Why The War Was Not About Slavery

By Clyde Wilson on Mar 9, 2016

 Abbeville Institute Clyde Wilson Library  

Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.
Two generations ago, the most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.
I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.
Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation and the seizure of the common government for the first time ever by a sectional party declaredly hostile to the Southern States. Were they to be a permanently exploited minority, they asked? This was significant to people who knew that their fathers and grandfathers had founded the Union for the protection and benefit of ALL the States.
It is no surprise that they mentioned potential interference with slavery as a threat to their everyday life and their social structure. Only a few months before, John Brown and his followers had attempted just that. They murdered a number of people including a free black man who was a respected member of the Harpers Ferry community and a grand-nephew of George Washington because Brown wanted Washington’s sword as a talisman. In Brown’s baggage was a constitution making him dictator of a new black nation and a supply of pikes to be used to stab to death the slave-owner and his wife and children.
It is significant that not one single slave joined Brown’s attempted blow against slavery. It was entirely an affair of outsiders. Significant also is that six Northern rich men financed Brown and that some elements of the North celebrated him as a saint, an agent of God, ringing the church bells at his execution. Even more significantly, Brown was merely acting out the venomous hatred of Southerners that had characterized some parts of Northern society for many years previously.
Could this relentless barrage of hatred directed by Northerners against their Southern fellow citizens have perhaps had something to do with the secession impulse? That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by New England fanaticism.
Secessionists were well aware that slavery was under no immediate threat within the Union. Indeed, some anti-secessionists, especially those with the largest investment in slave property, argued that slavery was safer under the Union than in a new experiment in government.
Advocates of the “slavery and nothing but slavery” interpretation also like to mention a speech in which Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens is supposed to have said that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The speech was ad hoc and badly reported, but so what? White supremacy was also the cornerstone of the United States. A law of the first Congress established that only white people could be naturalized as citizens. Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois forbade black people to enter the State and deprived those who were there of citizenship rights.
Instead of quoting two cherry-picked quotations, serious historians will look into more of the vast documentation of the time. For instance, in determining what the war was “about,” why not consider Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, the resolutions of the Confederate Congress, numerous speeches by Southern spokesmen of the time as they explained their departure from the U.S. Congress and spoke to their constituents about the necessity of secession. Or for that matter look at the entire texts of the secession documents.
Our advocates of slavery causation practice the same superficial and deceitful tactics in viewing their side of the fight. They rely mostly on a few pretty phrases from a few of Lincoln’s prettier speeches to account for the winning side in the Great Civil War. But what were Northerners really saying?
I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source, Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was “about.”
Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances. He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century. Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.
All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.
Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without which his party would dwindle away.
Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.” A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed, saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring their control of the federal machinery.)
At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox, Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.
A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.
The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the illegal blockade.
Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest. Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by moral considerations in regard to slavery.
Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians. They assume without examination that the North is always right and the South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence that might shed light on the matter.
When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption: Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and “Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.
Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He declared that this bill was the most important business pending before the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to this very moment.
Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn the niggers! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at work.”
General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the gall to disobey the government.
The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:

“I hope this may not be a war of emancipation but of extermination, & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”

Not a word about the slaves.
As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”
Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:

“The thing we seek is permanent dominion. . . . They think we mean to take their slaves? Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plow . . . .”

Seizing Southern resources was a common theme among advocates of the Union. Southerners were not fellow citizens of a nation. They were obstacles to be disposed of so Yankees could use their resources to suit themselves. The imperialist impulse was nakedly and unashamedly expressed before, during, and after the war.
Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”
Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote, “have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”
Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later Lincoln worshippers, Marx believed that the French Revolution was a continuation of the American Revolution and Lincoln’s revolution in America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the slave driver.” The war, then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who had flooded the Midwest after the 1848 revolutions. Not a word about the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln, wanted the land for WHITE workers.
Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he added.
Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:

“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and this I and my friends are all in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used as a means to control the volume of money.”

It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.
The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”
Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit . . . Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time . . . to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of his country.”

What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product, not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a by-product of the war, never a goal.
How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are part of the enemy.”
Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”
In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists. The speaker, a clergymen, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized, and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this program.
One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I recommend Kirk’s book Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work When the Yankees Come, which are available here.
I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and spoiled.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the concubines and servants of Union officers.
Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They collected in camps which had catastrophic rates or mortality. The army asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?
What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”
The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way of surviving together.
Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.
In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.
But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely documented before, during, and after the war.
Glory, Glory, Halleluhah


Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews. More from Clyde Wilson

Quote Of Clarity

"I am firmly convinced that Southern independence would have meant NO consolidated power capable of launching imperial wars against Spain and the Philippines; no intervention into the Great War in 1917, which directly led to the rise of Lenin and Hitler; no follow-up to the Great War that ignited in 1939; and no communist rule over eastern Europe until 1990."

- Old Rebel at Rebellion Blog


Post in total:

Peter Gemma reviews works of fiction and scholarship that explore the possibilities of a Southern victory in 1865. He finds most of them slavishly dedicated to propping up the standard interpretation that anything but a total Northern victory would have been a disaster:

In his book, “Defending Dixie” (Foundation for American Education, 2006), Professor Clyde N. Wilson observed that when writing about the South’s War for Independence most contemporary historians (and fiction writers in this case), “… insist [on] the interpretation we must accept … they wish to obliterate even the recognition of the possibility that there was any other legitimate interpretation.”

