Monthly Archives: May 2021

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

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The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession
Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

A gentleman wrote me this past March stating that when arguing history, Northerners always use the four declarations of causes for secession as proof that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

Those four declarations prove nothing of the sort.

Below, is our correspondence including the question posed by the gentleman, but first, here is some additional information:

THERE WERE 13 SOUTHERN STATES represented in the Confederate government. That 13 included Missouri and Kentucky, which were divided states that did not actually secede. They remained Union slave states - two of six Union slave states - the entire war (WHAT! UNION SLAVE STATES! I thought the war was fought over slavery with the Union fighting to end slavery! Man, they should have started with their own country. In fact, three of the six Union slave states - New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware - had slavery several months after the war. It took the second 13th Amendment in December 1865 for slavery to end in those three Union slave states.).

Remember, the first 13th Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed. It was passed by the Northern Congress and ratified by several states before the war made it moot. The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of the North on the slavery issue though it is only one small piece of the massive evidence that the North did not go to war to end slavery. There is much more absolute proof, so much so, that it is irrefutable that the North did not go to war to end slavery. The North was fine with slavery.

Back to the six Union slave states: The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them as well as slaves in already captured Confederate territory. That prompted Lincoln's secretary of state, William H. Seward, to state "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." It also gave Charles Dickens a good laugh at Lincoln's phoniness and hypocrisy, especially since all of Lincoln's life he favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

All 13 states represented in the Confederate government produced a legal document such as an ordinance of secession that withdrew them from the Union. Tennessee's was called a Declaration of Independence. Most of the ordinances of secession were straight-forward legal documents referring to their ratification of the Constitution and withdrawing the state from it, proclaiming their sovereignty, etc. Alabama and Arkansas did go a little beyond pure legalese in discussing some issues but nothing like a declaration of causes.

Only four of the 13 Confederate states issued declarations of causes. Nine did not.

Those four declarations are the basis for the entire argument against the South in most people's minds though anti-South detractors often use the Marxist technique of simply ignoring substantial evidence they don't agree with. They ignore the six Union slave states, the Corwin Amendment, the War Aims Resolution (war is being waged for Union, not to end slavery) and a ton of other evidence that slavery was not the cause of the war. The North was more interested in its economic power and wealth, not ending slavery, and they sure did not want a bunch of desperate freed slaves to come North with massive crime and social problems, and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding free blacks from living there or even visiting for long, including Lincoln's Illinois.

Anti-slavery in the North in 1856 and 1860 was political, to rally votes in the North so Northerners could control the Federal Government and continue their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and their massive tariffs like the Morrill Tariff. It was not morality for the benefit of the black man.

Even the slavery in the West issue was based, not on concern for blacks, but the opposite: Northern racism. They didn't want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West. Historians know this. It started with the Wilmot Proviso and is a clear fact.

The four declarations of causes are statements as to why states seceded, what their grievances were, and such. They are not declarations of war. Southerners expected to live in peace. After all, Yankees threatened to secede five times before Southerners finally did. Nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley during the time that South Carolina seceded in December, 1860. Greeley strongly supported the right of secession ("let our erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money, then he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Wars are always fought over money and power, never because one country does not like the domestic institutions in another. Would you send your precious sons off to die to free slaves in another country? Hell no.

Lincoln sent his hostile flotilla to Charleston and Pensacola to start the War Between the States in April, 1861, because a free trade South with European military alliances and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet - King Cotton - would rise to dominance in North America. The North would not be able to beat the South in such a situation. That's why Lincoln wanted to use his enormous advantages at that point in history, and fight. He wanted to establish the North as the dominant cultural and economic region of our great country, and he did. It's been that way for over 150 years though many of the big cities of the North today are on a death spiral thanks to liberal wokeness that permits violent crime and discriminates against the law-biding.

The four declarations of causes all mention several reasons for seceding. All mention the many constitutional violations of the North. The North was untrustworthy.

All mention Northern terrorism against the South such as John Brown who wanted to murder Southern men, women and children with a bloody slave insurrection like they had in Haiti. Brown was financed and organized in the North, then celebrated as a hero when brought to justice. His two sons were protected by Ohio and Iowa rather than being sent back to Virginia for trial as the constitution required.

South Carolina's declaration is a fascinating constitutional and early American history lesson. It proves South Carolina's sovereignty:

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definitely Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "ARTICLE 1-- His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." / Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

Georgia's declaration goes into great detail on the economic causes of secession. As Robert Toombs said, the North was a suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it into the North constantly. The Georgia declaration states:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.

This is a powerful statement as to why the Union was critical to Lincoln and the North, but was the antithesis of the States' Rights philosophy of the South.

Even Mississippi's declaration that begins with an assertion that it is identified with slavery as the basis of its economic well-being makes several critical points. It affirms the constitutional violations of the North but states about the North:

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. / It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. / It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. / It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. / It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

Texas's declaration of causes includes:

By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States. / The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.

Read these declarations and especially know your own state's if you live in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia or Texas. As stated, they do mention slavery along with numerous other extremely important issues. Northern constitutional violations are extremely important. If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, you can't trust them with anything.

The Northern support for terrorists like John Brown was a huge issue. The North was already at war with the South. Would you stay in a country with people who sent murderers, thieves and arsonists into your peaceful towns to kill your family and neighbors, destroy your property, poison wells, encourage the unimaginable horror of bloody slave insurrections with rape and murder, from which there would be no survivors like in Haiti?

The economic theft also mentioned was huge. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.1

Nobody in the North, ever a single time, suggested a workable plan for gradual, compensated emancipation such as the Northern states and all other nations on earth used to end slavery. The reason why is that Northerners were not about to spend their hard earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North with crime and violence, and be job competition. They would rather do as they did and just pass laws that forbid black people from settling or even visiting Northern states for long.

One can take the anti-South position and argue that the declarations of causes indicate slavery was one of many causes for the secession of four states, but only for those four.

