Over a year ago I took out the following full-page ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:  

“VMI’s removal of any of her monuments for the sake of an ignoble appeasement is embracing a politically correct lie in violation of her Honor Code and a repudiation of her Cadets who died on the Field of Honor.” 

Since then, VMI has been falling all over herself to repudiate her noble Confederate heritage for the sake of “taking a knee” to the politically correct lie known as “The Myth of American History,” which claims that the righteous North went to war against the evil South to free the slaves.  

Lincoln himself, in his First Inaugural, specifically stated that he was not going to war over slavery, but to collect the revenue. Are we to call “Honest Abe” a liar? Cotton was “King” and with the “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse, so Lincoln rebuffed all peace overtures from the South, provoked the firing on Ft. Sumter, launched his war, and drove the South back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. Follow the dollar and know the truth. The noted historian Barbara Tuchman most succinctly and accurately called it “The North’s War against the South’s Secession.”  

If the North were going to war to free slaves, why didn’t she free her own? There were slave States in the Union throughout the war. Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation as a desperate war measure halfway through it when the South was winning her independence. It had nothing to do with trying to end slavery in the United States. Why else did Lincoln's proclamation state that slavery was just fine as long as one were loyal to his government? Why did he admit West Virginia – a slave-State – into the Union afterwards? And why was slavery constitutional in the US throughout the war? The slavery issue was just the smelly “red herring” dragged across the tracks of a murderous and unconstitutional usurpation of power.  

“Stonewall” Jackson once owned some slaves. So what? George Washington owned far more slaves than Jackson ever did. What is to be done with his statue, and his arch? Abraham Lincoln, according to Kevin Orlin Johnson’s research in his book The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed, once owned and sold slaves from his father-in-law’s estate, and General Grant owned slaves through his wife’s estate in Missouri all through the war. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, everyone – Blacks included - was complicit in slavery in some way, just as we all are complicit in capitalism today. The US Census of 1830, for example, lists many free Black owners of slaves - from New Orleans to New England. Don’t try to make the South the scapegoat for a world-wide institution as old as recorded history (see Leviticus 25, for example, or the Greek and Roman Classics). That, too, is a lie. The South did not “enslave” anyone. Black Africans captured Black Africans and sold them into slavery to White people in the first place, and Yankee slave-traders brought them over here. According to the January 1862 New York Continental Monthly, New York, Boston, and Portland were the largest African Slave-trading ports in the world at the time of Lincoln’s election. The wealth and prosperity of New England was founded on the African slave trade, and the wealth and prosperity of the North was based upon the manufacture and export of Southern staples. It would be interesting to know if John Brown wore a shirt manufactured from slave-picked cotton when he was hanged.  

Virginia stood solidly for the Union she had done so much to create, until Lincoln called for her troops to invade the Confederacy. Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war,” and immediately seceded. Four other states, including occupied Missouri, followed her out. VMI and her Cadets fought and died to defend Virginia from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance – just as their fathers had done in 1776 when the thirteen (slave holding) colonies seceded from the British Empire. For VMI to repudiate her noble heritage for the sake of an ignoble appeasement based upon a bald-faced lie is a shame and a disgrace. 

As George Washington, “The Father of His Country,” fades into the mists of history along with the voluntary Union of sovereign States, Abraham Lincoln, dominating the Washington Mall in his Olympian Temple just as his Empire dominated Washington’s Republic in 1865, has been anointed “The Great Man of American History.” What part does the so-called “Great Man” play in history and cultural evolution? The answer is double-edged, for it requires an understanding of the distinction between the temporal process of “history” (“a chronological series of events each of which is unique”) and the temporal-formal process of “evolution” (“a series of events in which both time and form are equally significant: one form grows out of another in time.”) (1) 

G. W. F. Hegel defined the Great Men of History as the “World-Historical Persons whose vocations it was to be the Agents of the World-Spirit.” (2) If the “World-Spirit” is deduced here as being the impulse of evolution towards the culmination of its pattern, then we must look to this distinction between history and evolution to place the Great Man in his proper context.

The course of history – being a temporal process of unique events – can be determined as much by, say, the random act of an idiot or by Missus O’Leary’s cow as by the deliberate act of a Great Man. The course of evolution, on the other hand, is a different matter.  While we may hope that the course of history determined by the act of the Great Man is different from that determined by the act of a particular cow or a particular idiot, neither he nor they can determine or control the course of cultural evolution. What the Great Man can do and does do, however, is to ride the crest of evolution as a navigator or a pilot and obey the imperatives of his culture, an “unconscious impulse that occasion(s) the accomplishment of that for which the time (is) ripe.” (3) This is what distinguishes him from Missus O’Leary’s cow.
​
But it is not enough for him only to be a man of great capacity; he must also have a crest to ride. He must live in conjunction with, and respond to, the culmination of a cultural pattern of evolution; otherwise he will be lost in obscurity. These “World-historical-men,” therefore, are world-historical because they “met the case and fell in with the needs of the age.” (4) The man, then, does not determine the age; it is the age that calls forth the man. Had Abraham Lincoln been born ten years earlier or ten years later, America might never have heard of him.

Abraham Lincoln rode the crest of the Industrial Revolution in America, a revolution that transformed an age that had begun when Adam and his sons stepped out of the Garden of Eden and learned the domestication of plants and animals. The Age of Agriculture ended in the nineteenth century with the development of technology that could effectively harness solar energy from fossil fuels. With this revolution, steam power replaced muscle power as the prime mover of civilization, and the Machine Age was born roaring. The amount of energy harnessed by the Industrial Revolution and the efficiency with which it was put to use increased exponentially as technological evolution synthesized, resulting in the rapid growth and the increasing complexity of social structures to orchestrate it all. As the means and the efficiency of harnessing the free energy of the cosmos increased, populations in the industrializing cultures doubled and in some cases nearly tripled during the nineteenth century. The rural, aristocratic, agrarian feudal system became obsolete and was replaced by an urban, parliamentary, production-for-sale-at-a-profit economy, while the ideologies, values, beliefs, morals and myths of the industrializing cultures evolved apace to justify it all. With the great increase of population and cheap labor, and with the increasingly complex demands of industrialism, slavery and serfdom were found to be inefficient labor systems and they were abolished. While the basic dichotomy of the class structure remained, the composition of these classes underwent radical change. As Leslie A. White says: 

White makes an interesting observation of cultural evolution and its technological determinant: as culture evolves the rate of growth is accelerated. As technology synthesizes at an ever-increasing pace in our day, culture, like cancer, is metastasizing – but whether into a single global state or into a state of global frenzy remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we have unlocked the energy of the atom, and again a new revolution is upon us, this time superimposed upon the old. In addition, with the evolution of digital technology, of the internet, of the ubiquitous hyperventilating of the media dunning us day-in and day-out, and of the instant global communications between everyone from kings, priests, and tyrants, to radicals, peasants, and demagogues, social structures are being radically transformed all over the world. Whether this new wine can be contained in an old wineskin remains to be seen. We are indeed “riding the stream of Time,” as Bismark said (6), but any claims of control over it are sounding increasingly more like an anthropocentric whimper.

This realization should not be taken as defeatist. If we are discovering that we cannot control the course of evolution, then we must learn to adjust to it the way a sailor must adjust to the weather and to the conditions of the sea – conditions that he cannot control. In order to adjust to the course of evolution we must learn to predict it like we predict the weather, and, with the experience of a seasoned pilot, learn to “read the river” for its rocks and shoals, its tides and its currents.

To predict the course of evolution, a study of the history of those who have ridden this “River of Time” before us is necessary. And as the accurate marking of channels and hazards is vital if our river chart is to be worth anything, then we must sift history for the Truth. Only then – and with an attitude of humility before the might of the Infinite - may we hope to become successful pilots, like the Great Men of History.

Fisher’s Hill, a veritable fortress stretching across the Valley westward from the Massanutten – is a good place to rally from the good fight with Sheridan, whose cavalry alone outnumbers Early’s entire army. But a flank march through the woods on the mountain to the left breaks out and rolls up the lines. Ragged, starving, and lice-infested prisoners of war are packed into a long train of wagons and galloped all night down the Valley Pike to Winchester for fear of Mosby’s men.

