Confederate Digest

Sovereign Nations don't accept Occupation by a Foreign Army without a Fight.

2012-01-06T21:52:00.004-05:00

Southerners who are aware of their history know something about being occupied by a foreign army. Ron Paul is one of those Southern brothers. Everyone needs to see the perspective he gives in this short film.

Planting the Confederate Flag at Shuri Castle, Okinawa

2012-01-04T16:51:00.002-05:00

By LCDR Joseph D Haines, Medical Corps, USN

Only the Normandy D-Day invasion surpassed Okinawa in its scope, preparation, and forces employed. More than 548,000 Americans participated in the Okinawa invasion on 1 April 1945, an Easter Sunday. Curiously, there was virtually no resistance as they stormed the beaches. They soon discovered that the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy had literally gone underground, having spent a year forcing Okinawan slaves to dig their underground defenses. Eighty-three days of fierce combat were required to finally defeat the Japanese.

The newly organized American 10th Army conducted the invasion of Okinawa. The 10th, commanded by LTG Simon Bolivar Buckner, was composed of the XXIV Corps, made up of veteran Army units including the 7th, 27th, 77th, and 96th Infantry Divisions, and the III Amphibious Corps, with three batde-hardened Marine divisions, the 1st, 2d, and 6th. LTG Buckner's tactics were summarized by his statement, "The main thing is to lick the Japs. It doesn't much matter where or how we do it."

One of the most significant milestones in the Okinawan campaign was the taking of Shuri Castle, the underground headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army. After 2 months of fighting the Japanese, the 6th Marines and the Army's 7th Division were moving south, nearing Shuri Castle. MajGen Pedro del Valle commanded the 6th Marines. Following a hard fight at Dakeshi Town, del Valles Marines engaged in a bloody battle at the improbably named Wana Draw.

The draw stretched 800 yards and was covered by Japanese guns from its 400-yard entrance to its narrow exit. The exit provided the key to Shuri Castle. The Japanese were holed up in caves the entire length of the draw and had to be eradicated in man- to- man combat.

While the Marines batded through the mud and blood up the draw, the Army's 77th Division was approaching Shuri from the east. To the west, the 6th Marines were pushing into the capital city of Naha. Faced with this overwhelming force, Japanese GEN Ushijima's army retreated to the south.

On 29 May, Able Company, Red Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, commanded by South Carolina native Capt Julius Dusenberg, approached to within 800 yards of Shuri Castle. The castle lay within the zone of the 77th Infantry Division, known as the Statue of Liberty Boys. However, GEN Ushijima's rear guard had stalled the 77this advance.

Impatient, MajGen del Valle ordered Capt Dusenberg to "take that damned place if you can. I'll make the explanations." Dusenberg radioed back, "Will do!" Dusenberg's Marines stormed the stone fortress, quickly dispatching a detachment of Japanese soldiers who had remained behind. Once the casde had been taken, Dusenberg took off his hel- met and removed a flag he had been car- rying for just such a special occasion. He raised the flag at the highest point of the casde and let loose with a rebel yell. The flag waving overhead was not the Stars and Stripes, but the Confederate Stars and Bars. Most of the Marines joined in the yell, but a disapproving New Englander supposedly remarked, "What does he want now? Should we sing 'Dixie?'"

MG Andrew Bruce, the commanding general of the 77th Division, protested to the 10th Army that the Marines had stolen his prize. But LTG Buckner only mildly chided MajGen del Valle saying, "How can I be sore at him? My father fought under that flag!"

LTG Buckner's father was the Confederate BG Buckner who had surrendered Fort Donelson to then-BG Ulysses S. Grant in 1862. The Confederate Battle Flag flew only 2 days over Shuri Castle before the Stars and Stripes were formally raised on 31 May. Dusenberg's flag was first lowered and presented to LTG Buckner as a souvenir. LTG Buckner remarked, "Okay! Now, let's get on with the war!" Tragically, on 18 June, just days before Okinawa fell, an enemy shell killed LTG Buckner on Mezido Ridge while he was observing a Marine attack.

Author's Note: Supporting facts may be found in Iving Werstein's book, Okinawa: The Last Ordeal, Crowell Company. New York, 1968.

Sources here: http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2011/07/wwii-okinawa-confederates-storming.html

and here: http://www.mca-marines.org/leatherneck/confederates-shuri-castle-november-2009

Thanks to Marshall Hester for suggesting this story.

Robert Toombs - "Unreconstructed" Confederate - a legend in his own time.

2011-12-26T06:13:00.015-05:00

Home of Confederate Secretary of State and "Unreconstructed Rebel," Robert Toombs, Washington, Georgia

A legend in his own time, Robert Toombs was a successful planter and lawyer who led a turbulent career as state legislator, U.S. Congressman and Senator. “Defend yourselves; the enemy is at your door . . . !” thundered Toombs from the Senate floor on January 24, 1860. The following year, Georgia seceded from the Union and Toombs personified the South by evolving from conservative Unionist to fire-breathing secessionist. After serving just five months as the first Confederate Secretary of State, he resigned to serve as brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia.

In 1870, as the Reconstruction Era drew to a close in Georgia, Toombs felt that Georgia should live under a constitution of her own making. His last service to Georgia citizens was helping create the Constitution of 1877, which was not amended until 1945. Visitors are welcome to tour the house and grounds, and view exhibits and displays.

Home of Robert Toombs, Historical Marker

A historical marker reads: "This was the home of Robert Toombs -- planter, lawyer and distinguished Southern statesman. Born July 2, 1810, Robert Toombs was educated at Franklin College, Georgia, at Union College, New York, and the University of Virginia. He was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, 1837-1840, 1842-1845; of the United States Senate from 1853 until his resignation in 1861. He served as Secretary of State, C.S.A., resigning to become a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1877.

Robert Toombs died in this house on December 15, 1885, an "Unreconstructed Rebel." After his death this became the home of his devoted niece, Mrs. Frank Colley. This marker replaces one erected by the Children of the Confederacy of Georgia in June, 1941. "

Side Entrance to the Robert Toombs House, now a museum, operated by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and Wilkes County.

Located at 216 East Robert Toombs Avenue between Poplar Drive and Liberty Street, in Washington, Wilkes County, Georgia.

Photos by J. Stephen Conn

Merry Christmas from Federally Occupied Tennessee

2011-12-23T07:51:00.002-05:00

Sobering words of truth from Ron Paul

2011-12-22T08:41:00.003-05:00

The Code of Confederate Flag Etiquette

2011-12-20T09:35:00.003-05:00

From www.ConfederateColonel.com

T H E C O D E OF

C O N F E D E R A T E F L A G E T I Q U E T T E

A G U I D E T O T H E R E S P E C T F U L US E A N D DI S P L A Y O F T H E
F L A G S A N D S Y M B O L S O F
T H E C O N F E D E R A T E S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A

PREAMBLE
The flag and other symbols of the Confederate States of America represent the dreams of a Southern nation for which our ancestors sacrificed their lives and their fortunes, and for the high and noble standards that we should once again strive for. The flags and other symbols of the Confederate States of America should be treated with the highest respect and never used or modified in a manner that diminishes the image of a great and noble South. Use of the Confederate flag should be held to the same high standards as any other national flag.

DEFINITIONS
The Flag is defined as any of the flags used by the Confederate States of America. This includes:
a. First National or Stars and Bars
b. Second National or Stainless Banner
c. Third National
d. Bonnie Blue Flag
e. Confederate Battle Flag
f. Confederate Naval Jack
g. Any object which the average person seeing the same without deliberation may believe the same to represent the flag, colors, standard, or ensign of the Confederate States of America.

MODIFICATIONS AND USE OF THE FLAG
The flag should never be modified in any way. It should be displayed as originally designed without alteration.
The basic flag design my be incorporated into the logo of an organization only if it is done in such a manner as to hold the Confederate States of America in the highest respect.
The flag, or design elements of the flag, should never be used to associate The South or the Confederate States of America with any other political or social agenda.

Examples of ACCEPTABLE incorporation into a design are:
a. Sons of Confederate Veterans logo
b. United Daughters of The Confederacy logo
c. State flags

Examples of UNACCEPTABLE incorporation into a design are:
a. Images of the Confederate flag, or design elements of the flag, combined with images of skulls, motorcycles, or other objects that detract from the honor and respect due the flag.

Examples of UNACCEPTABLE use of the flag:
a. The Confederate flag with images of skulls, motorcycles, or any other object.
b. The Confederate flag incorporated into any article of clothing. An exception to this is neck ties and lapel pins that have traditionally been used to respectfully display patriotic symbols.

Examples of ACCEPTABLE use of the flag image:
a. Bunting or similar material used for patriotic decoration which includes design elements of the Confederate flag, or images of the flag such that it is clearly not being used as a flag. Examples would be the flag: depicted furled, on a staff, carried in battle, in a memorial arrangement.

DISPLAY OF THE FLAG
No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the Confederate States of America; the flag should not be dipped to any person or thing.
(a) The flag should never be displayed with the field down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.
(f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.
(g) The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature. An exception to this is unit markings on the flag when used by historical re-enactors.
(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations. The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing. Therefore, the lapel flag pin being a replica, should be worn on the left lapel near the heart.
(k) The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.

FOLDING THE FLAG
To fold the flag, two persons face each other and hold the flag waist high and horizontally between them. They fold the lower half of the flag lengthwise over the upper half; then fold it again in the same manner. The person holding the fly end folds the lower right corner to the upper edge to form a triangle, folds the outer point inward to form a second triangle, and continues to fold the flag in triangles until the entire length of the flag is folded, ending with the hoist end to the outside.

OCCASIONS FOR DISPLAY
(a) Display on buildings and stationary flagstaffs in open.
Night display: It is the universal custom to display the flag only from sunrise to sunset on buildings and on stationary flagstaffs in the open. However, when a patriotic effect is desired, the flag may be displayed twenty-four hours a day. It is preferred that the flag be properly illuminated during the hours of darkness.
(b) Manner of hoisting
The flag should be hoisted briskly and lowered ceremoniously.
(c) Inclement weather
The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed.
(d) Particular days of display
The flag should be displayed on all days, especially on:
January 19 – Robert E. Lee Birthday – Confederate Heroes Day (TX)
January 21 – Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson Birthday
February 22 – Confederate Independence Day (Founding of the C.S.A. / Jefferson Davis inaugurated)
March 4 – Confederate Flag Day
March 27 – Confederate Day of Prayer, designated by President Jefferson Davis in 1863 as a day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer” in the Confederate States
April 26 – Confederate Memorial Day (AL, FL, GA, MS)
May 10 – Confederate Memorial Day (NC, SC); “Stonewall” Jackson died
May 30 – Confederate Memorial Day (VA)
June 3 – Confederate Memorial Day (KY, LA, TN); Jefferson Davis Birthday
October 12 – Robert E. Lee died
December 6 – Jefferson Davis died

Notes and References

1. The Code of Confederate Flag Etiquette was compiled by Stephen Clay McGehee (ConfederateColonel.com) in April 2008 and was adopted by the Military Order of The Stars and Bars in July 2011.
2. This document is intended to be international in scope; the display of the Confederate flag in conjunction with the flag of a sovereign state is not addressed.
3. This document is based on the following:
a. UNITED STATES CODE, TITLE 36, CHAPTER 10
b. UNITED STATES CODE, TITLE 18, CHAPTER 33
c. UNITED STATES CODE, TITLE 4, CHAPTER 1
d. Florida Statutes 256.10 and 256.051
e. UDC Flag Code (http://www.hqudc.org/ info/flag_code.pdf)

Revisions
05/30/2008 – Display Section (g)

© 2008 Stephen Clay McGehee
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
For distribution details, see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Attribution link to www.confederatecolonel.com

(PDF version of the document)

Learn more at this link to Confederate Colonel: http://www.confederatecolonel.com/resources/flag-etiquette/

Thousands of Jews served in the Confederate Army

2011-12-19T06:18:00.005-05:00

Jewish Confederates

By Gary Ayres

The Jewish people historically want their history told as accurately as possible. It amazes me why they want to distance themselves from a past that was honorable. A past that was good to them and one in which they were accepted as equals.

Most Jewish Confederate descendants now join with the politically correct in denouncing their forefathers of the Southland of America, the Confederate States of America.

I believe that one of the largest ethnic groups to serve the confederate States of America were, 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd generation Jews.

Jews had lived in Charleston, SC since 1695 and, by 1800, the largest Jewish community in America lived in Charleston, SC. In fact the oldest synagogue in America, K. K. Beth Elohim, was founded in Charleston. By 1861 a third of all Jews in America lived in Louisiana.

Some say that more than 10,000 Jews fought for the Confederacy, with 2,000 of them being officers or in the Confederate Government. Others say that only 6,000 Jews served in the Union Army and as few as 2,000 Jews in the Confederacy.

I believe the number of Jews in the Confederacy was more likely to have been between 6,000 and 10,000. I believe that to be more likely because the Jewish population prospered more in the South, and the South was more tolerant to their religion than in the North.

Take today -- no one knows how many of the South's Jews have Confederate ancestors, probably 10,000's of just Atlanta's 100,000 Jews.