“What if” books about a CSA victory can lead to Southern daydreams. Perhaps if more novels and alternative history books penetrate the mass market, real—non-partisan—historical studies will be published. Those should generate serious reflections on why the triumph of the Confederate States of America would define political, philosophical, and cultural progress.

I am firmly convinced that Southern independence would have meant NO consolidated power capable of launching imperial wars against Spain and the Philippines; no intervention into the Great War in 1917, which directly led to the rise of Lenin and Hitler; no follow-up to the Great War that ignited in 1939; and no communist rule over eastern Europe until 1990.

Via Free North Carolina -

“Monsters of Virtuous Pretension”

By David Aiken


When I was a child growing up in Kirkwood Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, I was fascinated by three works of Atlanta public art:
The Cyclorama [and Civil War Museum at Grant Park] next to the Atlanta Zoo, is a 358 foot wide and 42 foot tall painting of the Battle of Atlanta, July 1864, the largest painting in the world – longer than a football field and taller than a four-story building. German artists painted it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1886, but in my lifetime it was permanently located in Atlanta. I was told a diorama was added in 1936, giving it a three-dimensional foreground. I remember it being restored in 1979 – 1982. It is the single most impressive painting I have ever seen, and I have seen hundreds of great paintings.
I grew up near Stone Mountain, the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world, much larger than Mount Rushmore, and the most popular tourist spot in Georgia. It is 90 by 190 feet, recessed 42 feet into the mountain. In 1916, it was conceived by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and officially completed in 1972. Since it is carved in granite, it will last longer than any other achievement by human beings. In other words, when all the buildings, bridges, dams and engineering feats of the human race fall into ruin and dust, the granite carvings of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson will endure. It is fitting, I think, that the greatest ideas and the noblest heroism should be remembered in the most enduring monuments.
I learned early in my childhood that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to preserve the values of men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson – who created a culture of the soil based on inalienable rights and true learning. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson led in the fight for the American Republic of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson: for self-government and fair taxation among free and independent states. They fought with bullets.
I understood that I would have to fight not with bullets, but with books in the classroom and in the minds of people. Lacking a sound knowledge of the South, of our history and literature, we are inadequately armed when conflict arises. I learned that knowledge of key Southern authors and books is as good as musket and shot. One of the first great insights of my life is that people are enslaved with the sword and with government and private debt, but with true knowledge people are liberated.
I grew up with Gone with the Wind — the 1936 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell. I always knew that Gone with the Wind is about the Yankee invasion of Georgia and the burning and destruction of Atlanta. Gone with the Wind would become the most popular American novel of the 20th century, surpassing standard academic novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby, and all the other novels which are currently required reading in almost every classroom in the country. Gone with the Wind inspired the 1939 David O. Selznick film, which has been viewed by more people than any of the other 300,000 Hollywood films. Today it is recognized as the biggest box office hit of all time, and the pinnacle of the Hollywood system.
I should add that it also has the most quotable line in all those movies.
By the time I graduated from Murphy High School, I had read all 1,037 pages of Gone With the Wind, seen the movie six times, been to the Cyclorama at least 20 times, and had climbed, visited or driven by Stone Mountain hundreds of times — back in the days before the Mountain became a Georgia state park. As a youth, I lived my life around these tributes to the Southern Confederacy, without embarrassment or shame. They were at the heart of my Atlanta. I can remember buying Confederate Battle Flags at Stone Mountain, and attending the Cyclorama with my school mates.
I also knew that Gone With the Wind and the extraordinary film it inspired were favorites of my mother.
I vividly remember a particular scene in the middle of Gone With the Wind. As a child, I would catch the # 18 bus from my house in Kirkwood to the downtown Loews Grand or Paramount theaters at Five Points. I would sit there enthralled, watching and learning. At one point in the long four-hour movie, many of the people in those theaters jumped up out of their seats and cheered.
We in the theater had watched young Scarlett as a courted and pampered sixteen year old; we had seen her as a seventeen year old widow in Atlanta during the war; we had seen her nursing wounded and dying Confederate soldiers; we had seen her escape the burning city to return home to Tara where – at the age of twenty-one – she had to become the head of her surviving family and to manage the plantation of her grieving and demented father. Then we see Scarlett do something extraordinary.
A Yankee straggler rides up to the door of the big house at Tara. He enters to pillage, rape and murder. We the audience see Scarlett take the pistol Rhett Butler had given her and shoot the invader in the face. Many of the young people of Atlanta in the 1940s and 1950s would clap, and often stand up and cheer. Even as a child in elementary school, and then as a high school student, I understood.
I had learned that invaders were people who raped, burned, tortured, plundered and murdered the good people of Atlanta – my people, who went to church on Sundays; my people who worked hard, who were courteous, well-mannered, loving and loyal; my people who paid their taxes and who tried to be virtuous and fair; my people who took care of me and tried to bring me up to be responsible and respectful; my people who were deeply Southern and devoutly Christian.
To this day, when I see Scarlett shoot that Yankee criminal, coming up the stairs to steal what little remained in that looted household and to do Scarlett and Melanie physical and emotional harm, I applaud. Why? Because I learned early how to recognize a monster when I saw one. I had learned that Gone With the Wind is not about slavery or racism. It is not about Southern indolence or decadence, nor is the novel just a romance or a saga of the Old South. Gone With the Wind, rather, is about a self-righteous and greedy minority of northern Americans who captured the government and invaded, burned, looted, raped and murdered another group of better Americans.
Liberal academic critics have whined, what does Margaret Mitchell know about the destruction of Atlanta. She was born in 1900, almost half a century after the Lincoln Administration invaded the South. What did the 1940s and 1950s youth of Atlanta know, almost a whole century after Sherman marched To the Sea in Georgia, and From the Sea in Carolina? Margaret Mitchell is not a primary source, critics shout; she is a romancer, a novelist, although she was a careful historian who went to great lengths to check her facts.
Having been a college and university professor for thirty-six years, I understand the importance of primary sources. What I needed for my students was an eyewitness account, by someone who was a careful observer, who interviewed people and preserved their personal accounts in a readable narrative. What I needed was a dedicated writer, an experienced journalist and a proven historian.
I have discovered many compelling historical documents about the horrors of invasion, written by persuasive Southern authors – most of them women, or men too old, too sick, or too disabled to fight. Some of them were written by teenagers. They all talk about the human face of war waged not on the battlefield, but in undefended houses, in undefended homes, in undefended villages and plantations, and in undefended cities of civilians.
One of these historical documents is more important than all the rest. It was written by William Gilmore Simms from Charleston, the Father of Southern Literature: the South’s most prolific antebellum author. Before the war Simms was an international celebrity. His books were well received and reviewed in England. Some were translated into German. One was published in Aberdeen, Scotland. Others were reviewed and collected in the last place an American would think to look for a Simms volume today. That place was Russia where works by Simms were reviewed in the mid-1800s and can still be found on display in rare book collections in both St. Petersburg and Moscow libraries.
It was actually a rather cruel twist of fate that placed Simms in Columbia shortly before Sherman’s troops reached the city. Simms did not go there as a war journalist. He had no desire to become a war correspondent. All he wanted to do was find a safe place to shelter what was left of his family. His wife of twenty-seven years had just died, and his oldest son was a Confederate soldier, fighting at the front. But his youngest son was just a toddler. Simms also had a son of nine and two daughters who were still in their teens and in need of protection which Simms felt he could not provide at his Woodlands Plantation in the Barnwell District. The state capital seemed to be the safest place for them. And so it was that Simms found himself an eyewitness to the destruction of the city where years earlier he had lived and served as a state representative.
Simms’s letters have been collected into six volumes. Approximately 150 of the 1,775 collected letters of William Gilmore Simms were written during the War for Southern Independence. They occupy over 300 of the 643 pages in volume IV. This fact alone speaks to the devotion of Simms as a writer, because during the war paper was hard to come by. Stamps were difficult to obtain. Simms had to make his own ink and candles. The mail was often carried from one area to another by traveling friends or family members. Near the end Simms entrusted his letters northward into the hands of soldiers returning to their homes.
Early in the war Simms wrote letters to friends in high places in the Confederate government, advising on everything from policy to fortifications of the Charleston area. He also made a valiant attempt to maintain a correspondence with close friends in the North, but as he points out mailing anything North was difficult because mail required both Confederate and Union stamps. Union stamps were almost impossible to find in the Carolina Lowcountry.
Almost thirty years of correspondence with James Lawson of New York ceases in 1861 and is not resumed until 1865, when it continues to the end of Simms’s life. In the letters written to Lawson between 1860 and 1861, Simms tells us much about the way South Carolina prepared for an invasion she was certain would come.
Simms is quite eloquent in listing the misrepresentations of the South in Northern newspapers, especially in the New York Times:

We crave peace. But prepare for the war that is threatened. If we are let go in peace, we shall not discriminate against the North and our trade will still be accessible to her industry and enterprise. Mr. Lincoln has spoken. And we are to have war.

I knew that in Gone With the Wind, the war starts – not with the bombardment of Fort Sumter — but when Lincoln calls for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South and coerce it back into the Union. The war began on April 15, 1861, when Lincoln calls for an army of volunteers, not on April 12 at Fort Sumter when South Carolina was reclaiming control of the fort recently invaded and stolen in the Charleston Harbor.
Simms is quite clear that the South did not want a war, and certainly did not start it:

Let us not declare it. Hostilities may exist without war. Let us simply meet the issues as they arise. The consequences [of starting a war] be upon the heads of those who would not suffer us to be at peace in the Confederacy, nor leave us in peace when we withdraw from it; whose consciences made them wretched at an alliance with us, yet when we relieve their consciences of all responsibility, are unwilling to be relieved, and resolve that the victims whom they have so long robbed and reviled shall not escape them.

In one letter Simms says that he has been writing every night for six weeks until three o’clock in the morning. In addition to advising political and government leaders, he was contributing heavily to the Charleston Mercury. Some of his submissions were on public affairs and domestic resources. He also published poetry in this paper.
Speaking of people in his own profession, Simms says:

I have been astonished to find that the Literary men are generally almost wholly ignorant of politics, the Constitution, the debates at the formation of the Confederation, and briefly of all the principles and issues which were involved in the establishment of the Confederacy.