A doctor volunteers his services in “the war to make the world safe for democracy,” but he is not needed there because he has a family, and his services are more needed at home.

A surgeon makes three invasions, and, building shelters for his wounded with pine boughs in the snow, refuses orders to withdraw from the Hertgen Forest and is killed by artillery fire while helping to carry a stretcher.

An Infantry officer in Burma helps to repel an attack at night, and attackers fall at his shots. “Oh, no, son. You mustn’t say that. That man may have had a little boy just like you waiting for him to come home.”

An Engineer officer in Vietnam, riding in a jeep and escorting a crippled bulldozer on a lowboy through a village near twilight, meets a man by the side of the road in a conical peasant’s hat, shorts, open shirt, barefooted, and feet planted solidly into the ground. For a moment their eyes meet – the eyes of the rash, parvenu West, the energy of the bright and lusty cities clamoring day and night for more steam, more steel, more trade, more wealth, and more power looking into the eyes of the eternal East, the blade of grass that pushes up through the cracked-pavement entropy of mean streets and litter-strewn alleyways, of desolate factories and drug-plagued ghettoes, of gang wars in crumbling concrete wastelands, the patient blade of grass that waits like the grave for its victory. The East does not blink, and Sheridan’s cavalry passes on.

​A deadly drone strike against civilians caps a withdrawal from Afghanistan, “The Graveyard of Empires.”    

​The Editor of the Roanoke Times has a bee in his bonnet to get something named for John C. Underwood (1). Underwood was a US District Judge in Virginia during Reconstruction who was to preside over the trial of President Jefferson Davis before charges were dropped by the US Supreme Court, and who did preside over the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867. He was described as a “semi-”carpetbagger, as he had resided in Virginia for a time prior to the war (2). Personally, he has been described as “repellant; his head drooping; his hair long; his eyes shifty and unpleasing, and like a basilisk’s...” (3)
 
Underwood was a native of New York who moved to Northern Virginia several years before the war, and had a farm in Clarke County, but he was a radical abolitionist and got run out of the State. During the war he returned under the protection of Governor Francis H. Pierpont’s Unionist government, where he was appointed US District Judge (4).
 
Pierpont’s “government,” founded by the Wheeling Convention early in the war and consisting of Pierpont as “governor” with three senators and nine delegates as the “General Assembly,” and ensconced in Alexandria across the river from Washington, was recognized by Lincoln, giving him “Virginia’s” electoral votes in 1864, as well as the votes of “West Virginia,” a new state separated from Virginia with the permission of the Pierpont government. After the war, the Pierpont government moved to Richmond, and Underwood went with it. In 1867, under the Reconstruction Acts, the Southern States lost their identities and were placed under martial law and an Army of Occupation, (Virginia being designated as “Military District No. 1,”) and all Confederate soldiers and any who gave aid to the Confederacy disfranchised (5). Blacks, on the other hand, were enfranchised (but not in the North) and under the control of the carpetbaggers and their Union Leagues, who taught them how to hate, and to vote the Radical Republican ticket (6).
 
Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been vindictively enchained at Fortress Monroe for the two years since the war. He was supposed to die there, but he did not. He was then supposed to be hanged for treason by military tribunal but he was not, as the civil courts had resumed jurisdiction (7). In the Spring of 1867, Judge Underwood was to bring him to trial in Richmond with a jury he selected. Perhaps more in the prevailing spirit of Northern vindictiveness rather than for any altruistic solicitude for civil rights, Underwood seated Blacks on the jury and, abandoning all regard for judicial decorum, harangued them with inflammatory lies against the Confederacy. “The Confederates had been motivated by the ‘fiery soul of treason.’ Southern ‘assassins’ had been guilty of murdering Federal prisoners of war deliberately by starvation; of practicing germ warfare by scattering yellow fever and smallpox germs among helpless civilians; of striking down Abraham Lincoln, ‘one of the earth’s noblest martyrs of freedom and humanity’...” etc. (8)
 
The editor of the Roanoke Times accuses the Virginia textbooks from the 1950s of “indoctrinating schoolchildren.” With the truth, perhaps, instead of with “The Myth of American History,” as now. Of course no charges of indoctrination could conceivably be made against newspaper editors at the Roanoke Times – pure and pristine as the new-blown snow as they are – or of their pandering to the mob during the “Woke Revolution” to sell newspapers. As part of the Lee Enterprises News Cabal, headquartered in one of those square-shaped states out there in the Midwest somewhere and answering to Warren Buffett, they could not possibly have any affiliation with The Ministry of Propaganda. But as Tennyson wrote, “they, sweet soul, that most impute a crime are pronest to it, and impute themselves” (9).     
 
As for Judge Underwood’s demagoguery, the Confederacy had been motivated not by “the fiery soul of treason,” but by the same desire for independence as in 1776. Scanty rations in Southern POW camps were the same scanty rations that starving Confederate soldiers subsisted on, and Union POW deaths were due to the North’s refusal to exchange prisoners. In fact, according to the Official Records, the mortality rate among Confederate POWs in Northern camps was higher than the mortality rate among Union POWs in Southern camps (10). As for Underwood’s charges of germ warfare, it is on record that between 1862 and 1870 perhaps as many as one million freedmen, or twenty-five percent of the population, died or were in mortal peril from starvation, epidemics and neglect under the hands of their Northern “liberators” (11). As for the assassination of Lincoln, the South had everything to lose and the Radical Republicans had everything to gain by it (12).
 
Jefferson Davis was offered a pardon by President Andrew Johnson, but he refused it and demanded a trial. It might have been the most important trial in the history of the United States, but the prosecutors were afraid that the uncomfortable facts of the Declaration of Independence and the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution might come up, Davis would be acquitted, and the North would lose in court what it had won in war. Worse yet, since Abraham Lincoln had never recognized the Southern States as being out of the Union, the embarrassing fact might be exposed that it was Lincoln – not Davis – who was the one who had committed treason under Art. III, sec. 3 of the US Constitution by invading them. So US Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase had the case dropped on a technicality and Davis went free (13).
 
But Judge Underwood was not finished. He was to preside over the Constitutional Convention that met in December of 1867, also known as the “Black and Tan” or “Underwood” Convention. With most White Virginians disfranchised, the delegation was comprised of 32 conservative Whites, and 70 Radical Republicans, which were composed of 25 Blacks, 17 scalawags and native Virginians, 6 from foreign countries, 13 New Yorkers, and the rest carpetbaggers from other Northern States. Some Whites and most Blacks were illiterate (14), fresh from the corn, cotton, and tobacco fields, decked out in silk hats and broadcloth suits, and reading newspapers upside down (15). A White conservative delegate from Augusta County described (among many other sketches of the Convention) Judge Underwood: “The president of the Convention is, apparently, a gentleman of great amiability. When I observed the other day the suavity of his deportment in the chair, and thought of the shocking harangues he was lately wont to deliver to his grand juries, I was reminded of Byron’s description of one of his heroes, - ‘as mild-mannered man as ever scuttled Ship,’ etc.” (16)
 
The Underwood Convention framed a Northern constitution, with secret ballots and an increase in local officeholders at taxpayer expense. It required free public schools and heavy taxes on land, which would compel the disfranchised Virginians to pay for the carpetbaggers’ programs. It gave the right to vote to every adult male who had resided in the State for six months, except those thousands who had been Confederate leaders. And it provided that no one could be an office holder or a juror unless he could swear that he had not supported the Confederacy. The Underwood Convention went on until the per diem ran out, and General Schofield, commander of Military District No. 1, finally compelled it to adjourn in April of 1868 (17), when “The Midnight Constitution” came into birth (18).
 
