great skill with their guns. The Yankees landed June 2nd and tried to set up a secure camp at the mouth of the Stono but between mosquitoes and Confederate fire, could not do it. They knew they had to destroy Tower Battery or leave the area. The Battle of Secessionville took place Monday, June 16, 1862 before dawn on a dark, drizzly morning. The earthen fort was not finished despite feverish activity around the clock and between artillery barrages. Sunrise was 5:14 a.m. but three hours before that, at 2 a.m., 3,500 Union troops formed the first of two columns, and 3,100 formed the second. Attackers were to "advance in silence and make the attack at 'first light' with the bayonet." [20] There were around 300 Confederates in the fort at the time. Col. Thomas G. Lamar was in command and had pushed his men to exhaustion. He had allowed them to sleep at 3 a.m., but not for long. Four Confederate pickets at the Rivers House were surprised and captured around 4 a.m. by the Yankee Forlorn Hope companies but not before getting a handful of shots off and drawing Yankee blood. Other winded Confederate pickets made it and alerted Tower Battery. Sgt. James M. Baggett fired a 24 pounder and a split second later Col. Lamar fired the Columbiad. The roar of the guns sprung the garrison to life as grape tore into the oncoming Yankees a hundred yards away. This was 4:30 a.m., 45 minutes before sunrise, and the Battle of Secessionville was ON. [21] A number of Yankees reached the parapet and fought hand-to-hand with Confederate defenders despite a "devastating fire from the thoroughly aroused garrison . . . of grape, cannister, chain, nails, and broken glass." Milby Burton writes in The Siege of Charleston:
The Yankee perspective tells us the most about the devastating effectiveness of the Southerners. Confederate Major-General Samuel Jones in his 1911 book The Siege of Charleston, writes:
Union Lt. Col. Frank Graves writes:
In brutal hand-to-hand fighting, Confederates drove them from the parapet. They withdrew "and, being unsupported for a considerable time, they fell back slowly, contesting every inch of ground" while under fire. They scattered after losing many officers.[25] The Yankee regiments became tangled up with each other then:
The Twenty-eighth Massachusetts advanced but the regiment in front of it fell back and threw it into confusion. The way was also blocked by a fallen tree and "an impassable marsh . . . and abattis of dense brush . . .".[27] At the same time, "the Seventy-ninth Highlanders, leading the Second Brigade, was ordered to the right to assail the work." It was led by Lt. Col. David Morrison who writes that, as he gained the parapet:
Morrison was ordered to fall back and said he "did in good order, leaving behind about forty killed or badly wounded, many of whom fell on the ramparts. I brought back with me six killed and about sixty wounded." Union Col. Daniel Leasure, Brigade Commander, rushed forward with his staff to lead another assault. They got to within three hundred yards of the Confederate works when:
He adds that the Eighth Michigan, which had led the attack, had been decimated QUOTE "by the murderous fire through which we all had to pass." [30] They were also hit by friendly fire from their own artillery and gunboats. The Third New Hampshire and Third Rhode Island were across what was then known as Simpson's Creek, on the right hand side of the Confederate defenders on the parapet. Those two Yankee units had advanced so far forward that they were behind the fort and started pouring fire into the back of the fort causing the Confederate artillerists on the parapet to abandon their guns and pick up their rifles. This was around 5:25 a.m. Union Colonel John H. Jackson, regiment commander, wrote that "he found no artillery on that part of the Confederates works" and could have easily gone into the fort:
Col. Jackson apparently never heard of pluff mud but Confederate Col. L. M. Hatch who designed the fort, sure had. Jackson saw reinforcements, the Fourth Louisiana Battalion of Colonel J. McEnery, around 260 men, advancing over the footbridge and into Secessionville then into the back of Tower Battery. Those reinforcements had given the Confederates their largest number of defenders during the battle, which was around 750. The battle had started with 300 Confederates in the fort up against 6,600 Yankees. Here is an account by a soldier IN the Fourth Louisiana Battalion, H. J. Lea of Winnsboro, Louisiana, who had advanced across the footbridge:
Lea goes on in great detail outlining the gallant career of the Fourth Louisiana then he ends with:
ME TOO, Brother Lea. To sum it up: It was 6,600 Yankees against 300 Confederates who were reinforced to a grand total of 750, so 750 Confederates with their guts and ingenious Col. Hatch's fort and footbridge, defeated the Union Army's 6,600 soldiers and the Union Navy's armada of gunboats on the Stono River. The Yankees had 683 casualties with 107 dead. Confederates had 204 casualties with 52 dead, most of them the troops who defended the guns on the parapet and fought hand-to-hand with the Yankees. Most of the Union dead were buried in a mass grave somewhere near Tower Battery. Yankees learned their lesson and left James Island within two weeks with their commander, Brigadier General Henry W. Benham, under arrest. As stated, Charleston was NEVER CONQUERED but stronger on the day it was evacuated than ever before. During the battle, Col. Thomas G. Lamar was wounded in the neck and passed command to Lieutenant Colonel Peter C. Gaillard who soon was wounded in the knee. He passed command to Lt. Col. T. M. Wagner. Wagner was killed the next year when a gun exploded at Fort Moultrie so, in his honor, an important battery on Morris Island was named Battery Wagner. It was where another Confederate victory against a much larger Yankee force took place: the battle featured in the movie Glory. Tower Battery was renamed Fort Lamar in honor of Col. Thomas G. Lamar, Tower Battery's commander. Today's Fort Lamar Road cuts right through the original fort on its way to the original community of Secessionville. Colonel Johnson Hagood, commanding the Advanced Forces, was instrumental in the victory because there were no Confederate generals directly involved. Hagood, later governor of South Carolina and for whom the football stadium of his alma mater, The Citadel, is named, wrote a report on the Battle of Secessionville June 18, 1862.[34] Hagood received the following commendation from Brigadier-General William Duncan Smith:
Warren Ripley writes in Siege Train, The Journal of a Confederate Artilleryman in the Defense of Charleston:
Milby Burton writes:
After the battle, the Confederate Congress passed this resolution:
Confederate soldier R. deTreville Lawrence also said after the battle:
Fort Lamar today, though battered by age, is still there in its entirety and much the way it was June 16, 1862. You will recognize the front parapet where so much hand-to-hand fighting took place, and know that behind it was the magazine, bombproof, observation tower and rifle pits where Confederates shot down Yankees that reached the parapet. You can look down Fort Lamar Road toward the Secessionville community and imagine the 4th Louisiana advancing at double-quick across the footbridge over the marsh to Secessionville then into the back of Tower Battery in just the nick of time. It is a beautiful and quiet place today. Go out there and walk those hallowed grounds and contemplate our magnificent Southern history then leave with an even greater determination to promote the TRUTH about it far and wide, and forever. Thank you. Notes1. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.----James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177 n. 56. 2. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.----James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177 n. 56. 3. The fake news Washington Post covered up the fact that President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication address at the Confederate Memorial's dedication, June 4, 1914. In their article "Majority of House GOP, including 3 Black Republicans, vote for failed Confederate memorial measure" by Gillian Brockell, June 14, 2024, all the Washington Post said was: "It was installed in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a ceremony attended by President Woodrow Wilson, who was noted even at the time for his racist view." The Washington Post is noted today for ITS racist, bigoted views in addition to its fake news as it proved by its malicious, fraudulent story against Covington Catholic High School's Nicholas Sandmann. Sandmann sued the Washington Post and other fake news outlets like CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. See "Washington Post settles lawsuit with family of Kentucky teenager" by Paul Farhi, July 24, 2020. 4. Johnson Hagood, Memoirs of the War of Secession, U.R. Brooks, ed. (Columbia, SC, 1910), 96. 5. R. deTreville Lawrence, Marietta, Georgia, "In the Battle of Secessionville." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, No. 11, November, 1922. 6. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 178-182. 7. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, (O.R.), LIII, 61, in E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 319. Burton also used the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies extensively. 8. B.A.O. Norris, Graham, Texas, "Confederate Artillery Regiments." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XV, No. 12, Dec. 1907; Reprint: Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1987, 1988. 9. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 178-182. 10. Charles W. Ramsdell, "General Robert E. Lee's Horse Supply, 1862-1865" in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017), 250. The quotation is from the OR, ser. I, v XXIX, pt. 2, 664-665. See also the North's overwhelming advantage with the railroads, "Railroads In The Civil War: Facts and Statistics (North vs South)," https://www.american-rails.com/civil.html, accessed 3-23-21; and Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Confederate Government and the Railroads," in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, 300. 11. Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits as Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures: Showing the Necessity of Union to the Future Prosperity and Welfare of the Republic (New York: Geo. W. & John A. Wood, 1860; Reprint: University: University of Alabama Press, 1965). 12. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 180. 13. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 142. The five military missions were: 1) the Welles-Fox Expedition, heading for Charleston; 2) the Rowan Expedition, also heading for Charleston; 3) Captain Adams' ships, lurking off Santa Rosa Island; 4) Colonel Brown's Expedition, heading for Pensacola; and 5) Porter's Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola. 14. W. A. Swanberg, First Blood, The Story of Fort Sumter (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), 280-282. Both Cameron's letter of April 4, 1861 to Anderson, and Anderson's reply to Cameron of April 8, 1861, that was intercepted by Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard in Charleston, are included. 15. "WHY?", Providence (R.I.) Daily Post, April 13, 1861. 16. Official Records, (O.R.), XIV, 524, in Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 98. 17. John Johnson, The Defense of Charleston Harbor Including Fort Sumter and the Adjacent Islands, 1863-1865. (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., Publishers, 1890); Reprint: Germantown, Tennessee: Guild Bindery Press, 1994, Chapter 1, Note 1, 25. 18. Two thousand Confederate reinforcements were to be sent but had not arrived when the battle began. John Johnson in his magisterial work, The Defense of Charleston Harbor, Including Fort Sumter and the Adjacent Island, 1863-1865., previously cited, writes: "Brigadier-General H. W. Benham . . . attacked the works at Secessionville with two divisions and a brigade (7000 men) early on the morning of June 16, 1862. The Confederates, under Colonel T. G. Lamar, Second South Carolina Artillery, were nearly surprised and worsted at the onset, but, resisting bravely and being reinforced to about 750 men, they successfully repelled four charges of the enemy, inflicting on them a disastrous repulse and a reported official loss of 683 men, the Confederate loss being 204, of which 32 were in the defense of the right by Brigadier-General Hagood."; Johnson Hagood wrote in his Memoirs of the War of Secession, previously cited, on page 96: "The Federals, by their own showing, had 6,000 men engaged and 1,500 in reserve (part of this reserve being the Third Rhode Island). Colonel Hagood might have found Hamilton's Battery on his flank had he advanced without first sending a force against the position first occupied by it. There were engaged on the Confederate side, in the fort and out of it, not exceeding 1,300 men, of which 450 were with Colonel Hagood." 19. Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 107. 20. Official Records, XIV, 524, in Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 105. 21. Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 104-105. 22. Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 106. 23. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 104. 24. Ibid. 25. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 105. 26. Ibid. 27. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 106. 28. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 106-107. 29. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 108. 30. Ibid. 31. Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 110. 32. H. J. Lea, Winnsboro, Louisiana. "The Fourth Louisiana Battalion at the Battle of Secessionville, S. C." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, January, 1923. 33. Ibid. 34. Battle of Secessionville, Report of Colonel Johnson Hagood., Headquarters Advanced Forces, James Island, June 18, 1862., in Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XII, January to December, 1884, 63-66. 35. Ibid. 36. Warren Ripley, ed., Siege Train, The Journal of a Confederate Artilleryman in the Defense of Charleston (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press), Published for the Charleston Library Society, 1986, ix, x. 37. Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 110. 38. Ibid. 39. R. deTreville Lawrence, "The Battle of Secessionville," Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, No. 10, October, 1922. This piece was published on Charleston Athenaeum Press on August 28, 2024.
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One of Shotwell Publishing's latest books is Dr. Clyde Norman Wilson's 80 page African American Slavery in Historical Perspective (Amazon, softcover, $11.95; Kindle, $4.99). This is an extremely important book because putting slavery in historical perspective puts the lie to the worthless presentist history regurgitated ad nauseam by academia and the fake news media. You can not learn from history when the history being taught is a fraud. Few, if any, have done more for American history than Clyde Wilson, who is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History with a 35 year career at the University of South Carolina. He is primary editor of the voluminous The Papers of John C. Calhoun and just finished editing an acclaimed 28-volume edition. He is author or editor of over 30 other books and over 800 articles, essays, reviews, etc. He has lectured all over the world. I have had the pleasure of attending many of them. His professional accomplishments and awards are too many to list here but include founding director of the Society of Independent Southern Historians, the Bostick Prize for Contributions to South Carolina Letters, the Robert E. Lee Medal of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, founding dean of the SCV's Stephen D. Lee Institute, co-founder of Shotwell Publishing, and the M. E. Bradford Distinguished Professor of the Abbeville Institute. A book like this has been badly needed for a long time. Everybody knows how pathetic and lacking the study of history is, in this day and age. The degradation of American History began in the 1960s when truth as the standard for history, began being replaced by leftist politics, as Marxists began their long march through the institutions. That replacement is largely complete today with academia 100% liberal, and free speech and inquiry non-existent on so many campuses run by mediocre DEI appointees like Harvard's Claudine Gay, and the racists at Columbia who allow Jewish students to be attacked or prevented from going to class by violent mobs. Those mobs support terrorists and are driven by hate-America agitators from around the world. I know the actual number of liberals in academia is closer to 90% but the few independent thinkers, especially in the humanities, are not going to speak up and have the screaming mob come to their office, or lose their chance for tenure. The entire atmosphere is sick and twisted, as always happens when woke politics takes over. Academia, much of the time, does not promote knowledge or wisdom for young people. It interprets almost everything according to leftist, anti-White racist precepts such as Critical Race Theory, DEI and other Marxist imperatives. Dr. Wilson states that slavery today is still a powerful, emotional force in public life and many have weaponized the word slavery though they "have no knowledge or understanding of what life was like in past times" thus "historical perspective is needed." That is exactly right because the prime problem today is idiotic leftist standards such as 1) men can menstruate and get pregnant, and 2) it is fair for men to compete in women's sports because, if they say they are women, they really are women. That's all it takes to become a woman. Biden just signed an Executive Order changing Title IX so bigger, stronger men can compete with girls and women though that puts women in danger (think rugby, lacrosse, basketball, and everything else). It is outrageous and degrading for women and girls to have to endure that along with men snooping around their bathrooms when they are most vulnerable, giving them no privacy or respect. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, praised legislation just passed in Arkansas, that negates Biden's absurdity. She said:
To understand the past you have to view the past the way people who lived in the past viewed it. It was not the past to them. It was their present. Wilson writes that "before the invention of labour-saving machinery, beginning [with] Britain in the late 1700s, the master-servant relationship was normal in almost every human society. . . . Servitude was the everyday condition of great numbers of people who did most of the world's hard and dirty work." (p1) There was slavery in the Bible though Christians "were urged to be good masters and good servants." There was slavery in ancient Greece and Rome in their greatest days, slavery everywhere in the Islamic world including of whites, slavery in Asian civilizations, and for 500 years, Europe's serfs and peasants had "little more freedom from labour and inferior status than African American slaves." (p2) Black Africans themselves were the source of most of the slavery of their black brothers and sisters. African tribal chieftains waging never-ending warfare caused slavery in Africa to flourish "longer than any other part of the world" and it still exists there today. The plantation economy of the pre-industrial world needed labor and black slaves were Africa's largest export for perhaps a millennium:
That is an amazing statistic. Only 5% of blacks in the African Diaspora came to the United States. Read the famous African American anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, in her book, Barracoon, from my article "The Washington Poop, I mean Post: Fake News AND Fake History," when she discovered it was fellow blacks in Africa selling her ancestors into slavery. Slaves did not voluntarily go onto slave ships because the slavers waved a red handkerchief and the blacks were curious and got captured. Black slaves were captured by other blacks in incessant tribal warfare then shackled and held behind bars for months in slave forts on Africa's coast such as Bunce Island off today's Sierra Leone, waiting on the slave trader to pull up. Those slave traders were mostly New Englanders and New Yorkers and, before them, Europeans. Then poor slaves faced months through the Middle Passage, chained side by side in the bowels of scorching hot slave ships with no ventilation, in vomit, feces, and the stench of death. It might make DEI racists sad but:
For the South-haters out there, Dr. Wilson writes:
The population increase of blacks in the United States is some proof of their condition, especially when black slaves in the Caribbean and other places did not increase at all. Mortality was high in the Caribbean because their lives were brutal. New slaves had to be brought in constantly, which caused many insurrections non-existent in the American South:
Even in the North, when "Slaves were 10 per cent of the New York population and household slaves were commonplace" Yale president Timothy Dwight "wrote a long poem about how much happier the slaves were in Connecticut than elsewhere." (p3) Even though the slave trade was outlawed in 1808 by the United States Constitution, New Englanders, who loved the lucrative profits, carried on an illegal slave trade until after the War Between the States. See W. E. B. Du Bois's famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1838-1870. On page 179, he writes:
The New England Yankee attitude toward slave trading is stated well by John Brown, the founder of Brown University, not the infamous John Brown of Harpers Ferry but John Brown, American patriot of Providence, Rhode Island:
That quotation comes from the excellent book by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company). Dr. Wilson gives us a prime example of the North versus the South on slavery:
Townsend said he had "saved the Africans from death in their own land, which may well have been true." He was to make $130,000 on this trip which was a huge sum back then.
