Monthly Archives: July 2019

Today we celebrate 400 years of American democracy and it all began in the South!

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Today we celebrate 400 years of American democracy
and it all began in the South!

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

I was doing some research last weekend and ran across an atlas website that looked pretty good and had a nice map.

I started reading under subheading "US History" and could not believe what I was reading!

I had always heard that New Englanders and especially people from Massachusetts were jealous of the South.

They're jealous because America, the greatest nation in human history, was founded in the South - I mean below the Mason-Dixon Line, in Dixie, if you will, at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

That means the very first Americans who weren't Indians were Southerners and damn proud of it back then and damn proud of it today! USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!

That's just too much for some of those arrogant New Englanders who go around telling people America didn't really start until they got here in 1620 (they FINALLY got here).

Of course, that is America's first FAKE NEWS to go along with all the FAKE HISTORY that comes out of New England, such as the absurdity that slavery caused the War Between the States and not the Northern lust for other people's money.

As Shelby Foote said, slavery was an element in the secession of the Cotton States but wasn't even close to being the primary cause of it or the war.

Independence, self-government and the supremacy of the States, as the Founding Fathers envisioned, were why the Cotton States seceded.

Those reasons, plus the fact that Southerners were fed up with the hate Northerners used to rally their votes to win the 1860 election.

Despite all that hate, over 60% of the country still voted against Abraham Lincoln.

Southerners were not about to let people who hated them rule over them.

New Englanders absolutely can not make an argument that Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee seceded over anything to do with slavery, and in those four states lived a majority of white Southerners: 52.4%.

Those states initially rejected secession.

But the moment the Federal Government attempted to coerce the sovereign Cotton States, like when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee seceded.

The issue was obviously federal coercion and they stated that, over and over, just as Lincoln stated over and over that his desire was not to free the slaves but preserve the Union, because Northern wealth and power were dependent on the Union, on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton.

Without the North, the South was in great shape with 100% control of King Cotton, the most demanded commodity on the planet.

Without the South, the North was DEAD.

Besides, Northerners and the Brits before them, brought all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process, but they don't talk about that too much.

Their fake history proclaims the right of secession to be legal when they want to do it with the Hartford Convention, the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas and other times, but not when we do, despite Virginia (with New York and Rhode Island) reserving the right to secede before acceding to the US Constitution.

That reserved right of secession by Virginia, New York and Rhode Island, which was accepted by all the other states, also GAVE the other states the right of secession because all the states entered the Union as equals. All had the exact same rights.

The website I mentioned above, under its US History heading, has this disgusting fake New England history:

"In 1620, the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower, landing in what is modern-day Massachusetts; their settlement named Plymouth survived, and the story of a new nation was subsequently born."

Of course, this is not history, it is a fraud.

If this person is versed enough in American history to know about the Pilgrims in 1620, then surely they know about Jamestown in 1607.

They most likely made a deliberate decision to falsify the record in order to glorify an undeserving New England.

You have to ask yourself, what else is falsified on this website?

With history as pathetic as it is today, they probably figured they could get away with it.

They would probably also tell you New Englanders who brought all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process (along with the Brits before them), were not American's slave traders.

Or that Boston and New York were not the world capitals of the slave trade in 1862, a year into the War Between the States, though W.E.B. Du Bois proves it conclusively in his book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638- 1870.

An honest mistake or interpretation is understandable, but regardless, this person and everybody like him or her should be corrected.

Here is their web address for anybody who wants to help them with their facts:

 

https://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/us.htm

 

Today, July 30, 2019, is the 400th
anniversary of American democracy.

The story of the most powerful and still freest nation in the history of the world begins in the South, in Virginia, where the capital of the Confederate States of America was located during the War Between the States.

Southerners were led by another beloved Virginia son, Gen. Robert E. Lee, in their bloody fight for independence.

But on this day, 400 years ago, the Virginia House of Burgesses met for the first time, at Jamestown, and became "the first representative legislative assembly in the Western Hemisphere."

The Associated Press, which is usually horribly biased and unreadable, wrote a pretty good story entitled "Seeds of Democracy" (Post and Courier, July 29, 2019).

The House of Burgesses began "as a group of 22 men - two chosen by the white male residents of each of the eleven major settlement areas." Today "Virginia's General Assembly is considered the oldest continuously operating legislative body in North America."

Finally, the AP and Post and Courier say something good about white Southern males!

Feels like it's been 400 years since the last time they did that!

In honor of American democracy's 400th anniversary, here is a PDF entitled Virginia First, written by another Virginian, Dr. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of our 10th US president, John Tyler, who served from 1841 to 1845. John Tyler was also a member of the Confederate Congress.