Here is an account we should look to from Joseph Goldsmith in reference to numbers in the Confederate Army. He was connected to the war from start to finish. He was close to the War and Navy Departments and the Confederate Government as a contractor for side arms and accoutrements.
Joseph Goldsmith was known as the "Jewish Confederate 'Chaplain'". Before the Fall Festivals of their Jewish observances in 1864, he went to Richmond and met with an old friend, Mr. M. J. Michelbacher.

Joseph Goldsmith writes in a letter, 1864: "There are right around here and in our other armies many Jewish soldiers who would like to keep Rosh Hashanah, but especially Yom Kippur according to our law and ritual. I am trying to get a furlough for these soldiers over these Holy Days, but do not know how to go about it. Here is a petition to the Secretary of War; you know him well; will you present it, or will you go with me to introduce me, or will you get Mr. Benjamin to recommend it?" "I informed Mr. Michelbacher that as far as Mr. Benjamin was concerned it did not come within the scope of his special office; that if his recommendation was needed I could pledge it, and that the whole matter was for Mr. Seddon to decide."

The next morning Mr. Michelbacher and Mr. Goldsmith met with Mr. Seddon. His reply to the petition of Mr. Goldsmith: "Well, gentlemen, as far as I am concerned I will give my consent, but must refer the matter to the Adjutant and Inspector-General. Whatever he does, I will sanction. He thereupon wrote his endorsement on the petition, and Mr. Michelbacher and I took it up to General Cooper, who, like Mr. Seddon, received us kindly, and with great interest discussed the proposition with us. He would gladly, he said, grant the furloughs, but, 'gentlemen,' he added, 'look, we have here a roster of all our soldiers, and we know, as far as possible from their names, how many of them belong to your religious denomination, and astonishing as it is that we count about 10,000 to 12,000 Jews who are serving in our Army. Now, should I grant the furloughs you request, you will readily see, that for the time being it would perhaps disintegrate entire commands in the field and might work to a bad effect; besides, the commanders of the different army corps should certainly be consulted. On the whole it would be impractible, as you, Goldsmith will readily acknowledge. In fact, he pleasantly added, "you will admit that if your forefathers had fought Titus on the Sabbath Day during the siege of Jerusalem, they most certainly would have beaten him. You see, therefore, I cannot conscientiously grant your request."

Later in 1895, Goldsmith wrote, "I am still a living witness and can, from my own memory, give you many names of gallant Jewish soldiers of the confederate Army. I had ample opportunity to see and to know. Many a wounded Jew have I met in the hospitals of Richmond and administered to his wants, and many a Jewish soldier have I seen walking on his crutch or having his arm in a sling, traveling to and from his command during the war. And I know further that it was simply a sense of loyalty to their homes and their neighbors that prompted them to fight for the South. If not, they could readily have left this country at any time as I myself could have done, had I so chosen. But love for our adopted country kept us here and we offered all we had in its behalf.

In November 1862, General Grant was convinced that the black market of cotton was organized by Jews. Grant ordered that "no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point." Nor were they to be granted trade licenses.

Now all wars have "contraband", black market", "illegal traders". This will include all people and there were just a handful of Jews that were "illegal traders". The majority of Jews were not. The terms "Jew", "profiteer", "speculator", "trader", were employed interchangeably.

Union General Henry W. Hallack linked "traitors and Jew peddlers" as one. General Grant shared Hallack's mentality, describing "the Israelites" as "an intolerable nuisance".

This order of Gen. Grant's in November 1862 was immediately and with enthusiasm carried out by the Northern Army. In Holley Springs, Mississippi, Jewish traders had to walk 40 miles to evacuate the area. In Paducah, Kentucky, the Union military gave 30 Jewish families, all long term residents, with 2 of Jewish inhabitants being Union Army Veterans 24 hours to leave.

The exodus of the Jews was not happening fast enough for Gen. Grant. He wanted more and he did show exactly the type of man Lincoln wanted for his Commander of the Armies of the United States.
In December of 1862, General Grant initiated an official order of anti-Semitism. It was one of the worst in 19^th century America and possibly of world magnitude 19^th.One could argue this was a test to be used on the Indians in the future. We know that tactics used in the burning of Missouri and of Atlanta was later employed on the Indians. This will never be taught in the schools to your children. It is another part of US history to be swept under the rug. This is no better than a lie to dupe people into believing that Lincoln and the US was correct in its invasion of the Southern States and its lies about a war it raged upon the Southern people, Jewish people included.

Of course it is hard to believe this, but if you just study a little about the advisors of Lincoln and the connection he had with the German Marxists, it will become clear and the truth will come out.
General Grant issued his "General Order Number 11". This order expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi.

The order said:
"The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department ('Department of the Tennessee,' an administrative district of the Union Army of occupation composed of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi) within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any on returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits."

There was enough backlash from residents for Lincoln to make a decision to have General Grant to revoke the "Order".

Here are just a few notable Confederates of the Jewish faith.

Abraham Myers was a West Point graduate and classmate of Robert E. Lee. Myers served as Quartermaster General and before the war, fought Indians in Florida. The city of Fort Myers was named after him.

Major Adolph Proskauer of Mobile, Alabama was wounded several times. A subordinate officer wrote "I can see him now as he nobly carried himself at Gettysburg, standing coolly and calmly with a cigar in his mouth at the head of the 12^th Alabama amid a perfect rain of bullets, shot and shell. He was the personification of intrepid gallantry and imperturbable courage."

In North Carolina, 6 Cohen brothers fought in the 40^th Infantry.

The 1^st Confederate of Jewish faith was killed in the war was Albert Lurie Moses of Charlotte, NC.
All-Jewish companies reported to the fray from Macon and Savannah, Georgia.

In Louisiana, 3 Jews reached the rank of Colonel. They were S. M. Hymans, Edwin Kuncheedt and Ira Moses.

Moses Jacob Ezekiel of Richmond, fought in New Market with his fellow cadets from VMI. He became a noted sculpture. His mother, Catherine Ezekiel was to have said, "she would not tolerate a son who declined to fight for the Confederacy".

Ezekiel wrote in his memoirs "we were not fighting for the perpetuation of slavery, but for the principles of States Rights and Free Trade, and in defense of our homes which were being ruthlessly invaded."

In tribute to Ezekiel it was written, "The eye that saw is closed, the hand that executed is still, the soldier lad who fought so well was knighted and landed in foreign land, but dying, his last request was that he might rest amoung his old Comrades in Arlington Cemetery."

Simon Baruch, a Prussian immigrant, settled in Camden, SC. He received his degree from Medical College of Virginia and entered the war as a physician in the 3^rd SC Battalion. He was at the Battle of Second Manassas. He became the Surgeon General of the Confederacy.

The most famous Southern Jew of that era was Judah Benjamin. He was educated in law at Yale. He was the first Jewish US Senator and declined a seat on the Supreme Court. He also declined an offer to be Ambassador to Spain.

Judah Benjamin served President Davis and the Confederacy in 3 positions, Attorney General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State.

After the war, he was unable to resettle in America. He settled in England, where he became a notable lawyer. He also wrote legal text while a lawyer in England.

Why does the politically correct (PC) want to destroy the history of a people just because they wanted to save their homeland from an invading army and a government gone wrong?

Not only the Scottish people have been fighting many lifetimes for freedom, but also people of the Jewish faith have done the same, and on American soil too.

Notes:
Jewish Virtual Library
Jews in The Civil War
www.jewish-history.com
Grant's General Orders
Abraham Lincoln, Coin Complete Works

See the Jewish Magazine article here: http://www.jewishmag.com/112mag/confederates/confederates.htm

Jewish Supporters of the Confederacy Abounded

2011-12-17T06:10:00.006-05:00

This Monument at Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia, honors more than
30 Jewish Confederate soldiers who gave their lives in defense of the Confederate States.

By Catherine Calos

Richmond Times-Dispatch

A year after the Civil War ended, Richmond's Jewish women came together to honor and mourn their own:

Marx Myers, killed at Manassas; Henry Smith, at Fayette Courthouse; Herman Hirsh, in Westmoreland County; Isaac Levy and Gustavus Kann, at Petersburg; Madison Marcus, Henrico County; and 30 other Jewish Confederates from around the South, dead in the defenses of Richmond.

The local men were buried in family plots around Hebrew Cemetery on Shockoe Hill.

Others shared a plot known as the soldiers' section. Caring for them became the goal of the Hebrew Ladies' Memorial Association. And in a fundraising letter "to the Israelites of the South" on June 5, 1866, Mrs. Abraham Levy explained that the group intended to place a headstone at each grave and erect a monument to their service.

"In time to come, when our grief shall have become, in a measure, silenced, and when the malicious tongue of slander, ever so ready to assail Israel, shall be raised against us, then, with a feeling of mournful pride, will we point to this monument and say: 'There is our reply.'"

That reply, bordered by an elaborate iron fence with draped muskets and crossed sabers, remains standing in Richmond, a testament to the service of Jews during the Civil War.

North and South, Jews were very much a part of the wartime response.

They were soldiers and blockade runners, merchants and calligraphers, public leaders and farmers. They died in battle, came home wounded, tended to the sick. Families tore apart as they chose sides. Tales of bravery and heartache lived for generations.

Judah Benjamin, sometimes known as "the brains of the Confederacy," was one of the South's highest-ranking officials. He served as attorney general, secretary of war and finally secretary of state during the four years that the Confederate capital was in Richmond.

Myer Angle, first president of Congregation Beth Ahabah, had six sons who fought for the Confederacy.

Phoebe Pember tended the sick and wounded as chief matron at Chimborazo military hospital, where as many as 75,000 were treated during the war.

Gustavus Myers, city councilman for 28 years and council president for 12, was one of the men who met with President Abraham Lincoln on a surprise visit to Richmond on April 4, 1865, to talk about an oath of allegiance for former Confederates.

There's much more. See the full story here:
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/2011/sep/18/13/jewish-supporters-of-the-confederacy-abounded-ar-1317911/

Photo by J. Stephen Conn

Cleburne, Texas honors Confederate General Patrick R. Cleburne

2011-12-16T05:54:00.005-05:00

This gleaming white Confederate monument stands in front of the Johnson County Courthouse in the center of downtown Cleburne, Texas. The town was named in honor of Confederate General Patrick Cleburne, under whom many local men served during the War for Southern Independence. General Cleburne is also memorialized on a large mural at nearby Wright Plaza, pictured below.

Historical Mural at Wright Plaza, Cleburne, Texas, feathers the town's namesake, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne.

An inscription on the mural displays a green Irish shamrock. It reads:

Born in Cork County, Ireland

Lived in Helena, Arkansas

CLEBURNE commanded regiment from Texas, Ark., at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kenesaw Mtn. Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Jonesboro, Franklin,

Gen. Cleburne was killed at the battle of Franklin, Tn. on November, 30, 1864, along with 5 Confederate generals including General Hiram Granbury. Confederate veterans and townsmen voted in 1867 to name the town after Gen. Pat, "The Stonewall Jackson of the West."

Hardee Flags / Granbury's Texas Brigade, Cleburne's Division

Another monument to General Cleburne, standing on the courthouse square, was placed by the state of Texas during the centennial of the War Between the States. It reads:

CITY NAMED FOR CONFEDERATE

GENERAL

PATRICK R CLEBURNE

1828 - 1864

BORN NEAR CORK, IRELAND, CAME TO THE U.S. 1849. DRUG CLERK IN OHIO, BECAME LAWYER IN ARKANSAS. RECRUITED 1ST ARKANSAS REGT. FOR CONFEDERACY, ELECTED COLONEL, PROMOTED BRIGADIER GENERAL MAR. 1862. BECAME MAJOR GENERAL DEC. 1862. RAPIDLY EARNED REPUTATION AS A SUPERB COMBAT OFFICER ON NUMEROUS FIELDS WITH ARMY OF TENNESSEE. EIGHT TEXAS REGIMENTS OF GRANBURY'S BRIGADE WERE UNDER CLEBURNE AND IN 1864 ATLANTA CAMPAIGN HE SAID THE PILES OF THE (UNION) DEAD WERE SILENT BUT SUFFICIENT EULOGY UPON GRANBURY AND HIS NOBLE TEXANS." ON NOV. 30, 1864 CLEBURNE, A SAVAGE FIGHTER, MET DEATH SIX PACES FROM THE FEDERAL LINES IN BATTLE FRANKLIN, TENN. BECAME KNOWN AS "STONEWALL JACKSON OF THE WEST."

ERECTED BY THE STATE OF TEXAS, 1964

Photos by J. Stephen Conn

Middle School Student suspended for wearing Confederate Flag Shirt

2011-12-15T06:19:00.004-05:00

By Lisa Coryell,

The Times of Trenton

Newspaper photo courtesy of the West family.

A Kreps Middle School parent who says her daughter was suspended for wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the image of the confederate flag says the school overstepped its boundaries and violated her daughter’s right to free speech.

Jane West says she’s thinking about withdrawing her daughter, Torri Albrecht, from the school even as district officials insist that the flag — viewed by many as a racially charged symbol — was not the reason the girl was suspended.