The other nine did not issue declarations of causes, and four of the Southern states, in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, seceded over nothing to do with slavery. Those states were horrified that the Federal Government would illegally and unconstitutionally invade other states, kill their citizens and destroy their property to force them to obey a Northern sectional majority. Those four were Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

Nothing the North or anybody else says matters anyway. The South had the right to secede and they did so properly. Among the conclusive evidence of the right of secession is the reserved right to secede demanded by New York, Rhode Island and Virginia before they acceded to the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, thus they had it too, since all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 13, 2021

HI Gene, I love your history books. I have just one question. I agree that the majority of the reasons the Civil War happened had to do with economics, taxation, and an overbearing Federal Government. Lincoln and the North made it clear that the reason they went to war was to "preserve the union." As for the South, many letters, speeches and papers talk about the economics of secession, but all of the States Declarations, start off with the Institution of Slavery and the election of Lincoln and his threat to Slavery as the reason they were pulling out of the Union. I just don't understand why, when you clearly lay out that Lincoln never did or said anything about going after slaves, was the South so scared and put this in the top part of their reasons for secession? Why not just say, we are tired of being economically raped? We are not being represented at the federal government level, we want the right to free trade, our own currency, we don't want to be part of this union. Thank you. Bill M.

Gene Kizer to Bill M. March 15, 2021

Bill, Good to hear from you! Your question is a great one and easily answered.

Only four out of 13 Southern states issued declarations of causes for their secession along with their ordinances of secession. Those states were: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas. The other nine had ordinances of secession but no declarations of causes.

The four declarations of causes do mention slavery, as you say, along with numerous other things including much grievance over tariffs and taxes, and the money flowing constantly out of the South and into the North because of Northern bounties, subsidies, monopolies, etc.

They all also state that Northern hate and promotion of terrorism is a prime reason for their secession, as well as Northern violations of the Constitution. Southerners did not trust Northerners and for good reason. If somebody sent terrorists into your country to kill your citizens and poison wells, etc., would you want to stay in the same country with them? Or leave, peacefully, as Southerners did? Remember, John Brown hacked Southerners to death in Kansas, he was financed in the North, then came to Harper's Ferry to start the kind of mass murder that had taken place in Haiti. When Brown was executed, he was celebrated in the North as a hero. Brown's two sons were protected from prosecution by Ohio and Iowa. So, Northerners sent terrorists into the South to murder Southerners then they martyred the terrorists when they were brought to justice. The country was already at war. Southern secession was the South dealing with it in their way, which was to leave peacefully.

Those four declarations of causes form the entire argument against the South yet all they do is establish the grievances that led to secession. Southerners unquestionably had the right to secede. Three states - New York, Rhode Island and Virginia - had reserved the right of secession before joining the Constitution, and all the other states accepted the right of NY, RI and VA to secede if they saw fit. That gave the right of secession to all the states because they all entered the Union as equals.

Slavery as the cause of the War Between the States is such an absurdity.

No Northerner said, before the war, that they should march armies into the South to free the slaves. They could care less about the slaves as was proven by the Corwin Amendment (leave blacks in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress), the War Aims Resolution (the war is being fought for Union, not slavery) and legion other documents and statements.

Yankees were making money hand over fist manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. They were draining the South dry with tariffs and taxes. They weren't about to give that up then have to face the South as a major competitor with European support and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet: Cotton.

The imminent collapse of the Northern economy because of Southern secession is what caused Lincoln to start the war. That, and the fact that they had the South outnumbered four to one, and outgunned 100 to one. I'll guarantee you if the North only had the South outnumbered two to one, and certainly if it was even, there would have been no war.

When the guns of Fort Sumter sounded, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy because Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee had not yet seceded. Those four states seceded immediately after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, and their clear reason why had nothing to do with slavery. It was their abhorrence of Lincoln using the Federal Government to invade a peaceful part of the country and kill its citizens for the benefit of Northern wealth and power.

In those four states, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, lived 52.4% - a majority - of white Southerners, so it is a fact that a majority of white Southerners seceded over nothing to do with slavery.

There is a ton more evidence but this is the short answer.

As stated above, when the war started, there were eight, soon to be nine slave states in the Union with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state during the war (think about that) VERSES the seven Cotton States.

That's eight Yankee slave states verses seven Southern slave states though that number was soon to be nine Yankee slave states.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not touch the slaves in the Union slave states or in captured Confederate territory. Yankee slaves were to remain in slavery.

Unquestionably, Yankees did not go to war to end slavery; and unquestionably, Southerners did not go to war to preserve it.

Southerners went to war because they wanted to be free and independent of people who hated them and who had sent terrorists into their country to kill them.

The most quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year before the war was from the Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Thank you for posing this excellent question. I have a lot more coming out in the next year or two solidifying even more my already irrefutable argument.

Are you on my email list? If not, give me your email address and I'll add you. I send out a blog article every week with history, defense of monuments, etc.

Good to hear from you.

Gene

Gene Kizer, Jr.
Charleston Athenaeum Press

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 15, 2021

Thank you very much Gene. FYI. I agree with you about why the South went to war. I feel the same way today. I agree with Hank Williams Jr, had the South won we would have a free country. Not an overbearing corrupt Federal Government and court system. We would have had a chance. Reason I ask is because I read those 4 states and Florida’s. And they seemed to focus on Lincoln's election and slaves. Liberals and do-gooders always bring that issue up to me when I tell them today is the same as 1860. It is not and was not about slavery. I am not on your email list. I am familiar with many of the facts you listed. They are in your book. I need to re read all the declarations from the states again. Thanks

Gene Kizer to Bill M., March 15

Bill, Got you added to the list! There will be a blog article in your inbox Thursday morning. There are a lot of articles on the website (www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com) you will enjoy. In fact, I might use this correspondence we've had here as a blog post since it is concise and your question an excellent one. A lot of people would benefit from that. I would keep your identity and contact information private. I don't know that I definitely will post it but it would be the basis of a good post. I agree with you 1000% about old Hank Williams, Jr.! I love that song If the South Woulda Won. All the best to you! Gene

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 15

Thanks Gene. That is fine. I love Hank Williams Jr. And your books. Was born in the North but raised in the South when it was still the South. I read the Constitution in Law School along with all the Founding Fathers' notes. There is no doubt in my mind they would have supported the South. I worked on Wall Street and the most evil creation on the planet is the Corporation. The fact is. They were banned under the original laws in our Country. To me, the civil war was about the greed of the North Bankers, Industrialists and RR barons power over the Republicans. They wanted all the $ and power. They smelled blood. What we have and what the world has today is the Military Industrial Complex and the Corporations have merged with the Entire Federal Government including the judiciary. Outside of states pulling out of the Union, I don’t know what else can stop what we are heading for. You can use my blog. I am sick of liberals telling me that the war was all about slavery cause that is what CNN says.

