The following is Neil Kumar's keynote Confederate Memorial Day address, given at the Fayetteville Confederate Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for the Southern Memorial Association of Washington County.
Good morning! Thank you for being here on this hallowed ground to honor our Confederate dead, and for allowing me the honor of being your speaker—and, I should add, for considering my candidacy as your next Representative in the United States Congress. This cemetery is a special place; there aren’t many like it. On the God-forsaken battlefields across the riven South, our ancestors were left unburied, their bones bleaching in the unforgiving sun. Others lay in shallow graves, their remains picked over by thieves and rooting swine. Local memorial associations raised what little money they could to provide for their burial. Northern groups had to be depended upon to return the proper remains from faraway Gettysburg; true to their character, Yankee jackals engaged in a profitable traffic in false “remains.” Very few of our fallen heroes’ bodies ever made it back home. In order to properly remember our Confederate dead, we have to remember why they died. Why did they give everything that they possessed, and charge so bravely into the mouth of Hell itself? The Confederacy was the canary in the coalmine for Western Civilization. Had our ancestors been victorious, none of the evil which has corroded and swept our nation away would ever have happened. Rather than speak of the War for Southern Independence, I am going to talk to you today about Reconstruction. Why? The seeds of our present condition were sown in the Reconstruction era. All of our forefathers’ worst fears came true in those years following their struggle. As General Richard Taylor put it, “The world cannot properly estimate the fortitude of the Southern people unless it understands and takes account of the difficulties under which they labored. Yet, great as were their sufferings during the War, they were as nothing compared to those inflicted upon them after its close.” We can name three Reconstructions, all with the same aim: the annihilation of the true America. In the First Reconstruction, the States of the former Confederacy were reduced to total bondage. The Second Reconstruction occurred through the 1950s and 60s, as the Federal government used the “Civil Rights movement” to eradicate the last vestiges of identity which the South had still clung to. The Third Reconstruction is what we are now experiencing; when they drove Old Dixie down, they also dug Old Glory’s grave. It is difficult to describe the state of the South at the Surrender in any meaningful way which would allow us to comprehend the total despair and utter devastation which faced our ancestors—but I will try. As Yankee soldiers returned home to parades and banquets, emaciated, malnourished Confederate veterans hobbled home for hundreds of miles, crippled, maimed, and wounded, primarily on their bare feet and in tattered rags, the bits and pieces of their garments strung together by string, twine, and even thorns. Anxious mothers, wives, and sisters searched the lorn face of each grey ghost as he limped by, praying that it would be the face of a lost loved one. Sometimes, the Federals provided transportation for their paroled Confederate prisoners, by packing hundreds like sardines into condemned vessels which sank, or putting them in trains which were “accidentally” derailed. In areas rife with guerrillas, like the Ozarks, returning veterans faced lynching. It is misleading to say that our Southern heroes were returning “home,” for they really returned to a smoldering ruin, smoke still billowing from the ashes of what had been the greatest civilization ever known to man. Their bountiful, verdant Dixie had been transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland; the blood-soaked roads were lined with the rotting carcasses of the hogs, horses, cattle, and other animals which the Yankees had gleefully slaughtered, the overwhelming stench of death suffusing the putrid air. As one veteran wrote of his return through Arkansas: “Desolation met our gaze. Abandoned and burned homes, uncultivated land overgrown with bushes; half-starved women and children; gaunt, ragged men, stumbling along the road…trying to find their families, and wondering if they had a home left.” The War had been particularly depraved in the Ozarks, a no-man’s land of near-total anarchy; unspeakable atrocities were committed, including the wholesale rape, torture, and massacre of untold scores of women, children, and the elderly. As one Ozarker wrote in 1863, “No guerrilla warfare ever carried on in Mexico or any of the South American republics has been fraught with more evils than that now waged upon us in Northwest Arkansas. Theft, plunder, arson, murder, and every other crime of the black catalogue have lost their former startling significance of horror by their daily occurrence amongst us. If we hear that one of our neighbors has been murdered, his house burned and