“They’re saying that now because they know they really went too far this time,” West said. “If there wasn’t a problem with the sweatshirt, why did the vice principal call at 10 after 8 on Monday to demand that I bring a change of clothes for my daughter?”

“He told me he had a bunch of students and a bunch of teachers come into his office to say they were disturbed by it,” she said.

West said she told the assistant principal, Jermaine Blount, he was crazy if he thought she was coming out with a change of clothes for the eighth-grader.

“The Indian kids wear their turbans. The Jewish kids wear their yarmulkes. That’s their birthright,” she said. “I told him that Torri was born in Virginia. That flag is her heritage and I’m not telling her to take it off. He said ‘I guess she’ll have to suffer the consequences.’”

West said before heading to the school she called her daughter’s cell phone to tell her not to follow any orders to turn the sweatshirt inside out.

When she got to the school she was told that her daughter had been given a one-day suspension, she said.

No stranger to run-ins with school administrators at Kreps over issues involving her daughter, West said she’d had enough. She told her daughter to clean out her locker because she wasn’t coming back to school.

District Superintendent Edward Forsthoffer III disputed West’s account.

“No student was suspended for wearing an inappropriate shirt,” he said. He declined to say why Albrecht was suspended, citing student confidentiality policies.

Speaking in generalities, he said the district has a dress code that bans any clothing that causes a substantial disturbance in school.

“We’d rather be proactive than reactive,” he said. “Ninety-nine times out of 100, when asked, students say ‘OK, I’ll change.’ Some want to make an issue of it for ulterior motives. If there’s defiance involved, if there’s profanity involved (in the refusal to change clothing), certainly we’d have to respond appropriately.”

The battle flag of Confederate forces in the Civil War is widely regarded as one of the most controversial symbols from American history. Many see it as a symbol of racism while others consider it a part of familial and cultural heritage.

West says she and her daughter are in the latter group.

“We are so far from prejudiced,” she said. “My older daughter is biracial. For Torri this was about expressing herself. It was about saying ‘I’m from the South and I’m proud of it.’ She didn’t do it to cause hurt feelings.”

There's more. See the full story here: http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2011/11/east_windsor_teen_suspended_ov.html

H.L. Mencken on Abraham Lincoln

2011-12-14T06:12:00.006-05:00

Abraham Lincoln

H.L. Mencken

From "Five Men at Random," Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 171-76.

First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920, p. 141

Abraham Lincoln - Politician

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas—surely an important matter in any competent biography—is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. William E. Barton, one of the best of later Lincolnologists, argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were live today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptibly humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus marking him fit for adoration in the Y.M.C.A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the political currents were safely running his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.

Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched hum, and the Cooper Union Speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His early speeches were mere empty fire-works—the hollow rodomontades of the era. But in the middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost badly simple—and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered today. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. 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 that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.

H. L. Mencken

About the Author:

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken
(September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956)
was an American journalist and magazine editor, popularly known as the "Sage of Baltimore." He is regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the first half of the 20th century. Many of his books are still in print.

John Hunt Morgan Monument in Lexington, Kentucky

2011-12-13T06:28:00.054-05:00

This impressive memorial to Confederate General John Hunt Morgan astride his horse stands proudly in front of the old Fayette County Courthouse, now the Lexington History Museum, Lexington, Kentucky. The front inscription on the granite pedestal of the memorial reads simply "Genl. John H. Morgan and His Men." On the side of the pedestal are the words, "Erected by the Kentucky Division United Daughters of the Confederacy." A Commonwealth of Kentucky historical marker beside the monument reads:

JOHN HUNT MORGAN (1825-1864)

Known as the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy, Morgan was born in Huntsville, Alabama; in 1831 moved to Lexington. After attending Transylvania, he fought in the Mexican War. In Lexington, he prospered as owner of hemp factory and woolen mill. Morgan organized Lexington Rifles Infantry, 1857; later led them to aid Confederacy. Reverse, John Hunt Morgan 1825-1864 Leading cavalry raids behind the enemy lines, General J. H. Morgan disrupted Union supplies and communications. For southerners, he was the ideal romantic hero. Captured in Indiana-Ohio raid, he escaped and was killed in Greeneville, Tennessee, September 4, 1864. Buried in Lexington Cemetery. Morgan became a courageous symbol of the Lost Cause.

John Hunt Morgan Historical Marker - Side 1

John Hunt Morgan Historical Marker - Side 2

John Hunt Morgan Memorial, Lexington, Kentucky

Photos by J. Stephen Conn

Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans file Lawsuit against the DMV

2011-12-12T06:33:00.005-05:00

Image from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles

The Texas Division Sons of Confederate Veterans has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, asserting that the DMV infringed on the Confederate's free speech rights by refusing to issue a specialty license plate which would have featured a Confederate flag. Below is a press release from the Texas SCV which was issued in conjunction with the filing of the lawsuit:

On December 8th, 2011 a complaint was filed in pursuant of 42
U.S.C. §1983 to vindicate the rights secured to the “Texas Division Sons
of Confederate Veterans” by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the
Constitution.

The Texas SCV is a non-profit organization that works diligently to
preserve the memory and reputation of the Confederate soldiers,
emphasizing the virtues of their fight for the preservation of liberty
and freedom. Like many other non-profit organizations in Texas, the
Texas SCV sought from the State of Texas, through the Department Motor
Vehicles Board, approval of a specialty license plate, both to raise
awareness of their endeavors and to raise additional money to fund their
activities.

This action is in regards to the recent denial of the specialty license
application presented to the Department of Motor Vehicles Board by the
Texas Division Sons of Confederate Veterans. Currently, the SCV has
specialty automobile license plates available to vehicle drivers in
Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, Maryland, Mississippi, Louisiana,
South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

The Texas SCV initially applied for a specialty license plate in Texas
with the Department of Transportation, the proper agency at the time, in
August 2009. That application was denied by the Department of
Transportation.

In 2009, the Texas Legislature amended the Transportation Code to
provide that the Department of Motor Vehicles, rather than the
Department of Transportation, was charged with issuing specialty license
plates. The license plate function moved to the new Department of Motor
Vehicles on November 1, 2009. At the time the Texas SCV reapplied with
the new governing department, to hopefully have a specialty plate in
advance of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, April 12, 2011. The official
public comments were heavily in favor of the Texas SCV’s application for
a specialty plate. Following commentary by both proponents and
opponents, the Board rejected the SCV plate at the hearing by an 8-0
vote without any discussion. At the same hearing, the Buffalo Soldiers
plate, without any discussion, was approved by a 5-3 vote. Since the
Department of Motor Vehicle Board has been charged with issuing
specialty license plates, the Sons of the Confederate Veterans plate is
the first, and only, to be rejected.

Through the members of the Department of Motor Vehicles Board, the State
of Texas has discriminated against the Texas SCV based on the ideas and
message that the Texas SCV supports, in clear violation of the First
Amendment. The Board seeks to bar the Texas SCV from expressing their
viewpoint while allowing all other groups to express their viewpoint:
this type of restriction is exactly the type which the First Amendment
is designed to erase. The only guideline that the Transportation Code
has to offer, which the Board referenced as its reason for rejecting the
plate, is that the Board can reject a plate “if the design might be
offensive to any member of the public…” This, however, cannot be the
standard. It is vague and indeterminable. Essentially, it is no
standard at all to say that the Board can discriminate based upon a
viewpoint if such speech is offensive to anyone. The First Amendment
clearly protects controversial speech. Additionally, even if simply
being “offensive to any member of the public” was sufficient to allow
for rejection, the State has approved numerous plates that are
“offensive to any member of the public.” In fact, the plate approved the
very same day as the Texas SCV plate was rejected – the Buffalo Soldier
plate – is offensive to Native Americans because the all-black cavalry
helped fight Native Americans in the Indian Wars from 1867-1888.

Accordingly, the Texas SCV seeks appropriate injunctive relief,
requiring the State of Texas to approve the Texas SCV’s application and
implement the specialty plate.

Granvel J. Block
Commander Texas Division
Sons of Confederate Veteran

Johnny Reb and Memories of Good Times in Camp

2011-12-11T11:47:00.003-05:00

From Confederate Veteran, Page 388

Nashville, Tennessee – October, 1930

Recreation in Army Life

James E. Payne, Dallas, Texas

The man or woman who imagines that Johnny Reb had a hard time from start to finish , that his sky was always obscured by clouds and his hours spent among the doldrums, is very much off his or her imagining.

Despite the stories of politicians of how we suffered hunger, etc., etc. every veteran who soldiered can recall many blue spots on the sky of his memory; many days and nights when pleasure led the march and love burnished life with gold.

One fortunate thing with us is that we had our games. Marbles, played with all the zest and avidity of schoolboy days; cards, running the gamut through smut, loo, euchre, three-card monte, poker, cribbage and whist; check, and the royal game of chess.

Then we had men with voices – voices of intriguing tenor of loftiest tone;, bass, deep with pathos, sweet with harmony; and thrilling baritone rich with melody. Almost indescribable was the power of those voices to please and enthrall the soul when assembled and mingled. It was not exactly grand opera, nor, thank the Lord, was it either “ragtime” or “jazz.” The songs were the old familiars, the rich melodies of the Southland, mingled with the popular Scotch and Irish Ballads. The very woods would ring with “Swanee River,” “Annie Laurie,” “Massa’s in de Cole, Cole Ground, “ “Lorena,” “Mary of Argyle,” “Kathleen Mavourneen,” etc., etc., Our “Truthful James” used to declare that when one of these concerts was running at full speed the song birds of the forest would come and perch overhead and take notes.

CAMP LIFE IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY-MISSISSIPPIANS PRACTICING WITH THE BOWIE-KNIFE
Image from Harper's Weekly, August 31, 1861

Black South Carolina man refuses to take down his Confederate Flag

2011-11-30T19:11:00.007-05:00

This young man known as GoGreen58, from Bluffton, South Carolina says:

"My college has forced me to take down my Confederate Flag, because they said I was violating a "Racism Code". The flag has been up for the last 2 months and no problems were happening around me, but now they want to say I'm violating a code. They cannot do this to me, because this is a public college and i have my rights to freedom of speech. The Sons of Confederate Veterans are on my side and I have an attorney. If the housing department does not allow me to put it back up, after the letter has been sent. Then a HUGE LAWSUIT will take place, because the housing department is violating my rights of Freedom of Speech. I'm Black NOT African American and I Don't see the Confederate Flag as a RACIST SYMBOL!!!

Follow this link for the story on CNN: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-709533

Lexington, Kentucky preserves the home of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan

2011-11-29T07:30:00.004-05:00

Visitors to the lovely city of Lexington, Kentucky are able to tour the Hunt Morgan House. The home, also known as Hopemont, is located near the downtown area at Lexington's Gratz Park. A favorite tourist attraction, it was once the home of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan.

Hunt-Morgan House, Lexington, Kentucky

This historic marker, number 3 in the Kentucky Historical Highway Marker Program. was placed beside the house more than half a century ago. It reads:

"MORGAN HOUSE -Home of John Hunt Morgan, "Thunderbolt of the Confederacy." Born Huntsville, Alabama, June 1, 1825. Killed Greeneville, Tennessee, September 4, 1864. Lieutenant, Kentucky Volunteers in Mexican War 1846-1847. Major General, C.S.A., 1861-1864.:"

.

Prophetic words of wisdom from General Patick Cleburne

2011-11-28T14:43:00.007-05:00

Mural of General Patrick Cleburne,
Wright Plaza, Cleburne, Texas

Quote from Patrick Cleburne; a Major General of the Confederate States of America during the War for Southern Independence:

"Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late...

"It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision...

"It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all that our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties."

Georgia Power backs down over Confederate Flag

2011-11-25T06:02:00.019-05:00

Atlanta - Earlier this year, Georgia Power twice removed Confederate flags from the graves of veterans buried in the Yellow Dirt Baptist Cemetery located within the grounds of Plant Wansley. When Georgia Power failed to respond to concerns of family members of the veterans buried in the cemetery, the families decided to contact the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans for help. Following several weeks of activity by members of the local SCV camp, the Haralson Invincibles Camp #673, as well as support from the entire Georgia Division, Georgia Power spokesman Mark Williams finally acknowledged the families' concerns and admitted that Georgia Power and it's parent company, the Southern Company, do not have authority to control the cemetery where veterans are buried.

Family members have expressed their appreciation to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the largest heritage preservation organization in the state and across America. Georgia Division Commander Jack Bridwell spoke on behalf of the SCV, "We are happy to see that Georgia Power has finally acknowledged that it has no authority to remove flags from the graves of these veterans, and we are happy to have been able to provide help to these families who wished to honor their ancestors. It is unfortunate that Georgia Power refused to honor the requests of the family members until our organization became involved. We will continue to fight for the preservation of Southern heritage and the respect of veterans across Georgia whenever such violations as these by Georgia Power occur; and we appreciate the outpouring of appreciation shown to the SCV by local residents and elected officials of Heard County.