Gene Kizer to Bill M., March 20

Bill, Thanks for your excellent message! I haven't been on FB in the past few days. I'm with you all the way. You are so right. I had a blog article a few weeks ago by Lysander Spooner, the abolitionist, and he said basically the same thing you just said. You are right about corporations. They are whores for money and will sell out the USA to China and others just like the NBA, Nike, Google, FB and the rest of them. Big tech is the worst. I think a lot of good people like you and me are aware of everything going on and are very concerned about it. We are at a crossroads in America and there are truly some bad people who want to take us in a horrible direction, the opposite of what we were founded on. One good thing: It will be our states that preserve something of our founding. They were supposed to be sovereign and have all the power anyway, and they might have to use it to save the country. If HR1 passes and somehow SCOTUS allows it to stand, all bets are off. I would have never in a billion years thought the Supreme Court would even consider letting an obviously unconstitutional abomination such as HR1 stand, but SCOTUS let us down badly with the election law suits the past couple months. They should have heard the Texas case as Alito and Thomas wanted. Roberts is a coward and the worst chief justice in American history so no telling what his court might do. I am so surprised at Kavanaugh and Barrett. Hopefully an election case can come up. I think Gorsuch is with Alito and Thomas now. We'll see. A lot is going to happen in the next few months. Thanks for writing! Agree with you 100% Gene

Bill M. to Gene Kizer, March 21, 2021

Hi Gene. We are in 100% agreement. I think that the Supreme Court has been compromised. Our only hope is the states. I know many of us feel the same way. Question is. How to we unite to form a coalition like the corporate communist left has?

 

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History,  2020), 103.

Woke Liberals in Academia, and the Marxist Communists They Love

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Woke Liberals in Academia,
and the Marxist Communists They Love

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Academia has given our country the racist identity politics of Critical Theory, the anti-white hatred of Critical Race Theory, and they have taught a generation of young Americans to hate their country.

Many in academia promoted Marxist Communism in the 1960s because they thought it would bring utopia (and they also realized that elites promoting Communism and socialism often get rich while the rest of us get the shaft). Look at the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who proudly proclaims herself a Marxist and just bought her fourth million-dollar home.

Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. Technology-wise, almost nothing from that time period is relevant today. The struggles against capitalism he was upset about have been obliterated by capitalism's enormous successes, which have produced more freedom and the highest standard of living in the history of the world. Karl Marx didn't have air conditioning and probably most of his life had to use an outhouse and corn cobs (the Sears catalog was not around in Europe back then).

Marx's class struggle, idolized by unimpressive people in academia, was irrelevant in America because we were, and still are, the essence of optimism and can-do thinking. We conquered a continent, landed on the moon, and are now doing helicopter experiments in the thin air of Mars. We created 50 strong states in the process, any one of which could thrive as an independent nation on this earth.

But many in academia, who are constantly trying to prove how smart they are (because they actually are not very smart), think they have found a better way than American optimism and capitalism, and Marx is their man.

The Communism inspired by academia's idol, Karl Marx, has caused a hundred million people to be murdered in the past century.

In The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, the definitive work on Marxist Communist horrors, all their crimes are laid out for riveting reading. Communism, according the book's original French publisher, is a "tragedy of planetary dimensions" with victims "variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history."1

Those number are itemized here:2

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: 1 million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 2 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Latin America: 150,000 deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths

Yet, Marxism is proudly proclaimed and promoted by BLM and by a great many liberals in academia.

Here's how Communist atrocities happen:

Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless "class war," in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power. This strategy applied not only to groups with opposing political views, but also to such social groups as the nobility, the middle class, the intelligentsia, and the clergy, as well as professional groups such as military officers and the police. Sometimes the Bolsheviks subjected these people to genocide. The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children, and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants.3

There is no difference in this and Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman writing his wife, telling her that there is a class of Southerners, men, women and children, who must be exterminated. Many former Union officers also planned extermination of the Plains Indians (except for George A. Custer, whom the Indians exterminated).

Another troubling statement from the paragraph above is "The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal . . . means...". That is no different from the Democrat Party's use of the legal system against their political adversaries today with the Mueller witch hunt, two baseless politically motivated impeachments, and recently the Biden DOJ going after Rudy Giuliani. There are also many politically-motivated harassment investigations of Donald Trump. They are designed, like the fraudulent polls that had Trump 16 points down just before the election, to drive down support for Trump.

It will likely not happen because these methods are well-known now, though the Republican Party without Trump is so stupid and cowardly, Democrats might get away with it again.

Here is a "preliminary global accounting of the crimes committed by Communist regimes,"4 the same regimes that were and are admired by so many in academia and on the left:

---  The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922

---  The famine of 1922, which caused the deaths of 5 million people

---  The extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920

---  The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930

---  The liquidation  of almost 690,000 people in the Great Purge of 1937-38

---  The deportation of 2 millions kulaks (and so-called kulaks) in 1930-1932

---  The destruction of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others by means of an artificial and systematically perpetuated famine in 1932-33

---  The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans, and Bessarabians from 1939 to 1941, and again in 1944-45

---  The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941

---  The wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943

---  The wholesale deportation of the Chechens in 1944

---  The wholesale deportation of the Ingush in 1944

---  The deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978

---  The slow destruction of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950

Communism easily drew people into its horrific orbit. Tzvetan Todorov speaks with authority:

[T]otalitarianism could never have survived so long had it not been able to draw so many people into its fold. There is something else---it is a formidably efficient machine. Communist ideology offers an idealized model for society and exhorts us toward it. The desire to change the world in the name of an ideal is, after all, an essential characteristic of human identity . . . Furthermore, Communist society strips the individual of his responsibilities. It is always "somebody else" who makes the decisions. Remember, individual responsibility can feel like a crushing burden . . . The attraction of a totalitarian system, which has had a powerful allure for many, has its roots in a fear of freedom and responsibility. This explains the popularity of authoritarian regimes (which is Erich Fromm's thesis in Escape from Freedom). None of this is new; Boethius had the right idea long ago when he spoke of "voluntary servitude."5

Americans are sure as hell not afraid of freedom. People came here from the beginning seeking freedom, and still do. It is in our blood.