The Echo with its 400 Africans was sent to Charleston, South Carolina "where they were received sympathetically and provided with food and clothing." Dr. Wilson continues:
Over time, many "believed that entering into Western Civilisation and Christianity, even in a subordinate status, was a net benefit for Africans." The Spanish Bishop of the Indies in the 1500s, Las Casas:
White Southerners had a relationship with black Southerners "that was not entirely negative" while blacks were "virtually absent" from the rest of the United States. That is one reason why so many blacks were enthusiastic to become Confederate soldiers. Dr. Lewis H. Steiner, Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed the exit of Stonewall Jackson's army from Frederick, Maryland in 1862. He wrote in his report:
There could have been many more blacks than "over 3,000" since Dr. Steiner began observing at 4:00 a.m., before light, and could have missed many light-skinned blacks. Steiner's is only one small example. Contrast that to the laws in numerous Northern states that forbid blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois. Six slave states fought for the North the entire war. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state in 1863, ironically just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed no slaves or few. The EP exempted all the Union slave states and all Southern territory already captured by the Union army. Dr. Wilson writes that "Western civilization, the greatest achievement of mankind so far, was White." They believed in White supremacy. "Non-whites they encountered were either savages or of very strange cultures." This was reality and "People in those days did not feel a drive to 'fix' it." Wilson writes:
Abraham Lincoln believed in White supremacy. He said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates he wanted the West reserved for white people from all over the world. That was the driving force behind the "no expansion of slavery into the West" argument. It was not concern for black people. Indeed, they did not want slavery in the West because they did not want Blacks in the West. All of the above, except for my additions, comes from just the Introduction. Dr. Wilson sets the stage for the rest of the book with this:
In Chapter 2, Antebellum Bondage, Wilson writes:
He writes that "Plantations had no barbed wire, watchtowers, or attack dogs, or even very many locks. . . . Corporal punishment was used on the plantation, although not as often as alleged. It was also common in the army, navy, merchant marine, factories, as punishment for crime, and in nearly every family." (p13) About day-to-day life, Wilson writes:
Wilson writes that "history is the sad record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind, antebellum American bondage was an evil not near the top of the list." Southerners, white and black:
In contrast, Northern society was cold and hard:
Wilson points out that economic control of the country is what Northerners were fighting for. They had huge advantages and thought they could win easily. They saw the Western lands as markets to exploit, railroads to build, wealth that would flow back to New York, Boston and the entire North. I could write volumes about the foaming-at-the-mouth determination of the North to control the taxes and tariffs of the country but here is one quote from the Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, 10 days before South Carolina voted unanimously 169-0 in a Convention of the People to secede from the Union. It comes from my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument. Here is what secession and an independent Southern republic meant to the North, and this is why Abraham Lincoln sent five naval missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861, to start a war:
Concern for the black man was nowhere in their minds, as Dr. Wilson continues:
Said Emerson, "The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery because he wishes to abolish the black man." (p24) Much abolition propaganda "was also a disguised form of closet pornography for puritans, dwelling on illicit sex, brandings, whippings, and the like." (p24) Democrat New Jersey governor, Joel Parker, said:
About blacks during the war, Wilson quotes Allan Nevins in The War for the Union, "long the standard mainstream history of this period":
Wilson writes that the following is from the "official history of the 24th Massachusetts Regiment":
Wilson quotes Frederick Douglas, "the foremost African American spokesman of the 19th century" who later said that "everything Lincoln did was for white people. Any benefit to black people was incidental. He [Douglas] acknowledged twenty-five years after the war that blacks were worse off than under slavery and that the fault was mainly with the central government in relation to which the black man is"
Nathan Bedford Forrest's "elite headquarters company contained several black men." Forrest
The words of former slaves are powerful evidence of their lives. Wilson writes:
One of the former slaves said:
Wilson quotes Jim Downs's, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (2015). Downs said the black death toll was 1,000,000 and "We must also take account of the postwar toll of malnutrition, homelessness, and debilitation from wounds, leading to early death. There were in 1866-1867 epidemics in the South recalling the death toll of the Spanish Flu after World War I." (p48) About Reconstruction, Wilson writes:
In Chapter 6, Conclusion, Wilson writes:
Wilson is right when he writes:
About the comparison of the South to Nazism, Wilson writes:
'The Righteous Union Myth' is falser, stronger, and more destructive than the supposed 'Lost Cause Myth.' (p62) Wilson writes that "Those who want the war to be about slavery and nothing but slavery are often hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion. Reason, evidence, and fair discussion do not enter the question for them." And:
Clyde Wilson's African American Slavery in Historical Perspective helps one understand history and see things the way the people of the past saw them. That is how you truly understand the past. He points out George Orwell's statement that "'The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.'" (p67) Today's politicized "emphasis on slavery has less to do with the real feelings of African Americans than with the deluded minds of white people seeking cheap virtue." Elizabeth Warren, Ty Seidule and Nikki Haley top the list. This outstanding books ends with:
This piece was published at Charleston Athenaeum Press on May 16, 2024.
The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery2/13/2022  Academia's absolute proof that the War Between the States was fought over slavery is based primarily on the declarations of causes for the secession of four of the first seven Southern states to secede: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. However, those four declarations prove nothing of the sort. There were 13 Southern states represented in the Confederate government. That 13 included Missouri and Kentucky, which were divided states that did not actually secede. They remained Union slave states - two of six Union slave states - the entire war (WHAT! UNION SLAVE STATES! I thought the war was fought over slavery with the Union fighting to end slavery! Man, they should have started with their own country). In fact, three of the six Union slave states - New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware - had slavery several months after the war. It took the second 13th Amendment in December 1865 for slavery to end in those three Union slave states. Remember, the first 13th Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed. It was passed by the Northern Congress, ratified by several states and strongly supported by Abraham Lincoln before the war made it moot. The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of the North on the slavery issue though it is only one small piece of the irrefutable evidence that the North did not go to war to end slavery. Back to the six Union slave states: The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them as well as slaves in already captured Confederate territory. That prompted Lincoln's secretary of state, William H. Seward, to state "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." It also gave Charles Dickens a good laugh at Lincoln's phoneyness and hypocrisy, especially since all of Lincoln's life he favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). All 13 states represented in the Confederate government produced a legal document such as an ordinance of secession that withdrew the state from the Union. Tennessee's was called a Declaration of Independence. Most of the ordinances of secession were straight-forward documents referring to a state's ratification of the Constitution then withdrawing the state from it, as well as proclaiming its sovereignty, etc. Alabama and Arkansas did go a little beyond pure legalese in discussing some issues but nothing like a declaration of causes. Only four of the 13 Confederate states issued declarations of causes. Nine did not. Those four declarations are the basis for the entire argument against the South because politicized academia and the ignorant news media simply ignore substantial evidence they don't agree with. They ignore the six Union slave states, the Corwin Amendment, the War Aims Resolution (war is being waged for Union, not to end slavery), Lincoln's very clear statements that the war is about preserving the Union, and a ton of conclusive evidence that slavery was not the cause of the North's invasion of the South. The North was interested in its economic dominance and wealth, not ending slavery, and Northerners sure did not want a bunch of desperate freed slaves to come North and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding free blacks from living there or even visiting for long including Lincoln's Illinois. Anti-slavery in the North in 1856 and 1860 was political, to rally votes so Northerners could control the federal government and continue their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and their high tariffs like the Morrill Tariff. Remember, they were the "Federals" in the war because they wanted to establish the supremacy of the federal government over the states, which they would then control with their larger population. Northern anti-slavery should be labeled, more accurately, "anti-South" - political agitation against the South - not anti-slavery. It was not a moral movement for the benefit of the black man. Even the slavery in the West issue was based, not on concern for blacks, but the opposite: Northern racism. They didn't want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West. It all started with the Wilmot Proviso. U.S. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania on Augusut 8, 1846 introduced a proviso prohibiting slavery in the territory won from Mexico after the Mexican War. Wilmot admitted his racist motivation was to keep blacks out of the West. He said, among other things: "The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. Let us keep what remains for ourselves . . . for free white labor."1 Lincoln said the exact same thing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that the West was to be reserved for free white labor from all over the world. No blacks allowed. The four declarations of causes are statements as to why states seceded, what their grievances were, and such. They are not declarations of war. Southerners expected to live in peace. After all, Yankees threatened to secede five times before Southerners finally did. Nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley during the time that South Carolina was seceding in December, 1860. Greeley strongly supported the right of secession ("let the erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money then he wanted war like the rest of the North. Wars are always fought over money and power, never because one country does not like the domestic institutions in another. Would you send your precious sons off to die to free servants in another country? Hell no. Lincoln sent his hostile naval forces to Charleston and Pensacola to start the War Between the States in April, 1861 because a free trade South with European military alliances and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet - cotton - would quickly rise to dominance in North America. The North would not be able to beat the South in a war in such a situation. That's why Lincoln wanted to use his enormous advantages at that point in history, and fight. He wanted to establish the North as the dominant cultural and economic region of our great country, and he did. It's been that way for over 150 years though many of the big cities of the North and West today are on a death spiral thanks to woke liberal policies that encourage violent crime and discriminate against the law-biding. Recent mass thefts in San Francisco, New York and other bastions of liberal wokeness by mobs of violent criminals have forced businesses to board up and leave rather than serve the public. That is a clear sign of a sick, decaying culture. The four declarations of causes all mention several reasons for seceding. All mention the many constitutional violations of the North. The North was untrustworthy. All mention Northern terrorism against the South such as John Brown who wanted to murder Southern men, women and children with a bloody slave insurrection like they had in Haiti. Brown was funded by the "Secret Committee of Six" out of Massachusetts. They gave him $679,000 in 2017 dollars. Seven of Brown's raiders who escaped Harper's Ferry were protected by Iowa and Ohio whose Republican governors would not extradite them to Virginia to stand trial as the Constitution required. Brown was celebrated and glorified in the North for wanting to murder Southerners. Of course, this shocked the South and caused it to realize that Northerners were already at war with them, so they debated the issue and voted to secede.2 The most widely quote phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding comes from the Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. South Carolina's Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, adopted December 24, 1860, is a fascinating constitutional and early American history lesson. It proves South Carolina's sovereignty and the sovereignty of all the states. The caps are in the original document. Here's part of it: Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." / Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE. Georgia's declaration goes into great detail on the economic causes of secession. As Georgia's famous senator, Robert Toombs, said, the North was a suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it into the North constantly. The Georgia declaration states: The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. That is a powerful statement as to why the Union was critical to Lincoln and the North, but was the opposite of the States' Rights philosophy of the Founding Fathers and the South. Even Mississippi's declaration that begins with an assertion that it is identified with slavery as the basis of its economic well-being makes several critical points. It affirms the constitutional violations of the North but states about the North: It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. / It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. / It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. / It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. / It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause. Texas's declaration of causes includes: By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States. / The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas. Read these declarations and especially know your own state's if you live in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia or Texas. Northern constitutional violations are extremely important. If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, you can't trust them with anything. Northern support for terrorists like John Brown was a huge issue. The North was already at war with the South. Would you allow yourself to be ruled by people who sent murderers, thieves and arsonists into your peaceful towns to kill your family and neighbors, destroy your property, poison wells, and encourage the unimaginable horror of slave insurrections with rape and murder from which there would be no survivors like in Haiti? The economic theft also mentioned was huge. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.3 Nobody in the North, ever a single time, suggested a workable plan for gradual, compensated emancipation such as the Northern states, themselves, and all other nations on earth except Haiti, used to end slavery. The reason why is that Northerners were not about to spend their hard earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North with crime and violence, and be job competition. They would rather do as they did and just pass laws that forbid black people from settling or even visiting Northern and Western states for long. The four declarations of causes indicate that slavery was one of the causes of secession for four states, but only for those four. The other nine did not issue declarations of causes, and four of the Southern states, in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, unquestionably seceded over nothing to do with slavery. Those four states --- Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina --- rejected secession at first but after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, they were horrified by the prospect of violent federal coercion. They were utterly disgusted that the federal government would illegally and unconstitutionally invade sovereign states, kill their citizens and destroy their property to force them to obey a Northern sectional majority. Another thing that proves the war was not about slavery: when Lincoln called for his immoral invasion, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy. There were nine slave states in the Union, soon to be 10 with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state into the Union during the war, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. There were only seven slave states in the Confederacy. The nine Union slave states on April 12, 1861 when the war started were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. The seven Confederate states were South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Nothing the North or dishonest academia or anybody else says matters anyway. The South had the right to secede and did so properly. Among the conclusive evidence of the right of secession is the reserved right to secede demanded by New York, Rhode Island and Virginia before they acceded to the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, thus they had it too, since all states entered the Union as exact equals. Southerners seceded democratically with conventions of the people to decide the one issue of secession just as the Founding Fathers had used conventions of the people to decide the one issue of accepting or rejecting the United States Constitution. The Founding Fathers established the precedent of using conventions of the people to decide single, important issues. Southerners followed it to the letter. Southerners wanted to be free to govern themselves just like the colonists had wanted when the British became tyrannical with their taxes that were minuscule compared to the 85% Southerners were paying in 1861, of which 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Southerners expected to live in peace but, as stated, Lincoln and Northern business leaders and banks knew that a free-trade South with 100% control of King Cotton, and British trade and military alliances, would quickly be unbeatable in a war. The South would then rise to dominance in North America. Lincoln started his war so he could throw up his naval blockade and chill relations between the South and Europe. This is confirmed by Lincoln's own commander inside Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, who was at ground zero on April 12, 1861, when the war started. Of all the participants in the drama, Anderson, alone, was in the best position to judge who started the war. When Anderson was informed that reinforcements would be sent after the South had been lied to over and over with the false promise that Fort Sumter would be evacuated, he wrote back to Secretary of War Cameron and Lincoln: . . . a movement made now when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout out country. . . . We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. . . . (emphasis added) Major Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, president of the North, the first sectional president in American history whom over 60% of even Northerners voted against in 1860. Lincoln, whose goal was to establish the Northeast as the dominant economic and cultural section of our country, succeeded, though over a million people had to die, which included 750,000 soldiers, with another million maimed. Notes 1 Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 90. 2 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 98-101. 3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 103. This piece was published on Charleston Athenaeum on Feb. 9, 2022.
