The Moral Superiority of the South, by James Atticus Bowden

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - It is hard to argue with James Atticus Bowden's title for his piece that appeared on the Abbeville Institute Blog June 22, 2023, for the simple reason that people are moving into the South in droves to escape places where civilization is collapsing.

In San Francisco, violent mobs created by liberal laws that encourage theft, ransack department stores and put employees at risk. Of course, that can not go on for long. No business can lose money and stay in business. They might squander their capital for a while but they are screwing their shareholders and showing their customers how stupid, cowardly and immoral they are for allowing this barbarism.

New York is the most corrupt place in American history where leftist politicians like AG Letitia James promise to use the law to "get Trump." "Too male, too pale and too stale" is her racist chant until she gets in front of patriotic New York firemen who boo her and shout "Trump! Trump! Trump!"

The blatant destruction of blind justice makes New York a fascist tyranny with its mouthpiece, the racist NY Times and its fraudulent 1619 "history."

The New York legal system is corrupt to the core as Alvin Bragg, NY County DA, shows us daily in his trumped-up case against President Trump but New York Governor Kathy Hochul assures us WE won't be prosecuted for having the wrong politics. It is only Trump they are after, in the most obvious case of election interference in history, directed by Biden's White House.

If you can't beat them in a fair election, invent a crime and prosecute them. Like Stalin said through his secret police, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

Hochul recently called out 750 National Guardsmen to patrol the unridable subway system and if you try to help people threatened with violence, as U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Penny did, you will be prosecuted like the older bodega worker who was attacked by a young thug and had to fight for his life. He luckily picked up a knife and killed the assailant only to find himself charged with murder by Alvin Bragg and sent to Rikers Island.

Public outrage finally resulted in dropped charges and justice for this crime victim of Bragg's ideology and incompetence.

Your Natural Right to self defense does not exist in Bragg's New York. You submit to the criminals or Alvin Bragg will step away from his political prosecutions to put you in jail.

The good people of New York who are fed up with corruption, tyranny and taxes head South to Florida, Texas, South Carolina and places where they can breathe free air, where law and order, Jesus and the Second Amendment, are in charge, and criminals are not.

Fortunately, the majority of people fleeing places like New York and moving South are conservatives whose politics aligns well with most Southerners.

THE REMOVAL of the 109 year old Confederate Reconciliation Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery last December has desecrated Arlington National Cemetery for all time and must be restored.

Kirk Lyons of the Southern Legal Resource Center writes in an April update that a joint Appellant Brief of Defend Arlington and the SCV will be filed by May 22, 2024. Lyons states:

. . . we are advancing two VERY important national issues: 1. Protecting a national treasure from WOKE bureaucrats; and 2. Preserving "Judicial Review" over bureaucratic acts "mandated" by Congress. In its briefing, the Department of Justice lawyers basically told the judge that she, as a representative of the judiciary, had NO authority to review Secretary of Defense Austin's order to dismantle the 1914 Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery because the order was mandated by Congress.

Lyons goes on:

This case is nationally important and sets a very ominous precedent when a court agrees with the executive branch that a judge cannot review the legality or the constitutionality of the act of an agent of the executive branch . . .

This question goes to the heart of "judicial review" and the constitutional checks and balances . . .

Go to DefendArlington.org where you can help with fundraising by buying a beautiful coin on which one side shows the world class Confederate Memorial and the other, Jewish sculptor and Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel. It is $25, and they also have a beautiful symbolic medal with the coin attached for $40, and the medal says "Deo Vindice" (see picture above). Buy both of these beautiful pieces and add some extra so that your donation is an even $100. It will be money well spent.

You can also donate on my donation page HERE.

Bowden's biography on the Abbeville Institute website states:

James Atticus Bowden holds advanced degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is an independent historian and Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Virginia First Foundation.

See Bowden's biography on his LinkedIn page HERE.]

The Moral Superiority of the South

by James Atticus Bowden

(first published on the
Abbeville Institute blog,
June 22, 2023)

THE SOUTH is morally superior. It always has been and, looks like, likely will be. It all started when the Yankees showed up in 1620 to be the second English-speaking people here. The pilgrims were absolutist, stiff-necked, uncompromising, dissenting Puritans. They were different from the start. They mostly came from East Anglia and the ancient Danelaw. The Puritan’s religion, ideas, attitude, and accent were different from Virginia from day one. Virginia, where America and the South began, was more about individual rights and ‘live and let live’. The South had a better culture and way of life.

Two separate sub-cultures became the first four basic American cultures – Puritan New England, Quaker and Mennonite Mid-Atlantic, Anglican Tidewater, and Presbyterian, Scot-Irish Frontier. For almost 250 years the cultures evolved broadly into the regional ‘South’ and the ‘North’. Neither region was homogeneous. Diversity abounded, but core cultures created two separate regions. And the South was the moral master with greater freedoms and opportunities.