Defenders of the Confederate flags that decorate grave sites at the Yellow Dirt Baptist Church cemetery - photo from article by Josh Lindenbaum.

Despite acknowledging their errors, however, neither Georgia Power nor the Southern Company have issued an apology to the families for removing the flags; nor have they restored the flags that were originally taken by Georgia Power employees. Georgia Power spokesman Konswello Monroe previously admitted that the company took the flags in a statement to the media: "Yes, we did remove those flags that were put up October 8, and we will be monitoring. If they are put back up we will remove them once again." The families of the veterans buried in the cemetery have not yet decided whether or not to press charges for the theft of the flags or the violation of the state and federal laws which protect the graves and flags of veterans. Family members and SCV leaders will be meeting within the next several days to discuss whether or not to have warrants issued for the arrest of Georgia Power officials.

For more information about Georgia Power's decision to restore the Confederate flags at the Yellow Dirt Baptist Cemetery, please contact Jack Bridwell, Division Commander of the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans at 1-866-SCV-in-GA or online at www.GeorgiaSCV.org .

Thanks to Marshall Hester for submitting this story.

1862 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation by CSA President Jefferson Davis.

2011-11-23T06:03:00.011-05:00

President Jefferson Davis, Confederate States of America, made the following Thanksgiving Day proclamation in 1862. His first such proclamation, "a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer," had been issued in 1861. It was not until two years later that the infidel Abraham Lincoln copied Davis and announced the first official Thanksgiving day in the North.

To the People of the Confederate States:

Once more upon the plains of Manassas have our armies been blessed by the Lord of Hosts with a triumph over our enemies. It is my privilege to invite you once more to His footstool, not now in the garb of fasting and sorrow, but with joy and gladness, to render thanks for the great mercies received at His hand. A few months since, and our enemies poured forth their invading legions upon our soil. They laid waste our fields, polluted our altars and violated the sanctity of our homes. Around our capital they gathered their forces, and with boastful threats, claimed it as already their prize. The brave troops which rallied to its defense have extinguished these vain hopes, and, under the guidance of the same almighty hand, have scattered our enemies and driven them back in dismay. Uniting these defeated forces and the various armies which had been ravaging our coasts with the army of invasion in Northern Virginia, our enemies have renewed their attempt to subjugate us at the very place where their first effort was defeated, and the vengeance of retributive justice has overtaken the entire host in a second and complete overthrow.

To this signal success accorded to our arms in the East has been graciously added another equally brilliant in the West. On the very day on which our forces were led to victory on the Plains of Manassas, in Virginia, the same Almighty arm assisted us to overcome our enemies at Richmond, in Kentucky. Thus, at one and the same time, have two great hostile armies been stricken down, and the wicked designs of their armies been set at naught.

In such circumstances, it is meet and right that, as a people, we should bow down in adoring thankfulness to that gracious God who has been our bulwark and defense, and to offer unto him the tribute of thanksgiving and praise. In his hand is the issue of all events, and to him should we, in an especial manner, ascribe the honor of this great deliverance.
Now, therefore, I, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, do issue this, my proclamation, setting apart Thursday, the 18th day of September inst., as a day of prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God for the great mercies vouchsafed to our people, and more especially for the triumph of our arms at Richmond and Manassas; and I do hereby invite the people of the Confederate States to meet on that day at their respective places of public worship, and to unite in rendering thanks and praise to God for these great mercies, and to implore Him to conduct our country safely through the perils which surround us, to the final attainment of the blessings of peace and security.

Given under my hand and the seal of the Confederate States, at Richmond, this fourth day of September, A.D.1862.
JEFFERSON DAVIS

Ohio Bicentennial Marker dedicated to Confederate General

2011-11-22T06:35:00.001-05:00

From the Mount Vernon News
Mount Vernon, Ohio

CENTERBURG, OHIO — A little bit of “Dixie” was on hand in Centerburg, Saturday, Nov. 12, as the Ohio Historical Society marker honoring Centerburg native Brig. Gen. Daniel Harris Reynolds, C.S.A., was unveiled in the village park at the corner of Main and Clayton streets.

Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Roswell S. Ripley Camp 1535, the group that sponsored the marker, were joined by members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Civil War re-enactors, and many members of the community. Also present were several members of the Reynolds family.

The marker honoring Reynolds is the fourth sponsored by the local SCV group and the third to honor one of the six Ohio-born generals that served the Southern cause during the Civil War, or as is known in the South, “The War for Southern Independence.” Other markers sponsored by the group include one marking the escape of Gen. John Hunt Morgan from the Ohio Penitentiary, located in Columbus’ arena district; one honoring Gen. Roswell S. Ripley, located in Worthington; and in Malta, a marker honors Gen. Otho Strahl, who was also a close friend of Gen. Reynolds.

Read more: Bicentennial marker dedicated to Confederate general / Mount Vernon News http://www.mountvernonnews.com/local/11/11/17/bicentennial-marker-dedicated-to-confederate-general#ixzz1eMWne49z

Ten Reasons for Secession

2011-11-21T10:10:00.000-05:00

By J. Michael Hill

A 2009 Zogby poll revealed that about one out of every five Americans believe that States have a right to peaceably secede from the United States and become independent republics. A similar percentage says that they would support a secession movement in their own State.

The greatest support for secession came from the South, where almost 26% of those polled supported a peaceful break with Washington, DC.

What is behind this increasing support for secession and independence? Perhaps the answer is this: hard reality has finally trumped the myth of a sacred, indivisible union. In other words, many citizens are beginning to see the hand writing on the wall, and the message is alarming.

There are at least ten good reasons for Southern secession in early 21st-century America:

1. The U. S. government is an organized criminal enterprise; secession is the only way to return to legitimate government.

2. The U. S. economy is failing; secession makes economic sense.

3. The South’s unique history and culture is worth protecting.

4. The criminal nature of the bank bailouts and the Fed.

5. A dysfunctional national electoral system, secession may be the only way to restore integrity to elections.

6. Third World immigration into the South, secession removes the federal government's interference and lack of performance.

7. Organic community vs. the globalism of the elites.

8. The implementation of an American police/surveillance state.

9. The Christian South v. secular America, secession provides the opportunity to return to Our Founding Principles.

10. Because we think we can rule ourselves better than we are being ruled by DC, secession is a path to American Liberty.

Can you think of some other reasons for secession?

About the Author: Dr. J. Michael Hill, a former professor of History at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is president of the League of the South.

You may learn more about the League at www.dixienet.org

New Book, "My Confederate Cousin" tells story of a Black Confederate Soldier

2011-11-19T21:03:00.001-05:00

King George, Virginia – Writer Robert Broome, Jr. announces the release of My Confederate Cousin, a fictional narrative based on a true account of his ancestor, a Black soldier who fought for the South during the War Between the States. This compelling novel charts the course of a family lineage with origins of English nobility interwoven with slavery on a plantation in Poolesville, Maryland.

Through a tapestry which involves military battles of the eighteenth century, Broome introduces the reader to Basil Dawson, the son of a white slave owner and a Black slave mother. Although Basil was a slave, he was not treated like one. He was educated, learning to speak both Latin and French, and was inducted into the Confederate Army where he fought alongside his father and half brother.

The author hopes his work will encourage others to have a new perspective of Black soldiers who had allegiances on both sides of the war which ultimately ended slavery in the United States. “Enlisting Black soldiers both slave and free in the militia from 1861 through 1865 played a significant role in the Civil War,” notes Broome. “It redefined our legacy and cultural history.” Broome received inspiration to pen this depiction of events after hearing many stories from family members of his cousin’s heroic efforts.

Many of Basil Dawson’s descendants continue to live in Poolesville, Maryland. Others have migrated to Gaithersburg, Maryland; Baltimore, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Florida; Wisconsin; and California.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Broome, Jr. is a published author and speaker who served in the United States Marine Corp, January 1976 through January 1980. His historical research unveils the often misunderstood details of military battles that helped shape the social, political, and economic landscape of America today.

With a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Management from Strayer University, Washington, D.C., Broome is employed by the federal government. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he resides in King George, Virginia with his wife and daughter.

Broome is available for speaking engagements, book club presentations, and interviews. He can be reached at broome50@peoplepc.com or 540.663.2232. Learn more about his book, My Confederate Cousin, or order online through the publishers’ website at http://sbpra.com/robertbroome/. The book can also be purchased at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnobel.com.

Publisher: Strategic Book Group

ISBN: 978-1-60976-390-9
Cost: $23.50 USD
Hardcover, 151 pages

Dickson County Confederate Monument, Charlotte, Tennessee

2011-10-05T07:13:00.005-04:00

In recent years there has been a movement afoot to remove Confederate monuments and other remembrances of our proud Southern heritage from the landscape. In such a "politically correct" age it is heartening to see that in some communities monuments to the C.S.A. are still being erected instead of being torn down. Here is one such example of a Confederate monument unveiled in March, 2001, in Charlotte, Tennessee, 42 miles west of Nashville.

Dickson County Courthouse and Confederate Monumernt

[Confederate States of America]
Deo Vindice

TO ALL WHO SERVED

IN MEMORY OF THE
CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
OF DICKSON COUNTY, TN

11th Tennessee Infantry, Co. C, E, H, K
49th Tennessee Infantry, Co. B, D
50th Tennessee Infantry, Co. A
10th Tennessee cavalry
24th Tennessee Sharpshooters
Baxter's Co. TN. Light Artillery
Baxter's Batt. TN. Light Artillery
Ross' Cavalry Brigade, Co. A
1861 --- 1865

Erected in March 2001

Dickson County Confederate Monument, Rear View:
"Offered in their memory by W. H. McCauley Camp 260 Sons of Confederate Veterans"

Confederate Symbols become issue in U.S. Presidential Race

2011-10-04T10:12:00.003-04:00

This image provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles shows the design of a proposed Sons of Confederate Veterans license plate. Eleven years ago, when the NAACP stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in then Lt. Gov. Rick Perry. Perry argued that states should honor their history and decide on appropriate displays. A related issue may rise this fall when Texas decides whether to allow specialty license plates featuring the Confederate flag. Photo: Texas Department Of Motor Vehicles / AP

WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Eleven years ago, when the NAACP stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in Rick Perry.

Texas had a pair of bronze plaques with symbols of the Confederacy displayed in its state Supreme Court building. Perry, then lieutenant governor, said they should stay put, arguing that Texans "should never forget our history."

It's a position Perry has taken consistently when the legacy of the Civil War has been raised, as have officials in many of the other former Confederate states. But while defense of Confederate symbols and Southern institutions can still be good politics below the Mason-Dixon line, the subject can appear in a different light when officials seek national office.

For Perry, now Texas governor for 11 years and in the top tier of Republican presidential candidates, a racial issue is already dogging him.

He took criticism over the weekend for a rock outside the Texas hunting camp his family once leased that had the name Niggerhead painted on it. Perry's campaign says the governor's father painted over the rock to cover the name soon after he began leasing the site in the early 1980s and says the Perry family never controlled, owned or managed the property. But rival Herman Cain, the only black Republican in the race, says the rock symbolizes Perry's insensitivity to race.

A related issue may rise this fall when Texas decides whether to allow specialty license plates featuring the Confederate flag. The plates have been requested by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nonprofit organization Perry has supported over the years. A state board he appointed will decide.

The NAACP says its initiative against "glorification" of slave-state symbols remains ongoing. "The romanticism around the Old South," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau. "It's a view of history that ignores how racism became a tool to maintain a system of supremacy and dominance."

Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner did not return messages seeking comment on the matter. But Granvel Block, the Texas Division commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the organization appreciated Perry's position on such issues.

Read the rest of the story here: http://www.chron.com/news/article/Perry-once-defended-Confederate-symbols-2201378.php

Colnfederate Monument in Watkinsville, Georgia

2011-10-03T22:53:00.001-04:00

Oconee County Confederate Monument, Watkinsville, Georgia

This simple Confederate Monument, in front of the Oconee County Courthouse, Watkinsville, Georgia, was erected by the Roberta Harris Wells Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy of Watkinsville. Being in a small county, the monument is smaller and less ornate than some, yet the inscription is eloquent. It reads:

COMMEMORATING THE SELF-SACRIFICE
OF THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
WHOSE VALOR IS ENGRAVED UPON
THE HEART OF THE SOUTH,
ENDURING AS TIME, EXCITING
AND COMPELLING THE ADMIRATION
OF ALL NATIONS AND ALL PEOPLES

The Former Confederacy and the American Memory Hole

2011-09-30T07:43:00.013-04:00

By Joseph Sobran

An extremely bright high-school student recently asked my advice about a few points concerning the U.S. Constitution. At 15, he was raising questions that didn’t occur to me until I was well into middle age. Maybe, I thought, this lad should be advising me!

But, accepting the role of wise elder in which he had cast me, I recommended a short curriculum, which I now offer to anyone who wants a corrective to the false history Americans are taught in government (as well as most private) schools. It may look simple, but I promise you’ll find it challenging.

Joe Sobran

First, three official documents: the Declaration of Indencence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution (with the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to them). Learn them thoroughly, until you see how closely the Constitution resembles the Articles and how both documents presuppose the Declaration.