family left to freeze and starve to death for the want of clothes and food, it is soon forgotten by us.” Moving through Huntsville and the ruins of Bentonville, even the battle-hardened General Jo Shelby was shaken, writing: “In many places for forty miles, not a single habitation is to be found, for on the road we met delicate females fleeing southward, driving ox teams, barefooted, ragged, and suffering even for bread.” Writing from Fort Smith in 1865, a Union commander wrote that several thousand families in the area “have nearly all been robbed of everything they had by the troops of this command, and are now left destitute and compelled to leave their homes to avoid starvation.” A Northerner who had visited Chicot County before the War had described the area as “the richest, fairest, and most productive” in Arkansas. With plantations “like a continuous garden,” it was “the most beautiful spot for a home I have ever seen in any country, and as rich as beautiful.” The same man returned in 1872, and found it “a gloomy place,” still in ruins: “Homes are desolated, buildings gone to decay, stock all gone, land grown up in weeds, almost every White woman in the county gone, White men afraid for their lives and getting away as fast as possible, every plantation for sale at a fraction of its former worth, a large portion of the cotton crop still in the field, wasting in the wind…not a smiling face seen.” Everything which could not be picked up and stolen by marauding Yankees had been destroyed. Few homes survived, but rather “lonesome smokestacks surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood.” These chimneys were known as “Sherman’s Sentinels,” giving rise to the cruel joke that “Southerners had a peculiar custom of building chimneys without houses to go with them.” No infrastructure remained: factories, railroads, levees, wagons, bridges, steamboats, docks, cotton gins, schools, courthouses, all gone. Arkansas didn’t have regular mail reestablished until July, 1867. The Federals had desecrated and defiled Southern churches with a special kind of delight. Estimates of the total damage in today’s money go well over one hundred billion dollars. Homes that still stood had been despoiled. Here, the losses were incalculable; think of those things which can never be replaced: “The only photograph of a child who had died, a crib built by an expectant father, blankets knitted by loving hands—the cherished mementos of life.” When one woman returned home, “her heart leaped when she saw picture frames piled in the corner, but sank again when she realized that the faces had been torn out and destroyed. All the sundry nothings that gather dust and warm the heart, the trinkets that young girls hide in bureau drawers, the watches passed from fathers to sons—all were gone, and they would never be recovered. These were just drops in a vast sea of destruction.” A Union officer described the new Southern domestic scene: “Window-glass has given way to thin boards, in railway coaches and in the cities. Furniture is marred and broken, and none has been replaced for four years. Dishes are cemented in various styles, and half [of] the pitchers have tin handles. A complete set of crockery is never seen, and in very few families is there enough to set a table…A set of forks with whole tines is a curiosity. Clocks and watches have nearly all stopped…Hairbrushes and toothbrushes have all worn out; combs are broken…Pins, needles, and thread, and a thousand such articles, which seem indispensable to housekeeping, are very scarce. Even in weaving on the looms, corncobs have been substituted for spindles. Few have pocketknives. In fact, everything that has heretofore been an article of sale at the South is wanting now. At the tables of those who were once esteemed luxurious providers, you will find neither tea, coffee, sugar, nor spices of any kind. Even candles, in some cases, have been replaced by a cup of grease in which a piece of cloth is plunged for a wick.” The Federals had systematically destroyed the South’s agricultural resources: our ancestors were left without seed, farm equipment, barns, or fences. Orchards ruined, fields fallowed. Millions of animals had been mercilessly slaughtered: cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, mules, chickens, domestic pets, everything killed and left to rot wherever it fell. Arkansas lost more than half of its animals. What few farm animals did remain were subject to nightly thefts by roving freedmen. Remember, too, that statistics are merely abstractions: If each of two farmers has a horse to plow with, and one loses his, to say that the supply of horses is reduced to fifty percent scarcely conveys the plight of the farmer who cannot work the land. The Yankees got what they wanted. There was no meat. The crops failed. Once-prosperous women and children, their breadwinners either in the grave or otherwise incapacitated, were reduced to begging for tiny morsels of food. Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of Southerners existed in a state of famine. Many thousands starved to death. Rolling epidemics of cholera and smallpox compounded the tragedy. In the Ozarks, much of the population scavenged in the woods, subsisting on greens, slippery elm bark, and roots. The Federals made great fun of a new pastime, popular among the garrisons: tossing bits and pieces of hardtack into large assemblages of starving Southerners and watching them fight over their refuse. Northern tourists visited the South on “pleasure parties” to leer at the abject misery of the once-proud Southern people. How did the supremely righteous United States government respond to the suffering of the Southern people? In 1865, the Yankees disbanded the Confederacy’s relief agencies, which, as pitiful as they were, had been the only thing keeping many poor Whites from starvation. Even the laws providing wooden legs for crippled veterans were abrogated; this, when there were nearly fifty thousand Confederate amputees, when, in some communities, over a third of the returning veterans lacked a limb. The Army even revoked the pensions of Confederate veterans who had prior American military service. All financial aid, both from the government and from private charities, went directly to freedmen; while black children tramped happily to school, White women and children hitched themselves to plows, lacking mules. It “was no strange thing to see little White boys driving a plow when they were so small [that] they had to lift their hands high to grasp the handles; or little White girls minding cows, trotting to springs or wells with big buckets to fill, bending over washtubs, and working in the crops.” As General Richard Taylor observed, “The land was filled with widows and orphans crying for aid, which the universal destitution prevented them from receiving. Humanitarians shuddered with horror and wept with grief for the imaginary woes of Africans; but their hearts were as adamant to people of their own race and blood. …Blockaded during the War, and without journals to guide opinion and correct error, we were unceasingly slandered by our enemies, who held possession of every avenue to the world’s ear.” Confederate stocks, bonds, and currency were unilaterally declared to be worthless. This, combined with the unlawful emancipation of the slaves, representing over thirty billion dollars of accumulated capital, left the South entirely bankrupt. The two to five million bales of cotton which had survived the War represented the only hope of salvation, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For this very reason, cotton was ruthlessly and systematically targeted for seizure. Almost all of it was stolen. Treasury agents who started their appointments bankrupt left as millionaires. Anything that could be made to bear the taint of service to the Confederate cause was subject to seizure; so, if an Army officer or Treasury agent deemed something as Confederate property, it was taken. Any property, including land, that was not presently being occupied at whatever time a Treasury agent came calling, was deemed “abandoned,” and taken. The Army often seized the local tax rolls, totted up the taxes back to 1861, and demanded immediate payment from bankrupted civilians whose currency and bonds had been deemed worthless. Failure to pay meant confiscation. The United States was determined to squeeze blood from the Southern turnip, instituting a property sales tax of 25%, plus a shipping tax, plus a revenue tax. Cotton was subjected to a $12.50 per bale tax, over 20% of its worth, plus an additional three cents per pound tax, amounting to another 19%. This cotton tax reaped the U.S. Treasury $68,000,000, a sum far greater than the entire expense of the first three years of Reconstruction and vastly greater than the sum of all relief measures, public and private, for the destitute South. There was, of course, no similar tax on Northern agricultural products, which were subsidized, like Northern fishing bounties, so this cotton tax also amounted to an export duty. As Southern property values collapsed by as much as 75%, taxes were jacked up exponentially, with the express purpose of forcing landowners to forfeit their holdings. In Sebastian County, taxes were increased elevenfold. Land worth $50 an acre sold for $3-$5. Estates worth $24,000 sold for $80—the value of the taxes. In this manner, vast swathes of the South—millions of acres, hundreds of plantations—were stolen for pennies on the dollar. In Arkansas, a book of 228 pages was required to list all of the lands for sale due to delinquent taxes. Carpetbaggers from the North descended as a swarm of locusts, picking the carcass clean of what little the War had left. The best Southern land was devoured by Yankees, including millions of acres of our virgin timberland, almost none of which exists anymore, clear-cut to feed Northern furnaces. Our abundant natural resources, our very birthright, the inheritance of generations yet unborn, were raped and murdered. As one Little Rock woman wrote, “The Federal Army robbed my children of