The editor of the Roanoke Times wants to have something named after John C. Underwood to pay him “tribute.” A portrait of his character by one who was knowledgeable of him at the time of the opening of Jefferson Davis’ trial in Richmond is offered here: “Reporters for Northern papers were present with their Southern brethren of scratch-pad and pencil. The jury-box was a novelty to Northerners. In it sat a motley crew of negroes and whites. For portrait in part of the presiding judge, I refer to the case of McVeigh vs. Underwood, as reported in Twenty-third Grattan, decided in favor of McVeigh. When the Federal Army occupied Alexandria, John C. Underwood used his position as United States District Judge to acquire the homestead, fully furnished, of Dr. McVeigh, then in Richmond. He confiscated it to the United States, denied McVeigh a hearing, sold it, bought it in his wife’s name for $2,850 when it was worth not less than $20,000, and had her deed it to himself. The first time thereafter that Dr. McVeigh met the able jurist face to face on a street in Richmond, the good doctor, one of the most amiable of men, before he knew what he was doing, slapped the able jurist over and went about his business; whereupon, the Honourable the United States Circuit Court picked himself up and went about his, which was sitting in judgment on cases in equity. In 1873, Dr. McVeigh’s home was restored to him by law, the United States Supreme Court pronouncing Underwood’s course ‘a blot upon our jurisprudence and civilization’” (19).
 
So name something after John C. Underwood, or perhaps build him a monument on the Capitol grounds. He is of low degree but eminently worthy of our times, and the carpetbaggers and the scalawags who have overrun Virginia are in need of love, too. But know that it takes more than a zip code to make a Virginian.  

​If you are like me, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about mules these days, but a passage from Faulkner brought them to mind. Collectivism so far has not taken root in the South, but things are so rapidly changing with the “Woke Revolution” there is no telling the future. But whatever the future holds, the “woke” will have to contend with the ubiquitous individuality of the native Southerner, and one of the most individual of that breed is the mule. As William Faulkner wrote in Flags in the Dust:

​As a city boy growing up in Lynchburg right after the Second World War, I didn’t have much occasion to come into contact with mules. My father had come home and was a manufacturer’s representative for a farm machinery company, but he told me they still used mules in the tobacco fields, pulling the sleds down the rows where a tractor couldn’t go. Most of those broad tobacco fields that I remember seeing below Lynchburg when we were driving to South Carolina to visit my grandparents are gone now, and the mules with them, too, I suppose.
 
I remember one day in South Carolina seeing a car load of colored men in an old car, with one leaning out of the window leading a mule trotting alongside, with harness jangling, in a picture surely worth a thousand words.
 
My long-time “ol’ podner” Doug Wakefield (may God rest his soul) grew up in the little town of Iva, South Carolina. In an early manifestation of his innate patriotism – before serving two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Navy – he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. He said on Sunday afternoons they would muster on the roof of Claude Finley’s mule barn to watch for Communist airplanes. Finley’s mule barn was the tallest structure in town, and CAP “intel” had evidently determined that a Communist strike on his establishment – the largest mule distributorship in the South - was likely most immanent on Sunday afternoons after church. I recently attended a funeral in Iva, but I saw no sign of any mule barns in the growing town or its environs.
 
Mules, horses, and oxen were the farm tractors before steam power replaced muscle power as the prime mover of civilization, and they carried history on their backs. In my front yard when I was growing up, there was a swale over which my tire swing hung. It was part of the remnant of General Jubal Early’s defenses of Lynchburg in 1864 when the Yankees came - the old road that connected Ft. McCausland on Langhorne Road with the redoubt held by the Lynchbug Home Guard – “The Silver Grays” – and the VMI Cadets up on Rivermont Avenue, where Villa Maria is now. My father rigged up my tire swing for me. He tied a chisel to the end of a heaving line, threw it high up over a limb on the big oak tree, bent the end of the heaving line to the main line for the swing, pulled that over the limb, tied a slip knot, pulled it taught against the limb, and secured the other end to the tire. Then he cut a drainage hole in the bottom of the tire and I was “good to go” (except for the wasps that you had to watch out for that would build a nest in the tire) getting a good running start and swinging out over that little depression in the front yard where ninety years before teamsters pulling wagons, and artillerymen pulling guns and caissons cracked whips and swore at hard-headed and recalcitrant mules:

​After The War, there were the “forty acres and a mule” that the carpetbaggers had promised the freedmen in exchange for their votes. It worked pretty good for the carpetbaggers, but not so good for the credulous freedmen. While they got top hats and cigars, the carpetbaggers got the votes and the forty acres. What they did with the mules is not recorded. They did not need mules to plow the ground for votes, or to harvest taxes, or to foreclose on the forty acres.
 
It front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – before Monument Avenue was desecrated and the Confederate monuments were vandalized and torn down – there stood a sculpture of a war horse. He was gaunt and starving, saddled with a McClellan, and with head drooping, worn to a frazzle. The new carpetbaggers and scalawags of the VMFA evidently felt that he looked too much like a Confederate horse, so to placate the tender sensibilities of the “woke” who abound these days, the War Horse was moved around back, lest he offend anyone, and the front of the museum is now graced with Kehende Wiley’s barbarian thug on horseback, “Rumors of War,” created by the artist to mock the “Jeb” Stuart monument (now torn down) - and unintentionally glorifying, sanctifying and enshrining the highest aspirations that those who adulate it are likely to attain.
 
There has been much talk about the replacements for the monuments on the Avenue that were torn down (the Lee monument has been thoroughly vandalized, but it is still standing, albeit under litigation.) A number of replacement heroes of a “woke” multicultural nature have been suggested, but none that remotely match Lee and Jackson for shaking the Lincoln Empire to its foundation while Jeb Stuart rode circles around it in defense of our independence. I don’t know how “woke” he is, but may I suggest a monument to the multi-cultural mule?      

​On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure to weaken Confederate defenses and to keep England or France from recognizing the Confederacy and lifting the blockade of the Southern Coast. It stated in effect that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government, but that those slaves behind Confederate lines were declared “then, thenceforward, and forever free” (1). The war did not end at Appomattox, for there were other Confederate armies in the field, and E. Kirby Smith did not surrender the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi until June 2, 1865, at Galveston, Texas (2). Thus, the last slaves under the terms of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were freed there on June 19, but slaves in the United States were not freed until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution in December of 1865.
 
Accounts survive of emancipation during the war. It was not always a “Jubilee.” Edward A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner during the war, reported, “The fact is indisputable, that in all the localities of the Confederacy where the enemy had obtained a foothold, the negroes had been reduced by mortality during the war to not more than one-half their previous number… In the winter of 1863-64, the Governor of Louisiana, in his official message, published to the world the appalling fact, that more negroes had perished in Louisiana from the cruelty and brutality of the public enemy than the combined number of white men, in both armies, from the casualties of war… The Yankees had abundant supplies of food, medicines and clothing at hand, but they did not apply them to the comfort of the negro, who, once entitled to the farce of ‘freedom,’ was of no more consequence to them than any other beast with a certain amount of useful labor in his anatomy (3)…
 
“We may take from Northern sources some accounts of these contraband camps, to give the reader a passing picture of what the unhappy negroes had gained by what the Yankees called their ‘freedom.’ A letter to a Massachusetts paper said: - ‘There are, between Memphis and Natchez, not less than fifty thousand blacks, from among whom have been culled all able-bodied men for the military service. Thirty-five thousand of these, viz., those in camps between Helena and Natchez, are furnished the shelter of old tents and subsistence of cheap rations by the Government, but are in all other things in extreme destitution. Their clothing, in perhaps the case of a fourth of this number, is but one single worn and scanty garment. Many children are wrapped night and day in tattered blankets as their sole apparel. But few of all these people have had any change of raiment since, in midsummer or earlier, they came from the abandoned plantations of their masters. Multitudes of them have no beds or bedding – the clayey earth the resting place of women and babes through these stormy winter months. They live of necessity in extreme filthiness, and are afflicted with all fatal diseases. Medical attendance and supplies are very inadequate. They cannot, during the winter, be disposed to labor and self-support, and compensated labor cannot be procured for them in the camps. They cannot, in their present condition, survive the winter. It is my conviction that, unrelieved, the half of them will perish before the spring. Last winter, during the months of February, March and April, I buried, at Memphis alone, out of an average of about four thousand, twelve hundred of these people, or twelve a day’” (4).
 