 IT IS CLEAR from Anne Wilson Smith's thorough, well documented and riveting book, that Charlottesville's inept, disgraceful Democrat leadership is the reason a person died and many were injured at the August 12, 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. If the city of Charlottesville cared about the United States Constitution and free speech, they would have protected everybody's right to it and nobody would have died. But that does not make good headlines for the left, which never lets a tragedy go to waste. I want to make it CLEAR that I am NO fan of the KKK or "white supremacy" whatever that means. I am an historian who is appalled at the fraud which passes for history in this day and age thanks to an utterly corrupt news media that is more like the propaganda ministry of the Democrat Party. By news media I mean CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC. the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, et al. ad nauseam, all of which are empowered by Big Tech, Google, Facebook and Twitter, that censor information for half of the country, not because it is false, but because much of it is true but harms the Democrat Party. Academia is just as bad or worse. It is 100% liberal (I know the actual percentage is only 90% but the other 10 are not going to say a word). A real debate is impossible in academia because it is made up of liberals trying to out-liberal each other and all petrified the mob will show up at their office, or, God forbid, accuse them of being a racist (which is defined as anybody who disagrees with a Democrat) thus most of them are dishonest but they know the Democrat Party line. We are living through a Marxist authoritarian revolution where the Democrat attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland, just issued a memo instructing the FBI to investigate parents speaking at local school board meetings. Those parents are upset with racist Critical Race Theory, transgenderism to young children, and other abominations being taught widespread across the country and dividing us horribly.1 A Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate and former governor, Terry McAuliffe, recently said in a debate that parents have no right to interfere with what schools teach their children. Pardon me, governor: THAT'S BULLSH_T. Anybody who thinks that should not be elected to anything, ever. Charlottesville Untold says, about Anne Wilson Smith, that she is the author of Robert E. Lee: A Biography for Kids (which I own and find a well-illustrated, delightful book!). There are 32 chapters in six parts, which organize the material well. Smith has done posterity a favor by compiling so much information that has heretofore been hidden by the fraud media. She has interviews, video accounts, court records, police reports, timelines, the Heaphy Report commissioned by the city of Charlottesville to find out what happened. The Heaphy Report is a non-political authoritative report released on December 1, 2017 described as an "independent investigation of Unite the Right and surrounding events led by Tim Heaphy and performed by his law firm Hunton & Williams."2 Heaphy is a former federal prosecutor.3 Smith writes: For creation of the 200-plus page report, the City of Charlottesville paid $350,000. Investigators reviewed hundred of thousands of documents and electronic communications from the City of Charlottesville and numerous agencies and offices of the Commonwealth of Virginia. They reviewed thousands of photos and hundreds of hours' worth of video footage and audio recordings, some obtained from the internet, some submitted by witnesses, and some obtained from law enforcement sources. They interviewed 150 witnesses including law enforcement personnel; representatives and members of the right-wing protester groups and left-wing counter-protest groups that attended, as well as unaffiliated attendees. They also provided phone and internet tip lines for members of the public to submit information. All of these official documents, the violence they describe, the critical communications among officials during the dramatic events, the bloody fights between mobs, the anarchy, most of the time with police standing around doing nothing, make this book an incredibly exciting read that is impossible to put down. Smith sets the stage by going into detail on how the destruction of century-old monuments to Confederate heroes and war dead began. She discusses the compromise that brought the Confederate battle flag off the dome of the South Caroling State House where it had flown since 1962 as part of the Confederate War Centennial. South Carolina had supplied 60,000 soldiers to Southern armies in the War Between the States and 20,000 had been killed and another 20,000 maimed. In the entire war, 750,000 died and over a million were maimed out of a national population of 31 million. We lost 400,000 in all of World War II out of a national population of 150 million. Though polls, even among a majority of blacks, showed that the Confederate flag over the State House was not a problem, virtue-signaling activists made it a problem so a legislative compromise was reached in 2000, the flag came off the State House and a historically accurate square Confederate battle flag such as Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia used in the war was placed next to the Confederate soldier's monument on the grounds in the front of he State House. This calmed the issue until June 17, 2015, when Dylann Roof murdered nine churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and soon thereafter was shown in pictures holding a Confederate battle flag. This gave then-Governor Nikki Haley a chance to advance her career by degrading her own state and the ancestors of her voters. Smith describes it well. After supporting the flag: Haley pivoted to the need to remove the flag to promote "healing." Haley, born to immigrant parents as Nimrata Rhandawa, had risen to power as part of the "Tea Party" wave of Republican populism, becoming Governor in 2011. South Carolinians had embraced her as one of their own, and elevated her, twice, to the highest office in the state. In an almost unfathomable act of betrayal, Haley turned on the people who had elected her by allowing their cherished and honorable past to be defined by a deranged mass murderer. The flag came down on July 10, 2015 and that opened floodgates for the destruction of monuments all over the country as well as unnecessary hatred and division, and the current Marxist authoritarian revolution we find ourselves in. If Haley had been a leader, she would have encouraged the building of more monuments but she didn't. She joined the left in destroying a sacred monument and thus put herself in the same class as the Islamic State, when they destroyed monuments hundreds of years old. ISIS, Nikki Haley and the Democrat Party, peas in a pod. Smith said she "learned that the rally in support of the statue of Robert E. Lee, perhaps the most admirable man our country has ever produced, was planned for August 12th in Charlottesville Virginia." She said "I resolved to go - in fact, felt I must - as a show of support for the first real demonstration of resistance to the cultural cleansing of the symbols of my forebears."6 Smith headed from Columbia to Charlottesville . . . expecting something not unlike the many flag rallies I had witnessed over the years in Columbia, though on a larger scale. I did not anticipate that I would watch events unfold which would have a lasting national impact. I could not have known how catastrophically misrepresented this event would be to the American public. I was appalled as I watched the day's events solidified into a tragic and utterly false narrative that was to become cemented into the national psyche. I did not anticipate that I would be present at a defining event in modern American history, so noteworthy that from that time forward, every utterance of the city name will evoke its memory. "Charlottesville."7 Smith confirms that . . . there were quite a few people, 'very fine people,' who showed up to oppose removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. These people have been accused by the most powerful voices in the nation of being "Nazis" and every other despicable name imaginable. None of them have ever been offered a platform to refute these accusations and tell their own version of the story. Not only are these individuals personally harmed by being prevented from addressing the accusations against them, but the nation as a whole has suffered under a tragic false impression of the events of August 12, 2017.8 The racist Wes Bellamy, Charlottesville City Council vice mayor, presents himself "as a champion of equality and anti-racism, but his social media posts revealed an open hatred of White people." This is the man who agitated to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename Lee Park. He is more typical than not of city leaders across the country who have voted to destroy century-old monuments that were built by a poverty-stricken South that had been devastated in the War Between the States but found money through bake sales and pennies from school children to honor their beloved war dead and heroes with fine monuments as statements to the future. Of course, the Democrat Party's Marxist Communist cultural revolution going on today has destroyed many of them. Smith documents the racist Bellamy's tweets including the misspellings in the originals: Lol funniest thing about being down south is seeing little White men and the look on their faces when they have to look up to you. @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 10/13/2012 That's Bellamy's beliefs but here's what Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander in World War II and later president of the United States thought about Gen. Robert E. Lee. On August 1, 1960, a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, wrote an angry letter to President Eisenhower excoriating him for having a picture of Lee in his White House office. Scott wrote: "I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me. "The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes."10 President Eisenhower wrote back on the 9th: Dear Dr. Scott: Just to give you a taste of why you can't put this book down, here is much of Chapter 11, Inside Lee, meaning Lee Park, with subtitle "In a combat zone without a rifle.", pages 103 to 109: Not only did the Unite the Right attendees have to fight their way through a hostile crowd to attend the rally, but they were not even safe once inside the confines of the park. They found themselves surrounded by Antifa without and separated by barricades within. While throngs of police watched passively, attendees were attacked like caged animals. It was during this part of the day that Baked Alaska was sprayed in the eyes with a chemical agent which left him hospitalized and temporarily blinded. The chaos inside the park continue until about 11:30 a.m. The young man from Appalachia, Chris, put it this way: "Once we were inside the park, everything really went to hell. We had anyone with a shield, anyone able-bodied was in front holding back protesters so they couldn't take the park. They threw rocks, piss bottles, bricks, and paint bombs." Chris observed fist fighting and people being attacked with clubs. Chris recalls that he was hit with "rancid piss" and paint bombs, despite the fact that he was trying to stay away from the front lines. After being pelted with objects for a while, he began to get angry, and decided to go up to the front to fight back. He admits that at that point, he got in "a couple of scuffles." Chris spotted plenty of men in uniform, both police and National Guard, standing near the park. "They had the means to break it up . . . They could've stopped it." Eddie Miller reported a similar experience on the Political Cesspool podcast that evening. "What we found, you would not believe, once we fought our way into the park, we were barricaded on three sides, only one way out of the park... We were there for an hour and a half, taking all kinds of foreign missiles, bottles of water, sticks being thrown in, our people being spit, hit with pepper spray, they turned gas on us, they threw feces and urine on us. And you know what the police were doing? They were sitting there with their fingers up their rears, watching, some of them laughing. Watching us take all kinds of endless abuse." On the same podcast, Brad Griffin of the League of the South reported, "When we got to the park, we found that Antifa was not penned by the police. The police allowed Antifa to attack our group. They attacked us with pepper spray, with bricks, with bear mace, with piss bombs, with literal human feces... The Antifa actually had like a canister of hair spray and a lighter, and actually turned it into a miniature flame thrower. I mean they had a literal flame thrower in Lee Park. They were throwing bombs and bricks. They were attacking our people... There were two dozen people on the ground, hit by mace, bricks, who were beaten trying to get into the park." Gene recalls being fenced in to a "little bitty" area with "all this stuff flying through the air." There were nurses in his group who were pouring milk in the eyes of people who had been pepper-strayed. He did not see anyone in Nazi or Klan garb or any swastikas amongst the crowd. Bill and his friend took cover under some oak trees on the south side of the park which deflected most of the projectiles. Bill had worn protective gear, but he took it off to get relief from the intense August heat. While milling around the park, he and his friend talked to a few people. He spotted Kessler and a lot of different groups there. He recalls being amidst a thick crowd, "Pretty much hemmed in." At one point, part of the barricades were pushed down to assist some people who were being attacked that were trying to get into the park to safety. He noticed that the police were not separating the protesters and counter-protesters. He also noticed National Guard members atop a bank across the street. "There was a big police presence, but they didn't do a thing." When Tom and his friends got into the park, they could see state troopers and cops. "There were barriers in the park between us and Kessler and his crowd." Tom got hit with a balloon full of blue paint, and his friend got hit with a hard projectile which they later identified as a condom filled with cement. Tom remembered noticing, "Cops were just sitting there just chilling, and I guess they're not gonna do anything. And we're being assaulted here." He began to wish he had not turned down his friends' offers of the shield and helmet. "I felt kind of exposed," The Iraq War veteran said. "I felt like I was in a combat zone without a rifle. Then it became survival mode." "[Antifa] were coming in waves trying to push into the park. I kept seeing them come and come and come. They are horrible, ineffectual fighters... a bunch of wimps." Tom also said "The League of the South are the ones I remember because they really kept Antifa out of the park." Other observers noted that the League of the South shield wall was critical in protecting rally attendees from the surrounding mob. Simon Roche, the visitor from South Africa, heartily praised the League of the South members who guarded the park entrance: And once we occupied the park after much ado, the police stood by and watched as the Antifa attacked the people, our people, over and over and over again. Eventually, marvelously, I saw how a group of about twelve young, young, young men, very young men, took it upon themselves to form a barricade between the Antifa and the rest of us. They were all that stood between us and the Antifa, and nigh on one thousand of the people who had come there to defend their culture, their history, their values, and their norms, because that's what it comes down to. And I tell you, if there's an impression that I'll leave with from the USA, it is that of these young men who took it upon themselves, who volunteered to stand at the foot of these steps under the direction of Michael R. Tubbs and defend all those people by themselves, and over and over and over again they were hit and they were smashed, and one Black man ran up with a great pipe and he smashed one man on the side of the head in front of everybody before running away into the crowd. They were spat on. And feces was thrown on them - some feces landed on me. And there was urine and there was some evidence of condoms filled with seminal fluid. And it was just tremendous for me to see with my own eyes how a thin line of young men, 19, 20, 21, 22, stood there and withstood everything that was thrown at them. Another attendee echoed Roche's praise, saying, "it was precisely the group most stigmatized by the MSM, the armored Alt-Righters with shields, who created what order existed."... Once their large entourage arrived in the park, Jim recalls some of the female League of the South members were acting as medics for those who had been injured on the way. Some Sons of Confederate Veterans and older folks were already there. He noted "weird gates separating the middle of the park," and about 200 or so cops standing around in riot gear doing nothing. "The park was surrounded by crazed Marxists," Jim recalls. They were throwing balloons with some kind of purple irritant that caused a light acid burn, as well as used tampons, urine, feces, and water bottles. The League of the South Members who were manning the shield wall would occasionally pull in stragglers who were arriving late and being attacked. "It was a scrum." When Luke arrived at the park, he found himself on the side with the League of the South and some "Nazi weirdos," and thought "I do not want to be near those people." He saw rally attendees scuffling with a handful of Antifa that had gotten into the park, and one large Black man screaming at people. At one point, the Black man put his hand on his pistol grip. "I almost hit the deck."... On the other side of the park, they spotted a more clean-cut crowd with Confederate and American flags and some young polo-clad Alt-Righters. Because of the barricade down the middle of the park, they had to exit back into the crowd of protesters to get to the other side. Luke and his party exited the way they had come in, then proceeded to walk around the park with their group in a square formation, with women and the elderly in the middle. They walked stone-faced forward, not wanting to start a fight by catching the eye of anyone of the surrounding sea of Antifa, who Luke describes as being "like a pack of hyenas." You can smell them ten feet away... They are gross people." As the group proceeded around the park, an Antifa jumped on and attacked one of their men out of the blue, choking him. "Holy shit!" thought Luke. A militia member intervened, and forced the Antifa to stand back. "I'm very thankful for the militia guys. They did more than any law enforcement officer that day." They finally reached the other side of the park, where another shield wall was being manned by a polo-and-khaki-wearing Alt-Right crowd. Luke remembers that it was extremely hot while he and his party were waiting inside the park for the rally to start. The cops were ambling about, not really doing anything, while the Antifa that encircled the park were "acting as if possessed" and throwing things - gas bombs, smoke grenades, bottles of urine - and there were rumors among the crowd that others were being hit with even more dangerous chemicals. Luck himself had already been pepper sprayed by this point... The chaos continued. Asked about his concern level, Luke described it this way: "If 1 is chilling, and 10 is Kandhahar province, I would say 7.5. It was as though a fort was being created in the middle of the park. Outside are crazy people who want to tear you apart, and the cops aren't doing anything."... One attendee described his experience as the victim of the aforementioned tactic. "An Antifa toady stole the hat of one of our comrades, which served as both physical and dox protection. Naturally he sought to retrieve his property, in the process getting mobbed by the crowd and receiving a nasty laceration... (This is a common Antifa tactic - to provoke and isolate an individual, then swarm him. I entered the fray to recover the hat and prevent my friend from being swallowed by the crowd, and in the process receiving a series of clubs to the head and torso in a surreal sort of baptism into politically-motivated leftist American street violence." The death of Heather Heyer is truly a tragedy and is squarely on the hands of Charlottesville Democrats who made the police completely ineffective that day. There is documentation of Heyer roaming with some mobs. Smith writes: Just a few days after the crash, Bro (Heyer's mother) visited the site of Heyer's death. In a statement that contributed to public confusion about the fatality, a tearful Bro told reporters that Heyer had died of a heart attack. "She died pretty instantly. She didn't suffer. She, um, died of a heart attack right away at the scene. They revived her briefly and then - not consciously, just got her heart beating again - and then her heart just stopped. So I don't feel like she suffered. That's been a blessing." Bro's statement attributing Heyer's death to a heart attack caused some to speculate that Heyer was not killed by the car crash at all. Theories swirled that Heyer, a 4-foot, 11-inch tall, 330-pound, smoker who had been walking around for hours in intense summer heat, died of natural causes which were merely exacerbated by the stress of being at the crash scene. However, the cause of death was ruled by medical examiners to be "blunt force injury."12 The Heaphy Report "did not find that a direct stand-down order had been issued" but police incompetence caused the same effect: The planning and coordination breakdowns prior to August 12 produced disastrous results. Because of their misalignment and lack of accessible protective gear, officers failed to intervene in physical altercations that took place in areas adjacent to Emancipation Park. VSP directed its officers to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts between protesters and counter-protesters. CPD commander similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations. Neither agency deployed available field forces or other units to protect public safety at the locations where violence took place. Instead, command staff prepared to declare an unlawful assembly and disperse the crowd.13 It appears that Chief Al Thomas illegally destroyed evidence or tried to. He was uncooperative with investigators. The conclusions of the Heaphy Report state: [P]olice planing for August 12 was inadequate and disconnected. CPD commanders did not reach out to officials in other jurisdictions where these groups had clashed previously to seek information and advice. CPD supervisors did not provide adequate training or information to line officers, leaving them uncertain and unprepared for a challenging enforcement environment. CPD planners waited too long to request the assistance of the state agency skilled in emergency response. CPD command staff also received inadequate legal advice and did not implement a prohibition of certain items that could be used as weapons. It would not surprise me a bit if much or all of this was done deliberately by Democrat leadership in Charlottesville. The more anarchy, violence and carnage that happened, the more the fraud news media would be able to lie and create a narrative to help Democrats, which is exactly what they did and continue to do to this day. Even "President" Biden began his presidential campaign with a lie for which there is absolute proof that it is a lie, talking about President Trump's statement that there were very fine people on both sides. Trump unquestionably was referring to the people for and against Robert E. Lee's statue, not any other groups. But truth makes no different to our fraud news media when an advantage can be had for the Democrat Party. The bottom line is what the Heaphy Report found, that: The City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12... This represents a failure of one of government's core functions--the protection of fundamental rights.15 Anne Wilson Smith has done an outstanding thing for truth and the public record by her guts with attending the Unite the Right rally and now, with this riveting book, giving voice to people who have been lied about endlessly by our disgraceful news media. Smith's putting all this into the public record is an invaluable thing for our country and posterity. Everybody should buy this book, not only because it is an exciting read that is hard to put down, but because it is eye-opening as to the corruption of the Democrat Party and the fraud news media. Our First Amendment rights do not cease to apply just because Democrats find somebody's speech objectionably. I find most of their speech objectionably but I would never, ever want them to be silenced. Let them bring it and be judged in full public view. Charlottesville Untold, Inside Unite the Right by Reckonin' webmaster Anne Wilson Smith, Shotwell Publishing, LLC, Columbia, S.C., Sept. 20, 2021, softcover, 396 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1947660588, thoroughly documented with footnotes, many of which contain QR codes so you can look at drone footage and such immediately as you read. Notes1 Mark Moore, The New York Post, "Legal group demands probe into Garland’s school parents memo," October 11, 2021, , accessed October 13, 2021.
