It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven of Ten: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

Posted on December 8, 2021December 10, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

Chapter IX
John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part-Seven--MAIN-PICT-2---Harper's Ferry 68K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter IX.

ON MONDAY, October 17, 1859 in Arlington, Virginia Colonel Robert E. Lee was "working on the financial accounts of his late father-in-law, George Washington Custis" who had died and left Lee executor of his "unprofitable and entangled mess" of an estate.

Of course that estate would later become our nation's most sacred burial ground, Arlington National Cemetery.

Lee was surprised to see Lieutenant James E. B. "Jeb" Stuart who was not clean shaven as he had been in the 1850s at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Lee was superintendent and Stuart was one of his favorite cadets.¹

Stuart's father had been a "lawyer who was famous locally as a bon vivant and heavy drinker" but Stuart was a "teetotaler and devout Episcopalian."

Stuart and his wife had each been given a slave but the "Stuarts did not believe in slavery and quickly freed both of the African Americans."²

Stuart fought the Cheyenne in Kansas and took a bullet in the chest but recovered. He also did peacekeeping between "John Brown and other abolitionists hooligans and the Missouri "Border Ruffians."³

Stuart and Lee were both on leave in 1859 and Stuart had a lot he wanted to do including trying to sell his invention, "Stuart's Lightning Horse Hitcher," to the War Department. It was a device to attach a saber "to a horseman's belt."

Instead, he was given orders to "go to Arlington to fetch Colonel Lee" because there was serious trouble at Harper's Ferry. On hearing, Lee left immediately for Washington without even putting on his uniform.⁴

President Buchanan and Secretary of War John Floyd said a man named Smith "and some 'Kansas "Free-Staters"' were inciting a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry" and had already "seized the government arsenal." State militiamen, a battalion of troops, detachment of Marines and ninety sailors were heading to Harper's Ferry and Lee was to take command and put the "revolt" down:

Lieutenant Stuart offered to serve as a volunteer aide, and Colonel Lee accepted. The two future Rebel generals left D.C. by a special train at five o'clock p.m.⁵

Smith was actually John Brown, a failure in life, who "'in ordinary times he would have been interesting mainly in a clinical sense'" according to Dr. Ludwell H. Johnson.⁶ Brown was "born in Connecticut in 1800" and descended from Puritans. Mitcham writes:

He became a fanatical abolitionist and recruited a small following. After securing funding in New England and Ohio, Brown went west, where he and his people took part in the turmoil that was "Bleeding Kansas," and murdered five men in cold blood, most hacked to death by swords in front of their screaming wives and children.⁷

Brown and his gang became robbers then "fled Kansas for New England, where he obtained funding for a terrorist attack in Virginia" which he planned to make into a multi-state "slave rebellion throughout the South" as they gathered followers.

Of course, Brown's New England funding violates the Constitution which is supposed to "insure domestic tranquility" and not murder and rape against fellow citizens.

Where is New England's plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, the way they "ended slavery" in New England? Ended slavery is in quotes because they didn't really end it there.

It is provable conclusively that most New Englanders sold their slaves back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. New Englanders just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one as noted by contemporaries such as Charles Dickens. See Black Bondage in the North by Edgar J. McManus (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973), and Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (NY: Ballantine Books, 2005), and other works.

The hypocrisy of New England and the North and many historians today with their "woke" history defending New England and the North, is breathtaking.

New England brought virtually all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process. They built much, perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the slave trade, and they are directly responsible, with the British before them, for forcing the horrendous Middle Passage on poor Africans.

On the Middle Passage, Africans were chained to decks in filthy stinking slave ships with feces, vomit, dead people, all baked in a stifling hot oven with no air circulation in the bowels of slave ships for months on end. They had been sold into slavery in Africa by their fellow black Africans.

So rather than work on a plan of emancipation that would work --- and, as stated, New Englanders knew how to do it --- they supported a terrorist and murderer to murder fellow citizens in the South.

The North was already at war with the South. By seceding, Southerners were protecting themselves.

Mitcham writes that Brown tried to recruit Frederick Douglas and others but Douglas thought better.

Brown also approached Harriett Tubman who "consented to help Brown and recruited slaves in southern Ontario to join the invasion. (Brown liked her and called her 'General Tubman.')". But Tubman disappeared and did not participate.⁸

Brown miscalculated because the blacks around Harper's Ferry were not "badly treated compared to those on some of the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of the Deep South." They "were house servants and free people of color. They would not be enthusiastic about joining a dubious revolt."⁹

Brown going by "'Isaac Smith'" gathered up 22 men and his weapons "four miles north of Harper's Ferry" and on Sunday, October 16, at night, "he struck." They captured Colonel Lewis Washington's plantation but his slaves were not interested in joining Brown. That should have told Brown he was in trouble.¹⁰

Next, they seized the Harper's Ferry arsenal:

The first casualty occurred when Hayward Shepherd, a highly respected free man of color and a baggage master for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, realized what was happening. Rather than join the raiders, he tried to run away, so Brown's men shot him in the back. Shepherd died of his wounds. Also murdered was Thomas Boerly, an arsenal worker on his way to work.¹¹

The incredibly ignorant Brown captured a B&O train but let it go so naturally it spread the alarm that terrorists had captured Harper's Ferry:

Individual militia companies from nearby communities quickly assembled and joined the fray. Local black people refused to join the battle, but local whites did---against Brown.¹²

More civilians were killed "including the unarmed mayor, Fontaine Beckham, and George W. Turner, who had attended West Point with Robert E. Lee." Brown "and his men took refuge in the armory, which was soon surrounded by local farmers and shopkeepers" who quickly realized Brown didn't have much of a force. They "recaptured the arsenal and loosely surrounded the terrorists in the nearby fire engine house."¹³

At 10 p.m. Lee and Stuart got there and "walked across the dark railroad bridge to the armory where Colonel Lee decided to wait until daylight to attack. He sent Jeb Stuart to demand "Smith" surrender. Stuart entered the engine room, startled at what he saw. 'Why, aren't you old Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, whom I once had there as my prisoner?'"

Brown would not surrender so, "At first light on October 18, Stuart again advanced to the engine house double doors under a flag of truce. 'Are you ready to surrender, and trust to the mercy of the government?' he asked."¹⁴

Brown said no but wanted to negotiate safe passage out, promising to release his hostages later.

Stuart refused:

Several of the hostages and captured workmen cried out to Lee and Stuart, urging them not to use force or Brown would kill them. Above their voices came the roar of Colonel Washington: 'Never mind us! Fire!'
'The old Revolutionary blood does tell,' an admiring Robert E. Lee remarked. He was sitting on a horse, about fifteen yards from the firehouse.¹⁵

Stuart "stepped aside and dropped his hat---the signal for the attack" and "A dozen Marines rushed forward" but heavy hammers didn't work so they rammed the doors "with a heavy ladder" and that splintered them.

Marine Lieutenant Israel Greene rushed in with his men and two were shot dead immediately. Colonel Washington pointed out Brown to Greene and Greene rushed him "and swung his saber hard, intent on splitting Brown's skull" but Brown dodged then stood up and "the lieutenant gave him an under-thrust with his sword midway up his body, lifting him completely off the ground" but it hit Brown's belt buckle which broke the ceremonial sword Greene was carrying.¹⁶ Greene had not been told they were assaulting terrorists this day. He had thought they were attending a ceremonial function:

If he had been carrying his combat sword, Brown's splattered insides would have been all over the fire engine house's floor. There would never have been a John Brown trial....¹⁷

Mitcham points out that had there not been a John Brown trial, Southerners might not have realized the effectiveness of abolitionist propaganda and Northern hatred toward them thus might not have reacted to Lincoln's election by seceding.

Brown was badly wounded and other terrorists killed or they surrendered:

The marines hauled Brown and his surviving men outside to the grass and treated their wounds. In all, ten abolitionists were dead---including two of Brown's sons---three were immediately captured, four were captured later, and five escaped. Six civilians died and nine were wounded, as were two marines, one fatally. There were militia casualties as well, but their exact numbers are not known.¹⁸

The bloody hands of the New Englanders who financed Brown's terrorism includes hundreds of thousands more deaths because Brown's raid and the North's adoring attitude toward Brown helped greatly to bring on the War Between the States.

Those same hypocritical Yankees would have been better off developing a realistic plan to end slavery but that was never the North's desire. They didn't want slavery ended then all the slaves move to the North and be job competition.

They wanted to hurt the South. They were drooling for political control of the country so they could keep taxing the South and spending the South's money in the North. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet over 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

All of this agitation and the war itself were about political power and money like all wars are. There was nothing whatsoever moral about the North's war against the South. Contemporaries like Charles Dickens knew it and stated it clearly.

Mitcham writes:

Following the raid, investigators examined the Kennedy Farm. They found Brown's correspondence with the Secret Six, a.k.a. the Secret Committee of Six---the abolitionists who funded John Brown. They also discovered maps of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The maps had notes pasted to the margins showing the black population. Counties with predominantly African-American populations had been highlighted. They also found the provisional Constitution for Brown's new government and 900 pikes.¹⁹

Edmund Ruffin "got hold of some of the pikes and sent one to the legislature of each Southern state with the inscription: 'Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethern.'"²⁰

Brown's trial began October 27, 1859. Brown "was defended by a team of New England lawyers, led by Massachusetts abolitionist John Albion Andrew." On October 30 Brown was found guilty of "treason, conspiring with and telling slaves to escape and revolt, and first-degree murder." He was sentenced to death and hanged December 2, 1859.²¹

The North's worship of terrorist Brown woke the South up and shocked it:

Church bells rang in his honor, women wore black mourning clothes, men wore black armbands, politicians lauded him, businesses closed, and ladies cried on the day of his execution. Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Phillips praised him, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson and the rest of the New England literary elite.²²

Emerson said Massachusetts prison inmates "were superior human beings to the leaders of the South" and Thoreau compared Brown to Jesus Christ. Brown's lawyer, John Albion Andrew, "was elected governor of Massachusetts."²³

This "proved to the South that the Republican party was not distancing itself from its extremist members but was embracing them" and apparently "endorsing anti-Southern violence and servile insurrection."

The Secret Six cowards who when safe in Massachusetts with their compound interest on their money from the slave trade safely in their pockets mostly ran rather than face their crimes:

The Secret Six who funded Brown were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Steams. Brown's captured documents and subsequent investigations of him revealed that they had financed the Harper's Ferry Raid, perhaps to the tune of $25,000 ($679,000 in 2017 dollars).²⁴

Frederick Douglas fled to Canada since he knew about the planned attack.

Higginson stayed in Massachusetts where he knew he would not be prosecuted.

The "Republican governors of Iowa and Ohio refused to extradite" the seven of Brown's raiders who escaped. This proved to Southerners that the North was not going to obey the law. To these Northerners, Southerners were already the enemy, and "To many [in the South], it was a harbinger of what to expect under Republican rule."²⁵

South Carolina, Georgia and Texas mentioned this Northern harboring of terrorists in their declarations of causes for seceding.

The South had become certain it could not depend on a Republican administration to obey the law and protect them from those who wanted the slaves to rise up and slaughter them in the night as had happened in Haiti. Thomas Jonathan Jackson of VMI and others began thinking seriously about secession and "Many Southern moderates started to believe the 'fire-eaters' had been right all along."²⁶

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eight of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Six: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 91.

² Ibid.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 91-92.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92-93.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 93.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94-95.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 95.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 96.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97-98.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 98.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 99.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100-101.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 101.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six of Ten: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows

Posted on December 2, 2021December 3, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Six of Ten

Chapter VII
Agitation and Compromise

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapters VII and VIII.

MITCHAM OPENS CHAPTER VII, Agitation and Compromise, with "William Lloyd Garrison was the son of an alcoholic sailor who abandoned his family. He grew into a staunch Baptist and a vitriolic, harsh, hateful man---an odd combination for a Christian."

Garrison denounced the Constitution as "A covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." The fanatical Garrison to his credit wanted the North to secede from the United States so he did not have to be associated with slavery. Georgia's Robert Toombs said Garrison, while an extremist, was a man of conviction who believed what he preached unlike so many for whom anti-slavery was a political position, not a moral one.

Most abolitionists were not pro-black but were anti-black. They were anti-slavery because they did not want blacks anywhere near them, especially in the West.

Garrison, with Arthur Tappen, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Garrison had published The Liberator since 1831.

His heart might have been in the right place --- to him, at any rate --- but his radical tactics did not hasten the end of slavery. They entrenched it. Mitcham writes:

The abolitionists' extreme rhetoric had a polarizing effect, in both North and South, which developed with remarkable speed. Virginia---which narrowly defeated a law abolishing slavery within the state only three years before---enacted a law in 1836 making it a crime to advocate abolition. The Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south to stand trial.¹

Mitcham points out that earlier generations of Southerners were like Thomas Jefferson who "denounced slavery in 1776" and thereafter but like so many others was stuck in the system that even Lincoln acknowledged would never be started up today (during Lincoln's lifetime). Lincoln also said if he had been born into a slave society, he would not know how to end it either.

Before virtue-signaling radical abolitionists, who never once had a realistic plan to end slavery, Southerners themselves wanted to end it. George Washington said "'It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery may be abolished by law.'"

James Madison, Father of the Constitution, was a slaveholder but admitted it was wrong.

The abolitionist demand for immediate, uncompensated emancipation was absurd. It would destroy the economies of the South and North because the Northern economy was based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton.

It would also create a dangerous social problem because how would former slaves live? Already it was against the law in several Northern and Western states for free blacks to live there or even visit. To survive they had to steal or commit other crimes.

Slavery could have ended with a plan that dealt with all those problems but there was no will for that, especially in the racist North where freed slaves would go and be job competition. The demand for such a thing was ridiculous and I suspect that many virtue-signaling abolitionists knew it was ridiculous but just didn't care.

Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Massachusetts acknowledged the danger of "the propaganda of abolitionist societies." They encouraged slave insurrections which were murderous bloody affairs such as happened in Haiti. Adams writes "'husbands and fathers at the South considered that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defence, the protection of their households against a servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office, and seized and burned abolition papers; indeed, no excesses are surprising, in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed.'"

Southerners attacked Northerners for "'wage slavery'" and Mitcham writes that "In 1850, near the end of his life, Daniel Webster lamented that the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850 would have led to the South gradually eliminating slavery had it not been for the frenzy stirred up by the abolitionists."²

The virtue-signalers, then and today, might feel good about themselves but their hands are usually dripping with blood.

Mitcham covers in detail every election, politician, political party, tariff, issue, date, percentage, and their significance in the entire antebellum period and he does it with a clarity and smoothness that makes it a pleasure to read.

The balance of power between North and South was huge because Northern states wanted high protective tariffs and large expenditures for public works in their states, while Southern states wanted low tariffs and free trade, the opposite of what the North wanted.

Mitcham writes:

A major factor in the Whigs' defeat was the Tariff of 1842, which they managed to push through Congress and persuaded a reluctant President Tyler to sign. Called the Black Tariff, it raised the rates from 20 percent to nearly 40 percent. The tariff hamstrung the economy so severely that total tariff revenues declined. As a result, the Whigs lost both branches of Congress in 1844.³

The U.S. soon annexed Texas then war broke out with Mexico (1846-48) "in which the United States Army pushed to the Pacific and captured California and the modern Southwest."

Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania on August 8, 1846 introduced his famous "Wilmot Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the "territory annexed from Mexico." Like so many anti-slavery virtue-signalers who were definitely not pro-black, Wilmot admitted his racist motivation was to keep blacks out of the West.

The entire issue of slavery in the West was political posturing. Slavery was not going to work in the West ever. Huge territories at one time or another were open for slavery yet there were never over a handful of slaves anywhere.

Mitcham writes:

Senator James G. Blaine of Maine recalled: 'The whole controversy over the Territories, as remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.'⁴

Mitcham believes Southerners should not have fought the battle over slavery in the West since slavery could not work there.

However, it was a huge point of honor because Southerners, as Mitcham points out, had largely conquered the western territory. More Southern blood and treasure than Northern was used in the Mexican War so to then be told they could not take slaves there, even if a Southerner didn't own any slaves, was too much of an insult.⁵

The election of 1848 "was close and heated." The racist Wilmot had more to say. Mitcham writes:

The Southern slaveholders were called the 'Lords of the Lash,' while their opponents (northern textile manufacturers) were dubbed the 'Lords of the Loom.' Many of the Free Soil Democrats wanted to keep the west open for free white laborers. Congressman Wilmot told one rally: 'The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. Let us keep what remains for ourselves . . . for free white labor.'⁶

There's gold in them there hills!

In 1848, gold was discovered in California and its population increased dramatically. That led to California wanting to be admitted as a state, which meant the South would be forever outvoted in the U.S. Senate.

On March 4, 1850, in his last speech when he was so ill that James Mason of Virginia had to read it, John C. Calhoun "warned that an overbearing North was dissolving the ties that held the states together. The United States, he declared, could not hold together by cries of 'Union, Union, glorious Union,' any more than a physician could save a seriously ill patient by crying 'Health, health, glorious health.'"⁷

Mitcham paraphrases Calhoun who stated that "compromise with Yankees was useless. The North would use it as a stepping-stone to greater concessions later."

The Northern majority had already begun to construe the Constitution to increase federal power and diminish states' rights, to minimize Southern influence at the national level. To avert disunion, the North had to stop its attacks and agree to a constitutional amendment to protect the Southern minority. It if would not or could not, the South should leave in peace.⁸

Mitcham writes that Calhoun would have gone down as one of our greatest political thinkers behind only Jefferson but for his "full-throated embrace of slavery."

Even so, John F. Kennedy ranked him among the top five senators ever. Had the South listened to Calhoun, the Civil War would have been fought a decade earlier, when the South was stronger. During the next ten years, due to immigration and the development of the West, the North grew stronger while Southern strength lagged. The South had a much better chance of winning in 1850 than it did in 1861, and even then, it was a near-run thing.⁹

Northerners knew they had the majority and were anxious to force their will on the rest of the country. Mitcham writes:

Webster made his final speech three days after Calhoun. He endorsed Clay's compromise. The anti-slavery Whigs, led by Senator William H. Seward of New York, were disappointed. Seward, meanwhile, became metaphysical. He spoke of obeying a 'higher law' than the Constitution---the kind of argument that could justify anything.¹⁰

Seward's "higher law" comment was warned about many times in the secession debate in the South in the year leading up to Southern states seceding. It is a perfect example of why Southerners did not trust Northerners to obey the Constitution, so how can you be in a country with them?

Sounds like woke liberals today who despise our history and the Constitution. Many are from the same blue state area that Seward was in the 1860s.

Seward also had another inflammatory comment that Southerners heard loud and clear in 1858 when he said an "irrepressible conflict" was coming between North and South.

In June 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was "world class propaganda" in the form of fiction, came out. Tom's "cruel master, Simon Legree, who is a Northerner by birth, tried to break him of his religious faith. When he fails, Legree beats Tom to death out of frustration."¹¹

Soon after, in 1856, pompous Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made an insulting speech about slavery and Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler was related to Rep. Preston Brooks, also of South Carolina.