Precise figures are unavailable, but by some estimates, out of a population of four million, as many as 25% of the freedmen perished or suffered mortal peril from epidemic illness and famine from 1862 to 1870 under the hands of their “liberators” (5). In February of 1865, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stevens tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the war with Abraham Lincoln. Stevens asked what the North was prepared to do for the Blacks that the North had emancipated. Lincoln responded, quoting a song then popular: “Root, hog, or die” (6). Perhaps a million did. 

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!" has come down to us as the lofty rallying-cry of the French Revolution, but in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities it is rendered as "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death!" (2) and we all know of the guillotine and its work. But Liberty and Equality are mutually exclusive and inversely proportional to one another in any government, and true Fraternity – an impulse welling up from within the individual towards his fellow man - cannot be imposed from without; therefore the French Revolution’s march towards Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death proved to be a march towards the perfect Equality of slavery to a totalitarian government devoid of all Liberty, and a coerced, affected Fraternity cowering in the shadow of the guillotine. 

The French Revolution destroyed the aristocracy, but the basic dichotomy remained, with the aristocracy merely replaced by the bourgeoisie. The same happened here after Lincoln’s War, with the agrarian Patricians of the old Republic merely replaced by a capitalist Oligarchy; while agrarian slaves were replaced by industrial wage workers, and slave insurrections were replaced by labor strife and urban riots. The Russian Revolution played it out again, when the Tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Bolshevik Party, and the peasants were herded into an industrial “workers’ paradise” through government orchestrated famines and re-education camps. “Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more joyous,” declared Stalin (3), just before the bloody purges and deportations to Siberia during “The Great Terror” in the 1930s.

Is this where the “woke” Progressives are taking us, with their Fascist “Antifa” rent-a-thugs, their Marxist Black Lives Matter mobs, their Anti-White and Anti-West Critical Race Theories, and their hubristic claims of being on “the right side of history”? History is cyclic, not linear, so there is no such thing as “the right side of history.” Perhaps, then, we may learn something from the Cyclic March of History by looking at the French Revolution, Lincoln’s Revolution, and the Russian Revolution – and then looking at the “Woke Revolution” of today. Follow the dollar and know the truth.

As Napoleon said, “Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency: their sole object is gain” (4). The world’s first international financial network was founded by the House of Rothschild, attaining great success by the end of the eighteenth century by lending money to governments and kings, and parlaying wealth into political power. Wars are  profitable to bankers because they expand the debts of the antagonists. If an antagonist doesn’t exist, then one must be created by financing the rise of a hostile regime. While the virtues of peace must always be proclaimed, perpetual conflict is where the money is. Both sides of the conflict may be financed, giving them each a 50/50 chance to win, but giving a one hundred percent chance for the bankers to win. If a government does not wish to borrow money to finance the conflict, then it would be necessary to encourage a revolution to replace it with one that does. G. Edward Griffin calls this “The Rothschild Formula” (5), and its footprints may be found on the three revolutions looked at here – and on the “Woke Progressive” revolution of today.

King Louis XVI of France inherited large French debts. His policy of taking out international loans rather than increasing taxes further increased the debt, while his helping to finance the American Revolution brought France near to bankruptcy (6). That, combined with poor harvests and bread shortages, sparked the French Revolution. In 1789, King Louis XVI was deposed and the revolutionary government took over. European bankers would not risk any large loans to it as long as there was the possibility that the king could return and repudiate the debts, so Louis was offered a cumbersome coach in which to “escape” to Austria. He was captured at the border, returned under guard, condemned to die for treason, and beheaded in 1793. His queen, Marie Antoinette, was beheaded thereafter. The international bankers foreclosed on Louis XVI’s France, and made safe new loans to the revolution (7). 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Wall Street Money Trust ginned up sectional hatred in America by helping to finance the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the case of Dred Scott, “Bleeding Kansas,” and John Brown’s Raid, which drove the “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and lit the fuse to Lincoln’s War (8). After the conquest of the Southern States, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was supposed to die in prison, but he did not, so he was to be hanged by military tribunal for treason to prevent him from coming back into power and repudiating the debts of the “carpetbagger” governments and their Black puppets who now ruled the Southern States. However, with the return of the civil courts, Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason for fear of his being declared not guilty and thereby exposing Lincoln’s War as unconstitutional (9). But the South was still prostrate under the iron heel of Reconstruction, and while the Southern Whites were kept at bayonet-point, the carpetbag governments ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which – among other things - forced the conquered South to pay for the Union war debts and repudiate her own (10). This, along with her total devastation from the war, kept the South in poverty until the Second World War, while Wall Street and the Money Trust gamboled in the Gilded Age (11).

Russia freed her serfs in 1861. The Tsar gave them land to purchase and forty-nine years to pay for it. But depression hit, followed by Russia’s unsuccessful Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5. The peasants couldn’t pay their mortgages, pay their taxes, pay for the war, and feed their families all at the same time, so they revolted in 1905. The Tsar was both the Government and the Church, and therefore owned the lands of both. He was heavily in debt to the international bankers, with much land as collateral, but there was no way for the bankers to foreclose as long as the Tsar had an army. A revolution was the ticket. The seeds had already been sown with the revolt of 1905, and fertilized with Marxist propaganda. Tsar Nicolas II mobilized his army to both avoid revolution and to give him the excuse to borrow more money to relieve the suffering population. But Germany saw the mobilization as an act of war, and declared war on Russia in 1914. Russia’s peasant army was no match for the most powerful army on earth, and when Russia suffered a reverse, the troops mutinied, killed their officers, and headed for home. The Russian front collapsed, Tsar Nicolas II was told his government was ended, and the Communists took over with the October Revolution of 1917. To ensure the Tsar could not return to power and repudiate the loans made to the Communists, he and his family were executed. The bankers foreclosed on Tsarist Russia, and made safe new loans to the Communists (12).

To ask what these revolutions and “The Rothschild Formula” have to do with the “Woke Revolution” today, a look at our national debt approaching thirty trillion dollars should give one pause. Bankers are creditors who make big money off of loans, so it is good business for bankers – who are among the most fiscally conservative people on earth - to promote profligacy, irresponsibility, and dependency among potential debtors. If war is where the money is in the international arena, at home the ticket is the Welfare State - or Socialism, or Communism, or whatever other iterations of collective dependency on government handouts you may choose – for it increases government borrowing to pay for it. Therefore, politicians who promise government handouts (both for citizens and for corporations) have been promoted by the Money Trust and Wall Street ever since the Lincoln Administration sold out the financial independence of the United States Government with the National Bank Act of 1864. America is now a debtor in the grip of Morgan, Rothschild, and their affiliates on Wall Street – a grip which tightened with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (13) – and to challenge them is futile. As John Randolph of Roanoke said long ago, “You might as well attack Gibraltar with a pocket pistol as to attempt to punish them.” (14)     

The Welfare State not only increases the national debt, it also creates political opposition, and as stated in “The Rothschild Formula,” Wall Street bankers have no qualms about financing both sides of any conflict. However, the side that promises the most expansion of the Welfare State is the side that bankers will find more profitable, so that is the side to bet on. In addition to the Welfare State, radical “human rights” policies, “civil rights” policies, and “affirmative action” policies that presume to correct the deficiencies in God’s Creation require an ever-expanding bureaucracy to administer them. This increases the size of government, which also increases borrowing (if the political inexpediency of raising taxes is to be avoided). Therefore, Wall Street will also promote the radical politicians and the radical media who promote these radical policies. 

Progressives are indoctrinating malleable minds with Critical Race Theory, not only through the “woke” media, but through the government-controlled public schools that have taken over child-rearing responsibilities in these profligate and irresponsible times. The anti-West and anti-White Critical Race Theory merely replaces the traditional Marxist class conflict with a neo-Marxist race conflict, so it appears that the Money Trust is now preparing to foreclose on Western Civilization with a race war. Western Civilization, for the sake of Equity with those who have none, must now abjure its own – from Virgil to Jefferson - and “take a knee” to the eternal African present. As ever, the basic dichotomy will remain. Only the nightmare will be different: enslavement to a totalitarian “affirmative action” bureaucracy, surrounded by a wall of skulls…

“The Myth of American History” claims that the righteous North went to war against the evil South to free the slaves, and that Confederate war memorials are monuments to treason, slavery, and White Supremacy.  