He is talking about Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville – the major literary men taught to our young students today.
In his letters Simms gives us recipes for making Cherry Bounce and Poor Man’s Soup. He tells us that May Weed can be substituted for spinach, and Cassia for tea. He tells us that cane can be worked into mats and baskets. When it came to collecting ideas for beating the blockade by using native plants and resources, Simms was knowledgeable and resourceful.
Simms’s son Gilmore was a seventeen year old cadet at The Citadel, where cartridges, cannons, and percussion caps were being made. The Cadets drilled daily. Even women and the elderly were armed and practicing to perfect their marksmanship. In a touching letter, Simms gives his son Gilmore step-by-step guidance on how to shave, carry his equipment, and conduct himself in combat. His most often repeated advice is to trust God and pray.
In reading these letters, we observe wealth and pride turning to poverty and pain. In addition to the death of his wife, four of his children die. Gilmore is wounded several times in combat and loses a finger. Yellow fever rages through Charleston. Beloved cities are reduced to ruins. Woodlands, his once grand plantation home, is burned to the ground by Sherman’s men. 10,700 books in the library wing he built to house them at Woodlands are destroyed or carried off, along with over fifty original paintings.
At war’s end, Simms lives in a garret. His remaining children are divided, some living in Columbia with him, some living in Bamberg with the Rivers family.
One of Simms’s letters is particularly important. From Woodlands on December 12, 1860, on the eve of South Carolina seceding (December 20, 1860), Simms wrote a long letter to a Northern critic. On January 17, 1861, the Charleston Mercury published an expanded version of the letter. In it Simms justified secession on the grounds of the broken friendship between North and South: “Many Northerners,” he says, “hate the South and vilify it as worthless, wanting in moral and energy; unprosperous, grossly ignorant, brutal; uneducated, wanting literature, art, statesmanship, wisdom – every element of intellect and manners.” (IV, 301)
He opens this letter by stating that the people of South Carolina are not safe in this Union:

Our safety is . . . more important to us than any Union; and, in the event of our future union with other parties, we shall certainly look to our safety, with . . . more circumspection than our fathers did, though they strove to guard their people, with all their vigilance, against the danger equally of a majority and of Federal usurpation.

Simms interprets the American Constitution framed in 1787, adopted in 1789, by the victorious Colonies as one based on friendship. He did not believe that government should promote a proposition of any kind. Instead, government should be founded on convivial order. A true Federation is based on separate and distinct states which have a compact with each other. A political order based on friendship pursues no good, no purpose. Rather, it exists for its own sake: a bond of friendship and sympathy. Friendships have no mission, no purpose. We stay in government because we are friends, not because we have some idealized world mission to accomplish, and certainly not because one section of the country becomes wealthy at the expense of other areas.
To Simms, selfish elements in the North have broken that friendship. As he says, “They [powerful and influential Northerners] have committed the greatest political and social suicide that history has ever recorded.”
Employing the image of the South as feminine, Simms compares the cutting of the bonds to a woman leaving a selfish, and abusive man: She “pleaded, even while she warned! She was [ever] reluctant to proceed to extreme measures.”
For thirty years now, Simms says, the South has had to put up with political and economic exploitation. Speaking for South Carolina, he continues:

She will secede as surely as the sun shines in heaven. She will rely upon the justice of her cause and the virtue of her people. She will invade nobody. She will aggress upon no rights of others. She has never done so. The South has never been the aggressor! But we will no longer suffer aggression under the mask of “this blessed Union.” We shall tear off the mask, and show the hideous faithlessness, cupidity, lying and selfishness that lurk beneath. And we shall do this, regardless of all consequences. For these we shall prepare ourselves as well as we can. . . . And on our own ground, in defense of our firesides, and in the assertion of ancestral rights, we shall deliver no blow in vain.

To Simms, the struggle against Northern aggression would ultimately be an issue of freedom: political freedom and economic freedom, self-government and free trade.
Simms was convinced that the South would thrive if freed from the jealousy, hatred and abuse of Northern aggressors:

We, in the South, have all the essential elements for establishing the greatest and most prosperous, and longest lived of all the republics of the earth! We shall declare our ports free to the industrial energies and productions of all the world, we subject Northern manufactures, for the first time, to that wholesome competition with the industry of other countries, the absence of which has made her bloated in prosperity.