Brooks, unable to challenge Sumner to a duel because that was something you did with gentlemen, and Sumner was considered a dog, entered the Senate chambers and beat Sumner unconscious with a gutta percha cane while Brooks' friend, Rep. Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina, kept Sumner's friends at bay.

Brooks was the perfect example of the hostilities of North and South. He was hated in the North but adored in the South and his cane, which had shattered into pieces in the attack on Sumner, became valuable as each piece was begged for as a sacred relic.

Brooks was sent a replacement cane on which were the words: Hit Him Again.

I was once commander of the Preston Brooks Camp, SCV, out of Columbia, South Carolina and our excellent newsletter, which I edited and published, was entitled, of course, "Hit Him Again!"

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

Mitcham includes so many fascinating stories in this chapter it is a delight to read, though some are quite sad.

Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852. Mitcham writes:

History often turns on a dime. One such turn occurred on January 6, 1853. The President-elect and his wife were traveling from Boston when their train derailed. It rolled down an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts. Pierce and his wife survived, but their only living child, Benjamin or "Benny," was crushed to death and nearly decapitated. Pierce could not prevent his wife from seeing the body. Afterward, both Pierces suffered from depression, Jane greatly. She wondered if Benny's death was God's punishment for her husband's seeking high office. A cloud came over their marriage and Pierce's incoming administration. His son's death and Jane's constant depression continued to trouble Franklin and materially contributed to the failure of his administration. Pierce was already a heavy drinker; after, he drank even more. It would eventually kill him. Franklin Pierce die of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869. His wife died of depression six years before him.¹²

The fight over the route of the transcontinental railroad began with Jefferson Davis, Pierce's secretary of war, "ordering two routes surveyed, one north and one south." The Southern route had land and right-of-ways settled but the Northern faced all kind of problems including unorganized territory, Indians and mountains.

Stephen A. Douglas "pressured President Pierce into supporting" the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to organize them as territories with "popular sovereignty" in place with respect to slavery. This repealed the Missouri Compromise, which forbid slavery north of parallel 36^o30' (except for Missouri).

Douglas did this because he needed Southern support for his bill to use the northern route for the transcontinental railroad despite the enormous problems when compared to the Southern route.

In a statement that proves that most anti-slavery in the North was political and not moral or pro-black, Mitcham writes:

Horace Greeley, an abolitionist leader and the editor of the New York Tribune, later commented that the [Kansas-Nebraska] act created more abolitionists in two months than William Lloyd Garrison produced in twenty years." (Bold emphasis added.)

It produced more abolitionists because so much money and political power was involved with having a northern route for the transcontinental railroad going through Chicago that suddenly Northerners, who had not given a damn about slavery before, became abolitionists to get that money and power.

That kind of greed for money was the cause of the War Between the States.

When Southerners left the Union seeking self-government as promised in the Declaration of Independence with "Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...", it meant the South would rise to dominance in North America with control of King Cotton and European trade and military alliances, and that is something Lincoln and the North could not tolerate. It had nothing to do with Northern morality or desire to end slavery but rather with Northern immorality, hypocrisy, and lust for other people's money.

As Lincoln said, it's about Union, the source of Northern wealth and power, and if he could free no slaves, or one slave, or all of them to preserve the Union, he was going to do it.

In 1854, "The American or 'Know Nothing' Party, which was formed out of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant elements, went from zero to fifty-one seats." They allied with "the anti-slavery Opposition Party and a few smaller parties, which held a handful of seats."

The Whig Party collapsed and:

Most of the former Northern Whigs joined the Republicans, which became the first genuinely regional party in the United States. It was a big government, big business party from the beginning. It advanced the ideas of Hamilton, who believed these policies would bring national growth through a powerful centralized government and government intervention through government regulation, subsidies, and high tariff policies, rather than through free-market solutions.¹³

George Washington warned that sectional parties would destroy the country but abolitionist Republican Wendell Phillips bragged that the Republican Party was sectional: the party of the North pledged against the South.

Of course Washington was right. This was the "tyranny of the majority" that the Founding Fathers warned about. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about it too. Northerners were determined to rule with their majority and pass legislation that robbed the rest of the country and sent money from the South into the North.

The "political winds were shifting, the political chameleons naturally changed with them."

Abraham Lincoln, for example, became less moderate. As an attorney, he had represented a slave owner and argued to have his client's slaves, who had fled to Illinois, returned to him. (He lost the case.). He had been silent on the issue of slavery, he had supported the Black Codes, and he was a big believer in African colonization. In 1854, he was an extraordinarily successful and wealthy corporate attorney, but his political career was at a low point. He demonized the South and said they were likely to expand slavery to the West. This claim was absurd and Lincoln had to know it (there were only eighty-fives slaves in Kansas at its peak), but being the political opportunist that he was, he joined the chorus anyway.¹⁴

The national atmosphere was tense and emotional. The "Border War" began. "In May 1856, 700 pro-Southern men descended on Lawrence, Kansas, and pillaged the place. Shortly thereafter, fanatical abolitionist John Brown retaliated by torturing and murdering five Southerners. They were not slave holders and had not taken part in the Lawrence Raid."¹⁵

That summer began barn and house burnings, "ambushes, and bushwhacking. At least 200 people were killed." This would continue until 1865.¹⁶

In the election of 1856, "The Republican platform called for high tariffs and for slavery to be excluded from the territories. This would keep them from the "troublesome presence of free Negroes," as Lincoln said.¹⁷

Mitcham writes that there were no moral considerations at all among Northerners: "The motives were purely to protect the economic and political interests of the North and West at the expense of the South."¹⁸ Their strategy was "to spread alarm in the North by proclaiming that 'slave Power' or the 'slaveocracy' intended to gain control of the government."

First, it would (somehow) conquer the territories; then it would spread slavery to the North. It would make every state a slave state. This was absurd, of course, but hysteria can work.¹⁹

Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken by his master into Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, sued for his freedom "but on March 6, 1857, [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and his colleagues ruled in favor of the slave owner. Speaking for the majority, Judge Taney declared that because he was black, Scott was not a person under the U.S. Constitution; he was the property of his owner, and property could not be taken from anyone without due process of law."²⁰

Taney also ruled that "the Missouri Compromise's prohibition on slavery was unconstitutional. Congress had no right to exclude slavery from any of the territories".²¹

Again, Abraham Lincoln remarked "that the South would not embrace slavery today (i.e., 1858) if it were not already economically entrenched there."²²

The 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate included the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates, seven of them:

Douglas attacked Lincoln's racist credentials. He accused Lincoln of thinking the black was his equal and hence his brother. Douglas himself pointedly remarked that the African American was not his equal and certainly not his brother.
Lincoln responded that he was not and never had been in favor of the equality of the races. He believed that so long as the two races lived together, there must be one superior race and one inferior race. 'I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race,' he declared.²³

Douglas won. He was appointed Illinois senator by the legislature despite Lincoln winning the popular vote. Senators were not elected directly by voters in those days. They were appointed by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment changed all that in 1913.

But "As a result of the election, Lincoln rose to national prominence. Also, slavery became a major issue."²⁴

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Five: Chapter VI, Cultural Differences)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 62.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 63-64.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 66.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 68.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 67.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 69.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70-71.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 71.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 73.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 79.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 82.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 83.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 84.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 86.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 87-88.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 88.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 89.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 90.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Five of Ten

Posted on November 25, 2021November 25, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

If Heaven ain't a lot like Dixie
I don't wanna go
If Heaven ain't a lot like Dixie
I'd just as soon stay home

From Hank Williams Jr.,
If Heaven Ain't a Lot Like Dixie

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Five of Ten

Chapter VI
Cultural Differences

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : This is a fascinating chapter comparing Southern culture with Northern.

Southern culture today must be superior because Northerners and Westerners are moving to the South in droves.

They are coming here to escape government tyranny and the violence and lawlessness in much of the blue state North and West. In California, four days ago, a mob of 80 people ransacked a Nordstrom department store and assaulted employees near Oakland. Two days before that, another mob robbed several stores in San Francisco.¹

Come South and try that.

We have our idiots who think the police are the problem and criminals ought to be slapped on the wrist or not prosecuted for stealing up to $950 but violence and massive theft is a clear sign of a sick decaying civilization.

In 2020 most of the George Floyd rioters and arsonists had their charges dropped and that was applauded by Kamala Harris, but Kyle Rittenhouse, a first-rate all-American kid out to help victims of mob violence was himself the victim of a leftist political prosecution with alleged prosecutorial misconduct. He was slandered by the "president" of the United States and fraud media but found innocent of all charges by a jury of his peers.

What was on trial with Rittenhouse was the right to defend yourself against mob violence. The left, always enamored with mob violence, thinks it gives them power, but average Americans on Rittenhouse's jury rejected that woke idiocy and affirmed the absolute right of self-defense.

That so many of my Democrat friends think this woke garbage is a good idea is why the often predicted electoral bloodbath will take place starting in 2022, and it can't come soon enough.

How about standing up for the law-biding who work every day and would like to raise children in a safe decent country. How about standing up for people who start businesses and risk all to hire other people and provide goods and services.

Of course, the criminals robbing businesses will step in human feces and drug needles in the streets of California, a state that once was great until it became a one-party Democrat state. Now, it can't keep the electricity on, but their leaders are all woke.

Here in the South there is a strong, prosperous civilization of FREEDOM from government tyranny, with happy patriotic people who will wave you into traffic in front of them, though if you cross them unfairly or threaten their families you will end up with a boot in your a_s as Toby Keith says in his song . . . or worse.

Keith's Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue describes it perfectly:

My daddy served in the army where he lost his right eye
But he flew a flag out in our yard until the day that he died
He wanted my mother, my brother, my sister and me
To grow up and live happy in the land of the free ²

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter VI.]

MITCHAM WRITES that the South has always been "more leisurely and less money-oriented" than the North and he quotes a British citizen, Anthony Trollope, who traveled extensively in the South and North. Trollope wrote in 1861:

The South is seceding from the North because the two are not homogeneous. They have different instincts, different appetites, different morals, and a different culture.³

John Adams in the Continental Congress wrote his wife that "the political union between the two people would not hold 'without the utmost caution on both sides.'"⁴

Mitcham describes it well:

New England, with its Puritan legacy, developed a self-absorbed, holier-than-thou culture that looked down on the rest of America. Their elite believed high tariffs were their natural right, making New England stronger than the rest of the country. They also viewed nature as something dark and foreboding, an evil to be conquered and controlled. The Southerner saw nature as something to embrace and enjoy. They loved hunting, fishing (usually with a cane pole), and horse racing (gambling), and had a relaxed attitude toward life and nature. Some even saw the South as close to paradise on earth.⁵

Mitcham points out that by 1850 "the North had many secular humanists, including atheists, deists, transcendentalists, and assorted other non-believers" but the South loved its religion. Southerners were not so delusional as to think they know all there is about the universe and meaning of life.

Through prayer, it [the South] looked to God for guidance and regarded secular humanism with suspicion and often with outright hostility. Baptist churches and Churches of Christ sprang up all over the place. Unpretentious, fervent country preachers expounded their simple truths straight from the Bible and gained thousands of converts, and their tent revivals became famous. ⁶

My Aunt Bell, who, with her husband Bruce, raised my dad and his six brothers and sisters when their mother died during the Depression, used to talk about camp meetings in Saint George, South Carolina. She told me when she was a young girl she would go for a week to the white preachings then stay the next week for the black.

Mitcham notes that the South is known as the Bible Belt and he gives us his best example of Northern and Southern cultural differences:

The fact that many Northerners use the term [Bible Belt] derogatorily while many Southerners (including this author) consider it a compliment further illustrates the differences between the two cultures.⁷

New Englanders "looked down on Southerners, with their French, Spanish, American Indian, and even African cultural influences, and certainly they considered themselves vastly superior to the uncouth Westerners."⁸

Mitcham quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote in his famous work, Democracy in America:

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.⁹

Tocqueville, a Frenchman, was perhaps the most astute observer of life in antebellum America because he was observing as an outsider. He traveled the country widely and published Democracy in America in two volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840.

Tocqueville also stated that any American state that became powerful enough to take over the federal government would do so and force the rest of the country to be tributary to its wealth and power, which is exactly what happened except it wasn't one state. It was all the close-knit populous states of the Northeast.

The North's population exploded in the 1850s with massive immigration. By the time Southerners realized they were going to be outvoted forever by the Northern majority --- something the Founders called the "tyranny of the majority" --- it was too late.

The South should have seceded in the 1830s because of the Tariff of Abominations, or in 1850, or better still, they should have listened to Patrick Henry and never joined the Constitution but instead formed their own country with fellow Southerners.

A big problem for Northerners was the "integrated nature of Southern society." The South was a multi-racial integrated society until it was forced during Reconstruction to adopt the Northern model of rigid segregation.

Segregation had been easy for the North because there were few blacks in the North, but it was impossible for the South until forced on the South after Reconstruction.

Southerners had resisted segregation because they associated it with "the ills of Northern industrial society, as pointed out by C. Vann Woodward in his classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a book Martin Luther King called 'the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.'"¹⁰

Northerners as the white Yankees in Gone with the Wind showed, were repulsed by the thought of Mammy touching their children.

Scarlett O'Hara thought that was absurd. Here's where fiction perfectly illustrates reality but even more horrifying than Mammy's black hands was the fact that "Black women often served as wet nurses for white babies, something Northerners found offensive, if not odious."¹¹

Mitcham points out that the black population in the South grew rapidly "after the slave trade ended, one indication of relatively good treatment. In other areas, there was no natural increase. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean and other regions required continuous importation of slaves."

Mitcham suggests reading the "Slave Narratives" of the Federal Writers' Project for a good perspective on slavery despite them being written years after slavery ended. They are still first-hand accounts by former slaves in their own words.

Northerners treated free blacks terribly, looked down on them and considered them a curse.

Ironically, most abolitionists were racists who didn't want blacks anywhere near them. They were anti-slavery, often as a political issue, but they were not pro-black. This is an indisputable fact.

The expansion of slavery in the West issue was based on that same Northern racism: Northerners didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks in the West near them. As Lincoln said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the West was to be reserved for white working men from all over the world. No blacks allowed.

Mitcham points out the many Northern states that had laws forbidding blacks from living there or even visiting. In Lincoln's Illinois in 1833:

[B]lacks could not vote, sit on juries, testify against white people, or attend public schools. If three or more free blacks assembled for the purpose of dancing, they were fined twenty dollars ($540.90 in 2018 dollars) and were to be publicly whipped. They were not to receive more than thirty-nine lashes, however.¹²

In 1853, Illinois "passed a law 'to prevent the immigration of free negroes into the state.' It declared it a misdemeanor for a 'Negro or mulatto,' slave or free, to come into the state with the intention of living." Any black person doing so "faced a fine or temporary slavery to pay for these fines and other costs."¹³

In the 1862 Illinois Constitutional Convention supported by Abraham Lincoln, there was Article XVIII, Section 1: "'No negro or mulatto shall immigrate or settle in the state after the adoption of the Constitution.'" Mitcham writes that:

The article was presented for a vote of the people separate from the Constitution. The Constitution was rejected by more than 16,000 votes, but Article XVIII passed by a majority of 100,500 votes and became an organic law in the Illinois Constitution.¹⁴

Indiana and Oregon also had laws which passed by wide margins that forbid blacks from settling there "Nor where these the only states to forbid black people and mulattos from entering. Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Colorado, and New Mexico, had similar language in their constitutions."¹⁵

Gen. William T. Sherman got a letter from his brother John Sherman April 2, 1862 that stated:

We do not like the negroes. We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana said yesterday: 'The whole people of the Northwestern States are opposed to having many negroes among them and that principle or prejudice has been engraved in the legislation for nearly all the Northwestern States.'¹⁶

Gen. Sherman owned two "'house slaves'" when he was president of Louisiana Military Academy in Alexandria. He wrote:

All the Congresses on earth can't make the negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony, save as master and slave.¹⁷

This was a common attitude in the 19th century North and West. Black people were far more accepted in the South where there was an equal number of free blacks as in the North. Slavery existed but there were also good, loving relationships between blacks and whites that could not even be extinguished by all the carpetbagger hate of Reconstruction.

Slavery was a way to get the cotton picked and nothing more. With the invention of machines to pick cotton, there was no need for slavery and Southerners would have ended it in a much better way than what happened with Lincoln's bloody war that killed 750,000 men and maimed over a million.

Lincoln's war and the corruption and hatred forced on the South during Reconstruction caused problems for blacks and whites for over 100 years but the North was still more racist as well as hypocritical.

Republican Sen. Benjamin Wade of Ohio, an abolitionist leader and Lincoln ally "became extremely critical of him when he failed to recruit black soldiers into the Union Army quickly. Privately, he called Lincoln 'poor white trash.' Wade was a matter of record intensely bigoted against people of color; during the Civil War, he wanted to send dispensable African-American troops into combat as rapidly as possible so Confederates could kill them instead of white soldiers."

In 1851, Wade called Washington, D.C.: "'a God-forsaken N**ger ridden place.' He wanted to hire a white woman as a housekeeper because 'I am sick and tired of n**gers.' He complained that he had eaten food cook 'by n**gers until I can smell and taste the n**er.'"¹⁸

Of course, Mitcham is correct when he writes:

Given the hatred much of New England and the rest of the North felt toward people of color, it is absurd and hypocritical to claim that many in the North invaded the South and sacrificed young white men to emancipate slaves.¹⁹

The one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. All of their documents for the first two years of the war like the Corwin Amendment, the War Aims Resolution, the six slave states that fought for the Union, etc. when hundreds of thousands of men died, prove conclusively that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They could care less about slavery. The only thing they cared about was their money and power.

Mitcham writes that before the war "unlike the industrial North, the South as a whole preferred a prosperous and innovative agricultural way of life because it was profitable and more congenial."²⁰

He notes numerous technological achievements in agriculture by Southerners such as the McCormack Reaper and:

Innovation was even more noticeable during the Civil War, when a Southerners invented the Gatling gun, Texas Rangers designed the Colt revolver, and Brigadier General Gabriel Rains developed the landmine. Other Southern innovations included ironclads, submarines, electronically detonated mines, and a workable machine gun.²¹

About literacy, Mitcham writes:

It is popular in the modern media to portray Southerners---antebellum and after---as illiterate. Frank L. Owsley, however, revealed that the literacy rate of the Old South was 91.73 percent. While that was less than that of New England (98.2 percent) and the Northwest (95 percent), it was higher than the male population of Great Britain (75.4 percent), and no one ever refers to the British of that day as uneducated and illiterate. The Old South's white literacy rate, in fact, was higher than every country in Europe except Sweden and Denmark.²²

Mitcham writes that the South in 1860 was "more prosperous than either the West, the North, or New England. Of the top eleven states in per capita income, six were Southern." He also points out:

Nor were all the prosperous people in the Old South planters and plantation owners. There was a significant class of sturdy, yeoman farmers. As the Union army discovered, they also made surprisingly good combat infantrymen.²³

Mitcham makes clear that Southerners "had a severe distaste for people from other regions coming to Dixie and telling them how to live." It is easy to understand why:

In New York City in 1860, women and children were working sixteen-hour days on starvation wages. There were more than 150,000 unemployed, 40,000 homeless, 600 brothels (some with girls as young as ten), and 8,000 bars or grog shops. Half of the children of the city did not live past the age of five. Other Northern slums were at least as bad.²⁴

Mitcham ends this excellent chapter with an absolute truth:

The North, beginning in New England, had a holier-than-thou attitude born of moral self-deception which unfortunately has become a permanent characteristic of some of their "elites."²⁵

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Six of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Four: Chapter V, The Nullification Crisis)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ "California police seek 80 suspects in flash-mob department store robbery, Reuters, 11/21/21, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-police-seek-80-suspects-flash-mob-department-store-robbery-2021-11-21/, accessed 11-24-21.

² Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American), https://genius.com/Toby-keith-courtesy-of-the-red-white-and-blue-the-angry-american-lyrics, accessed 11-24-21.

³ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 51.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 52.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 53.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 53.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 54.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 53-54.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 55.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 56.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 56-57.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 57.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 59.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four of Ten

Posted on November 17, 2021November 23, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Four of Ten

Chapter V
The Nullification Crisis

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

I am extending this series to ten. Mitcham's book is important enough for this comprehensive treatment because it covers all the important issues of the antebellum era and War Between the States from start to finish, and, as I have said many times, Mitcham cuts right to the chase. He explains everything well and does not waste your time.

Everybody should read this chapter through. It will give you a solid understanding of the antebellum era, nullification, and what they meant for the future.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter V.

The epigraphs for this chapter are perfect, especially the one from the Charleston Mercury:

South Carolina will preserve its sovereignty or be buried beneath it. ---Senator Robert Young Hayne, 1832

The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of taxes . . . and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.---Charleston Mercury editorial, November 8, 1860.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : The above excerpt from the Charleston Mercury is the primary reason for the War Between the States. It is ignored by many "historians," academia and the news media, because they are not only ignorant of Southern history, a large number of them are corrupt. This is unquestionably due to the politicization of history that began in the 1960s.

What comes out of academia today is not because of good scholarship and open, honest debate, but instead is the price professors have to pay to keep the mob away from their office. They know what they have to say and teach so they won't be branded a racist and lose their pensions.

The politicized news media is beyond corrupt. Most of its purpose is not truth but to keep 30% of the country voting democrat and hating the rest of the country.

As esteemed historian Eugene Genovese said 25 years ago, academic and media elites have turned Southern history into a "political and cultural atrocity," but truth is still readily available. It's in the outstanding scholarship of independent historians and publishers, and in places like this book of Dr. Mitcham's, not to mention all the excellent history written in the past when the standard was good argument and thorough documentation, unlike the woke politicized history of today that inspires nobody.]

MITCHAM STARTS CHAPTER V by pointing out that "The question of who could interpret constitutional issues was not addressed in the Constitution."

The judiciary moved quickly to take over that power but "Some of the Founders soon realized that, if this continued, the only restraint on the federal government would be the federal government itself, an oxymoron." In those days it was states that got to decide, under the Tenth Amendment, if something was constitutional or not.¹ Frankly, that's how it ought to be today. We'd have a lot more freedom if it was.

Nullifying tyrannical laws goes back to the Colonies: "The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, but the North American colonies considered it an illegal tax and resorted to mob violence to resist it." The tax collectors quit, which nullified the act and led to Parliament repealing it in 1766.

But the British wanted their colonies to be tributary to the empire's wealth and power just like the North did in the antebellum days as South Carolina noted in its secession documents.

The British followed the Stamp Act

with other attempts at taxation, including the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quartering Act. Taken together, these are called the Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts. Massachusetts led the way in resisting and trying to nullify them, resulting in the Boston Tea Party, the Suffolk Resolves, and the forming of the First Continental Congress. But did the states still have the right to do so after they joined the United States? This question would need an answer.²

It is fascinating to see how early legal cases reflected and formed political thought in our country. It always comes down to those who want a strong centralized all-powerful federal government, and those who don't.

The main issue in American history since the Revolution has been federal versus state power starting with the more populous North --- the Federals in the War Between the States --- desiring to control the federal government with its larger population so it could pass legislation favorable to itself. The Founding Fathers called this the "tyranny of the majority."

Mitcham points out that in 1792, Alexander Chisholm sued the State of Georgia on behalf of the estate of Robert Farquhar, for payment for goods delivered during the Revolution.

The case was tried in the Supreme Court but the Georgia lawyers refused to appear stating that Georgia was a sovereign state that "could not be sued without its permission."

Chisholm won, giving a "significant victory to centralized government because a branch of the federal government had placed itself above a sovereign state."

But that quickly led to "the Eleventh Amendment, which restored the states' sovereign immunity."³

The next battle "centered around the Alien and Sedition Acts" but they were declared null by the Democrat-Republicans who issued the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, so "this crisis ended without a clear resolution."⁴

Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 but on his way out the door, John Adams "tried to pack the federal courts with sixteen Federalist judges, who would have lifetime appointments to the recently created seats on the bench (the Judiciary Act of 1801)."

Mitcham writes:

Jefferson's inaugural address was a thing of toleration, art, and beauty. New England was once again threatening to leave the Union because it had lost the election. Jefferson invited it to do so. 'If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve the Union,' he said, 'or to change it republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.'⁵

The 'Midnight Judges Act' did not stand because Jefferson and supporters in Congress repealed it and "Jefferson swept the lower court benches clear" except for Adams' chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, Jefferson's cousin. Marshall later "cleverly inserted the principle of judicial review into the decision on the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison (1803)."

Jefferson fought it by trying to impeach an "arrogant and obnoxious Federalist Supreme Court judge" but lost when the Supreme Court decided arrogance and obnoxiousness did not rise to the required "high crimes and misdemeanors" required, so Marshall and the Supreme Court "was thus able to create for itself the right of judicial review, even though it was not in the Constitution."⁶

The issue was not settled because states could still review constitutional cases.

With regard to slavery, in the "early 1830s, the South inched toward emancipation." Mitcham points out that

there were more anti-slavery societies in the South than the North. The 106 Southern anti-slavery societies had 5,150 members. The twenty-four anti-slavery organizations in the North had 1,475 members.⁷

Virginia almost voted for emancipation in 1832. It lost 65-58 and the only reason was the emancipationists could not agree on the details. A resolution "that admitted slavery was evil" did pass 73 to 58.

Emancipationists believed it would pass in the future but then virtue-signaling

Northern abolitionists 'began their theatrical antics demanding immediate, uncompensated emancipation, backed by threats of terror and Northern secession.' The Southerners did not like people coming down and telling them how to live. As a result, the slavery issue became sectional. By 1850, there were zero anti-slave societies in the South.⁸

Meanwhile sectionalism grew. It was the one thing George Washington warned about. He said parties should always be national and not sectional. The moment they become sectional, Washington warned that the country was in trouble.

In 1833, 27 years before South Carolina seceded, "America teetered on the brink of civil war" over tariffs, nullification and states' rights.

The Denmark Vesey plot had been discovered. Vesey "a free black minister in Charleston and one of the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), was angry because he had been unable to buy his first wife and children out of slavery." The plot was discovered and Vesey and around 35 others were hanged and others deported.

The South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Seaman Act "which required the confinement of all foreign black sailors to their ships while they were docked in South Carolina ports. If a black sailor disobeyed the law and came ashore, he faced arrest and the prospect of enslavement."⁹ Other Southern states "which also feared servile insurrection---quickly replicated South Carolina's actions. The entire matter soon ended up in court."¹⁰

The Negro Seaman Act was declared unconstitutional because it "violated U.S. treaties with the United Kingdom" but that didn't matter to the South Carolina Senate which nullified the ruling and President James Monroe did nothing about it.

Late in his life Jefferson "recommended that Virginia reassert her sovereignty and nullify federal internal improvement legislation, which he considered unconstitutional." He died in 1826 but before that wrote about slavery "we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."¹¹

Two years later, in 1828, the Tariff of Abominations was passed 105 to 94 in the House, and 26 to 21 in the Senate. Southerners voted against it 50 to 3. It raised rates dramatically to around 47 percent on most items, and 51 percent on "implements with iron in them."

Mitcham points out:

The Constitution allowed a tariff for revenue purposes. For those who interpreted the document strictly, this did not mean that it authorized a tariff to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition or to favor one section of the country over another. The South solidly opposed protective tariffs, correctly envisioning that restraints on free trade would mean economic exploitation of an exporting region like the Cotton States.¹²

This use of the federal government to enrich Northerners through tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopoly status for Northern businesses is why Southerners in the Confederate Constitution forbid protective tariffs. It was not fair to favor one section of the country over another, especially when it cost that other section more in taxes. Even more outrageously, 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

No wonder Southerners seceded. Everybody knows that money drives everything. Nobody sends their precious sons off to die because they don't like the domestic institutions in other countries. We aren't at war today though there is more slavery on the planet than at any other time in human history as Mitcham pointed out early in his book.

Slavery as the cause of the American War Between the States is one of the biggest absurdities in all of history. It is the one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt: that the North did not go to war to free the slaves or end slavery.

Yankees care about money. Black lives did not matter much to them. That's why so many Northern states forbid blacks from living there or even visiting including Lincoln's Illinois.

The Confederate tariff was less than 10% for the operation of a small federal government in a states rights nation. The Yankee tariff, the Morrill Tariff, was 47 to 60%. That's one reason Northern ship captains were beating a path to the South where they could get cargoes.

The Morrill Tariff threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry overnight, which was the one-two punch that caused Lincoln to start the war. Northerners had already lost much of their manufacturing industry because they manufactured mostly for the captive Southern market, but Southerners did not want overpriced inferior Northern goods. They wanted free trade and had always wanted free trade. They wanted to manufacture for themselves and buy from England and other places.

Lincoln could see the death of the North on the wall, or severe economic damage at the very least. A free trade South with 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet --- cotton --- would bury the North in short order. Lincoln needed to fight right when he did, which is why he started the war. Every day that went by, the South got stronger and the North got weaker.

The South with European trade and military agreements would be unbeatable in a war, and Lincoln and Northern leaders knew it.

That's why we had the War Between the States. Certainly not for any mythological freeing of the slaves by the North, or protecting slavery by the South.

Slavery was a way to get the cotton picked. Technology and the invention of machines to pick cotton would have ended slavery by the 1880s. Southerners would much rather do like Yankees and hire when they needed to, and fire when they needed to, without a birth to death commitment. Lincoln didn't need to kill 750,000 people and maim over a million, but then his party would have disappeared from history and there would be no Lincoln Memorial.

Lincoln was a sectional president, president of the North. When he went to war, it was to protect and enrich the North. He did not care an iota about the rest of the country. That's why it was always "Union" for Lincoln, because that's where Yankee power and money were. And the Union would be controlled by the Northern majority.

Mitcham points out that the Tariff of 1828 caused John Quincy Adams to lose the presidential election to "hot-tempered, intolerant military man and slaveholder" Andrew Jackson. Jackson believed the high tariff should stay in place "until the national debt was paid off."

Mitcham makes a critically important point about that debt:

(Most of the debt was caused by over expenditures on internal improvements in the North. "Internal improvements" in today's terms means government subsidies to private industry, corporate welfare and crony capitalism, and catering to special interest groups. In the nineteenth century, they were characterized by corruption and enthusiastically supported by Abraham Lincoln and other Northern Whigs.) Despite his sympathy for the South, Jackson would not sanction nullification or secession.¹³

Here is why this book of Mitcham's is so outstanding. He talks about the tariff debate in the Senate which began December 29, 1829 between mainly Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and allies, and Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina and allies. Mitcham writes:

According to establishment historical mythology, the intellectually outstanding Webster, using his vastly superior debating skills, isolated the South, discredited states' rights, nullification, secession, and strict constructionism, and affirmed the principles of implied powers, strong central government, federal supremacy, and an indivisible, perpetual Union----- all by himself and in only a couple of speeches.¹⁴

However, this myth was "convincingly shattered" in 2016 by H. A. Scott Trask: "Trask examined the documents and newspapers of that time, which give an entirely different picture. At least as many people believed Hayne had defeated Webster."¹⁵

Mitcham gives an exciting account of the back-and-forth of Webster and Hayne. The debate begins with Connecticut Senator Samuel A. Foot's resolution about whether it was "desirable to limit the sale of public lands indefinitely and to stop the survey of new areas."

A Hayne ally, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri,

rose and denounced the proposal as just another attempt by New England to stop immigration to the western states. Their hidden aim, he declared, was to keep people in the East to work in their factories. On January 18, 1830, he spoke again and charged that the business classes of the East were trying to enrich themselves by taxing the South, injuring the West, and pauperizing the poor of the North.¹⁶

The debate went on for months with Webster, like New England liberal democrats today, adamantly defending the federal government and its growth. Webster "attacked the South and its institutions, and declared that Southerners were hurting the country by opposing the growing power of the central government."

Benton "correctly accused Webster of trying to isolate the South and form an alliance between the North and West, creating a coalition like the one that led to the election of Adams in 1824" and he added that "New England had threatened to secede on more than one occasion and that the region's attitude toward the Union was one of calculated indifference."¹⁷

Mitcham writes:

Hayne spoke again on January 21, attacking the New England faction as motivated by base self-interest and defending his state's right to sovereignty and nullification. He quoted Jefferson's contention that the national government was not the 'exclusive or final judge of the extent of its own powers.' (Like Marshall, Webster believed the Supreme Court was the exclusive evaluator of constitutional disputes.)¹⁸

As the debate about the Tariff of 1828 continued, the South Carolina legislature declared it unconstitutional.

Behind the scenes, Vice President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which advanced the idea of nullification vis-a-vis the tariff. He asserted that the Tariff of 1828 was unconstitutional because it favored manufacturing over commerce and agriculture. In Exposition and Protest, Calhoun held that state conventions (which had originally ratified the Constitution) could nullify any law they considered unconstitutional. The nullification could only be overridden by a three-fourths vote of all the states.¹⁹

Jackson was uncompromising, "He demanded immediate and unconditional obedience."

South Carolina refused "for constitutional and economic reasons." Since the "Panic of 1819, and, due to Western migration, its population had dropped from 580,000 to just under 500,000 in the 1820s." South Carolina just could not afford it.

South Carolina congressman and Calhoun supporter, George McDuffie, "expounded the Forty Bale Theory. The theory declared that the 40 percent tax on finished cotton goods in the Tariff of 1816 meant that 'the manufacturer actually invades your barns and plunders you of forty out of every hundred bales that you produce.'"

McDuffie's message was effective and "opened the eyes of many South Carolinians. It made converts to the idea of nullification and stoked the fires of many who already felt the federal government was taking advantage of them."²⁰

In this tense atmosphere, "President Jackson arranged an elaborate dinner at the India Queen Hotel on April 13, 1830, to celebrate Thomas Jefferson's birthday." Everybody was there.

Hayne spoke that evening and "denounced the tariff but avoided any mention of nullification." During the toasts, there were many anti-tariff messages so much so that the entire Pennslyvania delegation left. Tensions were high.

Jackson rose and looked straight at Calhoun and said with vigor, "Our Union, it must be preserved."

The entire room went silent. It could not have been more dramatic had Jackson ordered federal officers to arrest Calhoun on the spot. The vice president was scheduled to give the next toast. He arose, looked directly at Jackson, and in a firm voice said: 'The Union, next to our liberty, most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.'²¹

Northerners began realizing the Tariff of Abominations was too much. Thinking the Tariff of 1832 would adjust the rates satisfactorily, South Carolina did not take action:

The Tariff of 1832 did indeed lower the rates but not enough. The average tariff for dutiable good was 33 percent. Thanks to the tariffs, about 90 percent of which were paid by Southerners, the United States now had a budget surplus, but the Northerners drafted a bill that kept the tariffs high and protected the manufacturer's profit margins at the expense of the South. Many Southerners felt hoodwinked. Much of the rest of Dixie wanted a better compromise, but South Carolina was ready to act. Governor James Hamilton conducted pro-nullification, anti-tariff rallies throughout the state. As a result, the nullification forces won the state election of 1832 by a large majority.²²

The next events were exciting and important in American history. South Carolina governor James Hamilton "called for a special session to authorize a nullification convention. The legislature concurred, and the convention met on November 24. It chose Senator Hayne presiding officer and quickly declared the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and nullified them. State and federal officials were forbidden from collecting tariffs within the state after February 1, 1833. The leadership vowed to secede if the United States government tried coercion."²³

Jackson in private threatened to invade South Carolina and hang Calhoun. Jackson in public stated "he would use force to prevent nullification."

In the next few weeks, Hamilton's term as governor ended and Hayne was picked governor by the legislature which chose governors and senators in those days. Calhoun's relationship with Jackson was destroyed so he resigned as vice president and was picked to be a senator, replacing Hayne.

On January 16, 1833 Jackson "requested Congress pass the Force Bill authorizing military intervention in South Carolina."

South Carolina "mobilized 27,000 men."

Realizing bloodshed was about to occur and nobody really wanted war, a compromise was worked out by Clay and Calhoun rolling back "the tariffs over a nine-year period until 1842, when it reached the levels of the 1816 Tariff---about 20 percent."

In a final "gesture of defiance," South Carolina nullified the Force Act.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Five of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Three: Chapter III, Secession: The Constitutional Issue; Chapter IV, Pregnant Events)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 37.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 37-38.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 38.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 39.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 40.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 41.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 41-42.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 42.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 42-43.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 43.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 43-44.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 44.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 45.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 47.

²² Ibid.

²³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 47-48.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three of Five

Posted on November 11, 2021November 11, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Three of Five

Chapter III
Secession: The Constitutional Issue

Chapter IV
Pregnant Events

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Epigraphs at beginning of It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," two pages of Mitcham's endnotes for Chapters III and IV.

In Chapter III, Secession: The Constitutional Issue, Dr. Mitcham again cuts right to the chase when he writes:

The Issue of Secession can be dealt with very simply. The United States was a product of secession. The Declaration of Independence was the most beautiful Ordinance of Secession ever written.¹

He discusses the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789) among the 13 sovereign states, which was supposed to be perpetual but "every state left or seceded from it by 1790."²

A Constitutional Convention was held starting in Philadelphia in 1787, and on March 4, 1789, the Constitution of the United States went into effect. Mitcham writes:

Every state (colony) recognized the right of secession in 1776 and again in 1789. The Constitution dealt with this right indirectly in Amendment Ten of the Bill of Rights, which states: "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." It was ratified by the states between 1789 and 1791 and added to the Constitution on December 15, 1791.
New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia did not wait for the addition of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution to ensure they could leave the Union if they wished. They explicitly reserved the right to secede when their legislatures ratified the Constitution on July 26, 1788 [NY]; May 29, 1790 [RI]; and June 25, 1788 [VA], respectively.³

Part Two of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., is entitled "The Right of Secession." I go into detail in 91 pages, which include "An Annotated Chronology of the Secession Debate in the South" in the year leading up to Southern states seceding.