But to accuse the South of treason, you must first wipe your feet on the Declaration of Independence, signed by the thirteen slave-holding Colonies that seceded from the British Empire. As for White Supremacy, Tocqueville showed it to be vitriolic throughout the North, where the first “Jim Crow” laws originated and where the worst Black lynching in US history took place.

As for slavery, remember that it was Black Africans who captured and sold Black Africans into slavery in the first place, and that Northern wealth was founded on the African slave-trade and the manufacture of slave-picked cotton. But with the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse, so Lincoln invaded the South to drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union, not to free the slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation plainly stated that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government. You may look it up. 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is pure political demagoguery – an Orwellian excuse for his war of invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance at the point of a bayonet. Confederate monuments speak truth to this power, so mobs of government-sanctioned vandals have torn them down to silence them. But you can’t silence the truth. Thomas Carlyle said it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men, so let men of worth restore these men to Monument Avenue, and let he who is without sin cast the first stone. 

You could tell you were getting close when you smelled the marsh. Just before, on the right, was Sol Legare Road, down which was a Black settlement, including Backman’s Seafood. That was owned by Mrs. Backman, but it was run by her eldest son, Junior Backman. Her other sons were captains in her trawler fleet. Passing Sol Legare Road and looking out over the first tongue of marshland, you could see the trawlers tied up at the dock - pretty wooden boats with their graceful sheer and high bows, freshly painted white with red trim, and with red mast, boom, and outriggers. The nets hanging in the rigging were tar-dipped instead of the newer green dip, and they waved like gossamer in the balmy southwest wind, heralding an early opening of the season in May when the wildlife people had decided enough of the big white shrimp had spawned.

The tides run around six feet in those parts, and at low tide you could see the exposed black mud banks of the sloughs lined with clusters of oysters, and smell the heavenly smell of the golden green marshlands.

Past the first tongue of marsh you passed a stand by the side of the road run by a Black woman, who advertised on a hand-painted plywood sign: “LIVE AND STLL CRABS.”

Next after that was the turnoff onto a long sandy causeway leading out across the marsh to Bowen’s Island, where the road forks to make a loop around the island. Taking the right hand fork you pass several funky houses up on blocks to the left, and on the right, a little cinderblock house painted pink. Around the bend you emerge from the thick palmetto and live oak jungle and arrive at Mrs. Bowen’s laid-back restaurant on the creek, a restaurant noted up and down the Carolina Low Country. Entering one of the side doors, one faced a table and some chairs and a counter with the cash register beyond, where Mrs. Bowen presided as proprietress, cashier, and waitress. Behind the counter was the galley, which was John Sanka’s domain. Here fried fish, shrimp, oysters, and home-made hush puppies were created, garnished with a slice of pickle for a balanced diet, and served up on paper plates, which were delivered balanced on Mrs. Bowen’s arms to the joyous customers, who would wash down these delicacies with cold beer. On top of the refrigerator was a cardboard pyramid wherein John stored his knives when not in use, so that the Cosmic Forces would be concentrated in order to keep them sharp.

From this area of management, one went into the main dining area through one of the two portals in a cinder block petition. On the right, in the corner, was a juke box that would play “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart” for a nickel. Down the aisle between the two rows of tables, at the other end of the restaurant, sat Mr. Bowen in front of the big black-and-white TV set. He had to sit close because his eyesight was not the best. He also had it turned up full blast because he not only was a little hard of hearing, but because of the noise of the patrons. 

“When she dies, I’m going to sell this damned place and move to California!” he would say.

Mr. Bowen was born the year of the Spanish-American War, played the trombone in the US Marine Corps Band in both world wars - and in a jazz band in between, until Mrs. Bowen took it away from him.

Continuing on past the Bowen’s Island turnoff, just before the bridge across Folly Creek, was Geezer’s place - not a tourist destination. Passing beyond Geezer’s and the bridge, and just before crossing the next bridge over Folly River leading onto the beach, you have almost arrived at your destination. Here, on the right, one turned down another sandy road behind a bait-and-tackle shop. A little way down the road was a deep dip that must have been a prehistoric dinosaur wallow, for rainwater would fill it up to the hubcaps of a late fifties Chevrolet pickup truck with a straight six, three on the column, and the passenger-side door tied shut with a piece of rope. But just beyond that, there you were at one of the last refuges for individuals in this Brave New Corporate/Bureaucratic/Conform-or-Die-from-Political-Incorrectness World – the Folly River Boatyard. 

The proprietor’s name was Jim. His office was in an old trailer there on the yard. His wife ran the store room and his ex-wife was the receptionist in the office. Both of them were mad at Jim because he was running around on his girlfriend who lived over on the beach.

There was an assortment of boats around – little ones blocked up out on the yard and bigger ones at the dock waiting their turn to be hauled out on the marine railway. There was the usual resident kibitzer who lived on a little blue and white wooden cabin boat that never left the dock. He would come over and tell you how you were not doing things the way they were supposed to be done. To give credit where credit is due, sometimes he was right.

Mr. Richardson was the caulker and he taught me the fundamentals of that dying art. He used a regular carpenter’s hammer but he had an old set of caulking irons with which to drive the cotton and oakum into the seams. I found a set of irons available from an old cooperage firm in Charleston and purchased it. For a mallet, I took a piece of seasoned live oak and had a cabinet maker in town turn it down into a traditional cylindrical shape on his lathe. The mallet head was about a foot long and about two-and-a-half inches in diameter – a little thicker in the middle where the handle was fitted. I split each end of the hammer head lengthwise with a saw cut about four inches long to give it a bounce, and then banded each end with a short piece of thin-walled copper pipe of the same diameter. I drove wedges into the split ends to keep the bands tight as I knocked on the irons with the mallet. The handle was just a regular ball peen hammer handle that I got from the hardware store. I drilled a hole for it into the middle of the mallet head and wedged the handle in place, giving the whole mallet a “T” shape. 

Mr. Richardson showed me how to clean and roll the ropes of caulking cotton and how to knock it into the seams with successive little tucks. Then he showed me how to paint the seams and the caulking cotton with bottom paint and to putty the seams when the paint had dried.

Mr. Richardson was from over there on Sol Legare Road. One of his most noted accomplishments – other than caulking - was his remarkable talent for conserving his strength. We had a two-masted schooner hauled out on the railway in which he had been assigned to do something up forward inside the hull. The insides had been stripped out amidships except for the bulkheads and I was in there building a fiberglass-over-plywood fresh water tank in the floors of her. I kept hearing an occasional tap-tap-tap with a hammer coming from forward of the bulkhead. At first I didn’t pay any attention to it, but eventually I got curious and went forward to see what was going on. Mr. Richardson was lying in one of the fo’c’s’le bunks with his hammer and every now and then he would give a few raps with it on the bunk overhead.

“Whatcha doin’ Mr. Richardson?” I asked.

“Oh, Aye studyin’ de psychology ah de sitiation,” he said in his old Low-Country Gullah dialect, tapping again a couple of times.

When we were getting the schooner ready to go back overboard I asked Mr. Richardson if he was going out in her for sea trials.

“Oh, no,” he smiled, “Aye ain’ gwine’ out dey. No sah!”

“How come?” I asked.

“Aye ain’ gwine’ out dey ‘cause dey got sea munksters out dey!”

“How you know that?” I asked, “You been takin’ a little nip?”

“Oh, no!” he said. “Aye a good Chrustian! Aye ain’ use no anchor haul!”

“Well then, how you know ‘bout sea monsters?” I went on.

“Aye seen um on de talliwidgeon las’ night,” he replied.

“Is that right? Wha’d they say?”

“Well, Aye b’n watchin’ wi’de chillun’ an’ dis big munkster come up out de wa’ddah an’ sta’at stompin’ t’r’u’ de city knockin’ over bu’ldins and ma’ashin’ up cya’as and pickin’ up de people an’ t’rowin’ ‘em down, an’ all de people b’n runnin’ an’ hollerin’ an’ ca’ain’ on an’ de whole place catchin’ on fiyah an’ all like dat!” he said, getting more exercised as the description went on.