Lyon Gardiner Tyler wrote A Confederate Catechism and numerous other outstanding books and articles. He brought the College of William and Mary back from the dead after the War Between the States, and he served with great honor as its 17th president for over three decades, from 1888 to 1919.

Click Here to download the Virginia First PDF, then save to your computer and send to whomever you want!

Defending the South to an editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier

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Defending the South to an editor of the
Charleston, SC Post and Courier

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

I had some correspondence with an editor of the Post and Courier this week when I sent them a letter for publication in response to their July 6, 2019 editorial "Don't let extremists define our national symbols."

As a result, I saw an opening to send some valuable Southern history to this newspaper and I jumped on it.

Their editorial is good in that they are alarmed at Nike removing the Betsy Ross flag, the Charlottesville city council ending a celebration of Thomas Jefferson, and the idiots on the San Francisco school board voting to paint over an 80-year-old work of art portraying the life of George Washington.

The Post and Courier does not want us to validate bad people who attempt to redefine patriotic symbols, but wait! THEY in the media have done exactly that for years ad nauseam!

The media is the primary reason we have this politically correct hate and destruction of history in the body politic.

Here is the 250 word letter-to-the-editor that got this started:

 

START

Your editorial of July 6, "Don't let extremists define our national symbols" shows that your heart is in the right place but, boy, you need to look in the mirror.

You let the KKK and Dylan Roof define the Confederate battle flag though neither of them has an iota of claim to it.

You put the Southern Poverty Law Center's disgraceful campaign to remove Confederate monuments on your front page, and you agitate all the time against ancient monuments including the Calhoun monument on Marion Square, and even against the word "Dixie."

And now you are surprised when Colin Kaepernick and others follow your lead and turn the Betsy Ross flag, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington into vile racists?

The foundation of our great nation was indeed set in 1776 as you write, but it was certainly not "reset in 1865." It died a violent death in 1865.

In the republic of the Founding Fathers, states were supreme, but after 1865, the Federal Government and Northern majority were supreme, which was the North's goal all along.

You quote the Gettysburg Address but here's what the great H. L. Mencken wrote in May, 1920: "The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people,' should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves....".

END

 

The editor wrote back and asked who the "you" was and that gave me my opening:

 

Actually, the “you” is the Post and Courier, but also the news media in general because so much of the media is of the same political philosophy, which has utterly politicized history in recent decades.

As serious historians know, one can’t apply 21st century standards to the past. When you do that, you aren’t understanding the past at all. You are using it as a current-day political tool.

Your Robert Behre explained to us on the front page on May 16th why we should hate the word "Dixie" after the College of Charleston in a disgusting fit of political correctness changed the 175-year-old name of Dixie Plantation ("C of C dumps 'Dixie' name for plantation"). Behre then implied why we should also hate the song "Dixie" and word "plantation."

Do you not find it odd that four weeks later on June 15th, the Antifa vandalizers of the Defenders Monument at the Battery also had a large sign that said “DIXIE IS DEAD.”

Maybe they were inspired by Behre and maybe it was just a coincidence, but the Post and Courier is really not fair or accurate with Southern history at all.

You let the KKK and Dylan Roof define the Confederate battle flag though neither of them has an iota of claim to it. The battle flag is, arguably, the greatest symbol of pure American valor our nation has ever produced because it was a soldier's flag, not a national flag. It flew over the bloodiest battlefields of a war in which 800,000 died and over a million were wounded. It never flew over a slave ship like the US and British flags did for over two centuries. The largest Klan groups of the early 20th century carried the American flag.

Your editorial had mentioned the Declaration of Independence so I wanted to tell you that when Southerners debated seceding in the months before they actually did, the most widely quoted phrase of the secession debate came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. . .

And please don't quote that garbage about States Rights being the right to own another person. The Confederate Constitution allowed free or slave states to join.

Five slave states fought for the North throughout the entire war, and the Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them all as well as slaves in most Confederate territory already captured by the Union army.

The one thing that can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war to preserve the Union, as Lincoln said over and over, because all their wealth and power were tied to the Union. They manufactured for the South and shipped Southern cotton and they made obscene amounts of money with tariffs, bounties, subsidies, monopolies and such, which caused three-fourths of the treasury to flow continually into the North, though most of the money in the treasury came from the South.

When the Cotton States seceded, the Northern economy began a dramatic collapse and by war time, there were hundreds of thousands of people unemployed and a dire situation in the North.

Southerners seceded because they were fed up with Northern hate and support for terrorism such as John Brown and Hinton Helper that Republicans had used to rally their votes in the election of 1860 in which over 60% of voters nationwide voted against Abraham Lincoln.