I include much from Is Davis a Traitor by Albert Taylor Bledsoe, the 1995 reprint by Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing with Introduction by Clyde N. Wilson, emeritus professor of History at the University of South Carolina and author of numerous books, hundreds of articles, and primary editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

I also include an analysis of a Stetson Law Review article from Stetson University College of Law written by H. Newcomb Morse in 1986 that documents and brings up all the history and legal angles of secession and concludes:

. . . conceivably, it was the Northern States that acted illegally in precipitating the War Between the States. The Southern States, in all likelihood, were exercising a perfectly legitimate right in seceding from the Union.⁴

One of the most important things that I point out is what Dr. Mitcham just pointed out about New York, Rhode Island and Virginia reserving the right of secession.

Let me make it clear that because all the states entered the Union as equals, the acceptance of the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia by all the other states also gave it to them, though there is other, overwhelming, conclusive evidence that secession was a legal right accepted by all. Even Horace Greeley ("let our erring sisters go") and Abraham Lincoln believed in it until they realized it would affect their money. Then they wanted war as did the rest of the North as they watched property values sink and goods rot on New York docks.

In 1847, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, 14 years before he started the War Between the States in Charleston Harbor, Abraham Lincoln said:

Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.⁵

Mitcham writes that "the absence of any mention of secession in the Constitution and the intent of the Tenth Amendment remain quite clear." Mitcham means, of course, that nothing in the Constitution prohibits secession, and the Tenth Amendment gives all power not prohibited by the Constitution to the states or people, therefore the right of secession is clear. It is clear for numerous other powerful, conclusive reasons based in history, law, precedent and tradition, too.

Mitcham writes "The argument between Hamiltonians (large, strong, central government) and Jeffersonians ("governs best which governs least") continues---albeit in altered form---to the present day."

Ironically, as Mitcham points out, it was the Northeast, the New England states, who threatened to secede many times before the South actually did. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wanted to secede through the 1840s and 1850s because he did not want to be in a country with slavery. The treasonous Hartford Convention led by Massachusetts threatened to secede during the War of 1812 while at the same time aiding our British enemies. That is the very definition of treason.

Southerners never did anything like that. They debated the issue of secession and voted democratically in conventions stating their intent all along in accordance with precedents set by our secessionist Founding Fathers who seceded from the British Empire for the exact same reason Southerners seceded from the federal Union: Independence and Self-government. [And judging by what the Federal Government has become today with its deep-state corruption, an FBI that lies to FISA courts on surveillance warrants so they can spy for the Democrat Party on political rivals and innocent Americans, a DOJ and attorney general, Merrick Garland, who sicced the FBI on parents at school board meetings who are protesting racist Critical Race Theory and transgenderism being taught to their children at school, etc., etc., Southerners were right.]

The most widespread phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year leading up to secession 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.

Anything that New Englanders thought would dilute their political power would provoke talk of secession. Mitcham writes:⁶

In all, New England seriously considered secession five times:
1) over the Louisiana Purchase
2) over Jefferson's embargo
3) because of the War of 1812
4) over the annexation of Texas
5) over the Fugitive Slave Act

After the War Between the States, which killed over 750,000 and maimed over a million, Northern historians vilified the South to excuse their war to establish the Northeast as the economic and cultural capital of our great nation. Mitcham writes, "Fortunately for Northern historians, the morally abhorrent institution of slavery---of which the North had only recently divested itself, from which it profited until 1885, and which largely funded its industrial revolution---was conveniently available."

He hits the nail on the head when he denies that slavery was the cause of secession or the war:

The fact that there is a vast body of evidence to the contrary and that Southerners of that time gave several other reasons for secession was, and still is, simply ignored. But this is a highly successful Marxist tactic: focus on something that people find highly repugnant and then build an analytic framework around it.⁷

Chapter IV
Pregnant Events

Mitcham points out the many things that defined the antebellum era and led to the war. They began immediately after George Washington was inaugurated April 30, 1789. Three months later, on July 4, Washington signed the Tariff of 1789.

Tariffs were the "primary source of federal revenue" because there was no income tax in those days. Tariffs "placed an undue burden on the South, whose income, based on agricultural exports, was dependent on foreign imports."

A huge event that traumatized the entire South was the bloody slave revolt in Haiti that began August 14, 1791. Mitcham writes:

Within weeks, 100,000 slaves joined the rebellion. They killed 4,000 whites and destroyed 180 sugar plantations and 900 coffee plantations, as well as hundreds of large indigo farms. The revolution was characterized by extreme violence, torture, rape, and murder. Entire families were wiped out. Survivors often escaped with only the clothes on their backs. Many of them fled to the American South, carrying their stories of horror with them. Meanwhile, the whites who remained on the island formed militia units, which killed some 15,000 black people in an orgy of revenge. The fighting lasted until 1804, when Haiti became an independent republic under black leadership. It was the only successful slave insurrection in the history of the Western Hemisphere.⁸

Slave trading was not yet outlawed by the United States Constitution, which allowed slave trading until 1808, so New Englanders were going at it full steam. Of course, after 1808, New Englanders still made huge fortunes in the international slave trade picking up slave cargoes from African tribal chieftains and taking them all over the world including secretly into America. This they did until 1885, 20 years after the War Between the States ended.

But in the early antebellum days, Eli Whitney's cotton gin reversed the dying out of slavery and increased the demand for field workers dramatically, which Yankee slave traders were glad to meet.

The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts of the Federalist Congress restricted immigration and "the speech of people who defamed government officials, including the president." [Sounds like TODAY with the Democrat Party using big tech and cancel culture to censor speech and destroy the businesses and lives of Americans who don't agree with their twisted woke idiocy.]

This led to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which their legislatures passed in 1798. They "argued that individual states had the power to declare federal laws unconstitutional." A second Kentucky Resolution in 1799 "declared that if a state found a law unconstitutional, nullification was the proper remedy." Alexander Hamilton's solution was the opposite. He wanted "to send the army to Virginia to enforce the Acts."⁹

Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, which caused racist New England to show its colors. It was a "racial trauma" for New Englanders because Jefferson had slept with a black woman. New Englanders

considered Jefferson racially tarnished and called him the "first Negro president." They also resented the fact that black folks counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes, which determined the allocation of electoral votes. If it had not been for this "three-fifths rule," Adams would have been reelected.

Southerners wanted black people to count as the whole human beings they are, but Yankees wanted them reduced to 3/5ths of a person so the North would have more political power.

Mitcham writes, "Northerners of that day were highly prejudiced against black people, and they kept this bias throughout the Civil War era."¹⁰

He talks about "Josiah C. Nott, a descendant of one of Connecticut's oldest families, and Louis Agassiz, a zoology professor at Harvard" who did research on the inferiority of blacks to whites, presenting theories that blacks were not of the same species as whites --- "Nott described his racial theories as 'niggerology.'"¹¹

Ralph Waldo Emerson said blacks were "destined for the museums, like the Dodo." He thought they would die out if freed.

Southerners wanted to end slavery in a way that would work:

Thomas Jefferson once suggested that the slaves could go to the Western lands and find liberation. He received no support from the North, but Virginia statesman John Randolph thought it was a capital idea. He freed his 518 slaves in his will and caused them to be sent to Ohio, to lands they inherited from him, along with supplies provided by his estate. But Ohio refused to accept them. The free black contingent had to return to Virginia and ask to be made wards of the state.¹²

Tariffs increasingly became a problem. Mitcham writes about the "unintended consequences" of the Tariff of 1816:

First, the North became addicted to protective tariffs---and with incredible speed. Second, the nature of the tariff itself changed. It became a corrupt system for the redistribution of wealth by political means. Third, Northern manufacturers were now able to charge more for their own products and thus reap higher profits because the tariffs (taxes) on imported British goods were so high.¹³

That caused enormous economic problems for the South. They had higher costs, and a higher cost of living because of Northern tariffs.

The debate over the admission of Missouri as a slave state exposed the North's hypocrisy. Mitcham writes:

Among the leaders of the anti-admission faction was Northern flesh peddler Senator James DeWolff of Rhode Island. DeWolff was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. He made his money in the New England slave trade. His company ran eighty voyages to Africa before Washington shut down the importation of human beings to the U.S.A. in 1808. After that, DeWolff's ships engaged in the global slave trade.¹⁴

To make it worse, there were heavy federal subsidies of New England business interests including fishing and manufacturing. Like a drug addict, Yankees were addicted to other people's money and their method of theft was the federal government and their domination of it.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 brought Missouri, a slave state, and Maine, a free state, into the Union.

The "Black Codes" such as were adopted in Lincoln's Illinois prohibited free blacks from entering Illinois.

Lincoln believed, his whole life, in sending black people back to Africa or into a climate they could handle. He was a member of the American Colonization Society and "secretary of the Illinois branch for several years." Lincoln "and his colleagues, who included President James Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, and Stephen Douglas, had a simple solution to the 'Negro problem': return every African American to Africa, including those born in the United States."¹⁵

Meanwhile, a violent abolitionist movement rose in the North with leaders such as Lysander Spooner of Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and others.

The one thing that Southerners feared worse than all else, after the slaughter in Haiti, was a slave insurrection, but rather than trying to solve the slavery problem with good will, abolitionist extremists who were well-financed by New Englanders "flooded the South with handbills calling for slave revolts."

Mitcham points out that Henry Clay was Abraham Lincoln's idol. Clay was a slaveholder who believed in sending black people back to Africa. He also advocated for the "American System," a system of government largesse to help U.S. manufacturing compete with the British. The American System called for high tariffs, internal improvements for the North at taxpayer expense, and other of what today would be "corporate welfare."

Southerners were not against internal improvements but they believed that states should pay for whatever improvement they wanted. Improvements in one state should not be paid for by the people in another.

This is a prime example of the difference in the South's States' Rights philosophy and that of the North, which wanted to take over the federal government and rule for its own benefit only. Alexis de Tocqueville warned that if one state ever got the power to take over the federal government, it would do exactly as the North did: make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power.

Mitcham sums it up well:

The Tariff of 1824 was a sign of Northern political dominance in the United States. It was also a sign that Northern hegemony meant economic exploitation and poverty for the South. To Southerners, it proved that Northerners would ignore the Constitution if its economic interests were involved. James Spence wrote: 'The idea of a moderate system, generally beneficial to the industry of the country, without grievous hardship to any particular class, became altered into the reality of corrupt political bargains between special interests, to impose heavy taxation on all others for their own profit.'¹⁶

Two more slave revolts, one in 1811, and the Nat Turner revolt in 1831, kept Southerners on edge about slavery. Mitcham points out that "Abolitionists were irresponsible. Immediate, uncompensated liberation would have resulted in chaos and economic collapse for both the North and the South."

If the North really cared about ending slavery --- which they didn't --- they could have offered a plan of gradual compensated emancipation such as Northern states themselves used to end slavery. But Northerners were not about to spend hard-earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North and be job competition.

It is clear that most Northerners did not give a damn about Southern slaves and surely did not want free blacks in the North or West. During this time period the hypocritical North was still slave-trading all over the globe bringing huge fortunes constantly into the North.

Northerners also murdered abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois in 1837.

Promoting the murder of Southern men, women and children so the North could gain politically and some could signal their "superior" virtue, was not going to end slavery or help black people, but that was not the goal.

Political domination and Northern wealth and power were always the goal as Alexis de Tocqueville had said.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Four of Five

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 19.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 20.

³ Ibid.

⁴ H. Newcomb Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson University College of Law, Stetson Law Review, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1986, 436, in Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston and James Island, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014), 107, 121, available on www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com.

⁵ Abraham Lincoln, 1847 Congressional debate in the United States House of Representatives in John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command (Hashville: Bill Coats, Ltd., 1991), xv. Tilley's source, as state in footnote #4 on page xv, was Goldwyn Smith, The United States: An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871 (New York and London, 1893), 248, in Kizer, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, Note 104, 109-110.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 22-23.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 23.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 25-26.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 27.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 27-28.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 28.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 29.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 31.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 33.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Mitcham-endnotes-Chap-3-4-2 110K 600 pix

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Five

Posted on November 3, 2021November 3, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Two of Five, a close look at

Chapter I
Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler

Chapter II
Hypocrisy

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Back cover of It Wasn't About Slavery by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

In doing this comprehensive review of Dr. Mitcham's It Wasn't About Slavery, my motives are selfish because I wanted to learn his facts and argument thoroughly and the best way to learn anything is write about it.

Everything I have cited in this review shows where it is located in Mitcham's book. Of course, the book itself cites Mitcham's original sources. At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," four pages of Mitcham's actual endnotes for Chapters I and II. Many are explanatory with good additional information.

Chapter I, Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler, is one of the best short histories of slavery I have ever read. As I said before, Dr. Mitcham has a knack for cutting to the chase.

He talks about the word "slave" being mentioned in the Bible in Genesis and slavery today:

According to the International Labor Office, a United Nations-affiliated organization, there were an estimated 40,300,000 slaves in the world in 2017. This means that, in terms of raw numbers, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other time in history. There is, however, no great outcry about this fact, nor any large-scale movements to rid the world of it. After all, there is no money in that.¹

He points out how slavery was not racial in ancient times but "based primarily on military conquest or bad luck."²

Arab Muslims started racial slavery by enslaving black Africans and starting the Trans-Sahara trade routes that "took more than 10,000,000 Africans to North Africa and the Arabian peninsula." Many were enslaved by military conquest but others "were sold into slavery by fellow Africans." This era lasted until the 1800s though many African societies had converted to Islam and had slavery before the Muslims arrived. Many became slave traders. ³

Portugal "established trading posts along the West African coast" and began the second wave of race-based slavery.

Spaniards soon introduced race-based slavery into the New World in 1503 followed by the Brits in 1562. The British found the slave trade "so lucrative that they soon wanted to dominate it" but were not successful until 1713 when the "Treaty of Asiento with Spain gave Great Britain the bigger share of the slave trade."⁴

American Yankees started small in 1638 (18 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Harbor, Mass.) by importing a few slaves for personal use because "the slave trade was a Crown monopoly until 1749" when it was opened to all Englishmen. New Englanders wasted no time getting into it.⁵

Mitcham provides a number of fascinating primary source narratives about the inner workings of the slave trade such as "Captain Canot or Twenty Years of an African Slaver" from 1854. Canot netted, what would be today almost a million dollars, on one ship with 220 slaves amongst other cargo. The profits were astronomical.⁶

Mitcham writes that:

In 1836, English Captain Isaacs visited the slave trading port of Lamu on the island of Zanzibar. It was overrun with Northern fresh peddlers. 'There were so many Yankee slavers and traders active in Zanzibar that the local population thought that Great Britain was a subdivision of Massachusetts,' Isaacs recalled.⁷

The year 1836 was 25 years before the War Between the States. This was the same period when abolitionists were hated in the North and often beaten or murdered like Elijah Lovejoy, murdered by a mob in 1837 in Alton, Illinois at age 34.

Mitcham writes:

All U. S. slave ships were built in the North; none were constructed in the South. Their crews were mostly Northern men, and Northerners prospered by the trade. New England also prospered indirectly because their capitalists bought Southern goods that were mostly produced by slaves. The Yankees then sold them overseas, usually at a handsome profit. The centers of the slave fleets were not New Orleans, Charleston or Savannah. They docked at Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island, later joined by New York City, which was also the financial center of the slave business. New York bankers loaned money to slave buyers and Southern plantation owners to expand their cotton acreage. They often accepted slaves as collateral.⁸

When some journalist with the Hartford Courant in Hartford, Connecticut were researching slavery and to their shock found that Aetna Insurance Company of Connecticut had insured slaves, they looked further into it and the result was an outstanding book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank: (New York, Ballantine Books, 2005).

They are to be commended as outstanding journalists for their work though most journalists are still ignorant and disgraceful when it comes to Southern history. Esteemed historian Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made, et al.) called their treatment of Southern history, along with academia's, a "cultural and political atrocity."

So many "journalists" and "historians" today accept the fraudulent 1619 Project, which is the worst scholarship in American history. It is based on a complete lie, that the American Revolution was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery. That is the main theme of the 1619 Project yet there is no evidence whatsoever for it: not a single letter, speech, editorial or anything else. It is a total fraud, an invention by a white-hating racist, Nikole Hannah-Jones,⁹ published in the race-obsessed New York Times, which pushed the Russia Hoax, that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election in 2016. Of course Mueller proved that was a fraud but it didn't stop the New York Times from pushing it as hard as they could for a year and winning a Pulitzer Prize for their fraud. Shows Pulitzers mean nothing today because Hannah-Jones won one too.

The news media and academia have outsmarted themselves because most people think much of academia is a joke, which it is, and they despise the news media, which is responsible for so much racist hate and division in our country today with Critical Race Theory. CRT started in academia and is pushed by the Associated Press and rest of the fraud-news media.

Mitcham goes on to discuss the Triangle Trade and he points out that only "six percent of the slaves exported from Africa to the New World were destined for the thirteen American colonies. The bulk of them went to the Caribbean, West Indies, Brazil, or the sugar plantations of South America or the islands such as Trinidad and Tobago."¹⁰

The slave trade was so entrenched in New England, when the Brits proposed a tax on molasses, a component of the Triangle Trade, Massachusetts merchants "Protested that the tax would ruin the slave trade and cause more than 700 ships to be docked for lack of work."¹¹

African slavery would have been impossible without the help of other Africans in Africa who sold their own people into slavery as a result of mostly tribal warfare. Mitcham writes:

The Northern flesh peddlers obtained their black chattels primarily from other Africans. Historians Linda Heywood and John Thornton of Boston University estimated that 90% of the slaves shipped to the New World were first enslaved by Africans and only later sold to Europeans and American. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University writes: 'The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.'¹²

Esteemed black anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston documents this too with such works as Barracoon, which was a slave fort where captured Africans were held by other Africans awaiting the European or New England slave ships that would take them on the horrendous Middle Passage.

Slavery was so entrenched in African culture that Mitcham quotes an African chief, Gezo, who told Britain's Sir Richard Francis Burton:

'The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their wealth . . . the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.'¹³

Mitcham's sources, quotations and analysis that I have put in this review are the tip of the iceberg you will find in his book.

Mitcham goes into detail on how widespread slavery was in New England in the eighteenth century. He says in Connecticut half of all "ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves, and one-third of all doctors had them as well."¹⁴

There were strong laws regulating the behavior of free blacks, Indians and mulattos with serious punishments such as 40 lashes at one point for "even speaking against a white person."¹⁵

Mitcham concludes the chapter stating that 24 to 25 million blacks were transported "from Africa to the New World" and between "4 and 5 million of them died en route(the so-called "Middle Passage"), primarily because of the brutality of the slavers."¹⁶

As the Age of Enlightenment began, the British turned against the slave trade and promoted the idea of compensated emancipation, but Mitcham writes:

Even so, the North remained linked to slavery. Much of the capital that propelled the Industrial Revolution came from the slave trade. The North continued to profit from and, in one form or another, promote slavery until 1861. It also reaped massive financial benefits from federal tariffs on imports. (A tariff is a tax or duty placed on imports and/or exports.) Slavery and the commodities it produced for export, in fact, funded most of the federal government as late as 1860.¹⁷

Mitcham lists five groups involved in slavery in the era of European and American slave traders:¹⁸

1) Africans;

2) Arab-Muslim slave traders;

3) Northern flesh peddlers and other Yankees;

4) Latin American plantation owners;

5) Southerners.