“What happened after that?” I asked.

“Aye ain’ knows. Me an’ de chilluns b’n screaming an’ hollerin’ so much de wife come in an’ shet de talliwidgeon off!”

So I never did find out any more information about sea monsters. 

Later on Mr. Richardson told me about the root medicine – or “the root” as it is called – which is a form of Voodoo that was still practiced back in the swamps and remote Sea Island settlements in the Low Country. Love potions, money potions, windows painted blue to keep the root off, “cunjie” bags, roots put on a doorsill or under a gate in the dead of night, all had powerful effects. Mr. Richardson told me that down around Ladies Island, near Beaufort, if you needed to see a noted root doctor named Dr. Buzzard, he would come across the creek at midnight in a skiff towed by a flock of buzzards. His medicine was so powerful it would put people in the hospital. At the Medical College of Charleston, people who would come in who had had the root put on them would be treated with a diuretic that made them pass urine in different colors to cure them. They would be told that if they passed one color it was the root going out of them, but if they passed the other color the doctors would have to try something else.

One Monday morning Mr. Richardson and I were working on the quadrant at the head of the rudder post on a boat that was up on blocks out on the yard. A couple of police cars pulled up and carried the proprietor off in handcuffs. Mr. Richardson tossed his hammer aside and fell back listlessly against the waist exclaiming, “Aye ‘clare! Aye feel so ba’ad ‘bout de police ca’in’ Mist’ Jim off, Aye cya’an’ hardly work!”

I tried to sooth him and said, “There, there, Mr. Richardson. It’ll be all right!”
Evidently, Jim had had a little kerfluffle with his girlfriend over on the beach and had gone over to her house that weekend to get his TV set. She wouldn’t let him in so he kicked a panel out of the door and went in and got the TV anyway. She filed a complaint and Monday morning the police came around to the boatyard and hauled him off in handcuffs. Jim’s wife and ex-wife were both ecstatic over the developments and immediately took Jim’s girlfriend into their ever-expanding sisterhood.

During a work break on one of my first days at the yard I noticed a little crowd of yard hands gathered around the boat shed laughing at someone holding forth with some harangue or other. I went over and caught the last part:

“…. but he thought it was a tugboat coming up the river so he opened up the swing bridge. The mule ran off into the river and drowned and the hounds ran off and swam to the other side. It just so happened that the bridge tender was running for sheriff at the time and he didn’t get but seven votes, because everybody thought that anybody who couldn’t tell the difference between a tugboat blowing for the bridge and a mule with a fox horn up his ass ought not to be sheriff of the county!”

This was Abbott, who liked to be called “Blackie” (not to be confused with Captain Blackie, who used to be seen walking up and down Folly Road winter or summer with his short sleeves rolled up to his armpits, his captain’s hat at a jaunty angle upon his head, and his shirt unbuttoned halfway down with his chest hair sticking out in a gray ruff.) At that time Abbott was renting a place over on the beach where he was taking care of a fellow he had found living under the Folly Beach Pier. Abbott went around and told everybody on the yard that if they wanted to each chip in something like a bag of rice or beans or a can of vegetables or something every now and then, we could go over to his place at lunchtime each day and his buddy - who was living over there - would have a big pot of stew or beans or something for our lunch. So some of us went in on the deal and it was a pretty satisfactory arrangement for a little while until they got evicted. I don’t know what happened to his buddy but Abbott moved into the back room of Geezer’s place, which situation evidently was a little more stable.

The other arrangement seemed sort of like the halt leading the blind.

Geezer’s place, as noted above, was on the right hand side just before the Folly
Creek Bridge, right after the Bowen’s Island turnoff. Geezer never said too much. He mostly just sat in a chair sidled up close by the window so he could keep an eye on whomever was turning in to his place from up the road.

I had a double-breasted, pin-striped suit that a local tailor had made for me when I was on “R & R” in Thailand, and I asked Abbott if he wanted it. He did, and he used to wear it around Geezer’s place after work. He said people would ask him if he had undertaken to being an undertaker. He cut quite a sartorial figure around there for a while. All that he lacked to top things off were a white carnation in the lapel, a white fedora, and a violin case - and probably a set of spats to cover the brogans he wore that still had copper bottom paint drips on them from working at the boatyard.

Abbott had once served as a deputy sheriff in Columbia and had witnessed the first execution of a woman in South Carolina. It was done by the electric chair, and Abbott said he never wanted to see anything like that again. He had also served in Navy gun crews on merchant ships during the Second World War – probably as hairy as any job in the war. I am told that the Merchant Service – often backlit by the lights on shore along the coast despite the blackout regulations - were sitting ducks for the U-boats, and they had a higher rate of casualties than did any other branch of service, including the US Marine Corps.
Abbott had been torpedoed twice - once on an oil tanker that set the sea on fire off Newfoundland. He said he remembered seeing the German U-boat on the surface beyond the flames. He and some others were in one of those life rafts with the webbing in the bottom, and in the cold North Atlantic waters everybody got frost bitten except for the Bo’s’n and him, because – as he said – they were both alcoholics and had plenty of antifreeze in them. They were all rescued by a French Corvette.

One Saturday – before he had moved to Geezer’s place - I went over to the beach to get Abbott so we could go downtown and register to vote. Before we got off the beach he asked me to stop so he could run into the liquor store and get a half-pint, which he stuck in his pocket. When we got downtown we saw two different doors for voter registration. He went into the one marked A-M, while I went into the one marked N-Z. I told him I’d meet him out by the truck after we had gotten registered. When I came back out, there was no Abbott, so I waited at the truck. I waited - and waited some more. Finally I went into his end of the building. No Abbott. Somebody was standing outside on the sidewalk and I asked them if they had seen anyone fitting the description I gave them.

“Oh, yes,” they said. “The police carried him off about a half an hour ago.”

Well, that was pretty good. So I went down to the police station looking for him. I was told they had him back there in the jail. He was in a cell with a pretty big crowd and he was glad to see me. When I bailed him out he swore fealty to me forever and promised that he would pay me back. I said I could use a hand getting some sheets of tin up onto the roof of my boat shed over on Bowen’s Island if he was free next Saturday morning for a little while. He said he was, and I went and picked him up about eight o’clock.

It was a muggy, still morning and the sand gnats were about to eat us alive when I climbed up onto the roof, but fortunately a nice little breeze soon sprang up and blew them away. Unfortunately it also blew Abbott over into the honeysuckle when he tried to hand me up about the third sheet of tin, so that pretty much wound things up on the boat shed project for the day.

We had some pretty interesting boats come into the yard from time to time. One of the most beautiful boats I ever saw was the Louis B. Fuerstein, built in 1901. She was a big old Chesapeake Bay oyster “buy boat” – one of those boats that used to go out on the oyster grounds and buy oysters from the men tonging on the oyster reefs. The Fuerstein was about seventy five or eighty feet long with a very broad beam and a beautiful sheer line over a low freeboard. Her hull was planked fore-and-aft and she was round-bottomed and round-sterned. She had a varnished mast forward by the forepeak hatch, and a wheelhouse aft. The lines of the top of the wheelhouse followed the sheer line, and there was a small break aft of the pilothouse with narrow windows that allowed the pilot to see aft over the cabin top. The pilothouse was rounded off forward, and it and the cabin house were made of narrow strips of vertical tongue-and-groove. The engine room was below the pilothouse but it had a raised trunk with port lights near the deck, and one had to take a step up to enter the pilothouse through the side doors. Both the main deck of the vessel and the overhead of the cabin and the wheelhouse had not only a graceful sheer, but also a pronounce camber. And all was set off by a low, ornamental rail around the stern. She had been purchased by some Cubans, if I remember, who had tried to trawl shrimp with her, but she was underpowered for that, so they were taking her out offshore to use her to fish for grouper and blackfish (or black sea bass). Years later I saw a painting of the Fuerstein in an antique shop near Gloucester Point, Virginia, near where she had been built. 

Another big Bay boat came in, got hauled out on the railway for repairs and a paint job on the bottom, and was bought where she sat for forty thousand dollars cash - all in twenty-dollar bills. There was a lot of smuggling going on back in those days, and this boat was last seen heading south.