The Father of Southern Literature was in Columbia on February 17, 18, 19, and 20, 1865, when Sherman marched into the capital of South Carolina where some 20,000 inhabitants were living and seeking refuge. He was there when Sherman’s men began to rape and to torture and to murder innocent civilians, and to plunder and to burn one of the most beautiful cities in North America. During the conflagration, Simms walked the streets, observing and remembering. Afterwards, he would interview more than sixty people, when all the horrors were still fresh in their minds.
One month later, in March 1865, Simms led the effort to publish a newspaper which included his 90-page historical narrative entitled The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia – a primary historical document on the burning and destruction of a prosperous American city. Simms listed names of Carolina people and the addresses of their destroyed property. His account is a memorial to civilian casualties. It is also the story of corruption inside American government, and a report of American violence and crime against other Americans. This important primary source almost disappeared. In 2005 (140 years after 1865) I brought it out in a book I entitled A City Laid Waste.
Some of this will be shocking, because I am going to let Simms speak for himself and for the people of Columbia, and the people of the Confederate South. I know of six newspaper accounts of the destruction of Columbia, but by far the most detailed, the most extensive, the most inclusive and the most important is Simms’s. His account of American atrocities cannot be refuted, so lovers of Lincoln and lovers of Sherman have tried not only to discredit and repress it, but also to destroy it. The invaders became obsessed with turning their view of the war into historical record. In their determination, they ignored and then destroyed testimony which contradicted their claims.
As a result, the Jeffersonian view of America, the original vision of America dominant among the people of the founding generation up to 1861, as an experiment in justice and prosperity, has been removed from public record. International imperialism, instead, Lincoln’s view of America, dominates today. Lincoln’s America is currently the regnant view of American history and culture, and all Americans are consequently the poorer for the loss.
As a Revolutionary War historian, Simms sees America in terms of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the founding generation. He opens his historical narrative with an allusion to the Declaration of Independence and an implied question: are the human rights which our forefathers won from the British Crown being preserved or destroyed? Simms’s answer is that Lincoln and his Administration are undermining the great American principle stated in the Declaration of Independence: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This war, this invasion, unlawful and unconstitutional – Simms says — is a death blow to American inalienable rights. How can anyone say that Americans have the right to govern themselves when you destroy our places of government? How can anyone say that Americans have freedom of religion when you destroy our churches? How can anyone say that Americans have freedom of expression when you destroy our presses and burn our newspapers? How can anyone say that Americans have the right to pursue happiness when you destroy our homes and personal property? The “cruel and malignant enemy,” led by Sherman, is the antithesis of the America that the Founding Fathers envisioned and fought to establish.
We should remember that the youthful Simms studied law and passed the bar to become a practicing attorney. Throughout his life, Simms revered the rule of law. One of the people who reviewed A City Laid Waste said that every cadet at West Point should not only read but also study Simms’s account of the burning of Columbia.
Simms’s document The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia can be summarized in a word– INVASION. Simms states the subject matter in his title, but the meaning of this important narrative is expressed in four words – Simms’s four words: the invasion of South Carolina and particularly the destruction of Columbia was committed by “monsters of virtuous pretension.” Monsters of Virtuous Pretension. The invasion of the South, culminating in the conflagration of Columbia, was committed by criminals who loudly proclaimed simultaneously both their innocence and their alleged pure and lofty intentions.
We should never forget that Sherman began immediately denying that he had burned Columbia. He willfully and arrogantly blamed the destruction on Wade Hampton. Simms records what he observed as well as what he received in sworn testimonies:

Newly made graves were opened, the coffins taken out, broken open, in search of buried treasure, and the corpses left exposed. Every spot in grave yard or garden, which seemed to have been recently disturbed, was sounded with sword, or bayonet, or ramrod, in their desperate search after spoil. These monsters of virtuous pretension [bold italics, mine], with their banner of streaks and spangles overhead, and sworn to the Constitution, which they neither understand nor read, never once forget the greed of appetite which has distinguished Puritanic New England for three hundred years; and, lest they might forget, the appetite is kept lively by their women – letters found upon their dead, or upon prisoners, almost invariable appealing to them to bring home the gauds and jewelry, even the dresses of the Southern women, to deck the fond feminine expectants at home, whom we may suppose to be all the while at their devotions, assailing Heaven with prayer in behalf of their thrice blessed cause and country.

Subsequently, the whole of American history and American literature has been dedicated to defending monsters, to sanitizing, to whitewashing, to glorifying criminals. In my lifetime, American higher educated has been slavishly committed to the outrageous premise that the invasion of the South was a good thing, and the people who perpetrated that invasion were virtuous people. Lincoln and his Administration along with Sherman, and all the officers, sergeants and privates who were active in that enormity are heroes, so we teach American students today. And anybody who disagrees with this imperial bias, anybody who questions the fundamental premise, is called names – racist, ignorant, unqualified, out of date, imbalanced, unprogressive, un-American and domestic terrorists.
Any historical document that disagrees is ignored, or destroyed. That’s why Simms’s account of invading “monsters of virtuous pretension” was neglected for 140 years, and almost destroyed, resulting not in a fair and historical report, but in unexamined and unconfirmed assertions of northern righteousness and Southern degeneracy, as if Americans are not supposed to know any history, as if knowing the past makes Americans incapable of seeing grand universal principles.
More importantly, though, eyewitness sources contradict American romantic myths about Lincoln and Mr. Lincoln’s War. Listen to Simms’s detailed account of some of the sufferings of the people of Carolina:

The march of the enemy into our State was characterized by such scenes of brutality, license, plunder and general conflagration, as very soon showed that the threat of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as mere brutum fulmen. Day by day, brought to the people of Columbia tidings of newer atrocities committed, and a wider and more extended progress. Daily did long trains of fugitives line the roads, with wives and children, and horses and stock and cattle, seeking refuge from the wolfish fury which pursued. Long lines of wagons covered the highways. Half naked people cowered from the winter under bush tents in the thickets, under the eaves of houses, under the railroad sheds, and in old cars left there along the route. All these repeated the same story of brutal outrage and great suffering, violence, poverty and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village after village – one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging for it the same fate – lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson horrors. . . . Where the families still ventured to remain, they were, in most instances, so tortured by insult, violence, robbery and all manner of brutality, that flight became necessary, and the burning of the dwelling soon followed the flight of the owner. No language can describe the sufferings of these fugitives, or the demonic horrors by which they were pursued; nor can any catalogue furnish an adequate detail of the wide-spread destruction of homes and property. Granaries were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to waste under the feet of their cavalry or consigned to the fire which consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle, hogs, mules and the costliest furniture. Nothing was permitted to escape. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces, but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy, upon which they could conveniently lay hands, was employed to defile and ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses. Sick people were forced from their beds, to permit the search after hidden treasures. In pursuit of these, the most diabolic ingenuity was exercised, and the cunning of the Yankee, in robbing, proved far superior to that of the negro for concealment. The beautiful homesteads of the parish country, with their wonderful tropical gardens, were ruined; ancient dwellings of black cypress, one hundred years old, which had been reared by the fathers of the republic – men whose names were famous in Revolutionary history – were given to the torch as recklessly as were the rudest hovels; the ancient furniture was hewn to pieces; the costly collections of China were crushed wantonly under foot; choice pictures of works of art, from Europe; select and numerous libraries, objects of peace wholly, were all destroyed. The summer retreats, simple cottages of slight and unpretending structure, were equally devoted to the flames, and, where the dwellings were not destroyed – and they were only spared while the inhabitants resolutely remained in them – they were robbed of all their portable contents, and what the plunderer could not bear away, was ruthlessly hewn to pieces. The inhabitants, black no less than white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to be found in the abandoned camps of the enemy. The corn scraped up from the spots where the horses fed, has been the only means of life left to thousands but lately in affluence. It was the avowed policy of the enemy to reach our armies through the sufferings of their women and children – to starve out the families of those gallant soldiers whom they had failed to subdue in battle.