Academia, like the rest of the left, is committed to the lie that America is systemically racist. They will not admit it but they know that the hundreds of thousands of people who cross our southern border illegally every month, prove that systemic racism does not exist. That many people would never risk that long and difficult a journey to come to a racist country. Those people should not be allowed to break our laws, but they do.

The Black Book of Communism compares Nazis and Communists:

Efforts to draw parallels between Nazism and Communism on the basis of their respective extermination tactics may give offense to some people. However, we should recall how in Forever Flowing Vasily Grossman, whose mother was killed by the Nazis in the Berdychiv ghetto, who authored the first work on Treblinka, and who was one of the editors of the Black Book on the extermination of Soviet Jews, has one of his characters describe the famine in Ukraine: "writers kept writing . . . Stalin himself, too: the kulaks are parasites; they are burning grain; they are killing children. And it was openly proclaimed 'that the rage and wrath of the masses must be inflamed against them, they must be destroyed as a class, because they are accursed.'" He adds: "To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings." In conclusion, Grossman says of the children of the kulaks: "That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers: 'You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews!'"6

How is this different from racist academia's anti-white Critical Race Theory? It vilifies white people, white children, and dehumanizes them, demands that they admit privilege, and requires them to acknowledge things that do not exist like systemic racism. There is not a single law in America discriminating against anybody because of skin color and there hasn't been in well over a half century. In fact, it is just the opposite with affirmative action programs that shower privilege on blacks and discriminate against whites.

The majority of white people do good because they study and work hard, stay out of trouble, have a good attitude. Nobody gives them a damn thing.

Where will Critical Race Theory lead? Or will we stomp it out right now?

What Vasily Grossman above said is exactly what Gina Carano said earlier this year in an accurate, intelligent statement acknowledging that Germans dehumanized the Jews first, before rounding them up with ultimate destination for many, the gas chamber. Carano was fired from her successful show, The Mandalorian, by woke bigots at Disney. The Walt Disney Company today, far from the patriotic All-American company it was in years past, promotes a program of anti-white racism to its captive employees. They should SUE Disney every chance they get.

The "perversion of language" that the woke do all the time is another Communist technique:

Perhaps the single greatest evil was the perversion of language. As if by magic, the concentration-camp system was turned into a "reeducation system," and the tyrants became "educators" who transformed the people of the old society into "new people."7

The term "equity" is a prime example. It refers to equal outcomes, not equal opportunity.

America is not about equal outcomes. American is about equal opportunity so that those who are ambitious can work harder than other people and reap the benefits if they so chose.

The Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We have a great country because of the ideals of our Founding Fathers who were all white men. If that's white supremacy, it has created the greatest nation in the history of the world and has served us well, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, men, women, all of us.

To the horrors of Marxism and Communism admired by so many in academia and on the left, must be added the inhumanity of the Nazis:

. . . Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis. This clear record should provide at least some basis for assessing the similarity between the Nazi regime, which since 1945 has been considered the most viciously criminal regime of this century, and the Communist system, which as late as 1991 had preserved its international legitimacy unimpaired and which, even today, is still in power in certain countries and continues to protect its supporters the world over. And even though many Communist parties have belatedly acknowledged Stalinism's crimes, most have not abandoned Lenin's principles and scarcely question their own involvement in acts of terrorism.8

It would be nice if academia and the left would acknowledge Stalinism's crimes, but BLM's founders are proud to proclaim to the world that they are "trained Marxists."

Admitting the crimes of Marxism would take character and honor, which is missing from much of academia as it teaches young Americans a fraudulent history like the 1619 Project so they will hate their country. The 1619 Project's primary theme --- that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery --- is a total, complete and utter fraud with not one iota of evidence, I mean, not one letter, newspaper article, diary entry, nothing, yet Biden's Federal Government is pushing it into high schools all over the country along with racist Critical Race Theory.

Nikole Hannah-Jones got a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, which proves that Pulitzer Prizes mean nothing in this day and age. The NY Times got one too for their reporting on a hoax, Mueller's Russian investigation of the Trump administration. Both of these Pulitzers should be rescinded or have asterisks by them indicating that they are frauds.

All of this is a shakedown by the left with the constant false accusation of racism. It wasn't enough to steal the last election. Nikole Hannah-Jones wants reparations. The Democrat Party has a sick, maniacal desire for power. They all want white people, who have never been racist in the least, to pay money to people who are the essence of racists, for whom race is everything. They have their own Marxist Communist-type ideology in Critical Race Theory and identity politics.

The things that MLK fought against are the very things that many in academia are pushing today, and it should not be tolerated. NO taxpayer money should go to ANY academic institution that teaches even a hint of Critical Race Theory. State legislatures need to crack down on this racist hatred. Academia might as well offer courses by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Pary because there is no difference in the Klan's racial hate, and academia's racial hatred via Critical Race Theory.

American capitalism obliterated Marx's class struggle of the 1800s that academia so wanted to work here. We have never had any use for Communism or socialism. Our constitutional republic and the freedom, opportunity and wealth capitalism gives us makes us way more dynamic than any pathetic system of government handouts. We will run circles around that garbage, and we have since 1776.

Much of academia is an unimpressive racist hateful place in this day and age. The mediocre philosophies that come out of it don't compare to the freedom and opportunity that we already have.

America defeated real fascists, Nazis and Communists last century. We will certainly not be fooled by Marxist wannabes in academia this century, or ever.

 

1 Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, Consulting Editor Mark Kramer, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), X.

2 Ibid, 4.

3 The Black Book of Communism, 8-9.

4 Ibid, 9-10.

5 Tzvetan Todorov, L'homme depayse (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), p. 36, in The Black Book of Communism, 13.

6 Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 142, 144, and 155, in The Black Book of Communism, 16.