2 Anne Wilson Smith, Charlottesville Untold, Inside Unite the Right (Columbia: Shotwell Publishing, 2021), 317. 3 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xvi. 4 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 317. 5 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xii. 6 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xiii. 7 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xiv. 8 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xvi. 9 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 4. 10 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, , accessed 5-3-20. 11 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, accessed 5-3-20. 12 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 262. 13 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 319. 14 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 323-324. 15 Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 320.  Part Two of a Two-Part Review of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule, Professor Emeritus of History at West Point. The previous review, a guest post on Mr. Kizer's site by Col. Jerry D. Morelock, may be viewed here. A number of good historians have written reviews recently of Ty Seidule's book, Robert E. Lee and Me, including historian Phil Leigh who produced the video, Robert E. Lee and (Woke General) Please Like Me. Leigh also wrote a good article, Robert E. Lee and Ty Seidule. All of these reviews note that the tone of Robert E. Lee and Me is a desperate plea by Seidule for academia to "please PLEASE like me!" Academia is Seidule's new home. He has gone from the United States Military Academy at West Point, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.1 For Seidule to write such an embarrassing screed on his way into academia is understandable. Most of academia looks down on the military and military personnel. One of my professors at the College of Charleston in 1999, when I was a middle-age student, was Dr. Clark G. Reynolds. We became close friends. He told me on several occasions about the condescension of other faculty members toward military historians and the military itself. Dr. Reynolds would know because he was a very fine naval historian who had written several important books and served on the faculty of the United States Naval Academy, and as Chair of the Department of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy.2 Robert E. Lee and Me is a non-history book that is so historically irrelevant it doesn't even have an index. It was written by a virtue-signaling narcissist whose obvious goal is to make sure academia knows that he is woke and correct on all the leftist political issues of today that resonate in academia and are the focus of history departments that have hired social justice warriors instead of historians. It is extremely propagandistic. It is peppered with leftist talking points, references to white supremacy, fights over Confederate monuments, the Emanuel AME Church murders in Charleston, Charlottesville, George Floyd's death, and other current issues that Seiudule uses to tar Robert E. Lee and Southern history. Seidule is going from the most successful colorblind meritocracy in all of history --- the United States Military --- into a racist, non-diversified, America-hating, free-speech hating, Marxist-loving indoctrination mill. Academia has also given us the racist identity politics of Critical Theory, and the anti-white hate and racism of Critical Race Theory that now pollutes much of the country. The problem with academia is that it is 100% liberal and aggressively politically correct meaning there is no real debate on anything. I know the actual percentage of liberal professors and administrators is closer to only 90%, but the other 10 are not going to speak up. Even the professors who disagree with leftist dogma don't dare say anything and risk losing tenure or having the mob show up at their office. The whole environment is sick, but Seidue's book will fit him right in. My apologies to the truly open-minded folks still in academia who are appalled by racist identity politics, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, attacks on free speech and all the rest of it. I know there are some wonderful people in academia, but you know I am right about my description of most of it. On the very first page of Robert E. Lee and Me, Seidule talks about a PragerU video he did in 2015 entitled "Was the Civil War About Slavery?". He states that he answers that question in the first 30 seconds: Many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve the morally repugnant institution of slavery. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War.3 No it wasn't. Slavery was not the "single most important cause of the Civil War." Not even close. In Seidule's entire book, he does not even mention, once, the economic interconnectedness of the North and South in 1860, yet that was the underlying factor in causing the war, not slavery. Southerners seceded to govern themselves. They expected to live in peace, but Lincoln could not allow that and the reason was 100% economic. If it wasn't, Northerners like The Chicago Times would not have said things like: In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue,4 and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not compete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.5 (Emphasis added.) The Northern economy was largely based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. See Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of the Hartford Courant (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005). Without the South, the North was dead economically. Without the North, the South, with 100% control of King Cotton, would ascend to dominance in North America, and Lincoln knew it. Southerners were already paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Secession meant turning all that money inward, back on the South.6 Southerners wanted desperately to manufacture for themselves to get out from under the North's inferior goods that were greatly overpriced because of tariffs. In the meantime Southerners could buy from Europe at much lower prices than they had been paying. The Morrill Tariff, passed by greedy, economically ignorant Northerners in the U.S. Congress after the Cotton States seceded, raised the rate for entry into the North to as high as 60%, as compared to the South's low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States Rights nation. This threatened to shift the entire Northern shipping industry into the South overnight as Northern ship captains beat a path to the South where free trade reigned and protective tariffs were unconstitutional. The loss to the North of their captive Southern manufacturing market, together with the damage to their shipping industry by the Morrill Tariff, was a one-two punch they would not be able to recover from. That's before even considering the loss of the 85% of tax revenue the South had been paying. But the biggest thing driving Lincoln was the threat of European military aid. It would be for the South like French aid in the American Revolution was to the Colonists. The North would not be able to beat the South in that situation and, again, Lincoln knew it. He needed to get his war started as quickly as he could so he could set up his blockade and chill European recognition of the South, because, with European recognition of Southern independence, it was game over for Lincoln. So, Lincoln sent his hostile navy into the South to start the war, five different missions in April, 1861, to Fort Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola.7 The Charlestonians tried up to the last minute to avoid war and get Major Anderson to evacuate Fort Sumter but he did not feel like he could. He did, however, realize what Lincoln was doing and he answered a letter to Secretary of War Cameron and Lincoln stating: . . . a movement made now when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country. . . . We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. . . . (Emphasis added.) Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, who had to hurry up and get it started or soon the South with European trade and military alliances would be unbeatable. Abraham Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Just before the Fort Sumter drama, Lincoln had committed his act of war in Pensacola by secretly landing troops in Fort Pickens and breaking a long-time armistice with the Confederates down there. Lincoln was determined to get his war started as noted by several Northern newspapers including the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post which wrote, April 13, 1861, the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter: We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor. It is immoral that Seidule completely ignores this overwhelming evidence in pushing his propaganda but that is the tactic of the left: Do like Goebbels said and repeat the big lie over and over, while ignoring everything else. With everything Southerners had to gain economically by independence, it is absurd to say they seceded to protect slavery. That takes a lot of nerve anyway, since there were eight slave states in the Union when the guns of Fort Sumter sounded, soon to be increased by one with the admission of West Virginia. There were only seven in the Confederacy. On page 9, Seidule writes: Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Again, Seidule is dead wrong. As stated, there were eight slave states in the Union when the war started and only seven in the Confederacy. Four of the Union slave states had rejected secession at first: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. And in those four states lived 52.4% of white Southerners, a majority. But those states immediately seceded when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, and their reason was obviously federal coercion, not slavery. They believed, and rightfully so, that Lincoln's call to invade peaceful fellow states was unconstitutional and unconscionable. There was nothing in the Constitution in 1861 that required or allowed Lincoln and the Federal Government to force a sovereign state to do anything much less stay in a union they did not want. The Federal Government had no right to invade an American state, kill its citizens, and destroy its property. The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states calling conventions and actually voting to secede came from the Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Of the seven Cotton States that first seceded and formed the Confederacy, only four issued declarations of causes for their secession. In fact, those four declarations of causes were the only four issued by any of the 13 states represented in the Confederate Government. Missouri and Kentucky were represented in the Confederate Government though they did not officially secede. They remained as two of the six Union slave states the entire war; and Kentucky had slavery well after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery kicked in, in December, 1865. The four declarations of causes do mention slavery along with numerous other grievances including economic, constitutional, and the hatred used by the North to rally its votes in the election of 1860. That hatred was the primary reason for Southern secession. Northerners had supported murder and terrorism against the South. They had financed John Brown and sent him into the South to murder Southerners. He had hacked pro-South settlers to death in front of their families in Kansas. Lincoln's party also used Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis as a campaign document. They had hundreds of thousands of them printed and distributed coast to coast. It called for slave insurrection and the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. Would you allow people who hated your guts and were already at war with you to rule over you? What kind of stupid, cowardly people would do that? Certainly not Southerners. But the simplistic Seidule characterizes Southern secession like the fake news media characterizes those who have serious concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. Seidule writes: Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U. S. territory, violently. The truth of the 2020 election will come out eventually but there are certainly an enormous number of legitimate concerns that call into account Seidule's description of a "fair, democratic election" in 2020. The Texas law suit which was joined by 20 other states, lays out legion legitimate issues of corruption and constitutional violations that have never been adjudicated by a court. The Navarro Report also goes into great detail. Anybody with a brain knows that when mail in voting jumps from 5% to 35% at the same time that signature verification standards are lowered or dropped, it is a formula for disaster. For over a year, Southerners debated seceding from the Union. After all, five times in U.S. history Northerners had threatened to secede from the Union so nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley, until he realize Southern secession would affect his money. Then he wanted war like the rest of them. Before that, he believe "Let our erring sisters go" and he editorialized in favor of the right of secession. Three states had formally reserved the right of secession before acceding to the Constitution. They were New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Because all the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, those states had it too, because all the states entered the Union as equals with the exact same rights. The Stetson Law Review, a publication of the Stetson University College of Law, did a good article on the right of secession entitled "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession" by H. Newcomb Morse. He writes that the War Between the States did not prove that secession was illegal because: [M]any incidents both preceding and following the War support the proposition that the Southern States did have the right to secede from the Union. Instances of nullification prior to the War Between the States, contingencies under which certain states acceded to the Union, and the fact that the Southern States were made to surrender the right to secession all affirm the existence of a right to secede . . .8 He adds that the Constitution's "failure to forbid secession" and amendments dealing with secession that were proposed in Congress as Southern states were seceding strengthened his argument that: [T]he Southern States had an absolute right to secede from the Union prior to the War Between the States.9 Of course they did. How can you believe in the Declaration of Independence and governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed and not believe a people can leave a government that has become tyrannical and oppressive. That was the essence of the Revolutionary War and the foundation of our country. Northern hate, not unlike the hate we have in America today, drove the South from the Union, that and supporting terrorists and murderers like John Brown and encouraging mass murder in the South like Republicans did with Hinton Helper's book. The one thing about American history that you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war because they faced economic annihilation when the Southern States seceded and took their captive manufacturing market and their tariff revenue with them. The Corwin Amendment which passed the Northern Congress and was ratified by several states would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. That was the true feeling of the North and Abraham Lincoln in 1861 and it proves the North's motive was not to end slavery. And there is much much more irrefutable proof. A near-unanimous resolution entitled the War Aims Resolution established early-on what the North was fighting for. It was passed by the Northern Congress in July, 1861, three months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter: . . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . .10 It is unquestionable and irrefutable that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war because they wanted to dominate the country economically. Northern wealth and power were all dependent on the Union. That's why Lincoln said over and over it was about preserving the Union, not ending slavery. That puts Seidule's Union Army in a pretty bad light. Lincoln's troops were down here in the South. Southern troops were not up there in the North menacing any Northern city. Why didn't Lincoln just remove his troops who were on sovereign South Carolina and Florida soil? If he had done that there would have been no war, no 750,000 deaths and over a million maimed. The hateful Seidule argued against memorializing West Point graduates who fought for the Confederacy. He writes: I believed we should exclude them. After all, they died fighting against the United States. I argued stridently that West Point should honor only those who fought for the Constitution we swear to support and defend. West Point's mottos of "Duty, Honor, Country" (especially country) would seem to argue forcefully for exclusion of those dedicated to the country's destruction.11 Southerners were certainly not dedicated to the destruction of the Union. No Confederate EVER said any such absurdity. The United States could have easily continued into the future as a major power on this earth but with just a few less states. Seidule talks about support of the Constitution but Northern violations of the Constitution are one of the many legitimate grievances Southerners had and so stated many times. Many Northerners believed there was a higher power than the U.S. Constitution they should adhere to (and it always just happened to increase their political power). Other Northerners like William Lloyd Garrison believed the Constitution was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell." William H. Seward, Sr., Lincoln's secretary of state, asserted in 1850 that “[…] there is a Higher Law than the Constitution.” None of these self-righteous Northerners in the antebellum era ever proposed a plan to end slavery such as they had used in the North with compensated, gradual emancipation. That is how all nations ended slavery and it would have been easy to do but Northerners were not about to spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North and be job competition. Lincoln did talk about it time to time but Lincoln's primary idea for dealing with slavery was to send black people back to Africa or into a place where they could survive. This was Lincoln's plan his entire life. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). In Chapter 7, page 238, Seidule writes: Lee acknowledged defeat but felt neither he nor the white South had done anything wrong. In his famous General Orders No. 9, Lee bid his soldiers farewell. He stated his version of what the war meant and why it ended, initiating the Lost Cause myth. The Army of Northern Virginia "succumbed to overwhelming numbers and resources," a kind of code criticizing the immigrant army of the United States supported by unsavory businessmen and ruthless politicians. To prove how utterly disingenuous Seidule is, below is Gen. Lee's General Orders, No. 9. Compare what Lee actually said with what Seidule wrote above. See if you can find "a kind of code criticizing the immigrant army of the United States supported by unsavory businessmen and ruthless politicians" in Gen. Lee's short, heartfelt address. This, alone, proves what a fraud Seidule's entire book is. General Orders, No. 9 Lee was almost always outnumbered and outgunned. Grant himself admitted this when he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton July 22, 1865 to explain how he won the war: The resources of the enemy, and his numerical strength, were far inferior to ours. . . I therefore determined . . . to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but . . . submission. . . "13 The numbers showing the Union advantage over Lee are startling. Here's one example. Phil Leigh writes: Grant began his forty-day campaign with an approximate two-to-one numerical advantage. He had 124,000 troops compared to 66,000 for Lee. At the end, Grant had suffered 55,000 casualties, which was also about twice those of Lee. Losses for the two sides during the battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor correspond closely to the federal disasters at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg.14 The North had four times the white population of the South. While slaves helped the Southern economy, and many served as Confederate soldiers, they were not a big source of manpower. The North had a functioning government, an army, navy, merchant marine, sound financial system. They had a pipeline to the retched refuse of the world who came here often with only the shirts on their backs to find the Union Army recruiter with bonuses in hand, food and clothing. Over 25% of the Union Army was foreign born but as James McPherson points out, over 30% of the North was foreign born. The North was a wild busting-at-the-seams society. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate. Some speculate that because of the wildness caused by massive immigration during the 1850s that the North would have had a revolution if not for the western lands where they could send their surplus population. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" said Horace Greeley. So Lincoln starting a war knowing he had four times the white population of the South plus unlimited numbers of people verses the South's impossibility of adding more people because of the Union blockade, is despicable but understandable. The Republican Party was new, and what is better than a war to give it power, money and solidify it in the political life of a nation. Lincoln certainly figured it would be a short war but he found otherwise, that a people fighting for independence will fight until there are oceans of blood covering their sacred soil, and until their society is completely destroyed. The Northern manufacturing for armaments, ammunition, guns and uniforms was unlimited while it was non-existent in the South. Seidule's Union soldiers were always well-fed and had the latest weaponry but Confederates were always hungry, cold and often barefoot. There were 19 marine engine factories in the North. There were zero in the South. Northern society throughout the war barely noticed a difference in their day to day lives while Southerners suffered at the hands of Seidule's barbaric animals in the South raping, pillaging, murdering. All of that did go on and has been well-documented, as in every war. The great British historian, Antony Beevor, estimates that 2,000,000 German women were raped by the Russian army at the end of World War II as it conquered Germany. Union soldiers raping black women is especially documented in the Official Records. Gen. Lee often could not do things on the battlefield because he did not have the resources. That was never a problem for the North. The Federal ration of grain for their horses was ten pounds a day per horse. Lee wrote this to President Davis August 24, 1863: Nothing prevents my advancing now [against Mead] but the fear of killing our artillery horses. They are a much reduced, and the hot weather and scarce forage keeps them so. The cavalry also suffer and I fear to set them at work. Some days we get a pound of corn per horse and some days more; some none. Our limit is five per day per horse. You can judge of our prospects. . . . Everything is being done by me that can be to recruit the horses. I have been obliged to diminish the number of guns in the artillery, and fear I shall have to lose more.15 The South faced the same problem with railroads. Of the 30,000-plus miles that existed nationwide in 1861, 70% was in the North. There were 21,300 miles of track in the North and Midwest with 45,000 miles of telegraph wire while in the South there was only 9,022 miles with 5,000 miles of telegraph wire. The South had a much larger territory to cover with much smaller resources.16 Ramsdell writes: For more than a year before the end came the railroads were in such a wretched condition that a complete breakdown seemed always imminent. As the tracks wore out on the main lines they were replenished by despoiling the branch lines; but while the expedient of feeding the weak roads to the more important afforded the latter some temporary sustenance, it seriously weakened the armies, since it steadily reduced the area from which supplies could be drawn.17 So, again, Gen. Lee's "overwhelming resources" of the North is correct and Seidule is wrong. The Lost Cause Myth is not a myth. It is simply the Southern view of what happened, and it is both accurate and truthful. On the other hand, the Righteous Cause Myth of the North is truly a myth --- no, not myth, LIE. Their "righteous cause" was their money, power, and the lust to rule the country. Lysander Spooner, who was an abolitionist in Massachusetts, agreed: On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a West Point graduate and true American hero, is a much better representative of West Point and the United States Army than the virtue-signaling "please, academia, like me!" of Ty Seidule. Eisenhower is a much better judge of honor and character. Gen. Eisenhower, 1st Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in World War II, later president of the United States for eight years, had a picture of Gen. Robert E. Lee on his wall in the White House his entire time there.  Eisenhower speaks with some of the 101st Airborne Division June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion. Like President John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower had great respect for Gen. Lee and his cause, and he appreciated Lee's efforts to bind up the nation's wounds after our bloodiest war. On August 1, 1960, a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, wrote an angry letter to President Eisenhower excoriating him for having that picture of Lee in his White House office. Scott wrote: "I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me. / The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes."19 President Eisenhower wrote back on the 9th: Dear Dr. Scott:  Robert E. Lee, oil on canvas, by Edward Calledon Bruce, 1865. Seidule said people who use "War Between the States" as Gen. Eisenhower did, as I do, and as millions of others do, don't believe in equality; so I guess, yet again, Seidule is wrong. NOTES:
1 Hamilton College appears to be a charming, small liberal arts college founded in 1793 and named for Alexander Hamilton who was on the first Board of Trustees when it was Hamilton-Oneida Academy. Hamilton.edu, accessed 3-22-21. 2 Dr. Reynolds also taught at the University of Maine, and was History Departmental Chair at the College of Charleston (SC). Among his books are Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires; Navies in History; History and the Sea; The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy; and On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carrier. His complete bio is at www.WorldHistory101-102.com. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_G._Reynolds. 3 Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me, A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2020), 1. Seidule did not capitalize "southern" in his quotation. I always capitalize it and Northern, as well as North and South, which are obviously proper names that should be capitalized. 4 See also Footnote #47 on page 44 of Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) for the difference between tariff for revenue and protective tariff. What is meant by "a tariff for revenue" is a small tariff to raise a small amount of revenue to pay for the operation of a small federal government such as the government of the Confederate States of America. Southerners had always wanted free trade with the world. They believed in as small a tariff as possible. Contrast a small tariff for revenue with the huge protective tariffs the North loved that were punitive and meant to deter free trade so that one would be forced to buy from the North at jacked-up rates that were not determined by market competition but were jacked-up to the level of the tariff. The tariff is the perfect thing to contrast the differences in North and South. The moment the South was out of the Union, they made protective tariffs unconstitutional while the North passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff. The Morrill Tariff prevented the recovery of the Northern economy and made war Abraham Lincoln's only choice to save the North from economic annihilation. Of course, Lincoln's choice resulted in 800,000 deaths and over a million wounded out of a population of approximately 31 million. 5 Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, Vol. II, 573-574. 6 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 103. 7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142. 8 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 420. 9 Ibid. 10 The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861, and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed March 29, 2014. 11 Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me, 4. 12 Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), Vol. 4, 154-55. 13 Phil Leigh, Civil War Chat, "Ty Seidule's Falsehoods About Grant and Lee", https://civilwarchat.wordpress.com/2021/02/24/ty-seidules-falsehoods-about-grant-and-lee/, accessed 3-25-21. 14 Ibid. 15 Charles W. Ramsdell, "General Robert E. Lee's Horse Supply, 1862-1865" in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017), 250. The quotation is from the OR, ser. I, v XXIX, pt. 2, 664-665. 16 "Railroads In The Civil War: Facts and Statistics (North vs South)," https://www.american-rails.com/civil.html, accessed 3-23-21. 17 Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Confederate Government and the Railroads," in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, 300. 18 Lysander Spooner, "No Treason. No. 1, Introductory," Boston, by "the Author, No. 14 Bromfield Street. 1867". 19 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20. 20 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.  The Washington Post article, "Destroying Confederate monuments isn't 'erasing' history. It's learning from it."1 by African American associate professor Keisha N. Blain of the University of Pittsburgh, proves that not only does the Washington Post peddle in fake news, it peddles fake history. Professor Blain's contention in the short article is that "Confederate monuments, as well as Confederate-named Army bases, are modern inventions meant to distort history and celebrate a racist past" because: These symbols serve one primary purpose - to honor figures of the past who upheld an undemocratic vision of America. They were created by white supremacists. And they function as a balm for white supremacists who long to return to a period when Americans regarded black people as property. This is a silly, self-important view of history by a person obsessed with race. Whether Prof. Blain likes it or not, the culture and institutions of America came from white Europe. Great Britain is our Mother Country. We were founded because Europeans were looking for resources and wealth. The Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, we were founded by capitalist companies out to make money and create markets, which creates opportunity for average people. Europeans were Christians, Jews, Protestants, and their culture was derived from Greek democracy, ancient Athens and Sparta, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Bible, English Common Law, Magna Carta, the philosophy of John Locke, which found its way into Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. There was a scientific revolution to go along with the industrial revolution. This was great progress for mankind. That was the dominant culture from white Europe. It is more accurately described as American, not just white. White doesn't do it justice. Professor Blain's characterization is racist. White supremacy? If you go to Africa you have black supremacy. In Central America, Hispanic supremacy. In Asia, Asian supremacy. If you go up by the North Pole, you have Eskimo supremacy. Whatever the dominant culture is, that is what is supreme. White supremacy in America when we were founded by white Europeans is not too profound an observation, so big deal. The problem in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for blacks and whites was the bringing together of two diametrically opposite cultures: the tribal culture of Africa, and the advanced industrializing scientific civilization of Europe that had evolved and become strong and confident and was exploring the world looking for resources, markets, wealth, and opportunity. There was great competition among European nations for expansion, to spread their innovative cultures. Africans in Africa knew about capitalism too because they knew they could make money selling other Africans into slavery first, to the British, then later to Yankees, mostly New Englanders, who were America's slave traders. The tribal chieftains of Africa built slave forts like the one on Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and the barracoons Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African American anthropologist, wrote about in her book, Barracoon. It describes African tribal warfare and their slave trade in great detail.2 The goal of white European culture was not to have slaves. It was to build great cities and nations and wealth for all. There was some opportunity for blacks even during slavery because people like William Ellison, the famous black cotton gin maker in Sumter County, got rich and became one of the largest slave owners in South Carolina. Once slavery ended and the decades long rebuilding of the Southern economy was complete, more opportunity was created. We have continued to evolve until we have, today, unlimited opportunity for everybody from sea to shining sea. There is nothing holding anybody back in America today. Anybody can achieve anything they want with the right attitude and willingness to work hard. Opportunity is all over the place for blacks, whites, women, men, everybody. People just have to solve their individual problems, get the education or training they need, develop a strong work ethic then do like Sam Walton said and "get after it." Develop an intense determination to succeed. Those who buy into the false narrative of the left, that America is a horribly racist place founded on racism and slavery: you ain't going nowhere. You can drown in your misery or you can shake off that nonsense and get to work. We have had a two-term black president in America, no matter how mediocre and divisive he was. That proves America is not a racist nation in the least. The Democrat Party's false charge of racism against anybody who disagrees with them, promotes real racism, and so does their war on the past. Southerners did not secede because of slavery. They seceded because they were fed up with the Northern hate Republicans used in the election of 1860 to rally their votes. John Brown's terrorist raid at Harper's Ferry had been a wake-up call for the South. It proved Northerners were serious about murdering Southerners since Brown was financed by Northerners, then celebrated in the North as a hero when he was brought to justice. Two Union states, Ohio and Iowa, protected Brown's sons who were wanted for murder in Virginia. Protecting fugitives from justice when wanted by another state was unconstitutional. This was yet another Northern violation of the Constitution. Brown's mission had been to create a slave revolt like Haiti's that would result in thousands of Southern men, women and children brutally murdered. Republicans also used Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis, as a campaign document. It called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. This was the future for Southerners in the Union. So, ask yourself, if you were a Southerner in 1860, would you let Lincoln's terrorist, money thieving party rule over you? Or would you secede and form a new nation more to your liking as was your sacred right laid out in the Declaration of Independence where it states: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prof. Blain also accuses Southerners of being traitors. The idea that Southerners were traitors when they had the right to secede and exercised it properly, again, shows Prof. Blain's ignorance of history. The New England states threatened to secede many times more than Southerners. Horace Greeley believed in the right of secession ("let our erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money then he wanted war like the rest of the North. Three states - New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia - demanded the right of secession in writing before joining the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, thus giving it to them as well, because all the states are equal with the exact same powers. Prof. Blain's statement that Confederate monuments, Confederate-named bases, etc. serve "one primary purpose - to honor figures of the past who upheld an undemocratic vision of America" shows that she knows nothing about Southern history and probably has never cared to trouble herself with it. What Southerners did by calling conventions of the people (their secession conventions) to debate, then vote on the one issue of secession, is the most democratic thing to ever happen on American soil. It goes straight back to the Founding Fathers when they required that states call conventions of the people to ratify the Constitution rather than having it ratified by their legislatures. This was a far sounder foundation for the country than a legislative vote that could be rescinded by a later legislature. Each Southern state called a convention, elected delegates as secessionists or unionists, debated the issue thoroughly, then voted. Seven states seceded and formed a new democratic republic on this earth - the Confederate States of America - very similar to the one formed by our Founding Fathers but with States' Rights thoroughly protected. Four states rejected secession at first. Prof. Blain skips over this. She says only "By June 1861, four more states had seceded." The reason they seceded had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery though Prof. Blain does not tell you that because she, herself, does not know it. The four states that had rejected secession seceded because Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South. They were horrified that Lincoln would use the Federal Government to invade sovereign states and murder their citizens. The Federal Government was supposed to be the agent of the states, not their master. In those four states - Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina - lived 52.4% of white Southerners, therefore a majority of white Southerners seceded over nothing to do with slavery. They seceded over unconstitutional federal coercion. Prof. Blain does get one thing right. She says Lincoln "made no such promise in 1860" to end slavery. She's right. Lincoln and the North supported the Corwin Amendment which would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed. Not a single Confederate monument went up to honor whatever Prof. Blain means by white supremacy. All went up with pennies from school children, and such, in the war-impoverished South to honor their dead from a war in which 750,000 died, and over a million were maimed. Is that not enough suffering for Prof. Blain to understand that the region wanted to honor those souls who were their blood and kin in a permanent way? Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina who is today "still regarded as the greatest American classical scholar of all times."3 describes the sentiment well in 1892, 27 years after the war. He writes: A friend of mine, describing the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in Paris, when the circle of fire was drawing round the city, and foreigners were hastening to escape, told me that the press was so great that he could touch in every direction those who had been crushed to death as they stood, and had not had room to fall. Not wholly unlike this was the pressure brought to bear on the Confederacy. It was only necessary to put out your hand and you touched a corpse; and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of a brother or a friend.4 Not a single Confederate monument went up out of fear that black people were raising themselves up, another of the absurd assertions of Prof. Blain. If you what to know why Confederate monuments went up, straight from the mouth of Confederates, all you have to do is read the original Confederate Veteran magazine from any of its 40 year run. The raising of the money for all the Confederate monuments is in it, day by day, penny by penny, a massive work of love and patriotism. You can read the stories of the veterans organizations, the United Confederate Veterans, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and others. Read original stories of battles, speeches at dedications, look at pictures, read a lot of poetry. It is the most warm and wonderful thing you can imagine, exciting, dignified, extremely patriotic, by wonderful, decent people, and you can see that there is nothing the least bit racist about them. Prof. Blain has no idea what she is talking about. Her understanding of history is abysmal, bless her heart. What has happened to Southern history since the 1960s is a national disgrace, it is a "cultural and political atrocity" as Eugene Genovese said, especially what has happened in the past month with the Democrat Party's violent mobs and riots destroying historical monuments around the country. But unlike flighty liberals, Southerners know our history and are solidly grounded. We will immediately begin a new round of monument building across America so we end up with a net increase, and the new ones will be more magnificent than ever. We have one of the greatest historical records of all mankind, and throughout all of history, especially of valor, bravery and self-government. Here's how Basil Gildersleeve sums it up and is why we will make our history more known to the future than ever before: All that I vouch for is the feeling; . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.5 1 Washington Post, "Destroying Confederate monuments isn't 'erasing' history. It's learning from it." by Professor Keisha N. Blain, June 19, 2020, https://www.WashingtonPost.com/outlook/ 2020/06/19/destroying-confederate-monuments-isnt-erasing-history-its-learning-it/, accessed June 22, 2020. 2 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (NY: Amistad, 2018). 3 Clyde N. Wilson, Abstract, The Creed of the Old South by Basil L. Gildersleeve, Society of Independent Southern Historians, http://southernhistorians.org/the-societys-southern-life-recommended-reading/11-southern-literature/11-09-southern-literature-southern-view-of-southern-culture/11-09-04/, accessed 10/11/2014. 4 Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South (Baltimore: The Johns hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27. 5 Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27. This piece was previously published at the CharlestonAthenaeumPress on June 25, 2020.