He notes that "far too many people 'give a pass' to everyone except the Southerner---often without realizing it. He goes on:

This trend is a grievous injustice. The morally superior, sanctimonious attitude some people adopt when lecturing others concerning the sins of their ancestors isn't factual. When it comes to America's "peculiar institution," there is plenty of guilt---if that is the objective---to spread around.¹⁹

Chapter II

Hypocrisy

By 1750, Mitcham writes, "there were three times as many slaves in Connecticut as there were in Georgia. Massachusetts had four times as many as the Peach State."²⁰

"Northerners never particularly liked black people prior to the Civil War" Mitcham writes.²¹

That would explain the many Northern and Western states that had laws forbidding black people from even visiting, much less living there, unless they wanted to end up in jail or whipped. Lincoln's Illinois was one of them. Of course, there were the New York City Draft Riots during the War Between the States when scores of blacks were lynched.

Mitcham recounts a fascinating story that says a lot about eighteenth century New York:

In 1741, several fires broke out in the city, including one in the lieutenant governor's house. Further investigation into the fires uncovered the "Conspiracy of 1741," also known as the Negro Plot of 1741 or the Slave Insurrection of 1741. Those believed guilty were quickly arrested. More than two hundred people, including twenty poor whites, were jailed while more than a hundred were hanged, exiled, or burned at the stake. The two black leaders were gibbetted (i.e., hung in chains in a public display and left to die of exposure, thirst, and starvation). At least thirty-eight slaves faced execution along with several whites. Fourteen blacks were burned at the stake.²²

During the antebellum era, slavery began to end in the North when massive white immigration made it cheaper to hire a white man, whom one could fire at will, than buy a black and have to take care of him from birth to death.

New York passed a "progressive abolition law in 1799, with the goal of ending slavery by 1827. Rhode Island also passed a manumission law but it was very carefully written to protect the slave trade, which enriched the state. All the Northern states had enacted anti-slavery legislation by 1830. The Northern manumission and emancipation laws were designed so that the slaves' masters did not lose money."²³

What usually happened by ever-thrifty Yankees, was, the slave would be sold South back into slavery just before his twenty-first birthday, which would have free him. As Mitcham writes, "There was no moral outrage against slavery in the North. Much of the impetus behind manumission was a desire to protect white labor from cheap black competition."²⁴ Other books, such as Black Bondage in the North, by Edgar J. McManus, prove this too. Mitcham cites it.

Mitcham points out that the percentage of free blacks in the North declined too, in the antebellum period. Free blacks in the North had to worry about being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Between 1790 and 1830, free blacks declined in New York from 2.13 percent to .57 percent.²⁵

There was roughly the same number of free blacks in the North as in the South at war time. There were around 250,000 free blacks in the North, and around 250,000 in the South.

Thousands of free blacks in the South fought for the South in the War Between the States. Some 3,000 to 4,000 were observed by chief inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, Dr. Lewis Steiner, in Stonewall Jackson's army as he left Frederick, Maryland in 1862.

Frederick Douglas and others confirmed that many blacks were Confederate soldiers; and they were integrated in the Confederate Army alongside whites, "mixed up with all the rebel horde," as Dr. Lewis Steiner observed of Stonewall Jackson's army, not segregated as in the Union Army.

Mitcham writes about the fascinating story of Solomon Northup of Sarasota Springs, New York, who was a free black man, kidnapped, who spent twelve years as a slave then escaped and wrote about his ordeal in Twelve Years a Slave. It tells the truth about slavery because it is fact, unlike Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is fiction.

Slavery was dying out until 1793 when Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin for American cotton, which led to enormous demand for cotton and thus field hands: "Southern cotton production increased from 5 million pounds in 1793 to 500 million in 1835...".²⁶

The slave trade was outlawed in the U.S. in 1808 but "Northern flesh peddlers continued to sail and rack up the profits with tacit support from the United States government." Great Britain and France wanted to board American vessels looking for illegal cargoes of slaves but the American government would not allow it "so the U.S. flag proved to be ample protection for the slave traders" who continued to operate during the War Between the States and on through to 1885, twenty years after Appomattox, when Brazil, the last nation allowing slavery, ended it.

Mitcham writes:

The attitude of the flesh peddler was perhaps best expressed by the other John Brown, a rich slave peddler for whom Brown University in Rhode Island is named (not to be confused with the terrorist hanged in 1859). When he was criticized for traveling to Africa to bring back slaves, he replied that "there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses."²⁷

Mitcham quotes historian H. V. Traywick, Jr. who describes the horror in Africa of an attack on the Takkoi in West Africa by the Amazon women warriors of Dahomey. They "beheaded the old and sick and carried their heads off as trophies. The rest were marched in a slave column to barracoons (slave barracks) on the beach at Dymdah. The Dahomians stopped on the second day to smoke the heads of their decapitated victimes because they began to stink."²⁸

Traywick's source was African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston who wrote about the last known African "illegally smuggled into the United States" before the war as written in Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, and also her later book, Barracoon. That African was Cudjo "Kossola" Lewis and the slave ship that brought him to America was the Clotilda out of Maine, which took Lewis to Mobile. He has descendants who still live in the area of Plateau, Alabama.

Mitcham ends the chapter with:

Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent African American writer and anthropologist, said that it "suck in my craw" that her own black people had sold her ancestors into slavery. She had been raised on stories that white people had gone to Africa and lured the Africans onto the slave ships by waving a red handkerchief. When they boarded the ship to investigate, it sailed away with them. But, no, she declared, her own people had "butchered and killed, exterminated whole nations and torn families apart, for a profit." She was sadly impressed with the "universal nature of greed and glory."²⁹

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Three of Five

NOTES:

(Scroll down for: It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

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

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 2.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 4.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 5.

⁹ See "In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'Bloodsuckers,' Columbus 'No Different Than Hitler'", June 25, 2020, The Federalist, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler/, Accessed 11-2-21.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 6.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 7.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 8.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 9.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 11.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 12.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 15.

²⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 16.

²⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 17.

²⁹ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One of Five

Posted on October 27, 2021October 31, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part One of Five

Regnery History (Washington, DC, 2020); 240 pages, 381 end notes, 169 sources in the bibliography, excellent index, numerous pictures, available from the publisher and other places in hardback, softcover, ebook, audiobook, and audio CD; hardback ISBN: 978-1-62157-876-5.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. has a remarkable ability to cut right to the chase when analyzing history. It no doubt comes from his extensive knowledge and perspective gained from a lifetime of writing (over 40 books) and reading about the events of the past which define us today.

The text of the inside front cover of Mitcham's It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War starts with "If you think the Civil War was fought to end slavery, you've been duped."

That sentence identifies the book all over the Internet, which is excellent marketing for a book that does not just deserve a review, but deserves a "comprehensive" review. (I had put a sticky note to myself on the front of my copy to go through all of Dr. Mitcham's notes and bibliography and buy all the books he referenced for my library).

It Wasn't About Slavery goes way beyond the slavery issue. It is well argued and documented so that it is hard to question any of it.

Here's Dr. Mitcham's bio from the inside back cover:

Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. received his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. A university professor for twenty years, he is the author of more than forty books, including Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest; Vicksburg: The Bloody Siege That Turned the Tide of the Civil War; and Desert Fox: The Storied Military Career of Erwin Rommel. A former army helicopter pilot and company commander, he is a graduate of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College and is qualified through the rank of major general. He is a holder of the prestigious Jefferson Davis Gold Medal for Excellent in the Researching and Writing of Southern History.¹

The book starts with several pages of endorsements by historians and one by Phil Robertson, Duck Dynasty patriarch and Dr. Mitcham's fellow Louisianan.

There is an introduction and 15 chapters. Each chapter has a nice epigraph by an historical figure or document appropriate to the chapter such as this one for Chapter III, Secession: The Constitutional Issue:

The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simple this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.----Lysander Spooner, abolitionist leader

This review, Part One of Five, covers the Introduction and Dr. Mitcham's background, which gets us into it.

In the Introduction, Mitcham writes:

The victor, as Churchill said, writes the history, but these "historians" have abused the privilege. What passes for history today is cultural and intellectual nihilism, especially when it comes to the myth of the Enlightened and Noble Federal Cause. Their aim is not the truth (which should be the ambition of every legitimate historian) but to serve an agenda. They are saying instead: "Forget the past unless it fits the narrative of which we approve because everything that occurred before us is irrelevant and inferior to our views and therefore should be forgotten, modified, 'corrected,' contextualized, or destroyed altogether."²
Is it possible to be more narcissistic?

Mitcham goes on to say that the primary purpose of his book is "to help bring some balance to the debate about what happened in the pre-Civil War era."

He states that our war of 1861-65 was definitely not a "civil war" which is defined as two factions within one country fighting for control of the government. Southerners left the Union democratically by their people debating the issue and voting in convention to secede as was proper according to the Founding Fathers.

Mitcham likes the term "War for Southern Self-Determination" but he uses Civil War because it is well-known though he says, when he writes it, it is shorthand for War for Southern Self-Determination.

He states that "Freeing the slaves was a result of the war, not the casus belli." The cause of the war was money as it is for most wars.

I agree with Dr. Mitcham completely. In the case of the North, it was to keep the money flowing out of the South and into the North by preventing the establishment of a powerful, free-trade confederacy on its southern border, a confederacy with economic and military alliances with England and the rest of Europe. The South, in such a situation, with 100% control of King Cotton, would not buy inferior, overpriced goods from the North and would soon be unbeatable, militarily, by the North.

That's why Lincoln started his war as quickly as he could. He announced his blockade around Southern ports before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the reason was to chill the South's relationship with Europe, which would be game-over for Lincoln, and he knew it. Money, power and control is what Lincoln and the North wanted.

The one thing that can be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to free the slaves. The vast majority of their statements, actions and documents in the first two years of the war such as the War Aims Resolution, which states that they are fighting to preserve the Union and not to end slavery, prove it conclusively.

The Northern economy was based mostly on manufacturing for its captive Southern market and shipping Southern cotton. Without the South, the North was dead.

Without the North, the South was in great shape.

The South would start manufacturing for itself. Southerners put a low 10% tariff in their constitution vis-a-vis the North's astronomical 47-60% Morrill Tariff, and Southerners forbid protective tariffs. Northern ship captains were beating a path to the South while goods rotted on New York docks. The South was for free trade as it always had been. The North was for extreme protection for its own industry and artisans.

As the most prominent economist of the time, Thomas Prentice Kettell said in this famous book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, the South was producing the wealth of the nation with cotton and other commodities but the North was taking all the profit. Southerners were paying 75% of the taxes but 80% of the tax revenue was being spent in the North.

Mitcham says that if "culture is defined as the total way of life of a people, they [North and South] had distinct cultures from the beginning. Only with the evolution of modern historical thought, heavily influenced by the ideas and tactics of Marx and Stalin, did the Civil War become 'all about slavery.'"³

Mitcham does not address the right of secession and the resulting accusation that Confederates were traitors but he states unequivocally that secession was a right understood by all. No Confederate leaders were tried for treason because they would have won their cases.

Mitcham says when Jefferson Davis was in prison after the war, the hated radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who had been caned by S.C. Representative Preston Brooks in 1856, wrote to Supreme Court chief justice Salmon Chase stating "to try him [Davis]. . . would be the ne plus ultra of folly".

Mitcham continues:

Chase agreed. He wrote to his former colleagues in Lincoln's cabinet in July 1866: 'If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion.'.⁴

Confederate president Jefferson Davis was released from his Yankee torture chamber May 11, 1867, where lights had been kept on 24 hours a day with guards marching loudly nearby as a measure of spite for two years since it was known Davis was only able to sleep in total darkness.

Davis had wanted a trial but Yankees knew they would lose in a court of law what they had won on the battlefield because of their four-to-one population advantage and their 100-to-one gun advantage. That's why Lincoln started his war in the first place. His advantages had been so overwhelming he had been seduced into thinking it would be a quick war.

Abraham Lincoln, president of the North, did achieve his mission which was to keep the money flowing into the North from the rest of the country so New York and Boston would be great cities while the rest of the country be damned. No "consent of the governed" in Lincoln's mind.

The South suffered in abject poverty until World War II but their legacy of honor, valor, blood and sacrifice in their great war for independence is unsurpassed in world history. Few nations are as good. None are better.

Of course, Mr. Lincoln's war of invasion killed 750,000 men and mutilated over a million who suffered from lost limbs, eyesight and other injuries their entire lives.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Two of Five

¹ Another bio, this one from All American Entertainment, which books top-notch speakers nationwide for special events states that Dr. Mitcham "is also a former visiting professor at the United States Military Academy. At the University of Louisiana at Monroe, he was named 'My Favorite Professor' four times by the Baptist Student Association despite not being a Baptist. He was also named Freshman Honor Society's Professor of the Year." He "has also written dozens of articles and appeared on the History Channel, CBS, National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Network. He is the former adviser to General Norman Schwarzkopf on the CBS Special D-Day." And, in the private sector "Mitcham is also the former president and CEO of TelSon Communications, a private $7 million corporation that provided local exchange service in seven states." https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/speakers/437206/Samuel-W.-Mitcham,-Jr. Accessed October 26, 2021.

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

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

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, xix.

Polls Show Mounting Support for State Secessions, Strongest Among Southern Republicans – Guest Post by Leonard M. “Mike” Scruggs

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 16 Comments

. . . These statistics confirm what the University of Virginia study found. There are two ideological movements for secession. Conservative and Constitutionally oriented Red State partisans want to secede from socially and economically radical Blue State dominance, and Blue State partisans want a government unhindered by Constitutional restrictions and traditional religious and moral values. The Blue State partisans are geographically separated between the Pacific Coast and Northeast.

Polls Show Mounting Support for State Secessions

Strongest Among Southern Republicans

Guest Post by
Leonard M. "Mike" Scruggs

The Bonnie Blue Flag - Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights Hurrah!

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : Mike Scruggs has analyzed a large national poll taken in June, 2021, just four months ago, that reveals "a jaw-dropping 66 percent of Southern Republicans indicated a willingness for their State to secede from the United States and join other seceding States." That is an increase of 16 points in six months, since the last time such questions were polled.

Our country today has become a tyranny with serious problems that can not be tolerated much longer. Chief among them is censorship by Google, Facebook and Twitter et al. in unconstitutional collusion with the federal government. When they can de-platform the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and deny his communication with half of the country that still supports him, they can do anything. Big Tech thinks IT is sovereign rather than the people.

A tiny handful of Big Tech lefties in one-party California can not be allowed to control the information of the 200,000,000-plus Republican and Independent Americans who despise them.

When the federal government tells Facebook to censor COVID information because it doesn't fit the left's paranoid political narrative, that is the same as the federal government censoring information and speech, which is unconstitutional.

Big Tech and the corrupt news media, at the behest of the federal government, already censor valid information on safe effective COVID treatments that are being used all over the world, thus hundreds of thousands have to die for leftist politics.

Big Tech and the Democrat Party do not follow science. They ignore the natural immunity millions of Americans have because those Americans have already had COVID.

Natural immunity if you have had COVID is arguably, even likely, better than the COVID vaccine. Yet if you have this strong natural immunity and don't want the government's vaccine, you are a pariah.

The bottom line is that millions who have better immunity than the vaccine are about to lose their jobs in the name of fighting COVID thanks to the Democrat Party that does not follow science.

We are unquestionably in a Marxist cultural revolution being pushed by the race-obsessed Democrat Party.

Think about Democrat governance. In many Democrat big cities they have decriminalized theft so thieves brazenly walk into pharmacies like CVS and load up what they want then walk out.

As a result, pharmacies are closing left and right in those places. There will soon be none for law-biding citizens to use.

What's next?

If you walk across town in blue state big cities and aren't murdered, raped or robbed before getting to your destination, be careful not to step in human feces or get a syringe needle from a junkie living across the street from your children's school stuck in your foot.

This is a sign of a collapsing society though Democrats think they are headed to utopia.

Of course, they also think men who think they are women, really are women and need abortion rights.

Now the Democrats want the IRS to monitor your bank account so it knows when you have $600 in there though Republicans are trying to raise that amount.

There should be NO amount that allows the IRS to automatically monitor every American. If they have a reason, such as they suspect a crime, then fine. But not for anything else. Let's not make every American a suspect.

Imagine the corruption this will cause. Now, every Democrat administration (if there are any after the 2022 and 2024 electoral bloodbaths that are predicted) can call the IRS and target a political enemy because every American will now be suspect.

Democrats are authoritarians who constantly use the federal government and IRS to go after average Americans who disagree with their idiotic or racist policies like Critical Race Theory. They applaud AG Merrick Garland for siccing the FBI on parents upset at school boards for encouraging Critical Race Theory and teaching transgenderism to young children. The disgraceful Garland has a huge conflict of interest because his daughter is married to a man making millions spreading racist CRT around the country so Garland, of course, wants to keep the money flowing for his daughter. Lock those parents up if they interfere with Merrick Garland's family's cash flow. The children of the proles don't matter to Merrick Garland.

Democrats want a totalitarian tyranny with them in charge.

They don't care about free speech or the prosperity of the middle class. That's why Biden canceled the Keystone Pipeline then had to beg the Saudis on his knees to produce more oil. What a national embarrassment. As the famous chant at football games goes, F J B !!!

The only thing Democrats care about is their own power and wealth. We saw that in the Kavanaugh hearing. They offer nothing to Americans in general except anti-white hatred and racism. They don't even care about the black people they purport to love. They use black people. Defunding the police harms poor blacks in inner cities more than anybody.

If we have another stolen election because of Democrat Party corruption with mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, no monitors, etc. (see the Texas law suit filed in the U.S. Supreme Court shortly after the 2020 election), states will take action and may secede.

We have 50 powerful states in our Union. Any one of them could stand on its own. There are many small countries on the planet where people govern themselves democratically and are happy and prosperous.

One possible solution is to reel in federal power and re-empower the states as was intended by the Founding Fathers but good luck getting rid of the deep state. It, along with Big Tech, has more power today than the people, though the people are the sovereign.

We want free speech and the government out of our lives.

We want a reliable press and tech companies that allow all information to flow so we can make up our own minds about everything. We don't need some liberal pissant in California telling us what to think.

If states ever did secede, or, as I said, if there is another stolen election, or elections we can not trust, states WILL secede and they should because who the hell wants to live in a leftist tyranny with dopey California liberals in charge of our magnificent country. They can't even keep the electricity on out there. Their hypocritical leaders, again, step in human feces as they go maskless ignoring their own mandates that they force on the proles they rule.

If states ever did secede, and the red states formed their own constitutional republic, we could use most of the current United States Constitution as a base then add assurances that would make our republic free, prosperous and fair forever for all our citizens regardless of skin color.