Second, the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. This means The deralist Papers, but also a generous sampling of the anti-Federalist writings, of which there are many collections in print.

Third, Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 Kentucky Resolutions. These are brief but remarkably logical and incisive. They tell you how the author of the Declaration understood the Constitution. No document in American history has been more undeservedly neglected.

Finally, the most challenging of all: Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. You needn’t read all 1,200 pages, but you should master the 100 or so pages making the case for a state’s constitutional right to withdraw from the Union. You may pass over Davis’s defense of slavery, which is incidental: his argument for the right of secession applies in principle to every state, not just the Southern states.

If cogent, this means that the U.S. Government abandoned constitutional government long ago. It also means that, say, Massachusetts and Hawaii still have the same right to withdraw from the Union that Virginia claimed in 1861.

You may be surprised to learn that Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers took the right of secession for granted. Probably not one American in a thousand is aware of this today. But it was inherent in the Declaration’s proposition that the original colonies “are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.”

This is what Abraham Lincoln actually denied when he said that no state could leave the Union. Unlike Lincoln, Davis wasn’t even a lawyer; yet his grasp of law and history was far wider and deeper than Lincoln’s.

After the Confederacy was conquered, Davis was arrested and held in solitary confinement for two years on a charge of treason. But in the end the government dropped the charge and released him, having been warned by its own lawyers that Davis, defending himself in court, might well win acquittal by making a powerful case for secession — and thereby dealing a terrific blow to Union war propaganda. The intended show trial might have backfired — with Davis summoning the Founding Fathers themselves as his star witnesses!

It was a prudent decision. To this day, Union propaganda passes for objective history. But in fact so many Northerners agreed with the South — and with the Founding Fathers — that Lincoln had found it necessary to suspend the freedom of speech, the free press, and the ordinary rights of accused persons to habeas corpus and a jury trial. Dissent became a crime, and truth itself a fugitive.

But Lincoln’s crackdown — so comprehensive that the McCarthy era can’t remotely compare with it — succeeded. The North was deeply divided about his war, but effective criticism and opposition were crushed. Lincoln won reelection, the war, and a historical reputation for midwifing “a new birth of freedom.”

The long-term result has been the eclipse of the original understanding of the Union as a voluntary “confederacy” of sovereign states. Today that idea is regarded as a merely regional doctrine of the South. It was not. It was an idea once agreed on by virtually all Americans. Even Lincoln himself sometimes spoke of the Union as “this confederacy.”

It’s startling to see how often the United States were called a “confederacy” in the speeches and letters of presidents before Lincoln. His supreme achievement may be a feat of historical obliteration: he consigned America’s original self-understanding, perhaps irrecoverably, to the Memory Hole.

=====================================================================

Reprinted with permission

Confederate Memorial State Historic Site, Higginsville, Missouri

2011-09-29T23:29:00.014-04:00

Confederate Memorial State Historic Site and Cemetery

Missouri, the state of my birth, is usually regarded as a “border state” during Abraham Lincoln’s War to Prevent Southern Independence. Regiments of Missouri soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict. Although many of the citizens of Missouri tried to remain neutral, Yankee atrocities and war crimes against Confederate soldiers and civilians alike, both black and white, caused an ever increasing number of the Missouri populous to give their support and allegiance to the Confederate cause.

The war ended in 1865, but many Confederate soldiers survived and continued to live until the mid-20th century. In 1891, the state of Missouri established a home for aging Confederate veterans on 135 beautiful acres of land in Higginsville, Lafayette County.

Here in the western part of the Show Me State, 1,600 Confederate veterans and their families peacefully lived out their lives, over a period of 60 years. The last Missouri Confederate veteran did not die until 1950, at the age of 108. That was five years after I was born. Every time I am reminded of such realities, it impresses me that the War Between the States was not really all that long ago in the span of History. The lives of millions of people living today overlap the lives of our Confederate compatriots who fought in that senseless and unnecessary war.

Two years after the death of the last Missouri Confederate soldier, the Veterans Home became a State Historic Site. It is an interesting, albeit sobering place, to visit and to contemplate the darkest chapter in the history of our country.

Confederate Chapel and Cemetery

Confederate Re-enactment: Comissioning of the Sunny South Guard

2011-09-29T07:33:00.002-04:00

Sunny South Guard Confederate Re-enactors in Tampa
Photo by Phil Walters

Story Submitted by Marshall Hester

GENERAL JUBAL A. EARLY CAMP 556, Tampa,Florida, co-sponsored an authentic re-enactment of the 1861 commissioning ceremony of the Sunny South Guard Regiment, which later became the 4th Florida Infantry Regiment. The event was held September 17, 2011, near the site of the original ceremony in downtown Tampa It was organized by the Tampa Bay 150 Committee (co-chaired by Early Camp judge advocate David McCallister) and attracted re-enactors from across Florida.

Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief Michael Givens' addressed the gathering, which included his son Chandler portraying a Sunny South Guard volunteer and his daughter Olivia portraying a presenter of the regimental flag. Event co-sponsors and participants also included the Augusta Jane Evans Wilson chapter 2640 United Daughters of the Confederacy, Confederate Cantinieres chapter 2405 UDC, the 3rd Florida Regimental Brass Band, Company K 7th Florida Infantry, The Sunny South Guards Company K 4th Florida Infantry, the Peace River Artillery and living historian Marko Sumney. Early Camp aide de camp Brian Gilmore portrayed regimental commander Capt. John T. Lesley. Veterans of Murfreesboro, Chickamauga and Franklin, the regiment was surrendered after Bentonville. It was organized with 983 officers and men and lost forty-two percent of the 468 engaged at Murfreesboro, forty percent of the 217 at Chickamauga, and eighty-nine percent of the 172 at Missionary Ridge. The regiment surrendered 23 men in April, 1865

Bill O'Reilly Spins the Abraham Lincoln Myth

2011-09-28T18:21:00.004-04:00

Open Letter to Bill O'Reilly

from Valerie Protopapas

Dear Sir:

Bill O'Reilly

Obviously, you are not a stupid man but sadly, your intellect seems non-existent when it comes to your judgment about American leaders. You have stood foursquare against the current socialist trends in the federal government. You have condemned the excesses of Congress and the Administration and the ever growing centralization of power in Washington as well as the trashing of the Constitution. You have mentioned time and again that such excesses are diametric to the founding principles of the nation, flying in the face of that same document—and I have applauded you for your public defense of those republican (with a lower-case “r”) principles and the men (and women) who have championed them.

Yet, the other evening, I heard you—yet again—claim that the “gold standard” of American leadership was none other than President Abraham Lincoln. I actually became so enraged I turned off the TV! I could not bear to listen any longer. All that we currently endure we do so because of Abraham Lincoln! It was Lincoln who embraced the movement of power away from the Sovereign States and the People as envisioned by the Founders. It was Lincoln who adopted the socialist/communist ideologies brought into the United States from Europe with the arrival of the so-called “48ers,” the mostly German followers of Marx fleeing their failed revolutions in Europe. However, it is also true that Lincoln had adopted those same policies independently before he was influenced by Europe’s socialist upheaval. Did you know that Marx adored Lincoln for the very reason that he worked to centralize power in the federal government? And did you know that Lincoln’s government and military was filled with Marxists and socialists? It was Lincoln who abandoned all constitutionally imposed restrictions on the federal government and the presidency when he planned and initiated war against states performing an act guaranteed to them in the Constitution—that of secession from a union that was no longer in the best interest of their people. It was Lincoln who deliberately and with malice brought that war to fruition—a war that cost over a million lives both military and civilian and destroyed an entire section of what had been the united (lower-case “u”) States for a century or more. And the list goes on and on. There is no more infamous lie in the annals of American history than Lincoln’s analysis of the causes of the so-called “Civil War”—“…and war came.” War didn’t “come,” Lincoln brought it into existence in what proved to be a successful attempt to prevent the loss of eleven Southern states and the 75% of the federal revenues paid by those States. Indeed, the South, by Lincoln’s time, had become nothing more than a politically impotent economic colony supplying endless revenues to the rest of the Union while being driven ever deeper into poverty.

It was Lincoln who embraced—and profited from—Hamilton’s “American System,” which today we call “crony capitalism” and which is really nothing other than the enemy of free enterprise, fascism. Lincoln was supported for the presidency by the economic interests of states such as Pennsylvania to which he promised a high tariff to protect their manufactured goods and a continuation of the flow of capital from the South to the North. Lincoln had been a lawyer with one of the railroads supported by such tax-funded largesse and was so successful that he was allowed to choose the eastern terminus for the contemplated trans-continental railroad. It is interesting—and revealing—to note that the property he chose for that site just happened to be owned by him! Lincoln’s sobriquet at that time—Honest Abe—was bestowed by his contemporaries for the same reason that the sobriquet “Little John” was bestowed upon Robin Hood’s very large lieutenant. In other words, it was a reference to behavior diametric to the appellation and therefore not a complement.

Finally, if you think that we had election fraud in 2008, Lincoln made use of the military to assure his re-election, something that was by no means guaranteed in November of 1864. General Benjamin (Beast) Butler was sent to New York from which he triumphantly informed Lincoln that no Democrats had been permitted to vote. The same happened in other states such as Ohio where both Lincoln and Lincoln’s war were not popular. Soldiers were permitted to vote in areas in which they did not live to assure his re-election. Meanwhile, their presence at the polls was a warning to those who might vote Democrat. In fact, in many instances the ballots were color-coded so that the party chosen by the voter was immediately obvious to those partisan “poll watchers” and many Americas were “discouraged” from voting if a wrong color ballot was observed.

There is so much more on Lincoln’s illegal, unconstitutional and immoral actions that is a part of the public record and yet, he continues to be revered, even worshipped, by people who despise and reject the things for which he stood and on which he acted. Even the popular belief that Lincoln “freed the slaves” or, in fact, had any feeling for them individually or as a group is nonsense, proven over and over by his own words and actions. He cared nothing for slavery and even less for “the African” and was willing to put slavery into the Constitution in the original 13th Amendment (Corwin) if it would keep the Southern states compliant.

Even the claim so often made that he fought the war to “preserve the union” is a lie though many Northerners were deceived and indeed fought for that stated purpose. First, a union is by its nature voluntary. Coercion at the point of a bayonet is nothing but conquest and occupation, not “union.” Then, Lincoln, his government and all of the states who fought ostensibly to preserve the Union were traitors according to Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Indeed, the only act defined as treason in that document is the waging of war against any of the signatory states and aiding and abetting in that war. If there was ever an act more worthy of the taint of treason and the openly guilty parties more exposed to public view, it has to be America’s “Civil War” in which the federal government—or should I say, the President—declared war on seven (later eleven) signatory states and initiated total war against them. Of course, all of those who supported or permitted this war were themselves traitors to a greater or lesser degree. It is ironic that the taint of treason was spread so liberally—and so successfully—on states that had acted constitutionally in attempting to remove themselves from a hostile and eventually murderous “union” while the actual traitors have been lauded to the skies historically as heroes and “true Americans.”

No, Mr. O’Reilly, your “stand” against those attempting to make of what remains of this nation another “Peoples’ Republic” cannot be believed so long as you refuse to acknowledge where America started to leave the path of Aristotle, Locke and the Founding Fathers and embrace the governing theories and actions of Hobbes and Marx. Actually, you have only two choices: understand and admit that “the nation’s greatest president” was a traitor and a murderer (over a million dead) and repudiate his “vision” for the nation—a federal tyranny—or cling to delusion, deception and myth and, by doing so, render your own message null and void and yourself foolish at best and dishonest at worst. You cannot have Lincoln and liberty.

Valerie Protopapas
Huntington Station, New York

Young County Confederate Monument, Graham, Texas

2011-09-24T10:10:00.001-04:00

The Unique Confederate Monument pictured here graces the front of the Young County Courthouse in the center of "America's largest downtown square" in Graham, Texas. The inscription reads:

Erected September 1918
by the Fitzhugh Lee Chapter, U.D.C. of Graham and citizens
to the Confederate soldiers of Young County.

Confederates in North Dakota

2011-09-18T19:27:00.001-04:00

Earlier this summer, while on a road trip through the northwestern United States, I was tickled to see the Confederate Bar and Grill, proudly displaying the Confederate Battle Flag, in McClusky, North Dakota. Confederates, and Confederate sympathisers, are not confined to the Southern states. In my travels I've seen many other businesses and individuals proudly displaying the Confederate flag throughout the United States and even in many other countries of the world.

I would have enjoyed talking to the owner of the bar to hear the story of how the establishment got its name, but unfortunately it was early in the morning and the place was not yet open for the day.

Interestingly, McClusky is the county seat of Sheridan County, North Dakota, named for the notorious Yankee war criminal and Union General Philip Henry Sheridan. After the War Between the States was ended, and Sheridan couldn't slaughter any more innocent Southerners, he still had a sadistic, unquenchable lust for blood. He turned his attention from the Southern States and directed his sick fury against the Plains Indians, being credited with the saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Sheridan had first gained notoriety by raping, robbing, and ransacking Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley and its inhabitants Now he continued his infamy by committing genocide against Native Americans - most of whom, like the Confederates, only wanted to be left alone.