An under-reported fact is that when Sherman left Columbia, he commanded 248 wagons filled with Southern treasure.
Simms reports more atrocities committed by the invading monsters:

We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced upon women [rapes] . . . . Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered – one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. . . . We need, for the sake of truth and humanity, to put on record, in the fullest types and columns, the horrid deeds of these marauders upon all that is pure and precious – all that is sweet and innocent – all that is good, gentle, gracious, dear and ennobling – within the regards of . . . Christian civilization.

And then there was the killing:

[Mayor Goodwyn] while walking with the Yankee General, heard the report of a gun. Both heard it, and immediately proceeded to the spot. There they found a group of soldiers, with a stalwart young negro fellow lying dead before them on the street, the body yet warm and bleeding. Pushing it with his feet, Sherman said, in his quick, hasty manner, “What does this mean, boys?” The reply was sufficiently cool and careless. “The d___d black rascal gave us his impudence, and we shot him.” “Well, bury him at once! Get him out of sight!” As they passed on, one of the party remarked, “Is that the way, General, you treat such a case?” “Oh!” said he, “we have no time for courts-martial and things of that sort!”

“Should you capture Charleston, I hope by some accident the place may be destroyed. And if a little salt should be sown upon the site, it may prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.” These words advocating the centralization of American government along with the destruction of Charleston came in 1865 from Lincoln’s Chief of Staff, Major General Henry Halleck. The message was addressed to Sherman, whose mode of warfare was hailed in Northern papers as genius and decried in the South as barbaric.
Today, our children are taught not to question or to doubt, but to praise and to glorify the so-called great democratic achievements of Sherman in his notorious march through Georgia and South Carolina.
Simms exposes the popular glorification of Sherman, his men, and their march, falsely represented as an army of noble Americans on a democratic adventure, performing a great military feat. In the process of saving this Sacred Union, the romantic myth goes, American soldiers were outraged by haughty Southern aristocracy and by the oppression of black people, whom the invaders heartily embraced, so on and on the romantic myths go. As a result, the righteous invaders resolved to destroy Southern society once and for all, and thereby bestow on the planet a new birth of freedom.
These absurd pretensions of virtue and self-righteous justifications for criminal acts are easily contradicted by hundreds of Southern sources, chief among them is Simms’s account of Sherman in Columbia. Simms reveals Sherman’s invasion as evil, as rationalized by a deformed Christianity, as a fatal violation of the Constitution and core American values, and as carried out by a pretentious army of plundering criminals.
CONCLUSION
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing. Silence is the greatest shame. We must speak up, no matter how difficult.
To protect the Constitution and the freedom and well-being of the people of the South, the Southern states affirmed the right to disobey the American central government: a right affirmed and established by the founding generation, although labelled treason by Lincoln and his Administration.
As a result of defending the values of the American founders and the rights made explicit in the Declaration of Independence, the South was wrongfully, criminally, and brutally invaded – not by those warring for Christ and Christian morality, not by those building an exceptional civilization in the Western Hemisphere, not by those defending humanity or human rights. The South was invaded, brutalized, and conquered by “monsters of virtuous pretension.” As eyewitnesses like Simms said over and over again, by felons and brutes – who not only broke the rules of warfare by attacking, raping and murdering innocent civilians, but who also broke the rules of decency and Christian morality. I remind you that Simms addresses his historical narrative of the destruction of Columbia to Christians, everywhere.
Simms was present throughout this American enormity, when he recorded the horrors of invasion, and Sherman’s repeated denials – denials Sherman himself would eventually acknowledge. Simms not only exposes Sherman, but he also rebukes the invaders’ virtuous pretensions to defend and to justify their monstrous behavior.
Those who attempted to destroy the South did not succeed (although some are still trying today), because the ideas and ideals of the South are preserved, along with the malignant cruelty of the invaders — preserved in Simms’s writings as well as in the writings of many others. Southern ideals are also preserved in the Atlanta art that influenced my youth. What kind of civilization could inspire the Cyclorama, the carvings on Stone Mountain, and the American classic Gone With the Wind? These works of art spoke to me as an Atlanta youth, as well as to millions of others. The meaning of great Southern art points to the ideals of the American South.
The ideas and ideals of Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were both the inspiration and the model of the Southern Confederacy. I was taught that Confederate ideals include the goal of the responsible, sovereign individual, tempered by family, community, church and state. I knew that the Southern Confederacy was intended to protect the Southern land and the rights of the people on that land to be free from arbitrary executive power, entangling alliances, destructive wars, and unfair regional exploitation to benefit sectional elites.
If our teachings are false, if our art like the Cyclorama, Stone Mountain, and Gone With the Wind is inferior and irrelevant, and if our literary and historical sources like Simms are wrong, then they will not withstand the onslaught of globalism, secularism, and empire building. But if they are true, then they will sustain us in all manner of dark and threatening times, because we have faith in the final justice of the Good Lord Above and in His ultimate victory. Like our Revolutionary War forefathers, we have faith that freedom will eventually triumph over all forms of tyranny and usurpation. Like our Confederate heroes, we have faith that the courage, sacrifices and patriotism of men like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and William Gilmore Simms will not only endure but will finally prevail.