When Northerners began realizing how truly dependent they were on the South, they flew into a panic. Horace Greeley is the embodiment of the North and he proved himself a hypocrite of the first order. On December 17, 1860, the day South Carolina's Secession Convention began, Greeley published a long emotional editorial in the New York Daily Tribune affirming and supporting the right of secession as not only legal but moral. He is known for saying that our "erring sisters should be allowed to depart in peace." In "The Right of Secession," Greeley writes: -We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our view of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government," &c., &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And, if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why? . . . - we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred, even when invoked in behalf of those who deny it to others . . . if ever 'seven or eight States' send agents to Washington to say 'We want to get out of the Union,' we shall feel constrained by our devotion to Human Liberty to say, Let Them Go! And we do not see how we could take the other side without coming in direct conflict with those Rights of Man which we hold paramount to all political arrangements, however convenient and advantageous. [1] But three months later, as the Northern economy collapsed around him and genuine panic ensued with plummeting property values, business failures, factory closures, an imminent stock market crash, people in the streets, goods rotting on New York docks, and utter disaster on the horizon, he wanted war. The entire North wanted war. They all agreed with the New York Times: "At once shut down every Southern Port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate states."[2] The hypocrisy of Greeley, as the embodiment of the North, is breathtaking. He writes in his newspaper that "We hold the right of Self-government sacred," and we believe in the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, and we believe in the "just powers" of the government coming from the "consent of the governed," and we believe in the "Right of the People to alter or to abolish" a tyrannical government ¾ and we believe in a "devotion to Human Liberty" and the "Rights of Man" no matter how "convenient and advantageous" our current situation - and his most hypocritical of hypocritical statements, that "we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just." He then casts all his sacred principles to the ground and spits all over them. He spits on the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers too, and he grinds the Declaration of Independence into the dirt with his heel because they all were secondary to his money ¾ and the North was with him in lockstep.[3] Backtrack to December, 1860, as South Carolina's Secession Convention gets underway. South Carolina Governor Francis Wilkinson Pickens reflected the utter thrill and ecstasy of the South over its forthcoming independence. He said in his inaugural message that South Carolina would "open her ports free to the tonnage and trade of all nations, . . . . She has fine harbors, accessible to foreign commerce, and she is in the centre of those extensive agricultural productions, that enter so largely into the foreign trade and commerce of the world."[4] He said South Carolina would immediately seek free trade relationships with all countries, especially England, and it is for the benefit of all who may be interested in commerce, in manufactories, and in the comforts of artizans and mechanic labor everywhere, to make such speedy and peaceful arrangements with us as may advance the interests and happiness of all concerned.[5] Contrast that with Northern panic in the same week from The Chicago Times: In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue,[6] and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not compete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.[7] (Emphasis added.) New York City was petrified and ready to secede from New York State over the certain loss of its commercial trade with the South. The situation was too "gloomy and painful to contemplate" according to Mayor Fernando Wood. He issued his "Recommendation for the Secession of New York City" on January 6, 1861 to make it clear that New York supported the South and valued its trade with the South and wanted to keep it: When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master ¾ to a people and a party [Lincoln's Republicans] that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power of self-government, and destroyed the Confederacy [meaning the pre-secession Union with the Southern States intact] of which she was the proud Empire City? Amid the gloom which the present and prospective condition of things must cast over the country, New York, as a Free City, may shed the only light and hope of a future reconstruction of our once blessed Confederacy. . .[8] Northern society was volatile, anyway, wild and unstable, subject to economic panics (severe recessions/depression, bank failures, etc.). The entire decade before the war, the North was chaotic, dangerous, often a wretched place to live. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are true to life but don't even begin to tell the real story. Widespread poverty kept the working classes hungry and in turmoil. Constant immigration from Europe increased the pressure steadily and made the North a boiler on the verge of exploding. Most immigrants arrived with little or no money yet had to survive. They headed straight to factories and "industrial misery" where a man could work for only a few brutal years before his body was ruined by black lung and other diseases due to unhealthy conditions in crude factories. Industrial turmoil in the North mirrored Europe. European agitation was transferred to the North with "strikes and demonstrations, far-reaching, prolonged and repeated, never more volcanic in character than in the decade that preceded the Civil War."[9] There was genuine concern that if the enfranchised but miserable poor ever got organized, they would vote themselves into power then confiscate the property of wealthy people and redistribute it. It had happened in other places. Some historians believe it did happen in the North but the property taken was not that of a ruling class. It was the western lands. That is why the West was such a huge campaign issue in 1860. When Horace Greeley said, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," it was not just a good idea. It was the pressure valve of the Northern boiler that was about to explode - and it released the North's surplus population to the West like steam into the wind. William Gilmore Simms had toured the North on a lecture tour in 1856 and noted that Republican promises are "Addressed to a class, counting millions of desperate men, whom a grinding daily necessity makes reckless of every consideration of law, justice and the constitution."[10] He also said the North "is all wild, disordered, anarchical, ready for chaos and disruption. And, the Northern mind, where not fanatical, is marked by a frivolity, a levity, which makes it reluctant to grapple seriously with serious things."[11] In the Panic of 1857, tens of thousands of hungry workers had roamed the streets of Northern cities in mobs shouting "bread or blood!" Republicans had rallied those voters with slogans like "Vote yourself a tariff" and "Vote yourself a farm." Historian Mary Beard wrote that "when the Republicans in their platform of 1860 offered free land to the workingmen of the world in exchange for a protective tariff" they got a "tumultuous response."[12] Northern anti-slavery was in no sense a pro-black movement but was anti-black. It was a way to rally votes. Might as well substitute the term "anti-South" for "anti-slavery" because it was anti-South - against the South - not pro-black. Historian James L. Huston states well the Northern attitude toward slavery: If opposition to slavery had involved only antagonism toward racial oppression, then the northern attack would have barely existed. The North was not a racially egalitarian section seeking to establish equitable race relations in the slaveholding South.[13] Many of the genuine abolitionists in the North - the 2 to 5% mentioned by Lee Benson and Gavin Wright - were racists. This is a great irony but many hated slavery because they hated blacks and did not want to associate with them, especially in the West. David M. Potter states that Northern anti-slavery was "not in any clear-cut sense a pro-Negro movement but actually had an anti-Negro aspect and was designed to get rid of the Negro."[14] Abraham Lincoln also wanted to "get rid of the Negro." He had always supported recolonization. As stated earlier, Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is clear that "the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued." Some abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison had real concern for black people. Robert Toombs said Garrison was a man of conviction who would not take an oath to the U.S. Constitution because it protected slavery. Toombs said the good abolitionists like Garrison did not trust the "political abolitionists" and wanted nothing to do with them. These political abolitionists - the other 95 to 98% of the Northern electorate - wanted something from the government such as free land in the West, a protective tariff, bounty, subsidy or monopoly for their businesses. Some were working men afraid of competition with slave labor, especially in the West. All had been led to believe that if they voted Republican, the Republican Party would bring them riches beyond their wildest imaginations, farms, tariffs, land, whatever they wanted. This was not a pro-black movement in any way. It was a carnival of greed and special interests. Charles P. Roland in An American Iliad, The Story of the Civil War acknowledges the economic and racist character of Northern anti-slavery: There was a significant economic dimension in the Northern antislavery sentiment, the fear of competition from slave labor and the awareness that work itself was degraded by slavery. Finally and paradoxically, a racial factor contributed to the Northern attitude. Antipathy against slavery often went hand in hand with racism that was similar in essence, if not in pervasiveness of intensity, to the Southern racial feeling. Many Northerners objected to the presence of slavery in their midst, in part, because they objected to the presence of blacks there. [15] Alexis de Tocqueville observed the Northern racist attitude as well and said "Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known." [16] Many Northern and Western states had laws prohibiting free blacks from settling there including Lincoln's own Illinois. In Illinois, it was called "An act to prevent the immigration of free Negroes into this State" and it said that any free black person staying longer than 10 days "was subject to arrest and imprisonment."[17] Wars are not fought over issues like slavery. Mothers and fathers do not send their precious sons off to die because they don't like the domestic institutions in other countries. No country in history had a war to end slavery, and neither did we. Most nations ended slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation, or some variation thereof. That's what Lincoln always favored. The domestic institutions in other countries affect no one, but a threat to one's economy affects everyone and is extremely dangerous. It must be dealt with immediately before it gets out of hand. An economic collapse progresses with lightning speed into panic, runs on banks, mob violence, anarchy, and the collapse of the government itself. People are desperate, have no food, no money. Men have no way to protect their wives and daughters from rape, murder, violence. Civil law breaks down and is replaced by the law of the jungle. No government is going to let that happen. That's why we fought two Gulf Wars. Any threat to the free-flow of oil from the Middle East is a threat to our economy. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is Chapter Four of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., available at Charleston Athenaeum Press. [1] "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.
[2] The New-York Times, 22-23 March, 1861, as quoted in Adams, When in the Course of Human Events, 65. [3] If the North had granted the right of secession as Greeley had so strongly supported at first, there would have been no War Between the States. Greeley and the North could have formed a new relationship with the South and traded, done business, and been friends. However, Northerners saw their economic collapse and loss of wealth and power with no hope of regaining it. They knew 60% of U.S. exports had been cotton, alone, which they got wealthy shipping. They knew those cargoes would be irreplaceable. They knew Great Britain would supply manufactured goods to the South cheaper than the North, and that Southerners would soon manufacture for themselves. So, Northerners weighed their enormous advantages at that point in history and decided a bloody war of invasion and conquest to maintain their economic supremacy over a peace-seeking, independent South was better for them than fair economic competition in the world market. It would solve all Lincoln's political problems by causing Northerners to rally to the flag. It would also put people to work. (Emphasis added.) [4] Francis Wilkinson Pickens, "Inaugural Message of South Carolina Governor Francis Wilkinson Pickens," published 18 December 1860 in The (Charleston, S.C.) Courier. [5] Ibid. [6] See also Footnote #47 in Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014), for the difference between tariff for revenue and protective tariff. What is meant by "a tariff for revenue" is a small tariff to raise a small amount of revenue to pay for the operation of a small federal government such as the government of the Confederate States of America. Southerners had always wanted free trade with the world. They believed in as small a tariff as possible. Contrast a small tariff for revenue with the huge protective tariffs the North loved that were punitive and meant to deter free trade so that one would be forced to buy from the North at jacked-up rates that were not determined by market competition but were jacked-up to the level of the tariff. The tariff is the perfect thing to contrast the differences in North and South. The moment the South was out of the Union, they made protective tariffs unconstitutional while the North passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff. The Morrill Tariff prevented the recovery of the Northern economy and made war Abraham Lincoln's only choice to save the North from economic annihilation. Of course, Lincoln's choice resulted in 800,000 deaths and over a million wounded out of a population of approximately 31 million. [7] Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, Vol. II, 573-574. [8] Mayor Fernando Wood, "Mayor Fernando Wood's Recommendation for the Secession of New York City," January 6, 1861, in Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, Sixth Edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.), 374-376. [9] Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1936), Vol. 1, 633-634. [10] Simms, "Antagonisms," 72-74. [11] Simms, "Antagonisms," 36-39. [12] Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 649. [13] James L. Huston, "Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War," Journal of Southern History, Volume LXV, Number 2, May, 1999, 263-264. [14] Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, 35-36. [15] Charles P. Roland, An American Iliad, The Story of the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 3. [16] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), v. 1, 342, in Jeffrey Rogers Hummel Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 26. [17] H. Newcomb Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson Law Review of Stetson University College of Law, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1986, footnote #28, 423.  The North Did Not Go to War to End Slavery. If they had, they would have started by passing a constitution amendment abolishing slavery. They did the opposite. They overwhelmingly passed the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. This alone proves, unequivocally, that the North did not go to war to end slavery or free the slaves. The North does not get to redefine, in the middle of the war, its reason for going to war. What the North proclaimed in the beginning, stands, as its reason for going to war ¾ and it is unchangeable. War measures halfway through the war, such as the Emancipation Proclamation that freed no slaves (and prevented close to a million slaves from achieving their freedom), have nothing to do with why the North went to war in the first place. A near-unanimous resolution entitled the War Aims Resolution established early-on what the North was fighting for. It was passed by the Northern Congress in July, 1861, three months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter: . . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . . Throughout the antebellum years as the country achieved its Manifest Destiny marching westward, winning the Mexican War, growing in wealth and power, no credible Northern leader said they should march armies into the South to end slavery. Throughout the first two years of the war, almost nobody in the North said they were fighting to end slavery. To do so would risk racist Union soldiers deserting because they signed up to fight for the Union, not to free slaves whom they feared would move north and inundate their towns and cities and be job competition. Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, might have freed her four slaves if she had thought it was an abolition war and not a war for the Union. Most Northerners, excluding a few truly good-hearted abolitionists, accepted slavery. As stated earlier, historians Lee Benson and Gavin Wright maintain that the percentage of abolitionists in the North was "probably no more than 2 per cent, almost certainly no more than 5 per cent, of the Northern electorate," and, ironically, many of them didn't like slavery because they didn't like blacks and did not want to associate with them. Prominent abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered by an outraged Northern mob in Lincoln's own Illinois in 1837. The mob was trying to destroy Lovejoy's abolitionist materials and his press. By 1861, Northerners had been supporting slavery for 241 years and would continue supporting it throughout the War Between the States since five slave states, as noted earlier, fought for the North. Again, those states are Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri and West Virginia, which came into the Union during the war as a slave state. If the North was fighting to end slavery, it would never permit slave states to fight for the Union - or, it would have ended slavery in the Union slave states immediately. It did the opposite and made sure by constitutional amendment and proclamation that slavery in the Union was protected, just as it was, and had always been, by the Constitution. That's how the North really felt about slavery and freeing the slaves. Lincoln himself took it a step further. He supported the first Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - the Corwin Amendment - which would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. It passed March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's first inaugural. It reads: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof [slavery], including that of persons held to labor [slaves] or service by the laws of said State. About the Corwin Amendment, Lincoln said, in his first inaugural on March 4, 1861: I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution — which amendment, however, I have not seen — has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable. (Emphasis added.) Before Lincoln took office, President James Buchanan actually signed the Corwin Amendment after it had been approved by Congress and was ready to be sent to the states for ratification. Buchanan's act was symbolic only. It is important to note that the Corwin Amendment had required a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and it had passed with mostly Northern votes because seven Southern states were out of the Union by then and did not vote. Indeed, the bill's sponsor, Representative Thomas Corwin, was from Ohio. Three Northern states ratified the Corwin Amendment - Ohio, Maryland and Illinois - before the war made it moot. After the Corwin Amendment's passage, Lincoln sent a letter with a copy of the Corwin Amendment to each state's governor pointing out that Buchanan had signed it. Lincoln was making sure everyone knew of his strong support of slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. Before even mentioning the Corwin Amendment in his first inaugural, Lincoln made it clear that he strongly supported slavery and had "no inclination" to end it: Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And, more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read: I now reiterate these sentiments; and, in doing so, I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that the property, peace, and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming administration. (Emphasis added.) On August 22, 1862, sixteen months into the war, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, in response to a letter Greeley had sent him, and reiterated: . . . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that¾What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help the Union. (Lincoln's italics.) Exactly one month - September 22, 1862 - after writing his letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and the very first paragraph states clearly that the war is being fought to restore the Union and not to free the slaves: I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be, suspended or disturbed. (Emphasis added.) Clearly, the North did not instigate a war to end slavery. The focus on slavery as the primary cause of the War Between the States - even indirectly - is a fraud of biblical proportions and it prevents real understanding of American history. Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Lincoln scholar, David H. Donald, back in the 1960s, was concerned about the overemphasis of slavery as the cause of the war. He said the Civil Rights Movement seems to have been the reason for stressing slavery as the cause of the war. I have already proven that the North did not go to war to end slavery. There is much more evidence but the following is a good summary of the things in the beginning that show, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the North did not go to war to free the slaves or because of slavery:
The Emancipation Proclamation states, literally, that it is a war measure, and it was not issued early on. It was not issued before Lincoln took office, or after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, or during Lincoln's first inaugural. It was issued two years into the war - and it freed no slaves (or few). The conditions around the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and its timetable establish the fact that the North most certainly did not go to war on April 12, 1861 to end slavery or free the slaves. The North's support for slavery goes back to the beginning of the country when Northern (and British) slave traders brought most of the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process. Dr. Edgar J. McManus in his excellent book, Black Bondage in the North, writes that "Boston merchants entered the African trade as early as 1644, and by 1676 they were bringing back cargoes from as far away as East Africa and Madagascar." McManus writes: [The slave trade] quickly became one of the cornerstones of New England's commercial prosperity . . . which yielded enormous commercial profits. Virtually the entire infrastructure of the Old North was built on profits from the slave trade and slave traders such as Boston's Peter Faneuil of Faneuil Hall, the ironically named "Cradle of Liberty," which might have been a cradle for him but sure wasn't for the tens of thousands of black Africans he was responsible for snatching from their families and forcing into the horrors of the Middle Passage. McManus explains the importance of the slave trade to the New England economy: [The slave trade] stimulated the growth of other industries. Shipbuilding, the distilleries, the molasses trade, agricultural exports to the West Indies, and the large numbers of artisans, sailors, and farmers were all dependent upon the traffic in Negroes. It became the hub of New England's economy. See also the excellent 2005 book Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant. Let's go beyond the North's guilt for enthusiastic, widespread slave trading and look at the whole picture. The North could not have gotten cargoes of slaves without tremendous help from blacks themselves. Black African tribal chieftains had captives from tribal warfare rounded up and waiting in places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone to be picked up by slave traders from all over the world. The constant unrest in Africa today with genocides, kidnappings, never-ending warfare, people hacked to death, makes it easy to understand. Black tribal chieftains were worse then because there was no media attention on them. They made slavery easy. White people did not even have to get off the ship and usually didn't. Slavery could never have happened without those blacks in Africa who were all too willing to sell other blacks into slavery for profit. Slavery has always existed including today. Indians enslaved other Indians. The Romans would conquer a place and kill all the men and take all the women and children into slavery. Most cultures, worldwide, had slavery at one time or another. American slavery is not the first. Only 5% of slaves in the exodus from Africa, called the African Diaspora, ended up in the United States. Many ended up in Brazil and other places in South America and the Caribbean. Slavery is a blight on humanity but a fact of human history and we should understand the truth of it and not the politically correct lie that blames only the South. All Americans, but especially African-Americans, deserve to know the entire truth about slavery and not some white-washed version. "Truth" is why Lerone Bennett wrote Forced into Glory, to reveal that racist Abraham Lincoln deliberately did not free any slaves (or freed very few) with the Emancipation Proclamation, and, most of Lincoln's life (Lerone Bennett says all of his life) supported sending African-Americans back to Africa or into a climate suitable to them. The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation confirms this long-held belief of Lincoln's that "the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued." There would have been no American slavery without black tribal chieftains in Africa, and British and Yankee slave traders. The reason the South gets all the blame is because of a half-century of political correctness in which only one side of the story has been told because, if you tell the Southern side, even in a scholarly manner, you open yourself up to charges of being a racist and member of the KKK who wishes we still had slavery. Esteemed historian, Eugene D. Genovese, writes: To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity ¾ an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame. (Emphasis added.) NAACP resolutions passed in 1987 and 1991 spewing hatred on the Confederate battle flag also intimidate scholars who would rather not weigh in or who will take the anti-South side without a fair examination of the issues. Professors know that they stand almost no chance of getting tenure if they say anything good about the South in the War Between the States. They know that we live in a shallow and superficial time and just an accusatory whiff in the air that someone is a racist, whether they are or not, will end a college history career or prevent one from getting started. But, remember the old proverb: "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” The War Between the States is the central event in American history. It should be examined thoroughly just as Lerone Bennett has examined Abraham Lincoln and given us a fresh perspective on old Honest Abe the racist who used the "n" word more than the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the same Abe Lincoln who wanted to ship black people back to Africa and who deliberately freed no slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation when he could have freed close to a million under Union control. There is a lot to know and think about in order to understand what really happened. AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article is Chapter Two of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., available at Charleston Athenaeum Press. (Original at link includes footnotes).