their rights before they were born. The Old South, with all its resources, was theirs by inheritance, but, in lieu of its advantages, they have been made a part of the brick and mortar worked into the building of a New South.” The North thus riveted even tighter upon the South the colonial status under which it had long suffered: Southerners were forced to beg for Northern capital, lent at usurious rates as high as 60%, such that desperately-needed Southern income was transferred North while the South was prevented from accumulating its own capital. Their world had been so completely eviscerated that many Southerners envied the dead. Their entire world had been put to the sword and then to the torch, their tear-dimmed eyes blinded in a vortex of ash. As one man wrote, “Those who strew flowers over the graves of departed heroes will feel that the quiet dreamers in the dust are far happier than those who still walk the rugged paths of a distracted world…For them the wreath of wild flowers, for us the crown of thorns.” A Texan disconsolately noted that it “would have been far better for us had our whole people been exterminated, fighting to the last for their rights.” It is difficult to fully grasp the abyss that our ancestors faced, to realize what little promise life held for these men whose nation had been taken away. Many simply sat down and died, succumbing to unfathomable grief. Addiction and suicide were common. Tens of thousands of orphans wandered the land; in Fort Smith, children staggered through the streets drunk, bottles in hand. Northern liquor companies set up shop all over the South, opiates available at every corner store. The term “Reconstruction” was a sick joke, implying that things in the South would be put back as they had been before the War; in reality, of course, Reconstruction was merely a continuation of the War, waged now against a defenseless, prostrate, defeated people. By the first Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, the States of the fallen Confederacy were divided into five military districts, placed under total martial law. Arkansas and Mississippi constituted the fourth. The citizens had no civil recourse to this oppressive military despotism. The chief task of the military was to run totally fraudulent, illegitimate elections — Sound familiar? —wherein any Confederate sympathizers were disfranchised. Because essentially all of the Whites in a given area had served in or otherwise supported the Confederacy, this meant that the Whites could not vote. Keep in mind that the South had lost between a third and a half of its adult male population; Arkansas lost half of its White population, with many counties, including Benton, Washington, and Madison, losing over half of their populations. Two to three generations of our best and brightest had been snuffed out in the prime of life. In other words, its breadwinners, its ablest leaders, were either gone forever or foreclosed from office, leaving only the worst part of society eligible for office. As a result, the military-installed Reconstruction State governments were made up of Carpetbaggers—who had in most cases never even been to the States they were now supposed to govern—followed by Scalawags and blacks. The Reconstruction constitutional convention of Arkansas was known as a “bastard collection whose putridity stinks in the nostrils of all decency.” Carpetbaggers held the Governorship under Powell Clayton of Pennsylvania and Kansas, both U.S. Senators, two of three Representatives in Congress, and so forth, all the way down through the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at the State, county, and municipal levels. Even the Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court was openly for sale. This State was even more corrupt than it was under Bill Clinton—and that’s saying something. These Reconstruction governments were outrageously corrupt; at a time of pestilence, famine, and crushing destitution, these wretched hyenas engorged themselves. In Jefferson County, for example, the salaries of county officials increased by as much as 20 times. Faulkner County was created solely so that Governor Clayton could award new patronage offices. Millions of dollars in grants were awarded for railroads which were never built. In total, Arkansas spent well over twenty million dollars at the time—with only $100,000 of public improvements to show for it. More champagne was consumed in the dilapidated State Capitol in Little Rock than anywhere else in America. By the time the Radicals left Arkansas, most of her counties were bankrupt, and the State debt neared $16,000,000. In 1860, Arkansas ranked 19th in the nation by per capita wealth; by 1880, she was 43rd; by 2018, she was 49th. Again, though, these are statistics. How fared the people? A combination of spring floods, midsummer drought, and armyworm and cutworm infestations ruined the harvests of the next several years, marking the beginning of a cycle of debt which would go on for generations, as cotton prices collapsed. The