As a reward for his murderous deeds, all done in the name of "defending" the United States of America, Sheridan had several towns and counties named in his honor by the grateful European settlers who were only too eager to help steal the Indian's land from them - treaties be damned. The Indians that couldn't be killed were imprisoned in internment camps called "reservations" where many of their impoverished descendants live to this day. Since so many Indians from various tribes joined in the noble Confederate cause, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a freedom loving Native American owns the Confederate Bar and Grill.

Confederate Re-enactment Ceremony Honors Tampa Bay History

2011-09-08T07:33:00.007-04:00

Veterans of Tampa Bay’s own Sunny South Guard will be honored for their duty and sacrifice Saturday, September 17, 2011 at the Poe Plaza in downtown Tampa during a free historical re-enactment.

Tampa, FL –On Saturday, September 17, 1861, 100 of Tampa Bay’s most prominent

citizens formed a civilian militia to protect hearth and home after President Lincoln

called up 70,000 troops to force Florida to re-join the union. They marched off to

defend Florida, in what would become the CivilWar.When the company returned, it

was missing a third of its men. Those that remained went on to become mayors,

sheriffs, State Representatives, and Senators and even a Governor of Florida.

It was sacrifice like this that led the Veterans Administration (VA) to provide

veterans benefits to Confederate and Union soldiers, alike. This is the spirit with

which the Tampa Bay Sesquicentennial Commission will be staging an historical reenactment

of the Flag Presentation Ceremony to the Sunny South Guard that

originally took place on that date in 1861 when Florida seceded from the Union and

joined the Confederate States of America. This free re-enactment will happen just

steps from it’s original Old Fort Brooke location, at 201 N. Franklin Street in

downtown Tampa. During the event, dignitaries will recognize descendants from

the original pioneer families who settled here, and fought for Florida and her sister

states.

“Veterans understand what it means to fight for your country, and to make the

ultimate sacrifice—no matter how popular or unpopular the war,” said David

McCallister, co-chair of the Sesquicentennial Commission. “On this day, we’ll be

honoring descendants of some of Tampa’s most prominent family members who

stepped up to the task when duty called, a honor-worthy act, regardless of political

position”

The re-enactment is being hosted by the Tampa Bay Sesquicentennial Commission, a
group of historical re-enactors, genealogists, descendants of Tampa’s pioneer

families, as well as other civic-minded individuals and organizations interested in

preserving Tampa Bay’s rich history.

Back in 1861, Hillsborough County also included present-day, Manatee and Pinellas

Counties. In June of that year, 100 of the “darling” sons of Hillsborough County

organized themselves into an infantry company known as the Sunny South Guards

and offered themselves to Florida for her defense. Upon receiving orders to report

forWar duty and prior to their departure to Jacksonville in September, the ladies of

Tampa Town presented a company flag in a spectacular, moving presentation

ceremony. It was held at the officer’s barracks at Fort Brooke, Tampa’s militia

headquarters which was captured from Federal hands when Florida seceded.

The unit would be designated the 4th Florida Infantry, Co. K, and assigned to

Hardee’s Corps in the Army of Tennessee, CSA. The “Guards” were engaged at

Murfreesboro and Jackson, and participated in the Campaigns of the Army from

Chickamauga to Nashville and saw action in North Carolina. Some of these men will

killed in the line of duty, some were held as prisoners of war, while others returned

home to help re-build the economy.

The re-enactment will depict the historic events of that day and will include the 11

young ladies that represented each of the States of the Southern Confederacy. Each

will recite a poem and participate in the singing of the “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Up to 100

men in early war attire will portray the Sunny South Guardsmen listed on the Roll of

Honor (see link below to view the Roll and read bios). Onlookers in civilian attire

will represent the families of the men and townspeople who participated in the

ceremony. A special appearance by a re-enactment brass band, the 3rd Florida

Regimental Band, Co. B "St. Augustine Blues"(aka Ancient City Brass Band) in period

civilian attire will play “Dixie” at the end of the flag presentation. One of Florida’s

most famous re-enactors, Thomas Jesse, Cmdr. of the Department of the Gulf, CSA,

will be portraying then US Army Colonel Robert E. Lee.

The Company’s Captain, John T. Lesley, was reported by Tampa Tribune Historical

writer DB McKay in the 1960s to have accepted the flag and said, “Ladies and my

fellow countrymen. It is with humble words, yet in a prideful spirit, that I accept on

behalf of my fellow soldiers of the Guard this beautiful banner of the youthful

Confederate Republic, being delivered to witness before God and the world defense

of the freeman’s inalienable rights as defined by constitutional law.” Lesley, who

was wounded in action, later served as the Mayor of the City of Tampa, Hillsborough

County Sheriff and Florida State Senator.

The re-enactment begins at 3pm a 1860’s brass band concert, followed by the

ceremony and flag presentation re-enactment at 4pm. From 5 to 6pm, guests will

enjoy watching history come alive as re-enactors mix, mingle and discuss the lives

and times of 1861. (Peace River Artillery cannon display)

###

To learn more, visit

http://www.tampabay150.org.

To read the names of the soldiers being honored, visit

http://www.tampabay150.org/roll%20of%20honor.html

Thanks to Marshall Hester for submitting this story.

Historic Hertford Mural features Confederate Solider saluting Flag

2011-09-06T09:04:00.002-04:00

While visiting the coastal city of Hertford, Perquimans County, North Carolina, was intrigued to see this historical mural along Church Street in the downtown area. The mural was painted in 1983 and is comprised of many images of Hertford's History. The feature which first caught my eye was the large Confederate battle flag in the upper right hand corner, being saluted by a soldier in gray. Other images include Indians, Pilgrims, seagulls, local landmark buildings and the town symbol, a turtle on a log. I was a both puzzled and a bit amused to see that a New York Yankees baseball cap is at the lower left hand corner of the Confederate flag. Is there some significance to this, of was it just put there by the whimsy of the artist? If you know more about the mural, please leave a response.

Howard County, Maryland, Confederate Monument

2011-09-05T13:50:00.000-04:00

This Confederate Memorial, prominently placed in front of the Howard County Courthouse, Ellicott City, Maryland, was dedicated on September 23, 1948. It honors the brave men of Howard County who defended their sovereign state of Maryland from Abraham Lincoln's invading Yankee army during his illegal War to Prevent Southern Independence, 1861-1865.

The embellished bronze relief plaque, on a gray granite tablet, makes for an outstanding example of a tablet style monument. Three edges of the plaque are embellished with a border of twining foliage. The plaque is decorated with a low relief composition of overlapping elements: laurel wreath, drum, bugle, saber, rifle with bayonet, and flag.

Below the design the inscription reads:

BY THE

HOWARD COUNTY CONFEDERATE MONUMENT ASSOCIATION

IN HONOR OF THE BRAVE MEN

WHO FOUGHT SO COURAGEOUSLY IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY

Beneath the inscription is a listing of 92 names of the Confederate soldiers of Howard County. A miniature Confederate Battle Flag, which was apparently placed in front of the monument not long before I captured this image, shows that those soldiers and their honorable cause have not been forgotten.

When America Went Crazy

2011-07-24T11:35:00.003-04:00

By Eric Peters

Eric Peters

America lost its mind 146 years ago and hasn’t been the same since. Or rather, it’s been a different country ever since.

A psychotic, self-referential, duplicitous country – largely ignorant of its own history and convinced of its messianic role in world affairs. A country not merely content to live – and let live. But one determined to to force others – everyone – to live its way.

At bayonet point, if need be.

It all goes back to the events of 1861-1865. The struggle for Southern independence, which the modern histories dishonestly – not merely mistakenly – call the “Civil War.”

Which it was not.

The Southern states had no desire to dominate the Northern states, nor to control the government of the North. (Which is what the “federal” government had become by 1861, as the Northern states and Northern corporatist cartels controlled it; Lincoln was the front man for these corporatist interests – a shyster lawyer and born grifter who would do anything – to anyone – in the service of his paymasters.)

No, the Southern states simply wished to exercise that right which the American colonists themselves had exercised in 1776 (and which some Northern states had themselves threatened to exercise on prior occasions, for similar reasons). The right to withdraw from the voluntary union entered into by each sovereign state at the time of the ratification of the federal Constitution. The motives were no different – and no less honorable or legitimate: The Southern states, like the American colonies, had come to regard the central authority as distant, unrepresentative and increasingly tyrannical. It no longer served their interests. It no longer represented them. And to paraphrase the author of the original Declaration of Independence, when a government no longer operates in the best interests of the people as they see those interests; when it no longer represents them; and when its actions evince a systematic effort to subjugate them, when other remedies have not proved fruitful, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government – and start over.

This is what we celebrate on July 4th but what we also (in typically demented/ignorant/hypocritical American fashion) excoriate the Southern states for having done.

This was the Southern conception of “consent of the governed” – the same one held by the American revolutionaries – and the same one eradicated by the victory of the North over the South.

Since that unlucky event, there has been no recourse, no escape from Washington’s self-proclaimed, self-defined, self-interpreted and increasingly unlimited authority. We the People are not governed by consent but by force. This fact is too obvious to require extensive elaboration, yet many continue to believe we are “free” because we have “democracy” – that is, we may vote. But we do not have a choice. There is no freedom option. Just Government X (Republican) or Government Y (Democrat). This duopoly is far more subtle – and thus, far more effective – than the obvious single-party tyrannies of the past. But in fact we do have a single ruling elite – and so, no real choice – if your choice is liberty.

Lincoln – the ur American tyrant who set the stage for the blood-soaked Deciders to come – was the first to twist plain English and the meaning of the American Revolution into their dark matter opposites.

“Consent of the governed” became somehow a consolidated federal leviathan from which there is no appeal or escape. The consent of the Southern people (and thus, all Americans) trampled underfoot, to be kept forevermore in a forced union, like a bad marriage – at bayonet point.

“Republican” government – that is, delineated (and thus, inherently limited) powers became “democracy” – open-ended, unlimited mob rule, via the vote – administered by millions of petty tyrants from the DMV to the TSA to EPA to the IRS.

From this sprang the ends-justify-the-means (any means) rationales that have been used to abrogate every single formerly sacred right that the Bill of Rights was written explicitly to declare and protect.

And it was Lincoln and his crew – including war criminals such as Sheridan and Sherman (who would have made fine corps commanders in Hitler’s Waffen SS or Stalin’s Red Army) that gave life to the American Mission, the subjugation of the world itself.

Not merely consolidation and uniformity. A conviction that there is only one morally right way to live – the Yankee (corporatist/empire) way – and it must be brought to every corner of the Earth, by any means necessary.

There is a meaningful line in the Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. A union officer is confronted by a tired scout who admonishes him that the war is over; that it is time to stop the carnage. To let people be. The officer replies, “There ain’t no end to doin’ right.” In this you can hear the future echos of George W. Bush – or Barack Obama. From Iraq to Libya to main street, USA – there ain’t no end to doin’ right.

The orthodox histories pass over all this, touting instead the morally righteous crusade of the North to free the slaves and help the Black Man. Except of course the North did no such thing. Not only was slavery protected in the North and Northern-held territories until after the war was over (in other words, for nearly two years after the so-called Emancipation Proclamation of 1863) but the Northern populace would have revolted if Lincoln had touted his determination to subjugate the South – to “save the union” – as a crusade to free the black man. Not only was Lincoln himself a virulent racist (and a founding member of the Illinois “back to Africa” movement) but so was the North, which saw free blacks as threat to free white labor and which had “black codes” every bit – and often more – brutal than the black codes students are endlessly lectured about as being a Southern exclusive.

But pay no mind to that man behind the curtain. The war was about saving democracy and the consent of the governed. America is righteous. Let freedom ring.

Even though – as singer Merle Haggard put it – the average American has less real freedom today than he had as a parolee back in 1969.

Until the American people recover their senses the American consolidated Empire will only grow more oppressive, more and more openly brutal.

A people incapable of leaving their neighbors alone cannot be expected to leave the world alone.

Cloverism was born at Appomattox.

It is up to us to see it strangled.

Reprinted with permission from EricPetersAutos.com.

About the author:

Eric Peters is a longtime car/bikes/Libertarian-minded journalist. His new book, "Road Hogs," came out June 2011.

Peters has been writing a weekly column about cars for almost 20 years now. He is the author of "Automotive Atrocities" and "Road Hogs" (MBI). He lives in rural SW Virginia with his wife and a polyglot crew of animals.

Confederate Flags on Parade in Brandon, Florida

2011-07-22T21:58:00.009-04:00

The Sons of Confederate Veterans Gen. Jubal A. Early Camp 556, Tampa, carried the Colors forward with a vanguard position at the Brandon, Floirida Independence Day Parade, July 4, 2011. Early Camp's colour guard, led by camp Lt. Commander Wayne Sweat, advanced in front of a camp-sponsored Dixie-themed float. Camp members and friends gave away 1,400 miniature Confederate Battle Flags to the 50,000-plus spectators. Early Camp, commanded by Mike Herring, is home to one of the largest Confederate Battle Flag displays in the United States, a massive banner towering above the I-75 and I-4 junction near Tampa.