We would make our guiding principle a colorblind meritocracy and put it in law. We would be like America before the Democrat Party became Marxist Communist with the delusion that the American public will roll over and let them rule us.

We will adopt Martin Luther King's adage that it is not skin color that is important but the content of one's character. It is hard to get better than that.

Here are other things we could put in our red state constitution to keep our country free:

1) Strong anti-monopoly laws that would never ever allow a Google, Facebook or Twitter to arise. No company can ever censor our people. We want the innovation from vigorous competition always. WE WILL HAVE FREE SPEECH ALWAYS.

2) Laws forbidding cancel culture so that if somebody cancels a person because of their political beliefs, the canceler can be sued into bankruptcy immediately. NO MORE CANCEL CULTURE. Let the blue states have it.

3) Guaranteed equal justice under the law. We are supposed to have that now but we don't. The Democrat Party has politicized everything in America including the criminal justice system. Democrats get off while Republicans rot in solitary confinement. Violent rioters burning cities in 2020 got off while non-violent trespassers on January 6 in the capital who were let in, in many cases, and mingled in a friendly way with Capital police, rot in solidary confinement.

There are trials for every policeman who shoots a black person committing a crime but no trial for the murder of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed 120 pound woman, a United States Air Force war veteran who was not even warned before being murdered.

4) Strong laws against FBI and federal government corruption that led to the fraudulent Steele dossier which hamstrung a United States president for three years with the Mueller Investigation. In other words, Hillary Clinton would be in jail for a long time and so would Christopher Steele.

5) No racist affirmative action quotas. Everybody competes on an equal footing. No punishment of people alive today for something their ancestors were supposed to have done 150 years ago. That is a shakedown of monumental proportions. We are all equal today. If you have a problem, get more education. Get help somewhere. Everybody competes on a level field.

6) Strong laws to prevent the federal government from ever becoming as corrupt as it is today with its deep state. No labor unions in the federal government. No federal employees doing labor union business for the Democrat Party while on the clock as federal employees.

7) Strengthen the Tenth Amendment empowering states over the federal government. Limit tax flow to the federal government. No federal grants to study the sex life of the Ukrainian fruit fly.

8) National defense in the red states will be no problem since 44% of the United States military today comes from the South. Red state folks are patriotic and will serve, defend and die just like our ancestors did in the War Between the States when they were outnumbered four to one and outgunned 100 to one. Southerners still killed a like number of Yankees in a war that killed 750,000 and maimed over a million out of a population of 31 million.

9) Encouragement of states to pass monument protection laws so that 100 year old monuments are not allowed to be destroyed by mobs. Encourage more monuments to be built if need be but never ever do like ISIS, the Taliban and Democrat Party and destroy monuments to forebears.

10) Encourage the teaching of a comprehensive history of slavery which would start with blacks in Africa selling other blacks into slavery, then put the blame on the British and New Englanders who carried on most of the slave trade so much so one can argue that the entire infrastructure of the Old North was built on profits from the slave trade. Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, during the War Between the States, 54 years after the slave trade had been outlawed by the U.S. Constitution.

11) Absolute security of all borders so that we can not have an invasion like the one orchestrated by Biden and Obama to change the U.S. electorate to the skin colors favored by racist Democrats, which is anybody but white people.

12) No teacher union monopolies that stifle education and indoctrinate students with Marxist socialist Communist ideology with Democrats in charge.

13) School choice for everybody.

All those folks who want constitutional government, the rule of law, freedom and capitalism so they can have prosperity, will move to the red states, and all the Marxists, Communists and socialists can move to the blue states or Venezuela, Russia, China, Iran or other like-minded places. Remember, California can not even keep the electricity on, and when walking around in blue state big cities, one must watch out for drug needles and human feces in the street, or gangs robbing drug stores in broad daylight with government approval.

Mike goes into detail on the right of secession, which absolutely is a right. I'd like to add to his excellent analysis that three states reserved the right of secession before acceding to the United States Constitution: New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. By the acceptance of the right of secession of New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, all the other states had it too because all states entered the Union as exact equals.

There is indisputable evidence of the right of secession. See The Right of Secession, Part II of my book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. It is comprehensive and includes such things as a Stetson University College of Law, Stetson Law Review article that concludes that the South absolutely did have the right to secede and had exercised it properly. There is much more.

The Supreme Court Case Texas v. White in 1869 that concluded that Texas had never left the Union and that the Union was indestructible, apparently never read the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia that gave the right of secession to Texas and all the other states. Tell the families of the thousands of Texans who died fighting for independence against the Yankee invasion that Texas had never left the Union.

The chief justice presiding over this case, Salmon P. Chase, was Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, so, of course he was going to rule against secession and not indict his boss, Lincoln, for starting a war that killed 750,000 men and maimed a million, which LINCOLN ABSOLUTELY DID DO.

The abject corruption of Reconstruction rendered any decision of Chase's court as to the right of secession, invalid, and actually laughable.

No legal determination that involves corruption, duress, violence or coercion, which define Congressional Reconstruction, can be valid.

On the other hand, the secession conventions of the South, which had been called by Southern state legislatures and whose representatives were elected by the Southern people, are valid as the article in the Stetson University College of Law, Stetson Law Review, determined. That article is "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession" by H. Newcomb Morse. It states on pages 434 to 436:

When the Southern States seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861, not one state was remiss in discharging this legal obligation. Every seceding state properly utilized the convention process, rather than a legislative means, to secede. Therefore, not only did the Southern States possess the right to secede from the Union , they exercised that right in the correct manner.

Morse concludes:

. . . conceivably, it was the Northern States that acted illegally in precipitating the War Between the States. The Southern States, in all likelihood, were exercising a perfectly legitimate right in seceding from the Union.

Southern secession conventions were pure democracy at work. They debated the single issue of secession for days then voted to secede.

Of course they had the right to secede. The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to Southern states seceding 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.

No decision by Lincoln's former employee during the corrupt Reconstruction period can determine something as momentous as the right of secession, which was taught at West Point as an absolute right in the antebellum era, and was never questioned by anybody until Lincoln needed a justification for his bloody war. He waged that war for the supremacy of the federal government controlled by the North over the rest of the country. It was about Northern wealth and power, and gave us the corrupt federal government we have today. Yankees were the federals, as in federal government, during the war. They certainly did not fight to free the slaves as the War Aims Resolution and other Northern documents produced in the first two years of the war prove.

Following Mike's bio and article are links to The Times Examiner website, Mike's outstanding columns, and to his books.]

Mike Scruggs is the author of two books - The Un-Civil War, Shattering the Historical Myths; and Lessons from the Vietnam War, Truths the Media Never Told You - and over 600 articles on military history, national security, intelligent design, genealogical genetics, immigration, current political affairs, Islam, and the Middle East.

The abridged version of The Un-Civil War sold over 40,000 copies and won the prestigious D. T. Smithwick Award by the North Carolina Society of Historians, for excellence.

Mike holds a BS degree from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Stanford University. A former USAF intelligence officer and Air Commando, he is a decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War and holds the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and Air Medal. He is a retired First Vice President for a major national financial services firm and former Chairman of the Board of a classical Christian school.

Polls Show Mounting Support for State Secessions

By Mike Scruggs

(First published in The Times Examiner, 19 October 2021)

Strongest Among Southern Republicans

A BRIGHT LINE WATCH/YouGov poll of 2,750 Americans taken in late June 2021, revealed that a jaw-dropping 66 percent of Southern Republicans indicated a willingness for their State to secede from the United States and join other seceding States. This was up from an already high level of 50 percent in a poll following the January 6 incursion of crowds of protestors into the Capitol building. Most of these protestors were frustrated by questionable election results but had no destructive or evil intent. Overall, in the June national survey, 37 percent indicated a “willingness to secede.” Republicans in the Western Mountain regions also evidenced strong sentiments favoring secession at 43 percent. Curiously, Democrats on the West Coast and in the Northeast also showed above average sentiment for secession, but obviously for different reasons.

A University of Virginia (UVA) analysis in July of 2,012 voters, about half for Biden and half for Trump, also indicated surprisingly high sentiment for the secession of their State. Approximately 52 percent of Trump supporters favored secession to join other seceding “Red states.” Remarkably, even 41 percent of Democrats favor secession to join seceding “Blue states.” These poll results indicate a strong ideological enmity and distrust between the two parties. About 83 percent of the Trump voters were concerned about radicalism and immorality ruining the country. Curiously, 62 percent of Biden voters were concerned about radicalism and immorality, but perhaps from a different perspective.

The survey showed that Republicans and Democrats strongly distrust each other. More than 80 percent of both parties believe the opposing party presents “a clear and present danger to American democracy.” Much of this distrust has been created by undeniably radical social Marxist policies. Much more has been the deliberate result of an irresponsibly partisan mainstream media, which has little moral compass or regard for truth. “Can’t we all just get along” sighs only tend to bury important truths, and burying truth only makes things worse.

According to Dr. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics,

“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous…The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed.”

The June YouGov poll also found that 50 percent of Southern independents favor secession, while only 20 percent of Democrats favor it. In the Mountain states, 35 percent of independents favor secession but only 17 percent of Democrats.

Secession sentiment is fairly strong among independents generally with 43 percent of independents in the “Heartland” favoring it, compared to only 34 percent of Republicans, and 19 percent of Democrats. Secession sentiment among independents ranges from 33 percent on the Pacific coast to 50 percent in the South.

Democrat sentiment for secession is highest on the Pacific Coast with 47 percent favoring secession. Only 33 percent of independents and 27 percent of Republicans want the West Coast to secede from the United States.

In the Northeast 39 percent of Democrats favor secession, while 35 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans favor it.

These statistics confirm what the University of Virginia study found. There are two ideological movements for secession. Conservative and Constitutionally oriented Red State partisans want to secede from socially and economically radical Blue State dominance, and Blue State partisans want a government unhindered by Constitutional restrictions and traditional religious and moral values. The Blue State partisans are geographically separated between the Pacific Coast and Northeast.

Dividing the United States into a Red Constitutional Republic and two Blue Social Democracies (Pacific and Northeast), however, presents numerous national security and economic risks and difficulties for divided families. Nevertheless, the prospect for conservatives that they must give up freedom for the sake of unity is grim and unthinkable. Our hope for now should be in the 2022 and 2024 elections, and that many former Biden voters and Democrat partisans will be convinced by the terrible reality and ruinous failure of Biden and Democrat Party policies that the nation must return to the traditional Constitutional and moral values that made us a great nation, and which are absolutely necessary for our continued survival.

Is Secession legal and Constitutional? Even Congressman Abraham Lincoln said so in 1848:

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable and most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”

Might does not make right, and decades of propaganda cannot change the truth. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was referenced by the South Carolina Declaration of the Immediate Causes for Secession on December 24, 1860:

“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.”

Secession was and is legal, but the question today and always is whether secession is desirable. We are headed for some extraordinary tough decisions and hardships, unless voters wake up and throw out the social Marxists and their spineless establishment apologists in the 2022 and 2024 primaries and general election.

The 1860 South Carolina Declaration of the Causes for Secession has become a popular tool for political-correctness-chained academics to prove the Civil War was only about slavery. The word “slavery” or words or phrases pertaining to it are used 18 times in a total word count of 2,209. The document uses the word “Constitution” 21 times, which seems a more prevalent theme, if you insist on reading for word count rather than analytical context.

More than a dozen paragraphs point out the history of the British Colonies and United States from 1765 to 1860 pertaining to the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights to prove South Carolina’s Constitutional Right of Secession. Most of the slavery words were complaining about Northern violations of Article 4 of the Constitution and other breaches of promise regarding handling of runaway slaves. While I can fully understand and sympathize with the position of 14 Northern States and probably Abraham Lincoln on the unpleasant obligation to enforce Article 4, it is ridiculous to assert the War was only about slavery because South Carolina used violations of Article 4 as proof of Northern unfaithfulness to Constitutional principles. South Carolina in particular, but other Southern and Border States generally were very concerned that the North was abandoning Jeffersonian principles of government and seeking national greatness based on consolidated and centralized big government.

The Tariff Wars from 1824 through 1860, though not mentioned in the South Carolina Declaration of 1860, were a prime example of Northern sectional politics and government that ignored Southern interests. South Carolina had threatened secession in 1824 and 1833 (Nullification Crisis) over unfair tariffs that benefited Northern sectional interests and exploited and harmed the South.

The Northern myth that the Civil War was only about freeing slaves still rankles knowledgeable Southerners and others not bound by politically correct chains. This is largely because politicians, PC academics, and the media so frequently use it to make the South a racist and traitorous punching bag and perennial scapegoat.

This is true even on Fox News on which otherwise conservative commentators and contributors frequently refer to the U.S. or the Republicans as fighting a war to end slavery. This is such a shallow, half-baked misrepresentation that it belongs in the propaganda hall of fame.

The most recent and egregious example of bad scholarship serving as a punching bag to slander and defame the South, is Fox News commentator Brett Baier’s new book, To Rescue the Republic, which basically tries to upgrade General and later President U.S. Grant to the status of a national moral hero.

Grant did some noble things, but he allowed and encouraged several Union generals to make total war on Southern civilians, resulting in over 50,000 dead, and as President presided over one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history.

During Reconstruction, he allowed Radical Republicans to go wild in oppressing and exploiting the South. Baier apparently knows little about Reconstruction that does not follow the latest liberal academic spin, distortions, and coverups from writers such as Eric Foner, who believes Reconstruction was an “unfinished revolution” and anti-Confederate zealot Ty Seidule, who indoctrinated West Point cadets to believe Robert E. Lee and Confederates were traitors.

Does Baier know that during Reconstruction, approximately 228,000 Confederate veterans were disenfranchised to assure Republican carpetbaggers would win elections and establish the South as a Radical Republican stronghold. Does Baier know that the largely black Radical Republican Union League militias also stirred up racial resentment and resorted to intimidation to keep blacks from voting Democrat.

The Radical Republicans of the Reconstruction era have been replaced by Radical Democrats in the Obama-Biden administrations.

Baier wrote an excellent book on President Eisenhower, and Grant had a noble side, but the problem with Baier’s new book is that in his attempt to upgrade Grant, he slanders the South and Southerners as racists and traitors. One politically prominent Fox Contributor called Confederates “traitors” in reviewing Baier’s book. Baier’s book will contribute to Southern alienation from a distorted, anti-Southern national narrative that is being pushed even by Fox News. As an antidote, I recommend U.S. Grant’s Failed Presidency by Philip Leigh, published in March 2019.

Republicans should win the 2022 and 2024 elections and avoid more disastrous policy mistakes and calls for Red State secessions if they can assure fair elections and resist virtue-signaling opportunities to slander and enrage Southerners.

Link to The Times Examiner website: www.timesexaminer.com

Link to Mike Scruggs's columns at The Times Examiner: https://www.timesexaminer.com/mike-scruggs

Link to Mike's book website:

https://www.universalmediainc.org/books/. His books are also available on Amazon and other places.

Charlottesville Untold, Inside Unite the Right by Anne Wilson Smith – A Review by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Posted on October 14, 2021October 14, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Review of

Charlottesville Untold, Inside Unite the Right by Anne Wilson Smith

Shotwell Publishing, LLC, Columbia, S.C., Sept. 20, 2021, softcover, 396 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1947660588, thoroughly documented with footnotes, many of which contain QR codes so you can look at drone footage and such immediately as you read, $24.95 on Amazon.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

IT IS CLEAR from Anne Wilson Smith's thorough, well documented and riveting book, that Charlottesville's inept, disgraceful Democrat leadership is the reason a person died and many were injured at the August 12, 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia.

If the city of Charlottesville cared about the United States Constitution and free speech, they would have protected everybody's right to it and nobody would have died. But that does not make good headlines for the left, which never lets a tragedy go to waste.

I want to make it CLEAR that I am NO fan of the KKK or "white supremacy" whatever that means. I am an historian who is appalled at the fraud which passes for history in this day and age thanks to an utterly corrupt news media that is more like the propaganda ministry of the Democrat Party. By news media I mean CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC. the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, et al. ad nauseam, all of which are empowered by Big Tech, Google, Facebook and Twitter, that censor information for half of the country, not because it is false, but because much of it is true but harms the Democrat Party.

Academia is just as bad or worse. It is 100% liberal (I know the actual percentage is only 90% but the other 10 are not going to say a word). A real debate is impossible in academia because it is made up of liberals trying to out-liberal each other and all petrified the mob will show up at their office, or, God forbid, accuse them of being a racist (which is defined as anybody who disagrees with a Democrat) thus most of them are dishonest but they know the Democrat Party line.

We are living through a Marxist authoritarian revolution where the Democrat attorney general of the United States, Merrick Garland, just issued a memo instructing the FBI to investigate parents speaking at local school board meetings. Those parents are upset with racist Critical Race Theory, transgenderism to young children, and other abominations being taught widespread across the country and dividing us horribly.¹

A Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate and former governor, Terry McAuliffe, recently said in a debate that parents have no right to interfere with what schools teach their children.

Pardon me, governor: THAT'S BULLSH_T. Anybody who thinks that should not be elected to anything, ever.

Charlottesville Untold says, about Anne Wilson Smith, that she is the author of Robert E. Lee: A Biography for Kids (which I own and find a well-illustrated, delightful book!).

There are 32 chapters in six parts, which organize the material well.

Smith has done posterity a favor by compiling so much information that has heretofore been hidden by the fraud media. She has interviews, video accounts, court records, police reports, timelines, the Heaphy Report commissioned by the city of Charlottesville to find out what happened.

The Heaphy Report is a non-political authoritative report released on December 1, 2017 described as an "independent investigation of Unite the Right and surrounding events led by Tim Heaphy and performed by his law firm Hunton & Williams."² Heaphy is a former federal prosecutor.³ Smith writes:

For creation of the 200-plus page report, the City of Charlottesville paid $350,000. Investigators reviewed hundred of thousands of documents and electronic communications from the City of Charlottesville and numerous agencies and offices of the Commonwealth of Virginia. They reviewed thousands of photos and hundreds of hours' worth of video footage and audio recordings, some obtained from the internet, some submitted by witnesses, and some obtained from law enforcement sources. They interviewed 150 witnesses including law enforcement personnel; representatives and members of the right-wing protester groups and left-wing counter-protest groups that attended, as well as unaffiliated attendees. They also provided phone and internet tip lines for members of the public to submit information.
The report heavily condemned the Charlottesville Police Department leadership. Police Chief Al Thomas resigned on December 18, 2017.⁴

All of these official documents, the violence they describe, the critical communications among officials during the dramatic events, the bloody fights between mobs, the anarchy, most of the time with police standing around doing nothing, make this book an incredibly exciting read that is impossible to put down.

Smith sets the stage by going into detail on how the destruction of century-old monuments to Confederate heroes and war dead began. She discusses the compromise that brought the Confederate battle flag off the dome of the South Caroling State House where it had flown since 1962 as part of the Confederate War Centennial. South Carolina had supplied 60,000 soldiers to Southern armies in the War Between the States and 20,000 had been killed and another 20,000 maimed. In the entire war, 750,000 died and over a million were maimed out of a national population of 31 million. We lost 400,000 in all of World War II out of a national population of 150 million.