About David Aiken

David Aiken received a B.A. in History, Philosophy and English from Baylor University, a M.Div. in Biblical Studies and Christianity and Culture from Duke University, a M.A. in Southern Literature and Classics from the University of Georgia, and a Ph.D. in American Literature and Modern British and American Literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has written, edited or introduced more than fifty articles and books on William Faulkner, Flannery O'Conner, William Gilmore Simms and other Southern authors, and is a founding member of the Abbeville Institute and the William Gilmore Simms Society.

Causes/Reasons For The War Of Southern Independence

One of the major causes of the War Of Southern Independence, and among the chief motivating factors behind the deep Southern commitment to the fight evidenced by the widespread volunteerism of the so-called "Southern yeoman" who owned no slaves and had no stake in slavery, was the smug presumption to moral and even spiritual superiority of so many in the North, abolitionists and New Enlganders in particular. The stench of condescension and hypocrisy was particularly foul to Southerners of the day, which is not surprising since so many of them were of "Scots Irish" descent and within at most three generations of having escaped the grinding poverty and horrific political oppression of a Great Britain which reviled them. So the South as a whole tended to have a chip on its shoulder about anything which smacked of the establishment, entitlement or the upper class. In short, the North. You can't continually insult a man - or a region - and pretend surprise when he wants to step outside with you.

This is a casus belli which has been routinely overlooked by Northern commentators, many of whom today persist in the same offensive, contemptuous behavior which came so naturally to their forbears, particularly academics. As self-identified members of the elite and claimants to membership in the intelligentsia, they were representatives of that entitled class which led the North, and as such were simply incapable of recognizing their own egoism, prejudice and presumption. These representatives of the Northern elites were far more likely to understand Swahili than they were to grasp what it meant to live a Southerner's life, and to understand the factors which formed his character and personality.

As I noted, that same egotistical presumption and condescension is today routinely seen in the intellectual heirs of those elites who were so contemptuous of the South both prior to the North's military invasion and afterwards, when the South was crushed and humiliated for generations, unlike any other foe defeated by the United States. The most smug and condescending attitudes often come from academics, who rely on the same insulting behavior and presumptuous attitudes when speaking of today's South and its inhabitants. Often these academics retain the same smug pretensions of moral superiority as did their forbears. And, just as their forbears, they can exhibit a truly breathtaking hypocrisy and shocking degree of willful moral blindness, by praising as military geniuses and heroes men who intentionally made war on civilians, which included the same acts of barbarism, brutality and outright terrorism for which Nazi and Imperial Japanese generals were ignominiously hanged. Just think of the vanity necessary to accomplish such a neat intellectual trick.
Yes, such attitudes are still encountered today, when the same kind of moral egotists speak in terms of "lies" and "myths" on which Southerners "loudly" "insist". Because Southerners don't just have a different opinion - they're not even merely in error. No, they're perverse. Immoral. Evil. The familiar smug, scornful and patronizing words. And informed by the same narcissism and moral blindness which afflicted those who went before them.

 Via one of the best liberty/Southron aggregate blogs, a multi-daily must read:
 Free North Carolina

A Grand Day - Robert E. Howard And A Link

Today is the birthday of my fellow Texan, and acclaimed author Robert E. Howard.

I am honored to come out of my long drought to link to/post in full from one of my favorite daily blogs, the Rebellion Blog

Today's post from the Rebellion Blog Link: This day in history

In this post Old Rebel perfectly describes the why of this blog/this blog's name. So thanks, Old Rebel.

Please visit the Rebellion Blog, link it, and make it a daily visit. It does not disappoint.

And now reprinted in full:

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 This day in history

In 1906, Robert E. Howard was born. This native Texan became the king of pulp fiction, creating such memorable characters as Conan and Solomon Kane.

One of the real-life colorful characters who inspired the young writer was his grandfather, a Confederate veteran who literally "rode with Forrest":

Howard had a profound admiration for his grandfather’s exploits, a Confederate veteran, a man who “rode for four years with Bedford Forrest,” “was accounted the strongest man in his regiment and one of the strongest men in Forrest’s command. He could cleave a man from shoulder to waist with a single stroke of his saber,” [he] “loaned money, dealt some in cattle; he bought a sheep ranch, but, in the midst of a cattle country, with hired men running it, it was not a success. He wandered over into western New Mexico and worked a silver mine not far from the Arizona line” where “chief old Geronimo once stole a bunch of [his] horses.”