7 The Black Book of Communism, 19.

8 Ibid, 15.

Confronting the Woke in Academia

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When I think of the damage my race has caused the world, I just want to cry in my pumpkin spiced latte! I feel such shame for all the toxic things we have invented that have caused so much harm, such as the rule of law, constitutional rights, electricity, the elimination of famines, the combustible engine, nuclear energy, penicillin, clean water, sanitary sewer systems, hospitals, spacecraft, weaponry to keep us safe, the internet, and well, I could go on because pretty much everything ever invented is the fault of my people’s arrogance. Surely, this county would be better off if everyone ran around half naked with bear grease smeared on their bodies to keep the flies off of them like the Native Americans were doing when the evil white people got here. We certainly ruined their standard of living.

From an April 27, 2021 letter to UVA Pres. Ryan
by an alum, published below in its entirety

Confronting the Woke in Academia
Everybody Should Follow the Lead of This Fed Up UVA Alumnus

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : Academia, in many respects, is the enemy of America. It has given us the same kind of racist hate that the Ku Klux Klan promotes.

Woke academia's Critical Race Theory is nothing but vile abject race hatred and discrimination against white people. Leftists are promoting it all over the country at every level. Even the Federal Government is now promoting it to high schools and elementary schools. If the country does not soon get a grip on it, it will be impossible to cure.

Marxists in Academia are a big reason 120 retired flag officers (admirals, vice admirals, or rear admirals) are so concerned. They especially do not like Silicon Valley censorship, anarchists in the streets, the Democrat attack on election reform, and the use of "antiracism" to suppress dissent.1 They warn:

Our nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. . . . The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.2

The whole country had happily accepted the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King such as his I Have a Dream speech. That was the promise of the Civil Rights Movement: America as a colorblind meritocracy.

The country is all IN on that but racist academia is NOT.

Woke academia's Critical Race Theory specifically rejects Dr. King and his teachings, just like BLM rejects the nuclear family (which exposes their radical agenda because it has been known for years that the absence of black fathers in black homes is the major problem holding black people back, encouraging crime, etc.).

Of course, there is still much good in the idea of academia. We all love our alma maters.

But academia is SICK because it is 100% liberal. It has no credibility.

A real debate on any subject is impossible because academia can only present one side, albeit with different variations of that side, but, nonetheless, one side only.

They are liberals trying to out-liberal each other, yet even they often do not express their true feelings. They know if they say the wrong thing, the mob will show up at their office, or they will be accused of being a racist and their careers will be over. As I say, academia is sick.

Students know if they don't write liberal dogma on papers they will get poor grades and may also be accused of being a racist.

Academia is teaching a generation of young Americans to hate their country but they are 100% wrong in their reasons and justifications. In President Trump's Mount Rushmore speech July 3rd, 2020 he identified the problem beautifully:

Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.

So many in academia embrace Marxist hatred and doctrines, which shows how out of touch with reality they are. Just look around you! We have more wealth and the highest standard of living in the history of the world because of capitalism, competition, the enormous opportunity in our country from sea to shining sea!

Many thousands of people every single day are breaking our laws, which they should not be allowed to do but nevertheless are doing, by illegally crossing our Southern border. Unlike woke liberals in academia, they know that America is the promise land of opportunity for everybody who will go after it.

Most of disgraceful academia does not condemn the 1619 Project whose primary theme --- that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery --- is a total, complete and utter FRAUD without an iota of evidence.

Yet the Federal Government is now promoting this garbage and academia is going along with it because they are political liberals first, and scholars second.

Not a single PENNY of taxpayer money should go to any academic institution that encourages even a hint of Critical Race Theory. With no taxpayer support, they will have to raise all of their own money, and it can be pointed out how racist and worthless so much of what they are teaching, is.

Legislatures need to step up. Idaho and Florida have outlawed Critical Race Theory. Other states are working on it. All 50 need to make that racist garbage against the law.

Below, is an outstanding and clever letter by a Richmond attorney and 1981 UVA graduate, Robert Coleman Smith.

He has used the "F" word a couple times to make a valid point about woke UVA president, James E. Ryan's, acceptance of such language from the student, Hira Azher, whose entire campus dorm door is a vulgar sign (picture below) that starts with "Fuck UVA."

Bravo, Mr. Smith! Excellent Letter! I agree with every word of it.

Please share this post far and wide!

Links to several good articles about the situation at UVA are at the end of this post.]

ROBERT COLEMAN SMITH
Richmond, Virginia

 

April 27, 2021

James E. Ryan
Office of the President
University of Virginia
Post Office Box 400224
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4224

Dear President Ryan:

I’d like to wish you a warm and hardy fuck you! I had always thought this expression was a vulgar and disparaging term. But judging by the way you have embraced Hira Azher’s use of these words, I now know these “University sponsored” words must be a warm and loving idiomatic expression of peace and acceptance. Surely adding the word “fuck” to our academic nomenclature makes the University “great and good.”

Hira Azher's dorm room door at UVA. Photo by Sophie Roehse | The Cavalier Daily.
Hira Azher's dorm room door at UVA. Photo by Sophie Roehse | The Cavalier Daily.

I’d like to thank you for making my beloved alma mater more woke and progressive. In fact, the daily missives from UVA Today have transformed me from a well mannered Southern boy to a fully woke devotee of Saul Alinsky. Thanks to you, I now know that my white supremacist background has given me a distorted value system that is antithetical to not only the values of the University, but also to the various pagan gods that I never knew good woke people should be worshiping. I have now devoted my soul to the gods of Hatred, Division and Ignorance.

I am ashamed of my past and previous belief system that was once rooted in the tenets of Western Civilization and Judeo Christian ethics. To illustrate, just one of the errors of my pre-woke value system, I once believed in the sanctity of private property! I used to be a sympathetic admirer of the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. I realize now that this greedy and carnivorous cabal was just a bunch of hate mongers, and David Hume and Adam Smith were just evil, selfish white guys. Why what good UVA alum could possibly think that private ownership of property benefited the social construct? Ha, what a fool I was!

I used to have an extensive library (another example of my white privilege for which I am ashamed), but because of you, I have now burned all my books. Doing away with Virgil, Livy, Gibbons, Bede, Thomas Aquinas, Locke and hundreds of histories and books of classical literature has liberated me from my Eurocentric past. I mean, what have Europeans ever done to advance civilization? Certainly not as much as the Hutu or Tutsi tribes of Rwanda!