 Since the 1960s, the interpretation of Southern history and the War Between the States put forth by most of the news media and academia is largely a fraud. It is driven by the racist identity politics of the Democrat Party and not historical truth. If Southern history was interpreted objectively as it was before 1960, instead of with liberal political hate as it is today, nobody would dare remove a monument to soldiers in a war in which 800,000 were killed and over a million wounded, half of which were Confederate soldiers who were always hungry, ragged, outnumbered and outgunned, but exhibited valor such as the world had never seen. Drew Gilpin Faust in her excellent book, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War, uses the earlier statistics of 620,000 total deaths compiled by William F. Fox, and she writes that those deaths were "approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined." If you use Hacker's statistics, you'd have to add Vietnam, both Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and the war on terror; in other words, deaths in the War Between the States were higher than all other American wars combined, with room to spare. Faust says the rate of death "in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities." Confederate soldiers "died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white Southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War." She quotes James McPherson who writes that "the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II." To personalize some of those statistics, Confederate Col. George E. Purvis was quoted in Confederate Veteran magazine, March, 1897, from an article he had written about Union Gen. Henry Van Ness Boynton and the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. Gen. Boynton, with great respect for the courage of the Confederates he faced, wanted to make it a sacred memorial, not just to Union valor, but American valor. Col. Purvis writes that Gen. Boynton and a friend had visited the Chickamauga battlefield on a quiet Sunday morning in the summer of 1888 and heard singing in a church nearby. The general's thoughts went from those sweet sounds to the hellish and "fearful horrors of that other Sunday, when the very demons of hell seemed abroad, armed and equipped for the annihilation of mankind" almost a quarter of a century earlier: They saw again the charging squadrons, like great waves of the sea, dashed and broken in pieces against lines and positions that would not yield to their assaults. They saw again Baird's, Johnson's, Palmer's, and Reynolds's immovable lines around the Kelley farm, and Wood on the spurs of Snodgrass Hill; Brannan, Grosvenor, Steedman, and Granger on the now famous Horseshoe; once more was brought back to their minds' eye, "the unequaled fighting of that thin and contracted line of heroes and the magnificent Confederate assaults," which swept in again and again ceaselessly as that stormy service of all the gods of battle was prolonged through those other Sunday hours. In the "Balaklava" reference above, Gen. Boynton is noting Confederate valor far in excess of the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade" of the British cavalry against Russian forces in the Battle of Balaclava, October 25, 1854, in the Crimean War. The unfounded bigotry against the South in history today is liberal politics and not history. Every Confederate monument that has been removed, was removed from a college campus or by a liberal Democrat starting with Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans, despite widespread support for the monuments in New Orleans and nationwide (over 60% of Americans in polls say to leave Confederate monuments alone). Michael Signer in Charlottesville couldn't remove his monuments so he covered them with tarps that are constantly removed by outraged citizens. These Democrat Party cultural Nazis are more like ISIS when ISIS destroyed the monuments in Palmyra, "a first-century Roman city in Syria whose classical architecture was an inspiration for the facade of the U.S. Capitol."[i] Mitch Landrieu had to remove the New Orleans monuments at night with snipers in bullet-proof vests standing guard. ISIS destroys the monuments and culture of anybody who does not agree with them. Sound familiar? There is a rot in history in this day and age. Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, brings up a 1987 book by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, in which Bloom argues persuasively that radical theory in academia had changed things so much that humanities and social science departments within universities [where History resides] had abandoned objectivity and truth and become hopelessly politicized. If you doubt that academia and the fake-news media are overwhelmingly liberal (with all that that means for truth), consider that in the 2016 election, the 33 wealthiest colleges in the United States gave $1,560,000 to Hillary Clinton. They gave Donald Trump $3,000. Around 96% of money donated by journalists went to Hillary Clinton. In numbers of journalists giving, 50 gave to Republican Donald J. Trump, while 430 gave to Clinton. That means 10% of journalists donated to Republican Trump, and 90% to Democrat Clinton. Windschuttle writes: "Most young people today were taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture - equality, freedom, democracy, human rights - as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful. This teaching, Bloom argued, had bred a cynical, amoral, self-centered younger generation who lacked any sense of inherited wisdom from the past." It is worse than just the politicization of history. Windschuttle points out that for 2,400 years history has ranked "with philosophy and mathematics as among the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species as a whole." History's "essence" has been to "tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened." Unfortunately today, "these assumptions are widely rejected." Many in the humanities and social sciences "assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past" because "we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us." Because of this, supposedly, the entire point of history is no longer valid therefore "there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth" (Nietzsche had the same view over a hundred years ago) or between "fiction and non-fiction." In other words, nothing exists except what liberals tell us exists. Perhaps academics are right because it is certainly fiction that slavery caused the War Between the States. As Shelby Foote said, slavery was an element in the drama but not the cause of the war. Over 94% of Southerners in over 80% of Southern families did not own slaves according to the 1860 census. Men do not charge into "the smoke of the Union musketry and the very flame of the Federal batteries" as Col. Purvis noted, so somebody else can own slaves; but they do so enthusiastically for independence, especially if their country is invaded, and especially because their sires were the patriots who won American independence in 1776. Windschuttle reveals the outrageousness (almost to the point of stupidity) of the liberal academic mindset. This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic: One of the reasons the humanities and social sciences have been taken over so quickly by the sophistry described in this book is because too few of those who might have been expected to resist the putsch understood what its instigators were saying. The uninitiated reader who opens a typical book on postmodernism, hermeneutics, poststructuralism et al must think he or she has stumbled onto a new foreign language, so obscure and dense is the prose. Now, this happens to be a very effective tactic to adopt in academic circles where there is always an expectation that things are never simple and that anyone who writes clearly is thereby being shallow. Obscurity is assumed to equal profundity, a quality that signals a superiority over the thinking of the uneducated herd. Like Big Brother said: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. And now academia says: Clarity is shallowness. Obscurity is profundity. God help us. David Harlan points out more academic gobbledygook and liberal hate in his book, The Degradation of American History. He says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist. They said it "focused our attention on great white men at the expense of women and minorities, that it ignored the racial and ethnic diversity of national life, that it obscured the reality of class conflict." They wanted to expose the complicity of white men "in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history." They "feel no need to say what is good in American history. Eugene D. Genovese, one of American's greatest historians before his death in 2012, wrote this in 1994: Rarely, these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guild-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. . . . To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity. Dr. Genovese goes on to say that this cultural and political atrocity is being forced on us by "the media and an academic elite." I could go on and on, and I do in longer works that will be out later this year, so let me wrap up this article by pointing out that the monuments and memorials of both sides that went up in the early twentieth century were hugely symbolic for our reunited nation and the healing from a war that had killed 800,000 and wounded over a million. Drew Gilpin Faust writes: At war's end this shared suffering would override persisting differences about the meanings of race, citizenship, and nationhood to establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite. Even in our own time this fundamental elegiac understanding of the Civil War retains a powerful hold." The original Confederate Veteran magazine was established and ran from 1893 to 1932. It includes the definitive account of the War Between the States and the monuments that went up to honor Southern valor and sacrifice. It was written by Confederates who participated, soldiers, generals, women, politicians. You can not find a single angry or hateful word in the entire 40 year run, nothing but the most sincere outpouring of love and respect and the memorialization of Southern - indeed American - honor, valor and sacrifice. Today's Confederate Veteran has the same standard of truth and excellence and has since the SCV took it over decades ago. The portrayal of the Confederacy by the fake-news media and hateful liberal academia is overwhelmingly a fraud. The American Historical Association is a national embarrassment and should change its name to the American Ahistorical Association. Monuments in the South were paid for by pennies from children and an impoverished region that had been destroyed 35 years earlier, but it found money, a little here and there over the years, to honor its warriors, leaders and their families, and courage such as the world had never seen before. As Union Gen. Boynton said, he looked down again on those slopes, slippery with blood and strewn thick as leaves with all the horrible wreck of battle, over which and in spite of repeated failures these assaulting Confederate columns still formed and reformed, charging again and again with undaunted and undying courage. We are in a political fight and not a history debate. We need to look at it from that standpoint and develop creative comprehensive strategies to take on and defeat our enemies. The highest priority is to develop political influence. Observe how business people and politicians brand and market successfully. The NRA is a great example and they are under attack all the time as we are. The SCV, UDC, reenactors and every historical organization should push for, or support efforts, to put laws on the books protecting monuments in every state where there is no law. This goes back to political influence. Our Heritage Act in South Carolina has been effective though it is constantly under attack. Camps should make it a high priority to construct roadside battle flag memorials on private property in highly visible places. We should put 10 up for every monument that has been removed. New Orleans and Charlottesville, Baltimore, and other places should be awash with battle flags, then we should write, publish and speak constantly, and tell what those flags stand for. Learn. Read books and increase your historical knowledge. Read my book: Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., that's at Bonnie Blue Publishing and Amazon. My book has 218 footnotes and 207 sources in the bibliography so it is full of documentation you can use. Join the Abbeville Institute and the Society of Independent Southern Historians and participate. Update Wikipedia articles when you see historical prejudice against the South. Review local school texts and refute them when necessary. Write letters-to-the-editor of newspapers. Do whatever you can. Give money. Speak. Write. Share information. We are going to have to do all this ourselves, but in the age of the Internet and social media, we have enormous power at our fingertips, and it goes along nicely with historical truth. This piece was previously published in Confederate Veteran magazine, May/June, 2018.
The campaign was dismissed, at first, as "those Charleston Crazies, at it again," but it grew legs and took off and now was the talk of the country. It appeared Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's days on the fifty-dollar bill were, indeed, numbered. It was Saturday, April 9th, 2033 and Marion Square in downtown Charleston, South Carolina was jam packed with TV cameras and reporters as the debate was about to begin. A huge stage was set up on the north side of Marion Square close to Embassy Suites. A huge TV screen was set up on the south side at the back of John C. Calhoun’s statue. The Cooper River Bridge Run, with 85,000 runners, now the largest 10K in the world across the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America, had ended on Marion Square the weekend before. The place had been swarming with people, but this crowd was twice, maybe three times as large, and was getting loud and boisterous. "May I have your attention please," blared out a deep male voice that sounded like Trace Adkins. "Welcome to democracy and freedom of speech in ACTION!" At that, the crowd erupted and everybody cheered loudly interspersed with shrill whistling and Rebel Yells. "I'm John G. Gailliard of the Political Science Department of Charleston College, your moderator, and we are sponsoring this nationally broadcast event!" There was another round of hooting, hollering, whistling and clapping as Fox News, C-SPAN and others panned the crowd. "As most of you know, negotiators for the three parties debating today have hammered out the rules, and the Congressional Delegations of every Southern state have agreed to introduce legislation in Congress supporting the position of the winner of this debate . . ." he paused then yelled right into the microphone, "and it's WINNER TAKE ALL!" The crowd erupted again! Earlier, the Post and Courier had published an entire section on the debate spelling out the positions of each of the three sides. First, there was the genealogical group that had started the whole thing, the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South, who were descended from Confederate soldiers. They were demanding that Ulysses S. Grant's picture be removed from the fifty-dollar bill and replaced with Gen. Robert E. Lee's since Grant's house was slaveholding throughout the War Between the States, and Lee's was not. Lee did not believe in slavery, unlike Grant, who just about had to have his slaves forcibly removed after the war. At first, the public was skeptical about claims that the greatest Confederate general was not a slaveowner during the war, while the Yankee general, supposedly fighting to free the slaves, had sworn he'd join the Confederacy before he'd let his slaves go. Were there slaves in Ulysses S. Grant's house during the War Between the States? It just didn't make sense to a lot of people, especially those who rely on public education and CNN for their information. The second position was taken by Yankees who have felt so good about themselves for supposedly ending slavery that they were willing to overlook the fact that Grant's house definitely had slaves in it, that Sherman had no problem with slavery, that five slave states fought for the North throughout the war, and that Lincoln himself, before the fighting, supported the Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have protected slavery forever and placed it even beyond the reach of Congress. This second group called itself, Brothers United to Limit Lee, or B.U.L.L. They were feeling so God-awful good, they never even thought about the million people who died in the War Between the States out of a total population of 33 million. They did not care that old Honest Abe Lincoln was so racist he'd make the Grand Wizard of Ku Klux Klan blush, nor did they care that Lincoln, his whole life, favored sending blacks back to Africa. This second group just didn’t care about any of this stuff because they won and could walk around feeling good about themselves, which they had been doing for 168 years. The third position, put forth by Scholars for Justice, had come about in sort of a logical way. These folks reasoned that Grant was not the only slave master on American money. Washington, Jefferson, all of them had been white men who owned slaves, so what we really needed to do was put a black man who owned slaves on the fifty-dollar bill. That would make things fair. Then we wouldn't have to disturb any of the other slaveowning presidents on our money, which would happen if we put the non-slaveowning Robert E. Lee on the fifty-dollar bill. With a black slaveowning man on American money, everybody would be represented except Hispanics, but they were not significant players in the War Between the States, and the Indians were all Confederates, thus they’d be covered by Gen. Lee. William Ellison, the famous cotton gin maker from Sumter County, immediately came up because he was one of the largest slaveowners in South Carolina, and he was black. The Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South supported this position on a secondary basis because it only seemed fair. BULL was flat-out against it. The concept that blacks willingly fought for the Confederacy -- because to Southern blacks, the South was home -- is another concept that people who rely on public education and CNN have a hard time believing, though these same people will sometimes believe that blacks fought in the American Revolution for America, and back then every American colony was slaveholding. The reason they believe blacks fought in the Revolution for America is because they know stories like Crispus Attucks, a black man and great American patriot, who was the first man killed by the British in the Boston Massacre in 1770, God rest his soul. The night before, a fight had broken out in the courtyard of the Blind Tiger on Broad Street between one of the Sons and Daughters, and a member of BULL. There was a table full of members of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South drinking and talking and having a good time in their gray Confederate coats, next to a table full of BULL drinking and talking and having a good time in their blue Yankee coats, next to a table full of Scholars for Justice drinking and talking and having a good time in their stylish black coats that looked sort of like tuxedo coats but had brown elbow pads on the sleeves. Things started out with civility and fun, but the War Between the States was only 172 years ago, and that might as well have been yesterday, so it’s understandable that emotions are always high. “Why would you people glorify the side that wanted to destroy America?” said a member of BULL in jest, his chest poking out proudly. “We don’t. We just wanted to be left alone to govern ourselves, like the Colonies in 1776 wanted Great Britain to leave them alone so they could govern themselves,” said a Confederate Son. “That’s hardly the same thing,” said the BULL member. “Oh yea, your Horace Greeley said it was exactly the same thing. If it was OK in 1776 for three million colonists to secede from Great Britain, it was certainly OK in 1861 for nine million Southrons to secede from the federal Union. That’s what your Greeley