Thanks to Marshall Hester for submitting this story and photo.

Confederate Flag Display in Millen, Georgia

2011-05-19T22:19:00.001-04:00

Confederate Monument and Flag Display, Jenkins County Courthouse, Millen, Georgia

On a recent visit to Millen, Georgia, I was very pleased to see this display of Confederate flags in front of the Jenkins County Courthouse. The flags, with history and descriptions posted at the base of each, were placed in commemoration of Confederate History Month, which is offically observed each April throughout the state of Georgia.

Millen lies directly in the line of Union General William T. Sherman's infamous March to the Sea during the War Between the States. The town held a special significance to the murderous general as he is said to have rated is as one of the top three sites for destruction in Georgia. From his headquarters on the Myers Farm just south of downtown Millen, Sherman gave orders to burn the town and railroad station and to destroy the railroad tracks to Savannah.

The monument, dedicated June 3rd, 1909, bears inscriptions which include these eloquent words:

Front:

IN HONOR OF OUR
CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS,
WHOM POWER COULD
NOT CORRUPT
WHOM DEATH COULD
NOT TERRIFY,
WHOM DEFEAT COULD
NOT DISHONOR.

THOSE WHO SERVED.
THE
CONFEDERACY.

Rear:

THESE WERE MEN WHO
BY THE SIMPLE MANHOOD
OF THEIR LIVES.
BY THEIR STRICT ADHERENCE
TO THE PRINCIPLES OF RIGHTS,
BY THEIR SUBLIME COURAGE.
AND UNSPEAKABLE SACRIFICE,
EVEN TO THE HEROISM OF DEATH,
HAVE PRESERVED FOR US,
THROUGH THE GLOOM OF DEFEAT,
A PRICELESS HERITAGE OF HONOR.
FOR EACH SINGLE WRECK
IN THE WAR PATH OF MIGHT,
SHALL YET BE A ROCK IN
THE TEMPLE OF RIGHT.

Slave Trade from Africa to the Americas

2011-04-21T07:09:00.023-04:00

The disinformation spread through public schools and by Court Historians of the American Empire has been so effective that most people in the United States, and many around the world, think of the Southern Confederate States as the world's greatest culprits in the history of slavery. This has been a deliberate distortion of the truth in order to justify the inexcusable and unconstitutional war that Abraham Lincoln waged against the Southern states from 1861-1865.

The above map shows that over a period of four centuries as many as 15 million slaves were purchased or traded from their captors in Africa and brought to the Americas. Of these, only about 5% were brought to the United States. Those were distributed throughout the northern as well as the southern states.

At the outbreak of the War Between the States, every state in the Union had a history of slavery, with Massachusetts being the first to officially legalize slavery in 1641. Several of the pro-Union (Northern) states still practiced slavery at the time of the War, and were excluded from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which he admitted was issued only as a "war measure."

While this map is very enlightening, it does not show is that the slaves brought to the Americas were already slaves in Africa before being sold to Yankee slave traders from New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and other Northern states. It also doesn't show the fact that none of the slave ships were from Southern ports. Every slave ship that ever sailed from the United States to Africa was from the North and sailed under the flag of the United States. No slave ship every sailed under a Confederate flag.

Although slavery in any civilization is inexcusable by today's standards, the slavery in the Southern states was more humane than that practiced anywhere else in the Americas. Only in the Southern states did the slave population have a life expectancy equal to that of their masters, and it was the only slave population in the America's which increased through natural means.

The above map comes from the website www.slaveryinamerica.org/geography/slave_trade.htm

Civil War Myths and Misinformation

2011-04-09T17:58:00.000-04:00

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

When James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 the first thing he said at his George Mason University press conference was that the award "does not make me an instant expert in everything." Buchanan was well aware – and amused – at how previous recipients of the award had made fools of themselves by viewing the award as a license to pontificate about anything and everything, whether they knew anything about the subject or not.

No such modesty and sense of reality occupies the mind of a more recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman. As a New York Times columnist he has always done what all New York Times columnists do – pretend that he does in fact know everything about everything. A case in point is his March 29 New York Times blog entitled "Road to Appomattox Blogging." After mentioning how the Times has a special "Disunion" blog to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, Krugman gives a hilarious, elementary-schoolish rendition of his "take" on the "Civil War."

Krugman said he has always been infatuated by the "symbolism" of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with "Lee the patrician in his dress uniform," compared to General Grant, who was "still muddy and disheveled from hard riding." Krugman is apparently unaware that by the late 1850s, on the eve of the war, Robert E. Lee was in his thirtieth year as an officer in the United States Army, performing mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a "patrician" or member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the overseer of an 850-acre slave plantation owned by his wealthy father-in-law. The plantation, located near St. Louis, was known as "White Haven" (which sounds like it could have been named by the KKK) and is today a national park. (On the "White Haven" Web site the National Park Service euphemistically calls Grant the "manager" of the slave plantation rather than the more historically-accurate word "overseer").

In 1862 Lee freed the slaves that his wife had inherited, in compliance with his father-in-law’s will. Grant’s White Haven slaves were not freed until an 1865 Missouri emancipation law forced Grant and his father-in-law to do so. The fact that Lee changed clothes before formally surrendering did not instantly turn the 36-year army veteran into a "patrician," contrary to the "all-knowing" Krugman’s assertion.

Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in "manners" by a region that "excelled at the arts of peace." Well, not really. What the North "excelled" in was the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping: "the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World" (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).

The North waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, murdering at least 50,000 of them according to historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. It bombed cities like Atlanta for days at a time when they were occupied by no one but civilians, and U.S. Army soldiers looted, ransacked, and raped their way all throughout the South. The "arts of peace" indeed.

As for the war being a victory of "manners," as Krugman says, consider this: When the women of New Orleans refused to genuflect to U.S. Army troops who were occupying their city and killing their husbands, sons and brothers, General Benjamin "Beast" Butler issued an order that all the women of that city were to henceforth be treated as prostitutes. "As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women . . . of New Orleans," Butler wrote in his General Order Number 28 on May 15, 1862, "it is ordered that thereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." Butler’s order was widely construed as a license for rape, and he was condemned by the whole world. Ah, those Yankee "manners."

Krugman celebrates the victory of "a democratic nation" (the North) in his blog. But during the war the North was anything but "democratic": Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without any due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers; deported Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio for criticizing him; threatened to imprison Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for issuing the (correct) opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional; censored all telegraphs; rigged elections; imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature along with Congressman Henry May of Baltimore and the mayor of Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia to give the Republican Party two more U.S. senators; confiscated firearms in the border states in violation of the Second Amendment; and committed a grand act of treason by invading the sovereign states of the South (Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as "only" levying war against the states, or giving aid and comfort to their enemies).

Krugman is right about democracy in a sense: Democracy is essentially one big organized act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies a smaller group in order to plunder it with taxes. The "Civil War" proved that whenever a smaller group has finally had enough, and attempts to leave the game, the larger group will resort to anything – even the mass murder of hundreds of thousands and the bombing and burning of entire cities – to get its way. After all, in his first inaugural address Lincoln literally threatened "force," "invasion" and "bloodshed" (his exact words) in any state that refused to pay the federal tariff, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. He followed through with his threat. This is "the kind of nation I believe in," says Paul Krugman.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Slavery in Perspective

2011-04-02T06:46:00.006-04:00

By Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran
Syndicated Columnist

The recurrent fuss about Confederate flags has always struck me as silly, and never more so than now. I’ve been reading Hugh Thomas’s impressive history, The Slave Trade (published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). It’s one of those books that shift your whole perspective on the past.

Thomas covers the Atlantic slave trade from 1440 to 1870. It was a literally filthy business from first to last. More than 11,000,000 Africans were brought to the New World, while countless others — probably about 2,000,000 — died of miserable conditions in the overcrowded ships en route.

What I didn’t know is that fewer than 5 per cent — about 500,000 — of these Africans were brought to this country. Some 4,000,000 were carried to Brazil by the Portuguese, 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions, 2,000,000 to the British West Indies, and 1,600,000 to the French West Indies.

All this puts something of a damper on the assumption that slavery was a sin specific or “peculiar” to the American South. The slaves had been Africans who were sold to European merchants by other Africans who had enslaved them in the first place. Several of Africa’s proudest empires were built on the sale of slaves. For centuries Africa’s chief export was human beings. When Congresswoman Maxine Waters speaks of “my African ancestors’ struggle for freedom,” she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Slavery was an African institution long before it spread to the South, and there was no abolition movement to trouble it. When Europe banned the slave trade, African economies reeled.

So it’s rather comical for American blacks to sentimentalize Africa and stress that they are “African Americans” while cursing the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery. Africa has a much better claim to be such a symbol. Slavery still exists there, in Sudan and Mauritania and probably elsewhere.

As Christians, white Europeans always had a bad conscience about slavery. They wrestled with the question of whether Africans had immortal souls and natural rights. Even Southerners who justified slavery as a positive good felt that it needed justification.

Pagans had no such qualms. They no more felt they needed to justify owning slaves than owning cattle. Slavery was a fact of life, and slaves could be killed, mutilated, and even eaten without compunction.

In the Arab world African slaves were highly prized as eunuchs. They were used as guardians of harems and as civil servants, some of whom amassed considerable power. But many young African men died in the process because of inept or infected castration. The prevalence of eunuchs probably explains why African slavery didn’t leave the Arab world with a race problem. Given this history, it’s ironic that so many American blacks adopt Arab names to spite the white man and to achieve a supposedly independent “identity.”

Thomas indirectly punctures another cherished American notion: that Abraham Lincoln “ended slavery.” Lincoln is mentioned only three times, very briefly, in the entire book. Against the huge backdrop of the slave trade, he was only a local, marginal, and rather tardy figure. By 1850 it was clear that slavery was doomed throughout the Christian world. But just as we exaggerate our role in fostering slavery, we exaggerate our role in destroying it. We Americans tend to be self-important even in our self- flagellations.

The slave trade was so vast that a European might speculate in it, and profit by it, without ever seeing a single slave. Such distinguished authors as John Locke, Edward Gibbon, and Voltaire drew income from it. Voltaire was especially hypocritical. He took the self-serving view that it was less immoral for a European to buy Africans than it was for other Africans to sell them; and after denouncing the slave trade for years, he “accepted delightedly” when a merchant offered to name a slave ship after him.

Thomas tells the whole story without much moralizing. He knows the facts speak for themselves, in all their horror and pathos: people stolen from their homes, robbed of their freedom and even their identities, often dying namelessly amid unspeakable squalor, with no families or friends to mourn or memorialize their passing. The ones who survived to be slaves in the New World, though unenviable, were relatively lucky.

But in the end, the Christian conscience prevailed. Thank God.

See the original column here: http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/010531.shtml

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Copyright (c) by Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, http://www.fgfBooks.com. All rights reserved.

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Texas County named for Confederate Colonel C. M. Winkler

2011-04-01T09:11:00.006-04:00

Monument to Confederate Colonel C.M. Winkler

In 1994, upon visiting my 50th state in the U.S.A., I decided to set out on a new quest to visit each of the 3,142 counties or county equivalents in the country. At this point I am more than 97% of the way to my goal. One of the milestones along the way was visiting every county Texas, all 254 of them, which I completed in March of 2009. One of the interesting discoveries in Texas was to learn that scores of Texas towns and counties, especially in the western part of the state, are named for Confederate heroes.

Lt. Col. C. M. Winkler, C.S.A.

In the 1960s, during the centennial of the War Between the States, the state of Texas did a splendid job of identifying and marking much of it's proud Confederate heritage. The state legislature authorized numerous monuments and historical markers, such as the one pictured here, to help preserve the memory of the gallant men in gray who defended the Southland against Abraham Lincoln's invading Yankee armies.

I have already posted photos of a few of those markers, and will be adding more as time permits. The marker above stands in front of the Winkler County Courthouse in Kermit, Texas, just south of the New Mexico state line. It is a reminder that the county was named for Confederate Colonel C. M. Winkler. Clinton McKamy Winkler, Confederate soldier, lawyer, state legislator, and judge of the Court of Appeals, was born in Burke County, North Carolina, on October 19, 1821. His family moved to Indiana, where he grew up, and at the age of 19 he moved to Texas. Winkler was a Court of Appeals judge at the time of his death, May 13, 1882, in Austin, Texas

The inscription on the monument reads:

COUNTY NAMED FOR TEXAS CONFEDERATE

COLONEL C. M. WINKLER

1821-1882

Native North Carolina. Start of Civil War, organized and took company 150 men to join Confederate army in Virginia. Unit made part 4th Texas Infantry of famed Hood's Brigade. Rose to command regiment as Lt. colonel. Fought with famous unit in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Tennessee. Distinguished himself second Manassas, wounded at Gettysburg. Surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy

(1963)

Winkler County Courthouse, Kermit, Texas

John Carruthers Stanly: From Slave to Slave Owner

2011-03-29T13:10:00.008-04:00

John Wright Stanly House, New Bern, North Carolina

While Visiting the historic city of New Bern, in coastal North Carolina, I saw many interesting sites, including Tryon Palace, capitol of the independent State of North Carolina after the Revolutionary War, and Bradham Drug Company, the birthplace of Pepsi Cola. But to me, the most fascinating of all was the John Wright Stanly House. It was here that I learned the story of John Carruthers Stanly, a former slave who gained his freedom, only to become the largest slaveholder in Craven County, North Carolina.