I used to think that events from the past had a bearing on our present times and could give us perspective on how to make our world a better place. But now I know that these lessons from the past are dangerous and if uncovered threaten the University’s mission to cancel evil white guy culture. Why if the public actually learned these lessons from the past, our fellow comrades might think that the University’s leftist teachings are nothing but gobbledygook nonsense! We must destroy knowledge or else we will never reach our goal of a Marxist utopia!

Another example of my southern heritage that I have now discarded, is my parents taught me to be polite, deferential and respectful towards all people of all backgrounds. How bourgeois! Thanks to you and your stellar leadership in allowing students to scream trite, banal obscenities when debating important issues of public policy, I have given up respectful, fact and logic based dialogue. I have learned how to bowl over my adversaries. Why, the other day, I walked into Brooks Brothers and stole a $750 sports jacket. When the clerk confronted me, I fell into a histrionic fit, called him a racist and screamed a torrent of cuss words at him. I was able to keep the jacket. Sadly, they would not do the alterations for free despite me repeatedly yelling the word “equity” and “justice” at the store manager.

By the way, I am fully in the foxhole with Miss A…… (oops, see, that’s a patriarchal misogynist gender title of the old regime), I mean with Comrade Azhi! The nerve of Episcopal High School and the University of Virginia and all of their honkey alumni for paying for her education! She has every right to be angry and outraged. By the way, I listened to the secret tape she recorded of your conversation with her. I was really impressed with the way you pretended to be such a marshmallow. That was just great reverse psychology. You really showed her who was boss!

I have a another mea culpa to get off my chest. I need to expiate my sins because I was once proud of my ancestry and their service to the Commonwealth and our country. However, now I know they were all a bunch of greedy, avaricious and treacherous bastards. My loathsome family has been in Virginia for 400 years, and we have done terrible things, like building businesses, creating jobs, philanthropy, inventing technologies, serving on college boards and the vestry of our churches, all elements of the white male system of oppression. No one did anything cool, like attack a police officer or stick a gun in a pregnant woman’s belly while robbing her. We have caused all of the institutional problems the University has just recently discovered and now wants to remedy. Here are just a few of my family’s sins:

Building a country out of the wilderness. We all know that nation states are bad, especially those that have borders, oh wait, all counties have borders. My bad.

Fighting in every colonial war and conflict that our disgusting country has been involved. I used to be proud of their courage and their sense of honor for fighting for what they believed in, but now, thanks to my new UVA sponsored wokeness, I want to spit on their graves! How dare they fight the British for independence and then form a constitutional, republican form of government! That damned constitution has gotten in the way of us fulfilling our Leninist takeover of this country. By the way, to show you how much UVA Today has changed my mindset, I used to think that the 100 million people that Marxism killed in the 20th century confirmed its evil nature. Now I know that evil is the one indispensable tool we on the Left have to bring about radical, progressive change.

After I burned all my “Western Civ” books and thought I had cleansed my house of its odorous past, I found an old photograph of 22 members of the Coleman side of my family (Caroline County) all dressed in the Confederate grey right before hostilities began with the Union. Many were just young boys. They of course were already brain washed as they all were descended from Revolutionary soldiers who wrongfully fought for independence. The family didn’t want to split from the Union, but Lincoln federalized the Virginia militias, basically telling them they had to go kill fellow Americans. I am ashamed that they didn’t want to go kill people in South Carolina. What militant warmongers these Confederate soldiers were! I am ashamed they had the gall and the pigheadedness to protect their homeland from invasion from a foreign army for four long years. No doubt they should have just rolled over and did what they were told. When I read about their immoveable resistance at the Bloody Angle or standing ankle deep at the Crater in a river of blood, thrusting cold steel into the flesh of the enemy, I always think “what a bunch of sissies! Why should we honor them?” Unfortunately, my Confederate ancestors didn’t have the bravery to just go to a safe room and play with a University sponsored therapy dog. What losers! The whole idea of duty, honor, sacrifice and courage are certainly not the values we want to promote at the University. I am so glad the University removed the plaque commemorating these hedonists off the Rotunda. What a bunch of weenies! Obviously, people who have spent their whole lives virtue signaling in academia are much better people than those who gave their lives for their country!

I always thought that it was property rights, capitalism and free markets that liberated people out of bondage, but now I know differently. If only you had been alive in 1860! Surely someone as virtuous as you could have ended a 6,000 year social and economic institution through the sheer power of your wokeness.

I am so ashamed of my Occidental heritage. When I think of the damage my race has caused the world, I just want to cry in my pumpkin spiced latte! I feel such shame for all the toxic things we have invented that have caused so much harm, such as the rule of law, constitutional rights, electricity, the elimination of famines, the combustible engine, nuclear energy, penicillin, clean water, sanitary sewer systems, hospitals, spacecraft, weaponry to keep us safe, the internet, and well, I could go on because pretty much everything ever invented is the fault of my people’s arrogance. Surely, this county would be better off if everyone ran around half naked with bear grease smeared on their bodies to keep the flies off of them like the Native Americans were doing when the evil white people got here. We certainly ruined their standard of living.

I love the way you let the basketball team kneel during the national anthem! My father and his three brothers ( all University men, College, Law School, etc.) were soldiers during WWII. D-Day, Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima; they were all there being jingoistic imperialists. I hate them! Why do we owe these people any gratitude? When I saw those players kneel, I thought of my young Lt. father at Bastogne, outnumbered, freezing to death in the snow, leading a company of G.I.s against superior German forces, and then I laugh! How does it feel you dumb son of a bitch to see a bunch of University students disrespect you. Ha, ha, you imperialist war monger, I hope you are rolling in your grave!

Now that I am woke, thanks to you, I was wondering if I could take a class or two to learn some new platitudinal buzzwords like “micro-aggression,” “intersectionality,” “equity inclusion,” “problematic history,” “memory politics,” etc. When these right wing fascists, like that medical student Bhattacharya, disagree with me, I want to do more than just scream vulgarities at them and call them a racist. I want some cool new words that have no real meaning to scream at them too. And if I could use them in a rhyme, well no one will be able to out debate me!