Southern people faced another threat: that of the freedmen. Roving gangs of blacks roamed the countryside and looted, raped, burned, and murdered with impunity. The only legal authority was the Radical-controlled U.S. Army, and a large portion of the black criminals were enlisted men. There are countless reports of black soldiers forcing their way into homes, or lying on the roads or in the fields in wait, gang-raping White girls as young as five years old. For the first time, rape became a common feature of Southern life. Women and children lived in constant fear, only leaving home if they had to. Small-scale race wars occurred in Crittenden, Lafayette, Pope, and Yell Counties, with the worst of the violence in Chicot County. Of course, this epidemic of black crime was covered up by the Northern press, which instead printed fabricated and exaggerated accounts of White resistance. As one woman put it, “In full-volumed indignation over lynching, the usual course of the Northern press was to…lose sight of the crime provoking it. It was a minor fact that a woman was violated, that her skull was crushed or that she sustained other injuries from which she died or which made her a wreck for life—particulars too trivial to be noted by molders of public opinion writing eloquent essays on ‘Crime in the South.’” Newspapers regularly ran columns headed “Southern Outrages,” and every conceivable mistreatment of blacks by Whites was represented as taking place on a large scale. For ten years following the war, Union “witnesses” fed false atrocity tales to the Northern public; Harper’s Weekly even published sketches of sinister Southern women wearing necklaces made of Yankee teeth, of desks constructed of skeletons, of cups fashioned from skulls. You see, the lying press has always been the enemy of the people. This atrocity propaganda was utilized to justify the Federal government’s increasingly repressive measures against the South, carrying on the long tradition of stigmatizing the South as an ultraviolent, backward, reprobate society in dire need of punishment and re-education. This is the same genocidal rhetoric that we can see issuing forth today from every power center in this country. Arkansas suffered one of the most violent Reconstruction periods in the entire South, with the worst abuses of the era taking place during a reign of terror from November, 1868, to March, 1869, known as the Militia War, an event all the more incredible for how utterly forgotten it now is. Nature abhors a vacuum; action lusts for reaction. Suffering under an immeasurable array of humiliations and cruelties at the hands of an occupying force which declared open season on their families, White Arkansans finally fought back—this resistance often took the form of the Ku Klux Klan. It was against this backdrop that the Militia War was born. A major precipitating event was the October, 1868, assassination of Radical U.S. Representative James Hinds, a despicable New York Carpetbagger and the highest-ranking government official to be slain in any State during Reconstruction. Though the Klan was scapegoated for the murder, many speculated—not without considerable evidence—that the murder was committed on the orders of Hinds’s main political rival, Governor Powell Clayton, serving the double purpose of inflaming Northern opinion against Southern Whites. Governor Clayton set in motion a plan to wage war upon the people of Arkansas. Through an agent in Detroit, Clayton purchased an arsenal, including 4,000 rifles, 400,000 cartridges, 1,500,000 percussion caps, and more, arranging for its shipment to Arkansas by way of Memphis. This arsenal, mind you, was even larger than that which had been furnished General Zachary Taylor for his invasion of Mexico. Before Clayton’s shipment arrived at Memphis, however, a Democratic newspaperman learned of it, and widely publicized it, warning that the arms were “to be placed in the hands of the negroes of Arkansas…for the purpose of shooting down inoffensive citizens. …Woe to the steamboat that prefers such freights as swords and guns to plows and pruning hooks.” Due to an immense public outcry, the boat lines that usually operated to Little Rock refused to handle the cargo, forcing Clayton’s henchmen to charter a private steamer. Hardly had the steamer set out for Little Rock when it was set upon by a band of Memphis Klansmen, disguised as river pirates. They overtook the vessel, boarded it, broke open the crates, and tossed the guns into the depths of the mighty Mississippi. Clayton, needless to say, was livid, but for two reasons: first, at the loss of the arms for his mercenary army; second, at the loss of the profit he had expected to make from selling the guns to the State. The invoices, you see, had been altered to show a cost of $35,000, instead of the actual cost of $15,000. Rather than call for Federal troops, Clayton organized his own army. On November 4, 1868, he declared martial law in the counties of Ashley, Bradley, Columbia, Craighead, Greene, Lafayette, Little River, Mississippi, Sevier, and