The year Yankeedom just began in the North was a year after representative democracy started in the South – in a church.

Also, it was a year after slavery started in the English-speaking colonies. Yet, the moral stain of slavery went north fast. The Yankee slave ships made a lot of money, as Yankee banks financed more slavery, and, later, Yankee factories got rich using slave-produced cotton and other raw materials. There were fewer slaves in the North because of climate and agriculture, not from any moral sense of right and wrong. The sin of slavery was all-American.

New towns were planned in New England with careful care that no one settler got more than another. In the South, if you worked hard you could buy more land and provide for your family with wealth a commoner could never get back in England.

By the time of the Revolution, the regions had grown apart independently enough, for the Father of the Country, George Washington, to express his immediate distaste and disgust for the North when he went to Boston for the first time – to command all the Patriot soldiers.

Right after the Revolution, Virginia led, as usual, to change the state right of religion to separate church and state. The Massachusetts legislature was last.

The state right for chattel slavery was ended over a period of decades where it was easiest first. Canada and some places in the North offered refuge for escaped slaves, but the Northern states didn’t offer for the wholesale migration of almost 4 million persons to their home. The abolitionists didn’t offer a path, or to pay for the means, to elevate humans up from slavery. Some Southerners, like Stonewall Jackson, taught slaves to read and write. Some abolitionists advocated wholesale murder, like Nat Turner – killing babies in the crib, women and old people.

No one in power had a plan to end slavery well. Just as no one really has a satisfactory plan for 20 million illegal immigrants in America today. And, as today’s advocates for open borders and amnesty demand the insanity of America’s suicide with great moral preening, abolitionists pushed murder in the name of freedom. Interestingly enough, even the Leftist icon, W.E.B. DuBois, said that slavery wouldn’t have lasted in the South because Southerners held too great of an innate sense of fairness and justice. Culture commands.

Then, awful war came.

The South truly earned its moral laurels during its heroic defense against invasion. April’s celebration of Confederate History Month is all about valiant Confederate soldiers and their families. Southerners who know their ancestors’ names and regiments – enriched by tales of oral history – take pride in their courage, honor, and fidelity. Winston Churchill wrote the most profoundly Christian army that ever marched was the Army of Northern Virginia.

People who defend their homes against invading, robbing, looting, burning soldiers have the moral high ground. Pretending the Recent Unpleasantness was a moral crusade all about slavery, all the time, bar everything else in conflict and sad step-by-step political stumble into war, is like saying WW II in the Pacific was because of the “Rape of Nanking” by the Japanese. No, the Japanese invaded and the Germans invaded in WW II. The Yankees invaded the South.

After the Yankees won, the Union Army occupied the South for 10 years. They stole everything they could. Oddly enough, they didn’t invite all the freed slaves to move North. Go figure.

Reconstruction begat Jim Crow segregation. This second American moral stain, segregation, falsely makes the South the perpetual tar baby, like slavery, because of de jure segregation. Yet, the real vicious, personal racism of de facto segregation thrived in the North. The last riots over racial integration of schools were in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974. Racism doesn’t have a regional home, it lives in the hearts of all kinds of people.

The victory of the Civil Rights movement, inspired by a Christian Southerner, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his ideas of non-violence, transformed the Nation. Today, the South is different from other regions of America. The better universities offer courses on Southern literature, art, music, history, politics, etc. And, the South is better. Why else, would so many Yankees move south to overwhelm too many, formerly Southern communities?

The absolutist, self-righteous, our-way-only, Puritan culture of the North slowly walked away from the God of the Bible after The War. Today, the Yankees who worship the small god of “Self” and cherish the liberal trinity of race, class, and genders are dangerous Human Secular Totalitarians. The Sissy Christians still up North who support them are their useful fools. The ideas changed over 150 years, but the culture is the same. The North is a pushy, money-grubbing, rude, arrogant, historically ignorant, tribal and socialist, absolutist culture. Yet, many good Americans live there, no thanks to the culture.

The Bible belt is buckled in the South. A Southern, Biblically-based, moral majority culture cherishes the Rule of Law, not men. Southern Conservatism holds dearly to the same ideas as the American Revolution. Southern culture is family-family-family, faith, and freedom. It’s still live and let live. It still places personal and family honor highly. In fact, the differences in culture are too many for this piece. Yet, some bad Americans live there, no thanks to the culture.

In the future, the South will remain the moral master, because the ultimate defense of American and Western Civilization will be soldiered by stalwart Southerners more than anyone else. Conversely, while the defense of Christianity against Islamist Totalitarianism may come from Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe – if a miracle happens, or Asia, Southerners will be prominent among Americans willing to fight the good fight for generations.

God save the South!