Speaking of micro-aggressions, I have never had anybody of another race or gender show hostility towards me, other than of course the multitude of times my house or car has been broken into. Gee, if anybody was ever mad at me, I think I would melt like a snowflake!

I love the way that you extracted money from the taxpayers to engage in socialist economics. Bravo! As everyone knows, the original 1819 Charter of the University stated quite clearly that the President was to milk the taxpayers to pay for his virtue signaling. If one looks closely at the original charter, the paragraph about being a “good steward” of the taxpayer’s money was scratched out.

Finally, I would appreciate it if you could keep me informed of any riots, property destruction or arson I can help out with. I am very much interested in silencing the free speech of anyone who is not woke, especially those Nazis who make logic and fact based arguments. I am available to dox them, get them fired from their jobs, threaten their families, etc. Just let me know.

I am so thankful you are the head Commissar, oops I mean president of the University!

Robert-Coleman-Smith's-signature enlarged

LINKS:

https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2020/10/azher-moving-beyond-free-speech-why-i-say-fk-u-va

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/app/uploads/2020/10/Azher-Ryan-transcript.pdf

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/ryan-wilts-in-confrontation-with-azher/

https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/hira-azher-speaks/

The “F— UVA” Girl Speaks

 

NOTES:

1 Tristan Justice, "More Than 120 Retired Flag Officers Call On Americans To 'Save America, Our Constitutional Republic, And Hold Those Currently In Office Accountable'", May 10, 2021, The Federalist, https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/10/more-than-120-retired-flag-officers-call-on-americans-to-save-america-our-constitutional-republic-and-hold-those-currently-in-office-accountable, accessed 5-10-21.

2 Ibid.

 

The War, The New Orleans Bee, May 1, 1861

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The War

The New Orleans Bee,
May 1, 18611

The Union is the pretext---the subjection of the South
once for all to the supremacy of sectional foes is the
real object of the war.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : In this post are two editorials, one Southern, one Northern, published a week apart in early May, 1861, less than three weeks after Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, thus starting a war that killed 750,000 men and mutilated over a million.

The Southern editorial is "The War," and the Northern is "The Object of the War."

While these are just two editorials out of hundreds, publishing them together allows one to contrast what each side was fighting for.

The New Orleans Bee is exactly correct that Southerners just wanted to govern themselves and live in peace, while Northerners wanted to conquer and rule for their own wealth and power, which were synonymous with the Union.

It is obvious that the North had such overwhelming advantages against the South, they were going to fight. Most Northerners including Lincoln thought it would be a quick Northern victory.

The North had four times the white population of the South, a hundred times the arms manufacturing, an army, navy, merchant marine, functioning government, solid financial system, and, most importantly, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the earth with which to constantly feed Union armies. They could always replace their losses. Over twenty-five percent of the Union Army was foreign born.

Lincoln was a man fifty feet tall, armed to the teeth with modern weaponry, facing a man five feet tall carrying a musket.

Of course Lincoln wanted to fight, and he knew he better fight right then because every second that went by, the South got stronger and the North got weaker.

The North was facing the loss of its captive manufacturing market in the South.

At the same time, it faced the loss of its shipping industry when greedy Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff, which made the entry of goods into the North 37 to 50% higher than entry into the South. Northern ship captains were beating a path to the South.

The South's vision was as powerful as the North's was gloomy. The South had 100% control of King Cotton, the most demanded commodity on the planet. They would now have free trade with Europe and soon manufacture for themselves. They no longer had to be in a country with people who had committed terrorism and murder against them for years, who robbed them blind with taxes and tariffs, and who used abject hatred against them to win an election.

Southerners had been paying 85% of the country's taxes, yet 75% of the tax money had been going into Northern pockets.2 That money would now be turned back inward on the South.

Lincoln could fight right then and use his enormous advantages, or allow the free trade, low tariff South, with 100% control of King Cotton and European trade and military alliances, to compete with the North and perhaps grow to dominance on his Southern border.

The stakes were control of this magnificent country for all time, which meant unlimited wealth and power for the North. It meant huge dynamic cities like New York, Boston, Philly, and a connection with the West. It meant establishing the North as the center of American culture, commerce and technology.

That's what fifty-foot tall Lincoln and the North were fighting for.

That is why Lincoln sent five hostile fleets into the South in April, 1861, to start a war so he could use his enormous advantages to win it.3

It was certainly not to free the slaves. The one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

The Northern editorial below states that an abolition war would not only be unconstitutional, it would be a "wicked and treasonable war," and "those who seek to turn this war into a crusade against slavery . . . are at heart and in effect as much traitors to their country and its Government as are the rebels . . .".

This is not surprising since the North was no friend of the black man. Jim Crow started in the North and was there for years before moving South. Before that, the Northern leader, Abraham Lincoln, his entire life, favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive.]

The War

The New Orleans Bee,
May 1, 1861

The more moderate of the Northern papers still persist in the preposterous assertion that the people of that section have taken up arms simply to preserve the Union. Now, in the first place, this is not true, and in the next, if it were true, it would not in the slightest degree diminish the enormity of Mr. Lincoln's conduct. We say it is not true that this war is waged for the maintenance of the Union. The North knows better than that. She may be cruel, intolerant, aggressive and fanatical, but she is shrewd enough to fathom motives, and sensible enough to understand the impossibility of bringing together the ruptured members of the Confederacy [by Confederacy, they mean the original American republic, the U.S., before any states had seceded], and of keeping them together if they could be momentarily forced into juxtaposition. The Union is the pretext---the subjection of the South once for all to the supremacy of sectional foes is the real object of the war. Equally true is it that if the North really had at heart the perpetuity of the Union, Mr. Lincoln's policy has been none the less barbarous and unjustifiable. Unless he is a born idiot, which we do not believe, he must be aware that to send armies to occupy the South, and fleets to blockade her ports; to seize on all provisions and other articles destined for the South; to maltreat all who sympathize with us, and to display envenomed hostility to us by every possible manifestation, is not exactly calculated to increase the cohesive affinities between the South and North. Lincoln, instead of remitting them, is driving in the wedge of separation with all his force. He has acted as if his real design had been to place an eternal and impassable barrier between the two sections. This has been the effect, let his views have been what they may.