Howard also drew inspiration from his own Anglo-Celtic heritage. Tales of Celtic warfare fired his imagination, and certainly planted the seeds of the future exploits of Conan . In a letter to fellow author H.P. Lovecraft, Howard wrote:

Books dealing on Scottish history were easier for me to obtain than those dealing with Irish history, so in my childhood I knew infinitely more about Scottish history and legendry than Irish. I had a distinct Scottish patriotism, and liked nothing better than reading about the Scotch and English wars. I enacted these wars in my games and galloped full tilt through the mesquite on a bare-backed racing mare, hewing right and left with a Mexican machete and slicing off cactus pears which I pretended were the heads of English knights.

Howard's Conan stories portray its hero as an honest, fierce, manly, and incorruptible barbarian who cannot comprehend the soft, cynical, self-doubting, and decadent city dwellers he often has to rescue.

Not a bad example for the modern Southerner. Here's one excellent site, appropriately named Conan The Cimmerian, that celebrates Howard's pro-Southern legacy.

The Calamity of Appomattox, by H.L. Mencken

The Calamity of Appomattox, by H.L. Mencken
from Free North Carolina

Few have mused upon the result of a Southern victory in the 1860s and the subsequent political independence from the Northern section of the United States. Mencken does so below some 65 years after Appomattox and notes how the untimely death of so many promising young men in the Southern military hobbled the South politically for many years after the war. Had great men like James Johnston Pettigrew not died from Northern bullets, there would not have been the Heflins, Bilbos, Caraways and Tillmans he deplores.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

The Calamity of Appomattox
H.L. Mencken,
Published in The American Mercury, Sept., 1930

"No American historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured?

Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation?

How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers.

But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.

The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North. They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities, then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed.

First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any Southern standard, are gentlemen.

If the war had gone with the Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle….the old aristocracy, however degenerate it might have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said. Charleston, which even now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.

My guess is that the two Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they’d have come to terms as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would have kept aloof—and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.

No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

Today the way out looks painful and hazardous. But it will be hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter today for every American of any noticeable decency. There are, to be sure, advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of people.

, (The Vintage Mencken, Gathered by Alistair Cooke, Vintage Books, 1955, pp.197-201)

The Calamity of Appomattox, by H.L. Mencken

Dr.T's Response

I liked this response at There Are No Socialists - June 25, 2011 - 6:56 pm - by Victor Davis Hanson

Found through The socialisthistorical end game - Vox Popoli(VoxDay)

Here is Dr. T's fairly decent summary of how the US condition got to where it is today:

Dr. T's response(click for link to original):

“This country has been through some pretty tough times…. In all instances we’ve come through pretty well.”

Not in my opinion. We fight the British in a revolution about taxation without representation and form a new nation. Less than 15 years later the federal government imposes a tax solely on whiskey (and not on any other beverages, alcoholic or not, in violation of the equal taxation clause in our Constitution). Those who opposed the tax were met with federal force.

Our nation supposedly was formed as a federation of sovreign states. Sovreignty includes the right to make or break alliances. However, Lincoln and others decided that not only was secession bad, but that it called for war to force those states back into the USA. During that war, we violated the Constitution some more by suspending habeas corpus and initiating a federal military draft, which is not one of the federal government’s enumerated powers.

We had no business getting involved in the Great War, but we hadn’t had any action since the Spanish-American War (that we caused), and so we drafted some more men to get killed in trenches in Europe.

We experienced the Great Depression that Hoover and Roosevelt made worse with their multiple rounds of stimulus spending. Roosevelt repeatedly violated the Constitution, tried to pack the Supreme Court, and began the welfare state that plagues us today and that may sink us soon.

Roosevelt desperately wished to help the British in WWII, but he couldn’t get Congress or the people behind that idea. Instead, he provoked Japan at every opportunity, knowing that if Japan and the US went to war, Japan’s treaty with Germany would result in Germany declaring war on the US. Once that happened, the vast majority of our war effort went towards Europe despite the fact that the Japanese were the ones who had attacked us and who were capturing American territories, protectorates, and allies in the Pacific. We violated the Constitution again and took the homes of Japanese-American citizens and forced them to live in camps. We did not do the same to German-Americans or Italian-Americans.

The Vietnam conflict showed that we don’t have to declare war to draft men and send them halfway around the world to fight and die. More than fifty thousand died to delay the fall of South Vietnam to the communist North. The only good to come from this war was the realization that a smaller volunteer military works better than a military comprised mostly of conscripts. (Note that we still haven’t given up on the draft. It is only suspended.)

Johnson decided to distract us from racial conflict and anti-war sentiment by creating Great Society Ponzi schemes. The full effects of that will be felt within the next twenty years as we follow the course taken by Greece.

The 1960s featured free love and mind-altering drugs. We decided to address the latter by starting a War on Drugs in the 1970s that has not ended. It has given us the largest prison population (in both raw numbers and percentage of adults imprisoned) of any nation. The War on Drugs also featured further degradation of the Bill of Rights, with the 4th Amendment now almost worthless as your property can be seized without a warrant or without you being charged with a crime.

We follow all that with the massive overresponse to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, the loss of more liberties, the further trashing of the Bill of Rights, the massive expansion of government, and the deliberate infliction of public indignities and sexual molestations that provide no security benefits but show the public that our massive federal government can do almost it wants.

Yep, we’ve weathered our troubles so well that I’m emigrating as soon as possible.

H.L. Mencken And The Gettysburg Address

H.L. Mencken (HT - The Bonnie Blue Blog:


"The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."