Though polls, even among a majority of blacks, showed that the Confederate flag over the State House was not a problem, virtue-signaling activists made it a problem so a legislative compromise was reached in 2000, the flag came off the State House and a historically accurate square Confederate battle flag such as Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia used in the war was placed next to the Confederate soldier's monument on the grounds in the front of he State House.

This calmed the issue until June 17, 2015, when Dylann Roof murdered nine churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and soon thereafter was shown in pictures holding a Confederate battle flag. This gave then-Governor Nikki Haley a chance to advance her career by degrading her own state and the ancestors of her voters. Smith describes it well. After supporting the flag:

Haley pivoted to the need to remove the flag to promote "healing." Haley, born to immigrant parents as Nimrata Rhandawa, had risen to power as part of the "Tea Party" wave of Republican populism, becoming Governor in 2011. South Carolinians had embraced her as one of their own, and elevated her, twice, to the highest office in the state. In an almost unfathomable act of betrayal, Haley turned on the people who had elected her by allowing their cherished and honorable past to be defined by a deranged mass murderer.
That Haley believed that "healing" could be accomplished by purging the historical symbols of the founding population of her state is wildly misguided at best. Haley could have shown courage, statesmanship, and gravitas, promoting the healing she claimed to value using honest leadership to build bridges and foster understanding amongst Black and White South Carolinians, all of whom were grieving the murder of innocent churchgoers. Instead, she chose a path of short-sighted, self-serving opportunism, paving the way for what was to become a nationwide cultural purge that left a wake of destruction from which the country will never recover. She remains seemingly oblivious to the gravity of her transgression or the immensity of its impact.⁵

The flag came down on July 10, 2015 and that opened floodgates for the destruction of monuments all over the country as well as unnecessary hatred and division, and the current Marxist authoritarian revolution we find ourselves in. If Haley had been a leader, she would have encouraged the building of more monuments but she didn't. She joined the left in destroying a sacred monument and thus put herself in the same class as the Islamic State, when they destroyed monuments hundreds of years old. ISIS, Nikki Haley and the Democrat Party, peas in a pod.

Smith said she "learned that the rally in support of the statue of Robert E. Lee, perhaps the most admirable man our country has ever produced, was planned for August 12th in Charlottesville Virginia." She said "I resolved to go - in fact, felt I must - as a show of support for the first real demonstration of resistance to the cultural cleansing of the symbols of my forebears."⁶

Smith headed from Columbia to Charlottesville

. . . expecting something not unlike the many flag rallies I had witnessed over the years in Columbia, though on a larger scale. I did not anticipate that I would watch events unfold which would have a lasting national impact. I could not have known how catastrophically misrepresented this event would be to the American public. I was appalled as I watched the day's events solidified into a tragic and utterly false narrative that was to become cemented into the national psyche. I did not anticipate that I would be present at a defining event in modern American history, so noteworthy that from that time forward, every utterance of the city name will evoke its memory. "Charlottesville."⁷

Smith confirms that

. . . there were quite a few people, 'very fine people,' who showed up to oppose removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. These people have been accused by the most powerful voices in the nation of being "Nazis" and every other despicable name imaginable. None of them have ever been offered a platform to refute these accusations and tell their own version of the story. Not only are these individuals personally harmed by being prevented from addressing the accusations against them, but the nation as a whole has suffered under a tragic false impression of the events of August 12, 2017.⁸

The racist Wes Bellamy, Charlottesville City Council vice mayor, presents himself "as a champion of equality and anti-racism, but his social media posts revealed an open hatred of White people." This is the man who agitated to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename Lee Park. He is more typical than not of city leaders across the country who have voted to destroy century-old monuments that were built by a poverty-stricken South that had been devastated in the War Between the States but found money through bake sales and pennies from school children to honor their beloved war dead and heroes with fine monuments as statements to the future. Of course, the Democrat Party's Marxist Communist cultural revolution going on today has destroyed many of them.

Smith documents the racist Bellamy's tweets including the misspellings in the originals:

Lol funniest thing about being down south is seeing little White men and the look on their faces when they have to look up to you. @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 10/13/2012
So sad seeing these beanpole body White women in these sundresses smh...@ViceMayorWesB Tweet 10/18/2012
This nigga just said he don't have 2work as long as its White women walking the Earth. Lmaaaaaaaaoooooooo. That's some VA shit. @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 6/27/2010
lol people in here calling Thomas Jefferson a White Supremacist. . . . making a lot of valid points proving the accusation. Interesting... @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 5/14/2014
I really #hate how almost 80% of the Black people in here talk White. . . #petpeeve. #itstheniggainme. #dontjudgeme @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 3/30/2010
I DON'T LIKE WHIT (sic) PEOPLE SO I HATE WHITE SNOW!!!!! FML!!!! @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 12/20/2009
White women=Devil @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 3/3/2011
I HATE BLACK PEOPLE who ACT WHITE!!! (B U NIGGA) -- Jeezy Voice! @ViceMayorWesB Tweet 11/17/2009 ⁹

That's Bellamy's beliefs but here's what Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander in World War II and later president of the United States thought about Gen. Robert E. Lee.

On August 1, 1960, a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, wrote an angry letter to President Eisenhower excoriating him for having a picture of Lee in his White House office. Scott wrote: "I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.

"The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes."¹⁰

President Eisenhower wrote back on the 9th:

Dear Dr. Scott:
Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation's wounds once the bitter struggle was over, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower ¹¹

Just to give you a taste of why you can't put this book down, here is much of Chapter 11, Inside Lee, meaning Lee Park, with subtitle "In a combat zone without a rifle.", pages 103 to 109:

Not only did the Unite the Right attendees have to fight their way through a hostile crowd to attend the rally, but they were not even safe once inside the confines of the park. They found themselves surrounded by Antifa without and separated by barricades within. While throngs of police watched passively, attendees were attacked like caged animals. It was during this part of the day that Baked Alaska was sprayed in the eyes with a chemical agent which left him hospitalized and temporarily blinded.

The chaos inside the park continue until about 11:30 a.m. The young man from Appalachia, Chris, put it this way: "Once we were inside the park, everything really went to hell. We had anyone with a shield, anyone able-bodied was in front holding back protesters so they couldn't take the park. They threw rocks, piss bottles, bricks, and paint bombs." Chris observed fist fighting and people being attacked with clubs.

Chris recalls that he was hit with "rancid piss" and paint bombs, despite the fact that he was trying to stay away from the front lines. After being pelted with objects for a while, he began to get angry, and decided to go up to the front to fight back. He admits that at that point, he got in "a couple of scuffles."

Chris spotted plenty of men in uniform, both police and National Guard, standing near the park. "They had the means to break it up . . . They could've stopped it."

Eddie Miller reported a similar experience on the Political Cesspool podcast that evening. "What we found, you would not believe, once we fought our way into the park, we were barricaded on three sides, only one way out of the park... We were there for an hour and a half, taking all kinds of foreign missiles, bottles of water, sticks being thrown in, our people being spit, hit with pepper spray, they turned gas on us, they threw feces and urine on us. And you know what the police were doing? They were sitting there with their fingers up their rears, watching, some of them laughing. Watching us take all kinds of endless abuse."

On the same podcast, Brad Griffin of the League of the South reported, "When we got to the park, we found that Antifa was not penned by the police. The police allowed Antifa to attack our group. They attacked us with pepper spray, with bricks, with bear mace, with piss bombs, with literal human feces... The Antifa actually had like a canister of hair spray and a lighter, and actually turned it into a miniature flame thrower. I mean they had a literal flame thrower in Lee Park. They were throwing bombs and bricks. They were attacking our people... There were two dozen people on the ground, hit by mace, bricks, who were beaten trying to get into the park."

Gene recalls being fenced in to a "little bitty" area with "all this stuff flying through the air." There were nurses in his group who were pouring milk in the eyes of people who had been pepper-strayed. He did not see anyone in Nazi or Klan garb or any swastikas amongst the crowd.

Bill and his friend took cover under some oak trees on the south side of the park which deflected most of the projectiles. Bill had worn protective gear, but he took it off to get relief from the intense August heat.

While milling around the park, he and his friend talked to a few people. He spotted Kessler and a lot of different groups there. He recalls being amidst a thick crowd, "Pretty much hemmed in." At one point, part of the barricades were pushed down to assist some people who were being attacked that were trying to get into the park to safety. He noticed that the police were not separating the protesters and counter-protesters. He also noticed National Guard members atop a bank across the street. "There was a big police presence, but they didn't do a thing."

When Tom and his friends got into the park, they could see state troopers and cops. "There were barriers in the park between us and Kessler and his crowd." Tom got hit with a balloon full of blue paint, and his friend got hit with a hard projectile which they later identified as a condom filled with cement.

Tom remembered noticing, "Cops were just sitting there just chilling, and I guess they're not gonna do anything. And we're being assaulted here." He began to wish he had not turned down his friends' offers of the shield and helmet. "I felt kind of exposed," The Iraq War veteran said. "I felt like I was in a combat zone without a rifle. Then it became survival mode."

"[Antifa] were coming in waves trying to push into the park. I kept seeing them come and come and come. They are horrible, ineffectual fighters... a bunch of wimps."

Tom also said "The League of the South are the ones I remember because they really kept Antifa out of the park."

Other observers noted that the League of the South shield wall was critical in protecting rally attendees from the surrounding mob. Simon Roche, the visitor from South Africa, heartily praised the League of the South members who guarded the park entrance:

And once we occupied the park after much ado, the police stood by and watched as the Antifa attacked the people, our people, over and over and over again. Eventually, marvelously, I saw how a group of about twelve young, young, young men, very young men, took it upon themselves to form a barricade between the Antifa and the rest of us. They were all that stood between us and the Antifa, and nigh on one thousand of the people who had come there to defend their culture, their history, their values, and their norms, because that's what it comes down to. And I tell you, if there's an impression that I'll leave with from the USA, it is that of these young men who took it upon themselves, who volunteered to stand at the foot of these steps under the direction of Michael R. Tubbs and defend all those people by themselves, and over and over and over again they were hit and they were smashed, and one Black man ran up with a great pipe and he smashed one man on the side of the head in front of everybody before running away into the crowd. They were spat on. And feces was thrown on them - some feces landed on me. And there was urine and there was some evidence of condoms filled with seminal fluid. And it was just tremendous for me to see with my own eyes how a thin line of young men, 19, 20, 21, 22, stood there and withstood everything that was thrown at them.

Another attendee echoed Roche's praise, saying, "it was precisely the group most stigmatized by the MSM, the armored Alt-Righters with shields, who created what order existed."...

Once their large entourage arrived in the park, Jim recalls some of the female League of the South members were acting as medics for those who had been injured on the way. Some Sons of Confederate Veterans and older folks were already there. He noted "weird gates separating the middle of the park," and about 200 or so cops standing around in riot gear doing nothing.

"The park was surrounded by crazed Marxists," Jim recalls. They were throwing balloons with some kind of purple irritant that caused a light acid burn, as well as used tampons, urine, feces, and water bottles. The League of the South Members who were manning the shield wall would occasionally pull in stragglers who were arriving late and being attacked. "It was a scrum."

When Luke arrived at the park, he found himself on the side with the League of the South and some "Nazi weirdos," and thought "I do not want to be near those people." He saw rally attendees scuffling with a handful of Antifa that had gotten into the park, and one large Black man screaming at people. At one point, the Black man put his hand on his pistol grip. "I almost hit the deck."...

On the other side of the park, they spotted a more clean-cut crowd with Confederate and American flags and some young polo-clad Alt-Righters. Because of the barricade down the middle of the park, they had to exit back into the crowd of protesters to get to the other side. Luke and his party exited the way they had come in, then proceeded to walk around the park with their group in a square formation, with women and the elderly in the middle. They walked stone-faced forward, not wanting to start a fight by catching the eye of anyone of the surrounding sea of Antifa, who Luke describes as being "like a pack of hyenas." You can smell them ten feet away... They are gross people."

As the group proceeded around the park, an Antifa jumped on and attacked one of their men out of the blue, choking him. "Holy shit!" thought Luke. A militia member intervened, and forced the Antifa to stand back.

"I'm very thankful for the militia guys. They did more than any law enforcement officer that day."

They finally reached the other side of the park, where another shield wall was being manned by a polo-and-khaki-wearing Alt-Right crowd. Luke remembers that it was extremely hot while he and his party were waiting inside the park for the rally to start. The cops were ambling about, not really doing anything, while the Antifa that encircled the park were "acting as if possessed" and throwing things - gas bombs, smoke grenades, bottles of urine - and there were rumors among the crowd that others were being hit with even more dangerous chemicals. Luck himself had already been pepper sprayed by this point...

The chaos continue. Asked about his concern level, Luke described it this way: "If 1 is chilling, and 10 is Kandhahar province, I would say 7.5. It was as though a fort was being created in the middle of the park. Outside are crazy people who want to tear you apart, and the cops aren't doing anything."...

One attendee described his experience as the victim of the aforementioned tactic. "An Antifa toady stole the hat of one of our comrades, which served as both physical and dox protection. Naturally he sought to retrieve his property, in the process getting mobbed by the crowd and receiving a nasty laceration... (This is a common Antifa tactic - to provoke and isolate an individual, then swarm him. I entered the fray to recover the hat and prevent my friend from being swallowed by the crowd, and in the process receiving a series of clubs to the head and torso in a surreal sort of baptism into politically-motivated leftist American street violence."

The death of Heather Heyer is truly a tragedy and is squarely on the hands of Charlottesville Democrats who made the police completely ineffective that day. There is documentation of Heyer roaming with some mobs.

Smith writes:

Just a few days after the crash, Bro (Heyer's mother) visited the site of Heyer's death. In a statement that contributed to public confusion about the fatality, a tearful Bro told reporters that Heyer had died of a heart attack. "She died pretty instantly. She didn't suffer. She, um, died of a heart attack right away at the scene. They revived her briefly and then - not consciously, just got her heart beating again - and then her heart just stopped. So I don't feel like she suffered. That's been a blessing." Bro's statement attributing Heyer's death to a heart attack caused some to speculate that Heyer was not killed by the car crash at all. Theories swirled that Heyer, a 4-foot, 11-inch tall, 330-pound, smoker who had been walking around for hours in intense summer heat, died of natural causes which were merely exacerbated by the stress of being at the crash scene. However, the cause of death was ruled by medical examiners to be "blunt force injury."¹²

The Heaphy Report "did not find that a direct stand-down order had been issued" but police incompetence caused the same effect:

The planning and coordination breakdowns prior to August 12 produced disastrous results. Because of their misalignment and lack of accessible protective gear, officers failed to intervene in physical altercations that took place in areas adjacent to Emancipation Park. VSP directed its officers to remain behind barricades rather than risk injury responding to conflicts between protesters and counter-protesters. CPD commander similarly instructed their officers not to intervene in all but the most serious physical confrontations. Neither agency deployed available field forces or other units to protect public safety at the locations where violence took place. Instead, command staff prepared to declare an unlawful assembly and disperse the crowd.¹³

It appears that Chief Al Thomas illegally destroyed evidence or tried to. He was uncooperative with investigators.

The conclusions of the Heaphy Report state:

[P]olice planing for August 12 was inadequate and disconnected. CPD commanders did not reach out to officials in other jurisdictions where these groups had clashed previously to seek information and advice. CPD supervisors did not provide adequate training or information to line officers, leaving them uncertain and unprepared for a challenging enforcement environment. CPD planners waited too long to request the assistance of the state agency skilled in emergency response. CPD command staff also received inadequate legal advice and did not implement a prohibition of certain items that could be used as weapons.
CPD devised a flawed Operational Plan for the Unite the Right Rally. Constraints on access to private property adjacent to Emancipation Park forced planners to stage particular law enforcement units far from the area of potential need. The plan did not ensure adequate separation between conflicting groups. Officers were not stationed along routes of ingress and egress to and from Emancipation Park but rather remained behind barricades in relatively empty zones within the park and around the Command Center. Officers were inadequately equipped to respond to disorders, and tactical gear was not accessible to officers when they needed it.
CPD commanders did not sufficiently coordinate with the Virginia State Police in a unified command on or before August 12. VSP never shared its formal planning documents with CPD, a crucial failure that prevented CPD from recognizing the limits of VSP's intended engagement. CPD and VSP personnel were unable to communicate via radio, as their respective systems were not connected despite plans to ensure they were. There was no joint training or all-hands briefing on or before August 12. Chief Thomas did not exercise functional control of VSP forces despite his role as overall incident commander. There failures undercut cohesion and operational effectiveness. CPD and VSP operated largely independently on August 12, a clear failure of unified command.¹⁴

It would not surprise me a bit if much or all of this was done deliberately by Democrat leadership in Charlottesville. The more anarchy, violence and carnage that happened, the more the fraud news media would be able to lie and create a narrative to help Democrats, which is exactly what they did and continue to do to this day.

Even "President" Biden began his presidential campaign with a lie for which there is absolute proof that it is a lie, talking about President Trump's statement that there were very fine people on both sides. Trump unquestionably was referring to the people for and against Robert E. Lee's statue, not any other groups. But truth makes no different to our fraud news media when an advantage can be had for the Democrat Party.

The bottom line is what the Heaphy Report found, that:

The City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12... This represents a failure of one of government's core functions--the protection of fundamental rights.¹⁵

Anne Wilson Smith has done an outstanding thing for truth and the public record by her guts with attending the Unite the Right rally and now, with this riveting book, giving voice to people who have been lied about endlessly by our disgraceful news media. Smith's putting all this into the public record is an invaluable thing for our country and posterity.

Everybody should buy this book, not only because it is an exciting read that is hard to put down, but because it is eye-opening as to the corruption of the Democrat Party and the fraud news media.

Our First Amendment rights do not cease to apply just because Democrats find somebody's speech objectionably. I find most of their speech objectionably but I would never, ever want them to be silenced. Let them bring it and be judged in full public view.

NOTES:

¹ Mark Moore, The New York Post, "Legal group demands probe into Garland’s school parents memo," October 11, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/10/11/america-first-legal-asks-doj-inspector-general-to-look-into-garland-memo/, accessed October 13, 2021.

² Anne Wilson Smith, Charlottesville Untold, Inside Unite the Right (Columbia: Shotwell Publishing, 2021), 317.

³ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xvi.

⁴ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 317.

⁵ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xii.

⁶ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xiii.

⁷ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xiv.

⁸ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, xvi.

⁹ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 4.

¹⁰ Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

¹¹ Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

¹² Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 262.

¹³ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 319.

¹⁴ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 323-324.

¹⁵ Smith, Charlottesville Untold, 320.

Our Marxist Revolution, Guest Post by H. V. Traywick, Jr.

Posted on October 6, 2021October 7, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 6 Comments

It might be asked that if these States were considered out of the Union under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and under martial law, how could they ratify an amendment to the Constitution of a Union they were not in; and if they had never been recognized as being out of the Union, how could they be compelled to ratify it? The answer, of course, is Federal bayonets. Reconstruction was nothing short of a revolution on the same order as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Our Marxist Revolution

Guest Post by
H. V. Traywick, Jr.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : I'm proud to publish this article by Bo Traywick, which was published earlier this week by the Abbeville Institute Blog, and on historian and author Phil Leigh's blog, Civil War Chat. Phil also produced it as a podcast. There are links to the Abbeville Institute and Phil Leigh at the end of this article, as well as a link to Bo's website.