Away then with the false and hypocritical assumption that the North is engaged in a crusade against the South to preserve a Union broken beyond the power of human skill to reconstruct! Better for the Tartuffes [religious hypocrites]4 and Mawworms [parasitic intestinal worms]5 of the North frankly to avow their implacable enmity to us, and their intention to conquer and enthrall us, if possible. There would be some honesty in such a confession. There is none whatever in the wretched pretense with which they seek to mask their odious principles.

The truth is, and it is well for us to comprehend and appreciate it---this is no holiday game between the two sections. Mr. Lincoln's protestations and proclamations disavowing the intention to invade the South are worthless pieces of paper, because they are the productions of a public functionary whose entire course since his inauguration has proved him deplorably deficient in every manly attribute. Mr. Lincoln has signalized his brief career by a monstrous mass of perfidy and falsehood, and is therefore unworthy of the smallest credit. The North is bent on war. Facts demonstrate it. Every usage of war has been put in practice. The blockade of our ports, the stoppage of supplies to the South, the wanton and Vandal-like conflagration of Government stores and fortifications exposed to capture by the South, the efforts to control the navigation of the Mississippi, the deliberate persecution, insult and injury of all Southern sympathizers who unhappily fall into Northern hands, the fell spirit of violence and despotism openly acknowledged by Administration sheets, the threats of invasion and extermination---all indicate beyond the possibility of a doubt the disposition and purposes of the North. We are to have war, and probably on an extended scale. We have no confidence in the well meant but fruitless attempts to arrest the progress of the conflict. Mr. Lincoln is aware that the South is arming only for defense, and asks nothing better than to be suffered unmolested to pursue the even tenor of her way. The responsibility of hostilities lies with him. He can suspend them whenever he pleases. He has no desire to call off his bloodhounds, and the war will therefore go on.

It is well, too, to guard against another common error---that of depreciating the adversary. Rank folly were it to deny the courage of the people of the North. They belong to the revolutionary stock, and have displayed their valor in many a battle field. They are as brave as the men of the South, and were their cause a just one, were they, as we are, defending their houses and firesides, their freedom and independence against ruthless invaders, they would be, as we trust we shall prove, invincible. Yet they are as numerous as the swarms of barbarians which the frozen North sent from her loins to overrun the Roman Empire, and this is their great advantage. But against this we place our devotion, our unanimity, our strong defensive attitude, our easily protected territory. Let them come in in their courage and their numbers, and the South will resist the shock as steadily and successfully as she resisted the veterans of the British army on the plains of Chalmette [where the 1815 American victory in the Battle of New Orleans occurred].

 

The Object of the War

Concord New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette [Douglas],
May 8, 18616

The course of a portion of republican papers and their pulpit orators has raised a vitally important question as to the object and purpose of the war which the people of the North are now so unitedly and energetically preparing to prosecute against the rebels.---That question is this: Is this a war in support of the Government, the Constitution, the Union, and the dearly-purchased rights of a free people, or a negro crusade for the abolition of slavery? Whatever may have been the views of the people as to the causes of the war, or their opinions as to the proper remedy for the troubles out of which it has grown, there is no question that the great mass of them have responded to the summons to war with the distinct understanding that they were called upon to preserve national institutions and constitutional privileges, and not to destroy them---to sustain and perpetuate the Constitution and the Union, to uphold the Government, and put down armed rebellion seeking their overthrow. If such is the real character and purpose of the war, it must and will be cordially supported and energetically aided by the united people of the North; but if it is an abolition crusade, designed to destroy the rights and institutions of the South recognized by the Constitution, then it is a wicked and treasonable war and will not be participated in by any man who loves the old Union, reveres the Constitution and has a patriot's devotion to the Government and flag of our country.

We do not doubt that the President and his constitutional advisers entered upon this great contest with a single view to maintain[ing] the integrity of the Union, the authority of the Government, the perpetuity of the Constitution, the honor, rights, welfare and glory of the country, its flag and its people; and those who now seek to give it a different direction and purpose, have no countenance from those in authority. This we think is plain from the President's own declarations, in the most important document ever issued by the Chief Magistrate of this Union---his first Proclamation. In that he declared the object of his call for troops to be to suppress rebellion and "to cause the laws to be duly executed," and to "maintain the honor, integrity and the existence of our National Union," and he further declared that "in every event" the utmost care should be observed to avoid any "interference with property." To preserve the Union is to maintain the Constitution upon which it is founded; and this is thus solemnly declared to be the great end and purpose of the war. To make it an abolition crusade, is to overthrow the Constitution, and to disregard and violate its spirit and letter. And it is thus that the people understood the matter; and this accounts for the unanimity and zeal with which they have responded to the call of the Government. And the action of the commanders of troops in refusing to aid or countenance slave insurrections and the escape of slaves, in their march through Maryland, shows very plainly their ideas of their duty in this respect; and there is reason to believe that their course has met the approval of the Government.

It may therefore be safely concluded that the Government gives no countenance to their attempt to pervert this great popular movement from its noble and patriotic purpose. That purpose is to suppress rebellion, and to preserve the Union, maintain the Constitution and uphold the Government; and for that object all patriotic men will most cordially unite in contributing their means and their personal services to the extent of their ability. And those who seek to turn this war into a crusade against slavery, or who thus represent it, are at heart and in effect as much traitors to their country and its Government as are the rebels who are openly engaged in the Devil's work of attempting to overthrow that Government by force of arms.

 

NOTES:

1 "The War," The New Orleans Bee, May 1, 1861, in Southern Editorials on Secession, Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., American Historical Association, 1931; reprint, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1964 by permission of Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 511-13.

2 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History,  2020), 103.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142.

4 Tartuffe is defined by Oxford's Lexico.com as "A religious hypocrite, or a hypocritical pretender to excellence of any kind." https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/tartuffe, accessed 5-5-21.

5 Maw-worm is defined by Oxford's Lexico as "A parasitic worm which infests the stomach or intestines of humans and other mammals; especially a nematode of either of the genera Ascaris and Oxyuris." https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/maw-worm, accessed 5-5-21.

6 "The Object of the War," Concord New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, May 8, 1861, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, 1942, the American Historical Association; reprint, 1964, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., by permission of Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., Vol. II, 830-31.