Woodruff, to which Conway, Crittenden, Drew, and Fulton counties were later added. The targeted counties all lacked the influential newspapers that cities like Little Rock, Fort Smith, Helena, Fayetteville, and Pine Bluff had. The counties were divided into militia departments. The militiamen, mostly black vagrants and criminals, numbered over two thousand, and pillaged their way through the State for the next four months, preying upon the White citizenry, looting, imprisoning, raping, torturing, murdering, and burning in a gruesome saturnalia from the fiery pits of Hell itself. Radical Phillips County Representative Joseph Brooks, who would go on to lead one faction of the Brooks-Baxter War, wanted to reduce Arkansas to “a waste-howling wilderness” from the Missouri line to the Red River, “until we shall not have a habitation here, except for moles and bats.” D.P. Upham, the bestial militia commander of the Northeast, was a penniless Massachusetts Carpetbagger. After failing in business in New York, he followed his friend, Alexander Shaler, to Arkansas, settling at DeVall’s Bluff, where Shaler was stationed as a Yankee cavalry officer. There, Upham quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the area. The secret to his success? His friend, Brigadier-General Shaler, had control over the leasing of “abandoned” lands and the granting of business licenses. Through Shaler, Upham thus secured exclusive rights to operate saloons and purchase cotton, which were activities under U.S. Army supervision. Upham sold these rights to Northern investors in return for ownership interests in each enterprise. He talked his brother into coming to Arkansas, too, and the two of them bought up vast tracts of land that the Army had stolen from their rightful owners. Cases like this occurred in the South over and over again. Upham, in his own words, believed that Southern Whites should be exterminated, noting: “There is no other way, as I told Governor Clayton, nothing but good, healthy, square, honest killing would ever do them any good.” Clayton, Upham continued, “agreed with me exactly.” From his base at Augusta, Upham’s militia went to work, focused on murdering as many people and plundering as much property, from livestock to money, as it could. These monsters ran down and shot to death any citizens whom they encountered alone, men, women, and children of all ages and conditions. Countless Arkansans had their homes and businesses looted and incinerated, their barns emptied, their fields stripped. Hundreds of families already near starvation yet again lost all of their earthly possessions. People were dragged from their homes and tortured to death in front of their families; the militiamen often extorted ransom money from their victims and then killed them anyways. Prominent citizens who dared even mildly criticize the militia, from schoolteachers to physicians, were summarily executed, their corpses tossed into the White River. Even a British officer, traveling through Arkansas for his health, was slain. Confederate veterans met with the most brutal treatment; hundreds of them organized under a former officer and alleged Klan leader, Colonel A.C. Pickett. As Pickett and his men prepared to attack Upham’s headquarters at Augusta, Upham took fifteen leading citizens hostage and promised to kill them and raze the town. Reluctantly, Pickett called off the strike, and Upham ransacked the town anyways. Meanwhile, Clayton’s men worked much the same carnage in the Southwest. At Center Point, a force of five hundred militiamen converged from three directions and fired indiscriminately into the crowd of concerned citizens. In an all-too-common incident in Sevier County, black militiamen invaded the home of a Mr. Brooks and forced him and his children to watch as they gang-raped Mrs. Brooks. A Crittenden County woman echoed the near-universal recognition that the Federals, the Carpetbaggers, the Scalawags, and the freedmen who served as their blunt instruments, all were the “emissaries of the Evil One.” Indeed, no thinking man could look at the unforgivable crimes committed against our people and fail to see the hand of Satan. As Christ, through the Apostle Paul, warned us: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” That very same Satanic evil afflicts us today. Just as our forefathers faced the end of all that they had ever known and loved, so too do we. General Lee is reported to have said that, had he “foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.” Imagine what our Confederate heroes would do now, in our stead. We know how they responded to another totally illegitimate election, 160 years ago. Demon though he was, at least Abraham Lincoln was mentally competent, rather than a human sock puppet for demons unknown, like our current “President.” Our people have been reduced to a new kind of slavery, under a Regime more than ten times as repressive as that which our forefathers gave their all to defeat. The majority population of our nation is slandered and dehumanized at a