Everybody who wants to win this Marxist war on American history should subscribe to the Abbeville Institute Blog and Phil Leigh's Civil War Chat. Abbeville sends out scholarly articles daily, as well as videos, podcasts, and notifications of events and conferences. Phil sends articles, podcasts and videos several times a week.

Anytime you are arguing history or doing research, both of these sites are invaluable. Abbeville is loaded with some of the finest scholars and writers in the world, and Phil Leigh is one of the best analytical historians out there, especially on economic issues.

But back to Brother Bo: His writing always has a pleasant literary quality to it along with powerful, thoroughly documented history.

Below is Bo's bio from the inside cover of his book, Of Apostates and Scapegoats, Confederates in the "City Upon a Hill," followed by "Our Marxist Revolution."]

H. V. "Bo" Traywick, Jr. : A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, H. V. Traywick, Jr. graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot.

In 2018 he published The Monumental Truth: Five Essays on Confederate Monuments in the Age of Progressive Identity Politics, and is author/editor of five other books: Empire of the Owls: Reflections on the North's War against Southern Secession (2013), currently in its third printing; Road Gang: A Memoir of Engineer Service in Vietnam (2014); Virginia Illiad: The Death and Destruction of "The Mother of States and Statesmen" (2016); A Southern Soldier Boy: The Diary of Sergeant Beaufort Simpson Buzhardt 1838-1862 (2016); and Starlight on the Rails: A Vietnam Veteran's Long Road Home (2018).

Two of his book have been awarded the Jefferson Davis Gold Medal for History by the Virginia Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, one of which, Empire of the Owls, has also been commended by the Virginia General Assembly for its scholarship.

Our Marxist Revolution

by Bo Traywick

THOMAS CARLYLE SAID that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men.¹ Among the many worthy men who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was the savior of Western Civilization. Sir Winston Churchill said Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals of war.² But now the Lee Monument in Richmond has been taken down. Our groveling scalawag Governor says Lee no longer represents the values of Virginia. Judging by the filthy graffiti that has desecrated the Lee Monument ever since the rioting of last summer, I would say no truer words have ever been spoken. We are in a Marxist revolution. Critical Race Theory merely replaces traditional class warfare with race warfare, with White people, and particularly Southern White people, the “oppressors,” and the conveniently long-dead Confederacy the scapegoat for all the racial ills in the country.

Ever since the Spring of 1864, we Southerners have been on the defensive. No war was ever won on the defensive, but we have spent barrels of ink explaining the righteousness of the cause our forefathers fought and died for, mistakenly confounding the many causes of secession with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself. That, is what the war was “about,” and what we were fighting for was the defense of our land from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance – just as in 1776, when the thirteen slave-holding³ Colonies seceded from the British Empire. But, rather than taking the offensive and hammering our detractors with this simple Truth, we instead get ourselves into involved defensive explanations that cause their eyes to glaze over, and they calmly look at us and say “Slavery” or “racism” or “White supremacy.”

I take a different approach. I indict the hypocrisy of our detractors and their Myth of American History. The agitation over our Confederate monuments rests upon this fossilized myth, which proclaims that “The Civil War was all about slavery, the righteous North waged it to free the slaves, and the evil South fought to keep them. End of story. Any questions?”

Well, yes - and I don’t buy their myth. To think that the South went to war to keep their slaves, one must think that the North went to war to free them. The simple fact is, that it did not. Aside from the obvious fact of Lincoln’s bold disclaimer in his First Inaugural ⁴ at the outset of the war, if the North were waging a war on slavery, why didn’t she free her own slaves? The simple fact that slavery was constitutional in the United States throughout the entire war ⁵ is one of the most glaring omissions of historical fact buried under the colossal lie known as The Myth of American History. Do the grammar school histories indoctrinating our children or the Marxist professors of our highest universities of learning say anything about the self-righteous North’s arrant hypocrisy? When the various Northern States abolished slavery for its inutility in their industrializing society, they did not free their slaves. They sold them South before the respective abolition laws went into effect.⁶

So if the righteous North went to war to free Southern slaves, why didn’t the righteous Northerners first clean up their own back yards and free the rest of their own slaves? And why did Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – issued halfway through the war when the South was winning it – say that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government?⁷ And why did he admit West Virginia, a so-called “slave State,” into the Union six months later? And why did he – a documented White Supremacist ⁸ - choose to inaugurate the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to, in effect, drive Southern slavery back into the Union? In his Second Inaugural, he claimed that the South was fighting to expand slavery into the Territories,⁹ but with the South out of the Union, the Confederacy had already given up all claims to any and all United States Territories, making Lincoln’s specious claim just another smelly “red herring” to cover the tracks of his murderous usurpation of power in waging war against the secession of the Southern States. Since Lincoln did not recognize the Southern States as being out of the Union,¹⁰ by his own definition he was committing treason under Article III, section 3 of the Constitution by waging war against them.

Secession is merely freedom of association writ large. There were many causes of secession, not least of which that Southerners no longer wished to be associated with those people who slandered and despised them so. But that begs the question of why those people waged the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to prevent their departure. To hear their vitriol, one would think they would have been happy to be rid of these Southern Apostates polluting what the New England Pilgrim Fathers called their “Citty upon a hill.” But they weren’t, for running like a river beneath their bigoted pieties was their avariciousness. With the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and set up as a free trade confederacy on the North’s doorstep, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse!¹¹ So Lincoln rebuffed every Southern overture for peace and launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot.¹² South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation at Charleston just as Massachusetts had responded to George III’s provocation at Lexington and Concord, giving Lincoln the war he wanted,¹³ but putting himself in the shoes of George III.

Virginia, “The Mother of States and of Statesmen,” stood solidly for the Union she had done so much to create, but when Lincoln called for her troops to subjugate the “Cotton Kingdom,” Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war,”¹⁴ seceded from the Union, and joined the Confederacy. Four other States – including occupied Missouri - followed her out. But after four years of arduous service, as General Lee said at Appomattox, the South was compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources,¹⁵ and Lincoln drove the Southern States back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. Although John Wilkes Booth made a martyr out of America’s Caesar, Reconstruction cemented his conquest. With an Army of Occupation and the pretense of law, and with the Union Leagues stirring up racial hatred, a corrupt Northern political party transformed the voluntary Union of sovereign States into a coerced Yankee Empire pinned together by bayonets.

With her men killed and her land laid waste, the South, at the behest of General Lee, “accepted the situation.” In good faith she sent her representatives to the US Congress in December of 1865, but the Radicals were in control, and they were not allowed to take their seats. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania stated the Radical opinion: “The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conqueror. They must come in as new States or remain as conquered provinces. Congress … is the only power that can act in the matter… Congress must create States and declare when they are entitled to be represented… As there are no symptoms that the people of these provinces will be prepared to participate in constitutional government for some years, I know of no arrangement so proper for them as territorial governments. There they can learn the principles of freedom and eat the fruit of foul rebellion…”¹⁶

In that session, the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, was sent to the States and was ratified – three years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth Amendment was then proposed. This would gave illiterate Blacks the right to vote and serve on juries. It barred all ex-Confederates from Federal and State offices, and it required the Southern States to share in the payment of the Union war debt and repudiate their own. Tennessee ratified, but the ten ex-Confederate States that rejected it lost their identities in March of 1867 with the passage by Congress of the First Reconstruction Act.¹⁷

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the ten Southern States into five military districts, with Virginia being designated as “Military District Number One.” It stipulated that each Southern State frame a new constitution that met with Yankee approval. This was to be done by a convention consisting of male delegates “of whatever race, color, or previous condition” - with the exception of all Confederate soldiers and most other Southern White people, all of whom were disfranchised. Then, when the legislature elected under this new constitution had ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, that State would be declared “entitled to representation in Congress” – or, in other words, “readmitted into the Union.”

It might be asked that if these States were considered out of the Union under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and under martial law, how could they ratify an amendment to the Constitution of a Union they were not in; and if they had never been recognized as being out of the Union, how could they be compelled to ratify it? The answer, of course, is Federal bayonets. Reconstruction was nothing short of a revolution on the same order as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Results? For the North? “The Gilded Age.” For the South? Grinding poverty in a land laid waste until the Second World War, and the curse of being ruled by little men. For the Blacks? A recent study of military and Freedman’s Bureau records has revealed that between 1862 and 1870 perhaps as many as a million ex-slaves, or twenty-five percent of the population, died of starvation, disease, and neglect under their Northern “liberators”!¹⁸ Freed from their master’s care, “Father Abraham, The Great Emancipator,” had told them to “root hog, or die.” Black enfranchisement in the South, and the disfranchisement of Southern Whites, were merely cynical Northern political tools to cement the North’s conquest, and once she had achieved it with her so-called “Reconstruction,” the North abandoned her Black puppets – or “useful idiots” as the Communist Vladimir Lenin would have called them - to the upheaval she had wrought in Southern society and turned her attention to the Plains Indians, who were in the way of her trans-continental railroads. But that’s another story - let the Indians tell you that one.

The gradual peace and reconciliation after Reconstruction came in part from the South’s “acceptance of the situation,” and in part from the North’s recognition of the South’s difficulty in suddenly assimilating millions of Africans into a European population that had been steeped in Western civilization for thousands of years. As such, since the North had gotten what she wanted out of the war and Reconstruction – which was control of the Federal Government and its finances - she was content to let the South deal with her own domestic problems in peace. However, when hopeful Southern Blacks started moving North to the Promised Land in the Great Migration, they found themselves relegated by a cold Northern racism into segregated ghettoes, and discovered that the Northern rhetoric about social equality was a political sham.

The invention of television gave Northern politicians and demagogues a way out of this embarrassing situation by giving them the means to divert Black attention from de facto Northern segregation onto the codified segregation in the South, but their demagoguery provoked racial agitation that broke into urban race riots up North. Desperate, guilt-ridden Northern White Liberals were driven to devise further crusades upon which to divert the attention of their credulous and unwanted Black population onto Southern scapegoats. First came the self-righteous “Freedom Riders” protesting Southern segregation – locked arm-in-arm with Black protest marchers - and posting their Progressive virtues before the TV cameras for all to see. But while they were delivering tutorials on proper race relations to the benighted Southerners, the Blacks up North were burning their cities down - and they have been doing so ever since, forever compelling Desperate White Liberals to devise new crusades upon which to post their virtues.

Their latest crusade is against Confederate Monuments. But when all of the Confederate monuments have been vandalized and torn down, who will their next targets be? Be assured that these self-righteous, Latter-Day Puritans will not rest, for crusading, witch-burning and virtue-posting is in their DNA. It came over in the Mayflower. Meanwhile, Monument Avenue in Richmond is a desecrated and vandalized shambles; Thomas Jefferson is under assault at UVA; W & L has repudiated General Lee; and VMI has repudiated “Stonewall” Jackson, while her Cadets who fought and died at the Battle of New Market and are buried on Post under Sir Moses Ezekiel’s “Virginia Mourning Her Dead” have become an embarrassment – and a rebuke.

As the mania of Identity Politics and Radical Equity for every conceivable definition of race, gender, and species reaches the point of absurdity in the Victimhood Olympics, we have been carried away into Babylon, with women being sent into combat while men push baby buggies around town; with girls becoming Boy Scouts and men “choosing” to be women; with children “deciding” their gender and being given access to the bathroom of their choice in school; with anarchy ruling the classrooms and teachers being assaulted by their students; with history being taught as Marxist indoctrination and Critical Race Theory; with conservative speakers at colleges being hounded off campus by Antifa and Black Lives Matter mobs; with “affirmative action” and race-norming instead of merit and SAT scores determining college admissions; with laws being made to conform to barbaric behavior instead of barbaric behavior being made to conform to the law; with convicts being released to create racial parity in prisons; with the National debt approaching an unimaginable thirty trillion dollars; with the US Government printing money and running riot with it like teenagers with a bottle of whiskey and their daddy’s car keys, while the homeless wander the streets and beg on every corner as the Third World pours in across the open borders; and on, and on, and on… As one commentator said recently, we have become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out.

Do not hope to reason with these people, for trying to reason with them is like singing hymns to a fence post with a boom box perched on top of it blasting gutter-grunts from some Hip-Hop Rapper. I know whereof I speak, for I was once a Virginia Flagger on the sidewalk before the VMFA and faced these mobs. These are the same people who spat on us at the airport when we returned from Vietnam, so I quit before prison would become my portion, but not before I had gotten one protester arrested and convicted for “curse and abuse.” If Reconstruction was calculated like the Communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, today’s “Woke Revolution” is fanatically mindless like the French Revolution and its bloody Reign of Terror. I am waiting for the Confederate monuments to be replaced with the guillotine.

Progressives consider the march of history to be a linear march towards a secular Utopian perfection, where the oppressive Laws of God have been repealed. It began with the New England Puritans. While Southerners were following Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, these Yankee Utopians were burning witches in John Winthrop’s “Citty upon a hill”; and while Southerners were five hundred miles west of the Mississippi in Texas defending the Alamo, these Yankee Utopians were a hundred miles west of the Hudson in New York, establishing their collectivist, Free-Love communes, and setting themselves up as the standard by which all true Americans should be measured. In this they have been remarkably successful, to the point where today they have the inmates running the Equality Asylum. But as the Preacher says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “Consider the works of God, for who can make that straight which He hath made crooked?”

The righteous Progressives and their “Social Justice Warriors” love to claim they are on “The Right Side of History.” But Southerners know that history is not a linear march that will end in a rosy Utopia, but a cyclic March of Folly where rosy Utopian dreams end in totalitarian nightmares. Thus Southerners are and always have been Apostates in this Brave New World, where “all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,” as Kipling wrote.¹⁹

Southern monuments speak Truth to this Power with disdain, and stand as an indictment and a rebuke against the levelling mediocrity of these times. Lee, Jackson, and Stuart were heroes in the Classical mold of Hector, breaker of horses under the walls of windy Troy, or the fierce Achilles, or the brave Odysseus, or the dauntless Aeneas. No wonder the Heathen rage at our Confederate monuments, for these little men who swarm about in this age without a name are shamed by them. As Tennyson wrote, “Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain, to leave an equal baseness”.²⁰

The Reverend Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney, one-time Chief-of-Staff of “Stonewall” Jackson, wrote that Southerners know in due time they will be avenged through these same disorganizing heresies which will redound upon the North. Are we not seeing it now, with the godless anarchy that radicals have wrought, and with their blasphemous demands for Equity to “correct” the works of God? In Classical Greek mythology, Icarus in his hubris flew too close to the sun, but Nemesis brought him down. The Social Justice Warriors with their “Woke Revolution,” their “Equity,” their mob rule, and, most of all, with their hubris, forget that man is merely the Master, not the Creator of the world. So let these arrogant and successful wrongdoers flout their disdain for our Confederate monuments and all they stand for. As Dr. Dabney said, “we will meet them with it again, when it will be heard; in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of Judgement”.²¹ Meanwhile, keep your powder dry, and when they come to your door to take you away in the tumbril to the guillotine, let them be in for a surprise.

NOTES:

¹ Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, IV: “The New Downing Street” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 12 vols., Library ed. (New York: John B. Alden, 1885) 8: 134.

² Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1958) IV: 170-3.

³ See the 1790 US Census in Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits (New York: George W. & John A. Wood, 1860) pg. 120.

⁴ “First Inaugural Address” (1861) in Charles W. Eliot, LL D, Ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910). Vol. 43, American Historical Documents, 43: 334.

⁵ See Article XIII of the US Constitution, ratified December 18, 1865.

⁶ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) The Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) I: 381-2.

⁷ “Emancipation Proclamation” (January 1, 1863), Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 345.

⁸ Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000) pgs. 183-214.

⁹ “Second Inaugural Address” (1865). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 451.

¹⁰ ---. “First Inaugural Address” (1861). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 336-7.

¹¹ Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument (Charleston and James Island, S. C.: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 56-69.

¹² Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Ft. Sumter,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August 1937) pgs. 259-88, in Kizer, pgs. 197-248. See also John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command (Chapel Hill: U of N. C. P, 1941) pgs. 179-87, 266-7, 306-12, with documentation from original sources, including the Official Records.

¹³ “If the Union were to undertake to enforce by arms the allegiance of the confederate States by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of England at the time of the War of Independence,” quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) II: 425.

¹⁴ Gov. John Letcher, letter to Sec. Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, in the Richmond Enquirer, April 18, 1861, pg. 2, col. 1. Microfilm. The Daily Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 1, 1861 – June 29, 1861. Film 23, reel 24 (Richmond: Library of Virginia collection).

¹⁵ “Lee’s Farewell to His Army” April 10, 1865. Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 449.

¹⁶ Thaddeus Stevens, “The Conquered Provinces,” Congressional Globe, 18 December 1865, 72, in Walter L. Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to 1906, 2 vols. (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906) I: 148.

¹⁷ Acts and Resolutions, 39 Cong., 2 Sess., 60, in Fleming, ed. Documentary History, I: 401-3.

¹⁸ Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) passim. See also John Remington Graham, The American Civil War as a Crusade to Free the Slaves (South Boston, VA: Gerald C. Burnett, M. D., 2016) pg. 11.

¹⁹ Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm.

²⁰ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Merlin and Vivien,” The Works of Tennyson, Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Ed. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932) pg. 386.

²¹ Prof. Robert L. Dabney, D. D., A Defense of Virginia, [and Through Her, of the South,] in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (1867; Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1977) pg. 356.

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

Chapter IX John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

ON MONDAY, October 17, 1859 in Arlington, Virginia Colonel Robert E. Lee was "working on the financial accounts of his late father-in-law, George Washington Custis" who had died and left Lee executor of his "unprofitable and entangled mess" of an estate.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eight of Ten

NOTES:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Six of Ten

Chapter VII Agitation and Compromise

Chapter VIII The Chasm Grows

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Chapter VIII The Chasm Grows

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A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

NOTES:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Five of Ten

Chapter VI Cultural Differences

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Six of Ten

NOTES:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Four of Ten

Chapter V The Nullification Crisis

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Three of Five

Chapter III Secession: The Constitutional Issue

Chapter IV Pregnant Events

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Chapter IV Pregnant Events

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Four of Five

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Two of Five, a close look at

Chapter I Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler

Chapter II Hypocrisy

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Chapter II

Hypocrisy

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Three of Five

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part One of Five

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Polls Show Mounting Support for State Secessions

Strongest Among Southern Republicans

Guest Post by Leonard M. "Mike" Scruggs

Chapter IX
John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter VII
Agitation and Compromise

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter VI
Cultural Differences

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter V
The Nullification Crisis

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter III
Secession: The Constitutional Issue

Chapter IV
Pregnant Events

Chapter IV
Pregnant Events

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter I
Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler

Chapter II
Hypocrisy

Guest Post by
Leonard M. "Mike" Scruggs

Guest Post by
H. V. Traywick, Jr.