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H.V. Traywick, Jr.

Juneteenth

6/29/2021

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​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. 
NOTES:
  1. Charles W. Eliot LL D, ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. Vol. 43, American Historical Documents (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910) pgs. 344-6.
  2. Edward A. Pollard. Southern History of the War, 2 vols. (1866; New York: The Fairfax P, 1990) II: 524.
  3. Ibid. II: 198.
  4. Ibid. II: 194.
  5. John Remington Graham. The American Civil War as a Crusade to Free the Slaves (South Boston, VA: Gerald C. Burnett, M. D., 2016) pg. 11. See also Jim Downs. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012) passim.
  6. Kirkpatrick Sale. Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation One Hundred Fifty Years Ago (Mt. Pleasant, SC: Kirkpatrick Sale, 2012) pg. 46. 
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The Cyclic March of History

6/22/2021

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Hit mus’ be now de kingdom comin’, 
an’ de year ob Jubilo! ... (1)


"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…
  1. “Kingdom Coming.” Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets. https://www.loc.gov/resource/amss.hc00045b.0/?st=text
  2. Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities (1859; New York: Barnes & Noble, 2020) pg. 271.
  3. David L. Hoffmann. Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity [1917-1941] (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2003) pg. 126. 
  4. R. McNair Wilson, Monarchy or Money Power (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1933) pg. 72. Quoted in G. Edward Griffin. The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 4th ed. (1994; Westlake Village, CA: American Media, 2002) pg. 221.
  5. Griffin, pgs. 230-3.
  6. https://www.biography.com/royalty/louis-xvi
  7. Richard Kelly Hoskins. War Cycles – Peace Cycles, 7th printing (Lynchburg: Virginia Publishing Co., 2005) pg. 76.
  8. Graham, pgs. 44-5.
  9. Hoskins, pg. 77.
  10. Adams, pgs. 177-87.
  11. Leigh, pgs. ix – xviii. 
  12. Hoskins, pgs. 131-9.
  13. Graham, pgs. 48-64.
  14. William Cabell Bruce. John Randolph of Roanoke 1773- 1833, 2 vols. (New York & London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons – The Knickerbocker P, 1922) I: 431-2.
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On The Dispensation of Richmond’s Confederate Monuments

6/3/2021

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Following is the text of a presentation given to the Richmond, VA City Council on May 10, 2021.
“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. 
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    Author

    A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, the author graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his Commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He is a member of the Jamestowne Society, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Society of Independent Southern Historians. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, literature and cultural revolution, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot

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