A little decked over Bay boat came in for haul out, and I was to sail away in her.

The boat was built in 1917 in Perrin Creek, across the river from Yorktown, Virginia. She was of “deadrise” construction, built with a hard chine and cross-planked on the bottom in the traditional Chesapeake Bay fashion. She was about forty-five feet long, and had a GM 6-71 engine below the pilot house. One gained access to the engine compartment through a hatch in the pilot house deck.  She was decked over with the wheel house and cabin aft. Earl, the Captain, had been a civilian contractor in Vietnam with Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E) and had married a Vietnamese girl. He name the boat Mai Ly after his wife, and he was getting the boat fitted out to go blackfishing.

Captain Earl had a brother George who fished and shrimped out of his dock in Shem Creek, up in Charleston, and he was planning to take up the same endeavor with his boat. One day Jim came over and said Captain Earl was looking for someone to help him pilot the boat out of Stono Inlet and up to Charleston, and he asked me if I could do it. I told him I could. I had practiced land navigation extensively, running Long Range Patrols during Ranger training in the Army. I figured I could read a chart and a compass well enough to get us out of the river, out of the inlet, up the coast, and into Charleston. 

When we got to his brother’s dock, Captain Earl offered me a job, which I accepted. The pay was a percentage of the catch, and all the beer I could drink and all the tuna fish and Saltine crackers I could eat. I accepted on the spot. How could anyone turn down a deal like that?! I told Captain Earl I had to go back to the boat yard and give Jim my notice, and it might take a few days or so before I could start work as his deck hand. I told Jim about it at the boatyard and there was no problem and there were no hard feelings. People around there pretty much sort of drifted in and out of the place anyway. And eventually the boatyard, too, drifted away like the rest.

The Folly River Boatyard is long gone now, like Geezer’s place, and like Mrs. Bowen and her restaurant, which burned and got rebuilt into an upscale restaurant by her grandson. Gone, too, is the little stand on Folly Road with the hand-painted sign that read “Live and Still Crabs.” Now there is a stoplight, a shopping center, and a Piggly-Wiggly. Backman’s Seafood is gone, too. When some Arab Sheik bough Kiawah Island and developed it, that killed the shrimping. Just like off Folly Beach, the trawlers were not allowed to work within a half a mile of the shore where the best shrimping is, because they brought in the sharks. The Backman fleet either rotted in the marsh or went south, Junior Backman went to Fiddler’s Green, and Backman’s Seafood is no more, all gone the way of non-conformists and replaced by lock-step corporations, and by McMansions and condos that have popped up around there like mushrooms. 

​Nothing stays the same but the Absolute.

My grandfather loved Tennessee Walking Horses, a breed so named for their beautiful run-walk, a gait which they carry in place of the trot found in other breeds. It is like a magic carpet ride, and it is a gift from Heaven. Grandaddy would go to Shelbyville, Tennessee to see about them when he could find time to get away from his medical practice in the little town of Cameron, in Calhoun County, South Carolina. Grandaddy had a dapple gray in the paddock out back named Traveler, after General Lee’s famous charger. We’d bring him apples, but you had to hold it in your palm with your hand wide open flat so he wouldn’t nip your fingers. We were barefooted most of the time, and if we didn’t watch out when we climbed up on the fence, he would try to nip our toes.

Grandaddy gave my mother and father a Walking Horse (with papers) named Allen Slave for their wedding present, and Dad would take me riding with him when I was just a little tyke. He would perch me in the saddle in front of him with his arm tight around my waist, for Allen was pretty frisky.

Later, my father got another Tennessee Walker named Sox. He was a big chestnut gelding (with maybe a bit of roan) and had four white stockinged feet and a white blaze all across one side of his face – lots of “chrome” as they say these days. My father had originally gotten him to serve as his charger in the jousting tournaments - a sport that had been carried on in the South since antebellum days - and he rode in them until the pageantry faded from the tournaments in Virginia.

These tournaments originated with the old sport of Squires, who would gallop at rings and try to spear them with a lance. But the roots were far older than that. Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb, a veteran of the British Army and the Commander of the Arab Legion during the Arab-Israeli War, tells that cavalry fighting with the lance dates back to the Bedouin camel herders of the Arabian desert before the time of the Prophet (Peace be upon Him). As the Arab Conquest burst out of the Arabian Peninsula, the Bedouin cavalry exchanged their camels for horses to carry them (along with their code of chivalry, their fierce code of honor, and their contempt for settled communities) eastward to the Oxus and westward across North Africa and into Spain. The Bedouin’s code of chivalry and his mode of warfare was emulated and retained by the Spaniards and spread across the Pyrenees into France and England. Chivalry came full circle during the Crusades, when Richard the Lion-Heart rode out before his army with his lance to challenge a champion from the army of Saladin.
​
General Glubb relates that while this form of warfare eventually disappeared from Europe with the advent of gunpowder, it lasted with the Bedouin until just before the First World War – the last occasion being at the battle at Jumaima in 1910, when two champions rode out and met in personal combat in front of their respective tribes. After the First World War an immense number of rifles from the old Ottoman Empire fell into the hands of the tribes, ending the ancient custom of personal combat between champions and transforming this dangerous sport of limited warfare - waged for personal honor and glory - into total war.

We are now horrified and disgusted at acts of terrorism (“the poor man’s atomic bomb”) coming from those parts of the world, but those old warriors would have been just as horrified and disgusted at our mile-long sniper shots and the bombing of mountain villages by remotely controlled predator drones. As Edmund Burke had written of the French Revolution, the Age of Chivalry is dead. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.

In 1859, J. Alexander Patten, a contributor to the weekly New York Mercury, came down to Southside Virginia and sent back a series of sketches for publication. One of his sketches was of a tournament in Bedford County. I do not remember seeing such pageantry as he described, but it was not much different from that which my father described of the tournaments he rode in as a young man growing up in South Carolina. They were held at the high school, and each “Knight” had a Lady for whom he rode. Each of these Ladies, dressed in their finery, was seated in the stand near the announcer, and at the end of each of his rides at progressively smaller rings her Knight would present to her on his lance the rings he had caught. The Lady whose Knight won the tournament (by catching the most rings) was crowned Queen.

That much pageantry in the Virginia tournaments that I saw had faded, but I do remember the big tournament parade in Farmville, with all the Knights in their colors mounted upon their fiery chargers parading up Main Street. At the tournaments, the cars with their horse trailers would be pulled up in a row facing the track. In the middle there would be an announcer in an elevated stand with a PA system. The track ran down along three poles, each with a cross-bar higher than the rider’s head. The crossbars reached out over the track and were each fixed with a clip to hold a ring. The first round consisted of rings maybe two or three inches in diameter, and each Knight would have a go at them with his lance. The announcer would call each knight in the lists, and as his turn came the announcer would say “Charge, Sir Knight!” The Knight would charge down the track at a gallop and make his run at the rings. Those who did not catch all three rings in that series were eliminated from further competition, but those who did would make successive runs at successively smaller rings – all the way down to maybe a half an inch in diameter - until the champion of the tournament was determined.

There was one noted difference between the tournaments held in South Carolina and the ones held in Virginia. In South Carolina, the requirement was for the lance to extend at least seven feet in front of the grip and the lance must be held under the arm. In Virginia the lance need extend only three feet in front of the grip, and it might be held either under the arm or over the shoulder like a javelin. I used to think that the Virginia way skimped on tradition for the sake of utility, but on the Bayeux Tapestry (late Eleventh Century) it shows examples of Norman knights attacking at the Battle of Hastings carrying the lance each way. The caption under the picture in Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society notes that some Knights are using the lance as a javelin while others are carrying it in “the new manner.” My father held his under his arm in “the new manner” – Carolina style - as did most (but not all) Knights on the Virginia tracks. He did not hold the lance clamped to his side, however, but – standing in the stirrups at a gallop – he aimed it at the rings while sighting along it with his elbow held up.