fever pitch which worsens by the hour. Millions of aliens pour across our wide-open border every day, replacing us in the nation that our fathers built. Gaze long and hard at these graves. Read the names of these eternal heroes. We have failed them. We surrendered our liberties in the name of an exaggerated “pandemic” without putting up any resistance whatsoever. We allowed the rulers of the darkness of this world to make serfs of us all. The opioid plague has killed almost one million Americans in 20 years, with Arkansas one of the hardest-hit States in the nation. There’s a sodomite pride parade in Bentonville tonight, where children are going to be exposed to sex perverts at a drag show. What would these men buried here think of us? Could they forgive us for squandering the centuries-long inheritance which they bled themselves dry to transmit to us? Is it too late? Almost—but not yet. We can still take back that which is rightfully ours. The first step in our counterrevolution must be to remember who we are. That, above all, is why all of us are here on this June morning in the twilight of our civilization. As General Richard Taylor so eloquently reminded us, “Traditions are mighty influences in restraining peoples. The light that reaches us from above takes countless ages to traverse the awful chasm separating us from its parent star; yet it comes straight and true to our eyes, because each tender wavelet is linked to the other, receiving and transmitting the luminous ray. Once break the continuity of the stream, and men will deny its heavenly origin, and seek its source in the feeble glimmer of earthly corruption.” So, my fellow Arkansans, my fellow Americans: Remember who you are. Remember the suffering endured by those who came before. Remember that, though Heaven is far away, Hell can be reached in a day. Until Christ returns, no one is coming to save us. This nation is ours, and ours alone, to save. Let us take back our homeland, occupied since 1865. Take courage, and be of good cheer, for we will overcome this world. Bibliography Avary, Myrta Lockett. Dixie After the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South, During the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (Doubleday, Page, & Company, 1906). Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (Literary Guild of America, 1929). Coulter, E. Merton. The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (Louisiana State University Press, 1975). DeBlack, Thomas A. With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861-1874 (University of Arkansas Press, 2003). Dunning, William A. Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865-1877 (Harper Torchbooks, 1962[1907]). Fleming, Walter Lynwood. The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States (Yale University Press, 1919). Goodrich, Thomas, & Goodrich, Debra. The Day Dixie Died: Southern Occupation, 1865-1866 (Stackpole Books, 2001). Harrell, John M. The Brooks and Baxter War: A History of the Reconstruction Period in Arkansas (Slawson Printing Co., 1893). Henry, Robert Selph. The Story of Reconstruction (Konecky & Konecky, 1999[1938]). Johnson, Ludwell H. North Against South: The American Iliad, 1848-1877 (Foundation for American Education, 1993). Moneyhon, Carl H. The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin (Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Simkins, Francis Butler. A History of the South (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). Smith, John I. Forward From Rebellion: Reconstruction and Revolution in Arkansas, 1868-1874 (Rose Publishing Company, 1983). Staples, Thomas S. Reconstruction in Arkansas, 1862-1874 (Columbia University, 1923). Taylor, Richard. Destruction and Reconstruction (Time-Life Books, 1983[1879]). Thomas, David Y. Arkansas in War and Reconstruction (Arkansas Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1926).
4 Comments
Craig
6/10/2021 06:21:40 pm
I’m satisfied you’re very close to the truth. I will support you in the primary. Most of our reps in DC are on the dark side or all but asleep. Wish I had been at your speech.
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Thomas B Flynn, MD, FACS, FAANS
6/19/2021 10:15:31 am
My great grandfather,was a medical officer in the Confederate Army. Until a recent flood destroyed his uniform, I treasured it and still do his memory, The present “reconstruction” us well underway, as the now enormously privileged black population is shepherded into welfare dependence or seeks to dominate our politics is hoisted to undeserved heights. Our cities are governed by largely incompetent blacks as is testified to by their failing governments.
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Clyde Wilson
7/24/2021 05:45:05 am
White Guy and Guy Who Knows (cowards hiding behind false names): It is people like you who are why the South always loses.
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Rosie
1/14/2022 10:15:49 am
I bet your grandma makes great Chicken Biryani.
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