The War Between the States was one of the most unnecessary wars in all of history but then, from Lincoln's standpoint, it was necessary for him and his new political party to establish their control over the rest of the country, though 800,000 had to die and over a million be wounded for them to do it.

To Southerners, 1861 was 1776 all over, and we in Charleston can be especially proud because we were never beaten by the Union army or navy. Charleston was unconquered militarily and never surrendered in the War Between the States. It was the only place besieged that did not give way to the besieger. When Confederate troops were ordered to evacuate in February, 1865 to continue the war elsewhere, the city, which had endured one of the longest sieges in history, was turned over to the Union army by a city alderman.

Slavery was dying out and would not have lasted another generation.

It is unconscionable that you maintain this politically correct hatefulness toward Southern history. Maybe you should go back and read your own archives which tell a different story.

XXXXXXX, people are SO fed up with idiotic political correctness. The removal of Kate Smith’s monument (she helped win WWII with God Bless America) recently, and, as your editorial pointed out, Charlottesville’s canceling of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday; the San Francisco school board’s decision to paint over a beautiful 80 year old mural of the life of George Washington; the Kaepernick/Nike thing over the Betsy Ross flag.

It is disgusting and alarming, as your editorial pointed out. It is like a cancer. It ain’t gonna stop. It needs to be opposed and defeated, which will be hard because one political party is heavily invested in it.

I wish the Post and Courier would give me a chance to write long articles on history as you do with others. Everything I write is solidly argued and documented. It would definitely add to the debate.

Regardless, thank you for letting me send this to you.

Gene

Why the Cotton States Seceded and Formed the Confederate States of America

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Great Seal of the Confederacy featuring George Washington, Father of the Confederate States of America

By Gene Kizer, Jr.

 

President George Washington warned that political parties should always be national and not sectional, so they could govern with the good of the entire country in mind. He warned that a political party representing only one section would destroy the country because it would allow that one section to dominate and tax the rest of the country for its own benefit.

But money and power are mighty enticements and the North's population exploded in the 1850s. The new Republican Party realized that the North could outvote the rest of the country and rule for its own benefit, so the Republican Party became the first sectional party in American history: The party of the North. If they could just rally their votes they would have power, wealth, control. They were snarling and drooling like a pack of hungry wolves surrounding a lamb before tearing it to bits.

Bitter hatred against the South underpinned the entire Republican campaign. It rallied their votes and gave them a victory, but Southerners were not going to let people who hated them rule over them. The Southern States, in a brilliant display of democracy and self-government, called conventions, debated seceding from the Union, then seven of them did so, forming a new nation on this earth: The Confederate States of America.

For the South, 1861 was 1776 all over. The most widely quoted phrase of the secession debate in the South in the year before South Carolina seceded and got things going came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Southern leaders referred back to the Founding Fathers constantly and quoted them profusely. They had been proud of their country and government. Remember, a Southern man was author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson), Father of the Constitution (James Madison), military leader of the Revolution and first president who was proclaimed by Congress upon his death to be "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen" (George Washington).

At the end of the Revolutionary War, each state was sovereign as acknowledged by King George III and Great Britain. The colonies were now countries like any country in Europe. They banded together for common defense and to facilitate trade but did not give up their sovereignty. The Constitution gave only restricted power to the federal government with all other power reserved to the states as the Constitution's 10th Amendment makes crystal clear:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The population of the North began growing rapidly as the 1800s began and so did their desire for a stronger federal government that would enable them to control business and taxation and put their own economic interests first. The most astute observer of American democracy in the 19th century, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous work Democracy in America, warned that if one state (or section) became powerful enough to control the government, it would rule in its own interest and make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power. He also said that across the world, during this time period, there was much pressure for governments to consolidate.

A consolidated, powerful federal government was not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The Founding Fathers were highly critical of the "tyranny of the majority" in which 50% plus one vote could hang the other 49% or impose their will on the other 49%. That's what would happen with one all-powerful government in which special interests would be constantly fighting for control.

The Founding Fathers set up the original American republic with each state supreme, sovereign and in control of its destiny so that the people of each state could govern themselves as they saw fit. This was the kind of democracy and self-government the Founding Fathers intended. The federal government was to be weak, subservient and controlled by the states. The Founding Fathers did not think that one section should be able to tax and make laws for the other sections. That was the issue of the Revolutionary War. Great Britain wanted to tax the Colonies then spend that tax money in other parts of the British Empire.

President George Washington warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but prominent Republican Wendell Phillips stated clearly that the Republican Party

is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national - it is sectional. The Republican Party is a party of the North pledged against the South.