himself wrote in his New York Tribune before the war.” “But that was treason. They had no right,” said the member of BULL. “Au contraire, they most certainly had the right. The right of secession was never questioned by the Founding Fathers. In the beginning, even Yankees didn’t question it. You ever hear of the Hartford Convention of New England?” “Yea, but they didn’t actually secede.” “True, but they sure as hell wanted to. They voted to secede and sent a delegate to Washington to announce that they had seceded, but the War of 1812 ended before he got there.” The member of BULL had picked the wrong Son to argue with, but he grabbed his mug of beer and continued on. “Don’t you think we are a great nation today? Why would you people want to destroy that?” “We would have been two great nations, even greater. A million people didn’t have to die to prove it. We would have been friends, North and South, and all fought Hitler together and traded together and things would have been fine.” “Including your black slaves, huh.” “Well, you Yankees brought them all here and made huge fortunes in the process. You built the entire infrastructure of the Old North on profits from the slave trade.” “Yea, but if there had not been a market for slaves in the South, we never would have done that.” “True, but there were slaves in the North until massive white immigration from Europe made it cheaper to hire a white man than buy a black. Only then did Northern states phase out slavery.” “At least we did phase it out.” “Let me ask you this. Every Northern state used gradual, compensated emancipation. There were still slaves in the North when the war started. Many Northerners waited until just before a slave was due to be emancipated, like just before his 21st birthday, then sold him back into slavery in the South. Not a pretty record.” “I don’t know if I believe all that.” “It’s absolutely true, but here’s my question. If the North really wanted to end Southern slavery, why didn’t you suggest doing it in the South the same way you had done it in the North, with gradual, compensated emancipation?” Another member of the Sons and Daughters blurted out, “Because damn Yankees were not going to spend their hard-earned sweat shop money to free blacks in the South. They could care less.” Another Son added, “That’s right, because freed blacks going North were job competition for the Northern working man and unemployment was already so bad, there was near anarchy in many Northern cities. Ever hear of ‘Blood or Bread!’” He was referring to bad riots in Northern cities in the Panic of 1857. Of course, the South had been stable. “I still say secession was treason,” said another BULL member. “The first forty years of America’s existence, nobody questioned the right of secession. Do you think the colonists who fought a bloody war to be independent from the British would immediately lock themselves into another government they couldn’t get out of? Are you crazy?” The BULL members were getting agitated. Everybody in the courtyard was tuned in with great interest because this was an excellent bar room debate that had gotten loud.” “Oh hell, let’s have another round of beers and cool down.” “Good idea.” More beers were brought but soon two women were into it. “The Southern aristocracy or slaveocracy,” said a dark-haired female BULL with a sneer, “caused the war. They weren’t gonna give up their black mistresses without a fight.” A very pretty blonde Daughter who looked like Shannon Bream, said, “Southerners debated the issue of secession for months. Every single Southern state called a convention, elected delegates, debated the issue then voted to secede.” “So what,” said the dark-haired BULL girl. “The convention votes were then ratified by a popular vote of the people in every single Southern state, just like happened with the Constitution. It was pure democracy in action.” “I can’t believe the backward South knew to do all that,” replied the female BULL. “The ‘backward South’ supplied almost every Founding Father. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Mason, Henry, all of them Southerners. In 1861, Southrons believed they were heirs to the Founding Fathers. It was Yankees that had changed from the original republic.” “Yankee progress,” said the female BULL. “Yankee anarchy,” replied the blonde Daughter. “Massive immigration from Europe kept the North wild and needing an outlet for its extra people, which is why so many went west. Like Horace Greeley said, ‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!’” The blonde Daughter took a sip of her beer then quickly added, “The South was producing most of the wealth of the nation. Yankees were stealing it with tariffs and monopolies. Like Robert Toombs said, the federal government was a ‘suction pump’ sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it in the North. Hell, the North couldn’t even feed itself.” “Bullshit. We had great cities, all the banks, money and most of the shipping in the country.” “That’s true, all of it earned by selling Northern goods to the South. The South was nothing but a big captive market for Northern factories. Without the South, Northern factories stood idle, and the North was nothing.” Another Son added, “Northerners were benefiting from slavery as much as Southerners.” One of the BULL members smirked and said, “By seceding, you were threatening our economy, the stability of our nation. We had every right to fight.” “Fair enough,” said the Son, “so don’t go around saying the war was fought to free the slaves. That’s a pile of you-know-what. White Yankees could care less about black slaves, and damn sure didn’t want them in the North.” There was a pause. Both sides were disgusted and on edge. The Scholars for Justice found the whole thing fascinating, as if they were at a college lecture, and everybody else in the courtyard was all ears. “Youse guys started the war. We finished it,” said a raspy-voiced member of BULL. “Lincoln started the war by lying to Confederates in Charleston Harbor in April, 1861. He swore he would not send troops to Fort Sumter. He lied. He knew he was starting the war. Lincoln the liar.” “Lincoln had every right to reinforce a federal garrison under siege,” said a BULL member. “The Charlestonians were feeding the Yankees in Fort Sumter. The fort was in sovereign South Carolina waters occupied by a hostile foreign power threatening one of our most important cities. We had every right to demand that it be evacuated.” Another Daughter added, “Hell, we had representatives in Washington at that very time trying to pay Lincoln for all federal property in the South. He kept promising to move the troops out, but he couldn’t.” “And just why couldn’t he,” said the dark haired female BULL member. “Because when the first seven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy, the economy of the North collapsed and was in complete anarchy. Factories were closed. Ships were idle or moving South to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans. Goods were rotting on Northern docks. Property values had gone down to nothing. Mobs were in the streets. Lincoln was starting to be hated by his own party. War solved all of his problems. Gave him ‘a magnificent burst of patriotism,’ I think, is the way one Yankee put it.” A BULL member said, “You Southerners. You don’t get your way so you quit. You’re like a bunch of big frigg’in babies.” “Yeah, babies tired of being robbed by Northern thieves. Southerners were paying seventy-five percent of the taxes through high tariffs and monopolies that protected Northern industry, but seventy-five percent of the tax money was being spent in the North. You damn right we were tired of all that!” Another Son added, “Seventy-five percent was a hell of a lot more money than the British were robbing from the Colonies in 1776.” “Good Lord. If it wasn’t for us, you’d still have slaves, wouldn’t you.” “Always back to the slavery issue which y’all admitted was bull a few minutes ago. Yankee bull.” “I’ve had enough of this,” said the most vocal BULL member who got up and when he did, spilled a beer on one of the Daughters. He looked at her then, without apologizing, started to walk off. A son jumped up and grabbed him and said, “Hey, you owe the lady an apology.” The BULL member jerked his arm away and put his finger in the Son’s chest, so the Son decked him, causing both tables to empty like a baseball game brawl. The bartender, Sean, blew a foghorn, and that deafening sound in the small courtyard backed everybody off for a moment. “We’re not puttin' up with this crap! Y’all are gonna have to leave!” “Damn,” said one of the Scholars for Justice. “Just as it was getting good.” Another Scholar for Justice said, “What if we moderate the discussion and keep it from elevating into fisticuffs. Could we stay then? Please?” Both sides seemed to want to go along with that. Nobody wants to leave the courtyard of a good Charleston bar on a starry night in April. Sean looked undecided for a second, but must have been thinking about all the beers and tips he’d miss if they left. “OK, y’all shake hands. Dammit, I mean it. If y’all are gonna stay, it’s gonna be friendly. That’s the deal. We’re all Americans, you know.” For about twenty minutes, nothing happened. People talked in their groups, laughed. Then one of the Sons said over to the BULL members table, “You know, a nation has to say why it is fighting BEFORE it goes to war. All nations in all of history have done that. Right or wrong, they’ve all spelled out their reasons before fighting and killing other people.” “We don’t disagree with that,” said a BULL member. “Then why do you say the war was fought over slavery, when Lincoln himself said over and over, it was to preserve the Union. Nobody in the North, I mean NOBODY said they were marching armies into the South to free the slaves. Hell, no white Yankees would have signed up to die for Southern slaves, and you damn well know it.” “The war was to preserve the Union when it started, then later, it was to free the slaves.” “You mean, later, when you needed a justification for murdering and raping hundreds of thousands of people, it becomes a noble quest to free the slaves. Before that, it was to preserve the Southern tax base for the Union, am I right?” “Hell no, you’re not right, asshole.” One of the Scholars for Justice, a big dude, quickly stood and looked at both sides and said, “Y’all want to get kicked out of here? Cool it.” “You Southerners fought because you wanted to keep your black mistresses,” said that same dark-haired female BULL member who brought it up earlier and was obviously titillated by the thought. “Nope. We Southerners fought because Yankee murderers and rapists invaded the South. You invaded our country. That’s why we fought.” Another Son said, “Hell, at first, Virginia voted against secession. They were not even gonna secede, and Virginia was the biggest Southern state.” “Virginia was smart,” said a BULL member. “I’ll admit Lincoln tried to get Robert E. Lee to lead the Northern armies but Lee stayed loyal to Virginia.” “So, why did Virginia secede?” A couple Sons and a Daughter tried to answer at the same time. “Because Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South. That’s when Virginia seceded.” Another Son added, “Try to say Virginia seceded to preserve slavery. You’d be a liar. Virginia’s secession convention reconvened the day after Lincoln called for the invasion of the lower South, and they promptly seceded because they did not believe in federal coercion of another sovereign state. Virginia seceded on principle. It had nothing to do with slavery.” Somebody added from a couple tables away, “And Virginia was followed by the three remaining Southern states not yet in the Confederacy, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. They all seceded right after Virginia to show their disapproval of federal tyranny and coercion.” “So, all that proves is that Virginia is as traitorous as the rest of the South. It just took her a little longer to show it.” “Glad you brought that up,” said a Son who had been quiet during most of this argument. “Three states, when they ratified the U.S. Constitution, specifically preserved the right of secession. Virginia, New York and Rhode Island. All three of them demanded that their right of secession be put in writing as a condition prior to accepting the U.S. Constitution. In Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession, she used the exact language from that right of secession that had been preserved and acknowledged by all the other states acceding to the Constitution seventy-nine years earlier.” Both sides began talking among themselves and the discussion died down except for one BULL member who said that South Carolina was still a hot-headed state like their ancestors who had seceded first and started the whole thing. That pretty blonde-haired Daughter quickly said, “South Carolina supplied approximately 60,000 Confederate soldiers to Southern armies in the War Between the States, and 40,000 of them were killed or wounded. That’s a legacy of honor, valor and sacrifice unsurpassed in American history. No money-grubbing Yankee state can touch it.” BULL members were quiet for the first time all night, but not for long. “Yep, that’s a lot of Rebs we killed. I thought one Reb could whip ten Yankees?” “Well, let me ask you a question. We Southrons were outnumbered four-to-one, we were out-gunned a hundred-to-one, y’all had most of the ships, factories, a functioning government and pipeline to foreign immigration to feed your army with. We had to start everything from scratch. My question to you is, how come we were still able to kill the same number of y’all, that y’all killed of us?” “Say what?” a member of BULL said. “That’s absolutely true. Some 350,000 Southerners died, but 350,000 Yankees died too, ‘Stiff in Southern dust,’ as the song goes. So you see, we’ve been feeling pretty good about our valor and honor all these years.” The lights came on and “Last call for alcohol” was made. Three of the Scholars for Justice stood and addressed both groups. “This has been a fascinating discussion. Both sides have made their points. We have a proposition to make. Can you meet us tomorrow morning before the debate at Magnolia Cemetery, by Soldier’s Ground, next to the Confederate Soldier’s monument. Don’t worry, there’s Yankees buried there too. We want to address both groups together and I’m serious, you will not regret coming. Please come. Ten o’clock.” There was some discussion in the two groups but it was agreed they would all meet on Soldier’s Ground at Magnolia Cemetery at 10 o’clock the next morning. People headed out the bar and into the beautiful Charleston night. The cool air felt good on their faces. There was a slither of a moon up there and a billion beautiful stars. The next morning a good crowd showed up at Magnolia Cemetery by the big Confederate soldier’s monument. The Scholars for Justice had set up a podium and loudspeakers. At 10 o’clock sharp, one of the scholars walked to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming. As we said last night, you will not regret it. “At the end of the War Between the States, Gen. Robert E. Lee told his defeated Southern army to go back home and be good Americans. Southerners have done exactly that “It is OK that we disagree on the causes of the war. I am a Southerner so, in last night’s debate, I agreed with the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South. However, my best friend, here, William Yang, is a Yankee and disagrees with me, and I respect that. “I want to propose something to you, but first, I want to read this beautiful poem that was written right after the War Between the States by Miss Agnes Leonard. It’s called After the Battle, and it was first published in the Chicago Journal of Commerce in June, l868, and later in Confederate Veteran magazine. Here, on this sacred ground, at Magnolia Cemetery, is a most appropriate place to read this beautiful, sad poem:
There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. Gray-coated Southerners and blue-coated Yankees were hugging each other and shaking hands and patting each other on the back, while the Scholar for Justice reading the poem recomposed himself because it had touched him too. He had barely been able to get through it. “We have a proposition for the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South, and Brothers United to Limit Lee. First, we have had considerable debate among the Scholars for Justice about putting black slaveowner William Ellison on the fifty-dollar bill. It had not occurred to us at first but a lot of African Americans probably would not like the idea of a black slaveowner on our money. “We then had a spirited debate about putting Jim Limber’s picture on there. As you know, he was the adopted black son of Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the war. We have no children on our money so we reasoned that Jim Limber would be seen as reaching out and bringing us together. “In the end, though, we have decided that it’s time for a non-slaveowning man from that era to be on our American money. We are dropping William Ellison and Jim Limber and will support the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South in putting non-slaveowning Gen. Robert E. Lee on the fifty-dollar bill in place of slaveowning Ulysses S. Grant.” Blue-coated members of BULL were shaking their heads as Rebel Yells went up to the heavens from the sacred ground at Magnolia Cemetery. Later that day, on Marion Square, right after John G. Gailliard of the Political Science Department of Charleston College had said that the debate was winner take all, he informed the crowd that the Scholars for Justice were now supporting the Sons and Daughters of the Confederate South in their quest to put Robert E. Lee on the fifty-dollar bill. The debate itself was anticlimactic as the Sons and Daughters with the Scholars soundly defeated BULL and paved the way for the first non-slaveowner from that important era of American history – Confederate General Robert E. Lee – to be honored by having his picture on our American fifty-dollar bill. * Grant's quotation, at the beginning of the story, is documented in Footnote 24 of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., which you can find on Charleston Athenaeum Press. Here is Footnote 24 from page 16: There is a well-known story about Ulysses S. Grant wherein Grant states that he is fighting to preserve the Union and if anybody accuses him of fighting to free the slaves, he will promptly go join the Confederacy and fight on their side. There may be some truth to it, and maybe not. Grant did own one slave whom he freed in 1859, but his wife, Julia, owned four throughout much of the war, therefore Grant's household was a slaveholding household. Grant's supposed quotation was published in 1868 in the Democratic Speaker's Hand-Book, which was a Democratic Party campaign document in the 1868 campaign when Grant was running for president as a Republican. However, in 1861, Grant was a Democrat, and, as stated, living in a slaveholding household. The Democratic Speaker's Hand-Book on page 33 states that Grant was the Colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois, stationed near Mexico in 1861, and that Grant's quotation was provided by the editor of the Randolph Citizen, a Missouri newspaper. It starts: "In a public conversation in Ringo's banking-house, a sterling Union man put this question to him [Grant]: 'What do you honestly think was the real object of this war on the part of the Federal Government?'" 'Sir, said Grant, 'I have no doubt in the world that the sole object is the restoration of the Union. I will say further, though, that I am a Democrat - every man in my regiment is a Democrat - and whenever I shall be convinced that this war has for its object anything else than what I have mentioned, or that the Government designed using its soldiers to execute the purposes of the abolitionists, I pledge you my honor as a man and a soldier that I will carry my sword to the other side, and cast my lot with that people.' Source: Democratic Speaker's Hand-Book: Containing every thing necessary for the defense of the national democracy in the coming presidential campaign, and for the assault of the radical enemies of the country and its constitution, compiled by Matthew Carey, Jr. Cincinnati: Miami Printing and Publishing Company, 1868.
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