My father’s Carolina lance was not ornate. It was a plain shaft with a tip fashioned from a 30-06 cartridge. But I remember going down town with him in Lynchburg to have his new lance made for the Virginia tracks. He had a long stainless steel rod about two feet long ground into a point on one end. This was then welded to the inverted base of a stainless steel cup that had been milled on a lathe to allow the tip to be fitted and attached onto the end of the shaft. The lance was a wooden, straight-grained shaft that had also been turned down on a lathe with a taper and a little decorative swell at the other end, and shaped in such a way that it was perfectly balanced at the grip point. It also had some heft to help stabilize it with inertia and keep it steady when at a gallop. At the three foot point my father ran a piece of copper tubing through a drilled hole and turned it back a little to keep his grip in the proper place – which gave a homely touch to a traditional warrior’s carefully crafted, ornate, and personalized weapon. When held at this point the lance was perfectly balanced, and I remember it being kept propped up behind the kitchen door long after my father had given up the tournaments and turned Sox out to pasture.

I rode Sox quite a bit - sometimes with a McClellan saddle, sometimes bareback, and sometimes with a Western saddle. My father (who had spent all of his life on a flat saddle) said you couldn’t fall out of one of those Western things if you tried - “and for God’s sake, don’t grab hold of the saddle horn!”

In the front pasture there was a line of three telephone poles. If you were riding Sox and weren’t paying attention and rode to the fence up by the road and then turned back, the old war horse would see that line of poles and break into a gallop down along them, thinking he was back on the tournament track.

Taking Sox back to the stables, I would unsaddle him and wipe him down. One day, while giving him a drink of water at the trough and putting a block of hay in his stall and some sweet feed in his box, I wondered where his blood had been. Had it pulsed in the veins of a horse in Stuart’s cavalry? Or had it been in Tennessee with Forrest? Had it been in Carolina with “Lighthorse Harry” Lee or “The Swamp Fox”? Was it there at Camlann when Arthur fell? Had it known the chafe of a chariot shaft or a pull on the reins from Hector, breaker of horses, before the walls of windy Troy? Did it race with the horsemen across the Eurasian Steppes when the worlds collided and the seas parted and the oceans churned as Lord Shiva danced the Tandava across the thunder-cracked skies at the Fall into Time? Sox only gave me a nuzzling shove, rubbed the side of his head up and down against my shoulder, and went back to munching his sweet feed.

The last thing I saw of the tournaments in Virginia was a picture in the newspaper of some “Knight” - with a plug of tobacco in his jaw - wearing a flannel shirt and a feed store hat. My Father had long since gone fox hunting with my sister. He later became Master of the Bedford County Hunt, but I remember him best thundering down the tournament tracks – glory at a gallop! His sash was of red and gold, and it is now carefully folded in the drawer of my bedside table. He was “The Knight of Melrose” - Champion of his mother’s plantation in Buckingham County - and I was his Squire. Like the Knights of old, he taught me to ride, to shoot straight and to speak the truth.

“Always mount from the left. That’s the way horses expect you to do. It comes from centuries of cavalrymen having to mount from that side with their sabers on their left hip.”

“Reach over with your left hand - palm down - and take the set of reins in your fist. Let the right rein come out between your middle finger and your ring finger, and the left rein come out from the bottom of your fist. That way you can neck-rein him and leave your right arm hanging straight down by your side, or free for wielding a saber or a pistol.”

“Sit up straight! Don’t flop around like a feed- sack!” And “Don’t flap your elbows up and down like some buzzard or those people in the cowboy movies!”

My father ran the Small Arms Committee at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, before he was sent to India and Burma. “When you shoot for accuracy, take a breath and let it out. That calms your heartbeat. Take another breath, let half of it out, and catch it in your throat. Then press the trigger! If your front sight wavers off the target, hold the pressure you have on the trigger until you bring it back, and then press some more. It is supposed to surprise you when it goes off. If you jerk the trigger you are going to miss every time!”

After the war there were a great many war movies that were produced by Hollywood. When we lived on Landon Street, we boys on the street loved to go see them. One would go and the rest would check him out: “Was it in color or black-and-white?” “Did it have a lot of war stuff, or was it a bunch of all that lovey-dovey stuff?” We always thought that Hollywood ruined perfectly good war movies when they filled them up with all that lovey-dovey stuff, but my father said that the hugging and kissing were his favorite parts. I once asked him if he had ever shot anybody in the war.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, looking into the distance, “there were two times I might have. It was at night, and you can’t see anything in the jungle at night. The Japs attacked us and everybody was shooting. I shot at two men and they each went down - but everybody was shooting at the same time, so I don’t know if it was me or not.” 

But my father was a crack shot and I knew what had happened.

“Man, Daddy, I wish you’d’a shot a hunnerd of ‘em!” I said excitedly.

“Oh, no, Bud,” he said quietly, looking at me with earnest conviction. “Don’t say that, Son. That’s not right. Those men might have had families waiting for them to come back home. He might have even had a little boy just like you. You mustn’t think that way.”

The bravest are the gentlest…

“Tell the Truth,” he would tell me. “Don’t deceive people. Look them in the eye. Being deceitful is common. It is unmanly and unworthy of a gentleman,” and he taught me integrity by trusting me.

I was pretty trifling when I was a little boy coming along. One of my duties was to feed and water the horses, but often I would go down to the stables and dawdle around and fiddle around and shoot at the chickens with the bb gun and all that, and get the job only half done before it was time to leave for school. This only happened during the week, of course, when my father – who traveled - was away. My mother would then have to take me to school and finish my chores after she got back home. (I must admit, we children sometimes got a little spoiled by our mother!) Then my father would have to start all over again with me when he returned home at the end of the week.

“Did you water the horses?” he would ask.

“No, Sir, I forgot.”

“Well, go water them. They can’t water themselves, and they can’t talk and tell you when they are thirsty. You have to look out for them. They are depending on you to see to it that they have something to drink.” And I would go back down and water the horses.

The next time I forgot, my father said, “Alright. Tomorrow I want you to go all day long without taking a drink of anything so you will know how they feel.” So I went along and went along next day, getting thirstier and thirstier through breakfast, dinner and supper, with nothing to drink then or in between. Nobody was looking over my shoulder. I was just not drinking anything like he had told me. Then, after supper that evening, two of my cousins and I got dropped off at the movie theatre downtown. We got a box of popcorn. Salty popcorn. This was a very bad move. After eating that, I got to feeling about as dried up as an Egyptian mummy. I couldn’t stand it anymore, but what was I going to do?

With the Apotheosis of Attorneyism – that “blackest of terrestrial curses,” as Thomas Carlyle called it in one of his Latter-Day Pamphlets - the splitting of hairs has not only been elevated into one of the highest forms of art, but into a sanctified virtue. I did my part to make it so when I brought my case before the bar of my conscience.

I knew my Father wanted to teach me the timeless things that a man ought to know about duty, honor, and responsibility towards others – particularly towards others that are dependent upon you. I also knew that I did not want to betray his trust. On the other hand, I knew how sad he would be to learn that his son had died of thirst in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre, and I certainly wanted to spare him that grief. The verdict that I handed down to myself, therefore, was probably one of the most masterful splittings of a hair that has ever occurred in the history of American jurisprudence: I would not “drink” anything at all. I would merely “eat” a cup of ice from the concession stand!

It worked! I lived! 

However, when we got home I neglected to mention any of this to anyone.

As Carlyle also observed, all lies are cursed and damned from the beginning. I soon found out that a calculated distortion of the truth – no better than a lie - is equally cursed. My father was proud of me. He would tell the story over and over again. “I knew he wasn’t going to take a drink!” he would always end by saying. With each telling I felt worse and worse. So one day - after I couldn’t stand it anymore - I determined that a true confession would be good for my soul. I spared him the pettifoggery. I just told him that I had indeed not taken a “drink” at all that day, but I had gotten so thirsty at the movie theater that evening that I had “eaten” a cup of ice. 

He didn’t say anything - but he never told that story anymore.

One night, many years later, I dreamed. Like Crazy Horse I went to the shadow world where the spirits of things abide. In a familiar room, but one filled with shadows, my father came to me and said, “Everything is alright, Bud,” and I woke up crying like a little boy.