The Republican Party of the North was pledged against the South because it had four times the white voting population of the South and knew if it could rally Northern votes, it could take over and rule the entire country. Numerous special interest groups were brought together under the misnamed antislavery umbrella, misnamed because it was not in any sense a pro-black movement. It was mostly political, economic and racist, and should be more accurately called anti-South instead of antislavery. Historian Charles P. Roland said "There was a significant economic dimension in the Northern antislavery sentiment" and that "a racial factor contributed to the Northern attitude." He said "Antipathy against slavery often went hand in hand with racism" because

Many Northerners objected to the presence of slavery in their midst, in part, because they objected to the presence of blacks there.

Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the same thing and said "Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known."

Republicans in 1856 and 1860 campaigned on an aggressive economic policy of protectionism for Northern industry with slogans such as "Vote yourself a tariff!" and "Vote yourself a farm!" They supported monopoly status for Northern manufacturers, which took away free market competition and allowed them to charge the South whatever they wanted for their goods. Something that would cost $100 on the free market might end up costing Southerners $400, and all that extra money went right into the pockets of Northern businessmen because of the workings of the federal government.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. There were bounties, subsidies and payments out of the federal treasury for Northern businesses, and monopoly status for Northern shipping with accompanying high rates, though most of that shipping was Southern cotton. King Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.

The Northern majority had fixed an oppressive tariff system on the South that caused the South to pay most of the country's taxes, yet 3/4ths of the tax money was spent in the North. Georgia Sen. Robert Toombs said there were

bounties and protection to every interest and every pursuit in the North, to the extent of at least fifty millions per annum, besides the expenditure of at least sixty millions out of every seventy of the public expenditure among them, thus making the treasury a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands.

One of the two major documents to come out of South Carolina's secession convention in December, 1860 was The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States, and it said in part:

The Revolution of 1776 turned upon one great principle, self-government - and self-taxation, the criterion of self-government. . . . The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position toward the Northern States that the Colonies did towards Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament. . . . The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths of them are expended at the North. . . . No man can, for a moment, believe that our ancestors intended to establish over their posterity, exactly the same sort of Government they had overthrown.

The economic issues were huge but even bigger was terrorist John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry not long after he had hacked several innocent pro-South people to death in Kansas. Brown was financed and encouraged in the North, then celebrated as a hero after he was hanged. Two of his sons escaped and were protected in Ohio and Iowa though wanted for murder in Virginia. This violated the Constitution. They should have been extradited to Virginia to stand trial for murder. Southerners lost all faith that the North would ever abide by the Constitution.

Worse was Hinton Helper's book, The Impending Crisis of the South, which called for violent slave insurrections in which the throats of Southerners would be cut. The Republican Party adopted it as a campaign document and printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them to every corner of the country. President James Buchanan, president before Lincoln, blamed this Republican hate and fanaticism for causing the war.

Southerners were not going to allow people who hated them to rule over them. When Abraham Lincoln was elected by a Northern sectional minority with the second lowest popular vote total in American history (39.7%), the South Carolina legislature called for the election of delegates to a Convention of the People and on December 20, 1860, that convention voted 169 - 0 to secede from the Union. The new Republic of South Carolina was the catalyst for the secession of six more states over the next two months and the formation of a new nation, the Confederate States of America.

Here are the dates and votes of the seven deep South states making up the new Confederacy:

1.  South Carolina, December 20, 1860, 169-0.
2. Mississippi, January 9, 1861, 84-15.
3. Florida, January 10, 1861, 62-7.
4. Alabama, January 11, 1861, 61-39.
5.  Georgia, January 19, 1861, 208-89.
6. Louisiana, January 26, 1861, 113-17.
7.  Texas, February 1, 1861, 166-8.

The first session of the Provisional Confederate Congress met on February 4, 1861 in Montgomery, Alabama.

On February 8, 1861 they adopted the Provisional Confederate Constitution. It was similar to the U.S. Constitution but strengthened States' Rights and made improvements to solve the contentious issues of the antebellum era. Slavery was not required under the Confederate Constitution. To have slavery or not have it was up to each individual state. Southerners anticipated that many free states would join the Confederacy because of its economic policies and this worried Abraham Lincoln greatly. Oppressive protective tariffs were unconstitutional.

On February 9, 1861 Jefferson Davis was elected unanimously as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. He was a former senator from Mississippi, had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, had fought in the Mexican War and had been U.S. Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857. Georgia's Alexander Stephens, "Little Alec," was also elected unanimously, as vice-president.

George Washington was put front and center on the Great Seal of the Confederacy because Southerners considered him the father of their country.