John Carruthers Stanly
1774-1846
Black Slaveholder

Stanly, born a slave in 1774, was the son of an African Ibo woman and the white prominent merchant-shipper John Wright Stanly. He was apprenticed to Alexander and Lydia Stewart, close friends and neighbors of his father. They saw to it that John received an education and learned the trade of barbering. At an early age, they helped him establish his own barbershop in New Bern.  Many of the town’s farmers and planters frequented his barbershop for a shave or a trim. As a result, Stanly developed a successful business. By the time he reached the age of twenty-one, literate and economically able to provide for himself, his owners petitioned the Craven County court in 1795 for his emancipation. However, he was not completely satisfied with the ruling of the court and in 1798, through a special act, the state legislature confirmed the emancipation of John Carruthers Stanly, which entitled him to all rights and privileges of a free person.

Between 1800 and 1801, Stanly purchased his slave wife, Kitty, and two mulatto slave children. By March 1805, they were emancipated by the Craven County Superior Court. A few days later, Kitty and Stanly were legally married in New Bern and posted a legal marriage bond in Raleigh. Stanly’s wife was the daughter of Richard and Mary Green and the paternal granddaughter of Amelia Green. Two years later, in 1807, Stanly was successful in getting the court to emancipate his wife’s brother.

Some politically correct Court Historians end the story here, if they acknowledge the existence of black slaveholders at all.  What a noble thing, to purchase and emancipate one's own family! But there is much more to the story.

After securing his own and his family’s freedom, Stanly began to focus more on business matters. He obtained other slaves to work for him. Two of them, Boston and Brister, were taught the barbering trade. Once they became skillful barbers, Stanly let them run the operation while he used the money they helped him earn to invest in additional town property, farmland, and more slaves.

Through his business acumen, Stanley eventually became a very wealthy plantation owner and the largest slaveholder in all of Craven County. He profited from investments in real estate, rental properties, the slave operated barbershop, and plantations from which he sold commodities such as cotton and turpentine.

Stanly’s plantations and rental properties were operated by skilled slaves along with help from some hired free blacks. To improve his rental properties in New Bern, he used skilled slaves and free blacks to build cabins and other residences and to repair and renovate these properties. During the depression of the early 1820s it was slave labor that kept Stanly economically stable.

The 1830 census reveals that Stanly owned, 163 slaves. He has been described as a harsh, profit-minded task master whose treatment of his slaves was no different than the treatment slaves received from white owners. Stanly’s goal, shared by white southern planters, was on expanding his operations and increasing his profits.

During the early 1820s, Stanly’s wife, Kitty, was taken seriously ill. She became bedridden and, despite careful attention by two slave nurses, she died around 1824. It was at this same time that Stanly began to face a series of financial difficulties.  His fortune began to plummet when the Bank of New Bern, due to the national bank tightening controls of some state and local banks, was forced to collect all outstanding debts. Unfortunately, Stanly had countersigned a security note for John Stanly, his white half-brother, in the amount of $14,962. Stanly was forced to assume the debt. This, along with his own debts forced him to refinance his mortgages and sell large pieces of property, including slaves. When these options did not resolve his economic woes, he resorted to mortgaging his turpentine, cotton, and corn crops, as well as selling his barbershop, which had been operating continuously for forty years. Without a steady flow of income, his fortunes continued to decline.  In 1843, his last 160 acres of land were sold at public auction. Three years later, at the age of 74,  John Carruthers Stanly died. At the time of his death he still owned seven slaves.

Maintaining the Mason-Dixon: Maryland...

2011-03-28T00:54:00.001-04:00

Here is a very interesting and informative video about Maryland, the northernmost Southern state.

Southern National Congress Statement on Just War and Defense

2011-03-27T06:20:00.013-04:00

With the American Empire currently waging unnecessary, illegal and unconstitutional wars on three fronts: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, I am republishing the 2008 statement made by the Southern National Congress concerning Just War and Defense.

Remonstrance and Petition for a Redress of Grievances

Just War and Defense

We, the Delegates of the Southern States, in Congress assembled, make the following Findings and Affirmations:

The Southern States and People of the nascent United States played a pivotal role in the War of Independence. Without their contribution and sacrifice, America’s freedom from England could not have been won. Thereafter, Southerners have faithfully served in every conflict, representing a disproportionate share of the enlisted ranks and officer corps of the U.S. Armed Services, and sadly, of the killed and wounded as well.

Although subjected to unjustified aggression in the War Between the States and cruel exploitation thereafter, the Southern People, at the urging of their former Confederate leaders, embraced the obligations of citizenship and have proven to be among the most loyal and patriotic Americans.

Southerners have won a reputation for courage, valor, and martial prowess in all the country’s conflicts. We have rallied to the colors whenever called with an intensity of devotion that has been an example to the rest of the country and cannot be doubted.

Regrettably, since the beginning of the twentieth century and most recently the so-called Global War on Terror, the United States Government has embarked on a path of imperialism and military adventurism that has not brought us greater security but has actually made us less secure. This policy of aggressive war abuses the willingness of Southerners—indeed, of all Americans—to risk our lives in defense of the country. Moreover, these endless wars are as staggering in their costs as they are tragically unnecessary, with an enormous human price in dead, maimed, and displaced; and in untold billions of dollars, contributing to the current economic crisis that threatens the very foundations of our society.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants the exclusive power to declare war to the U.S. Congress. But the President and Executive Branch have usurped this power and levied aggressive war without just cause and through deceiving the People as to the threats, necessity, and costs of these conflicts. The Congress has failed in its Constitutional responsibility to check an imperial Executive, while improperly authorizing the use of force and appropriating funds for an unconstitutional, undeclared war.

The right of the People to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is recognized by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore, we, the Delegates to the First Southern National Congress, remonstrate against unnecessary war and the use of armed force to establish American hegemony across the globe, and petition the Government of the United States to:

Refrain from the use of deception and fear to institute aggressive, unjustified, and undeclared military actions.

Restore the sovereign authority of the States and the People and obey the Constitution by levying war only with a proper declaration of war issued by the U.S. Congress.

Observe moral law and the long-established law of nations regarding just war, under which conflict is exercised with a just cause, right intention, probability of success, proportionality, and respect for the immunity of non-combatants.

______________________

Adopted 6 December 2008 by the First Southern National Congress at Hendersonville, North Carolina and ordered to be transmitted to the Delegations to the United States Congress of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; to the President of the United States, and to the State Governments of these Southern States.

On Behalf of The Fourteen States, Officers, and Board of Governors of The Southern National Congress

Thomas Moore
CHAIRMAN

Learn more at the Southern National Congress website: http://www.southernnationalcongress.org/

Southern Responses to South Carolina's Secession

2011-03-26T06:28:00.002-04:00

HOW SECESSION IS REGARDED.; IN BALTIMORE. IN NEW-ORLEANS. IN MOBILE. IN MONTGOMERY. IN PENSACOLA. IN WILMINGTON. IN PORTSMOUTH. SECESSION IN MISSISSIPPI. MISSISSIPPI AND KENTUCKY. AFFAIRS IN VIRGINIA.

The New York Times
Published December 22, 1860

BALTIMORE, Friday, Dec. 21.

South Carolina's secession produced not the slightest sensation here, one way or the other. People seemed relieved and cheerful, and the streets were gaily crowded and business was better. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that if the North now does right, and makes honorable, manly concessions, indicating an absolute determination to cultivate friendly feelings, and will repeal the obnoxious laws, the other Southern States will cheerfully meet them. W.

NEW-ORLEANS, Friday, Dec. 21.

A general demonstration of joy on the secession of South Carolina occurred here to-day. One hundred guns were fired and the Pelican flag unfurled. impromptu secession speeches were made by leading citizens, and the "Marsailles Hymn" and polkas were the only airs played. A bust of CALHOUN was exhibited decorated with a cockade.

An actor announced the secession of South Carolina last night from the stage of the Varieties. It was received with enthusiasm.

MOBILE, Thursday, Dec. 20.

The secession of South Carolina was celebrated here this afternoon by the firing of a hundred guns, the cheers of the people, and a military parade. There is great rejoicing.

The bells are now ringing merrily, and the people are out in the streets by hundreds, testifying their joy at the triumph of secession. Many impromptu speeches are being made, and the greatest excitement everywhere exists.

MOBILE, Friday, Dec. 21 -- P.M.

There is an immense secession meeting here to-night. The wildest enthusiasm is displayed. The oldest men are taking a prominent part in the proceedings.

Many places are illuminated in honor of South Carolina to-night.

MONTGOMERY, Ala., Thursday, Dec. 20.

Gov. MOORE has ordered one hundred guns to be fired at noon to-morrow, in honor of the secession of South Carolina.

PENSACOLA, Fla., Thursday, Dec. 20.

The secession of South Carolina is greeted with immense enthusiasm here. One hundred guns are being fired in honor of the event.

WILMINGTON, Friday, Dec. 21.

One hundred guns were to-day fired in honor of the secession of South Carolina.

PORTSMOUTH, Friday, Dec. 21.

Fifteen guns were fired to-day. The Palmetto flag was displayed at Norfolk.

WASHINGTON, Friday, Dec. 21.

A dispatch from the editor of the Mississippian and State Gazette, published at Jackson, to the Mississippi delegation in Congress, dated this, evening, states that Mississippi has elected Delegates to the State Convention in favor of separate State Secession by a very large majority -- say seventy in the Convention of one hundred delegates, and by a popular majority of 30,000 votes.

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Friday, Dec. 21.

Hon. W.S. FEATHERSTONE, Commissioner from Mississippi, had an Interview with Gov. MAGOFFIN, at Frankfort, yesterday. The result of it is not yet known. He arrived here to-day.

NORFOLK, Va., Thursday, Dec. 20.

A large meeting of citizens was held at Ashland Hall last night. Resolutions were adopted recommending the holding of National and State Conventions; opposing coercion; favoring the arming of the State, and declaring against the opening of the African Slave-trade.

Here is a link to the above article in The New York Times Archive: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A1FFD3859127A93C0AB1789D95F448684F9&scp=17&sq=secession,%20south%20carolina&st=cse

Stonewall Jackson Window

2011-03-25T02:34:00.004-04:00

Stonewall Jackson Window behind the pulpit of Church in Roanoke, Virginia
"In Memory of Stonewall Jackson"
"Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees."

The article below is reprinted from The New York Times, Published July 30, 1906

Stonewall Jackson Window

-------------

Erected in Negro Church by Contributions from Negroes.

ROANOKE, Va., July 29 -- A memorial window of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson was unveiled in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church today. The congregation is composed of negroes. The window was erected by the pastor, the Rev. L. L. Downing, the money for its purchase coming wholly from negroes.

The Exercises were largely attended by both races, the Confederate camps of Roanoke and Salem and the chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy. There were addresses by white citizens of Roanoke.

Downing's father and mother were members of a Sunday school class of negro slaves taught by Jackson at Lexington before the war, and to-day's exercises marked the realization of an ambition Downing has had since boyhood, to pay fitting tribute to the Confederate commander.

The picture presented on the window is that of an army camping on the banks of a stream, the inscription underneath being Jackson's last words: "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees."

Here is a link to the New York Times article: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F10910FA395512738DDDA90B94DF405B868CF1D3

Dixie in Utah

2011-03-21T06:26:00.001-04:00

Entering Utah's Dixie National Forest

While on a recent road trip through Utah I was delighted to discover that some of the most scenic landscapes in the Beehive State are called Dixie. Early settlers in Utah gave that endearing name to the warm southern part of their state.

Established in the early 1900's, Dixie National Forest spreads across almost two million acres of southern Utah, stretching for about 170 miles, making it the largest national forest in the state.

The beautiful Dixie landscape varies from 2,800 feet above sea level near St. George, Utah to 11,322 feet at Blue Bell Knoll on Boulder Mountain. Much of the Forest is actually desert, but there are also millions of acres of green - pine and juniper dominating the mid-elevations with aspen, pine, spruce and fir in the higher reaches of the forest.  The southern rim of the Great Basin, near the Colorado River, provides spectacular vistas of multi-colored cliffs and steep-walled gorges.

My hat is off to the good folks of Utah who, more than a century ago, named one of the most beautiful parts of their state for the place I hold dearest of all - Dixieland.

Utah's Red Canyon in Dixie National Forest
"A Journey Through Time Scenic Byway", between Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.

Hell No, We've Not Forgotten!

2011-03-20T01:09:00.003-04:00

Fort Sumpter National Monument, Charleston, South Carolina

EDITOR's NOTE: Even though I disagree with many of the Northern perspectives and false persumptions in this New York Times article, I do find it interesting to see what the Yankess are saying about us Southrons.

In the South, the Civil War has not been Forgotten.

The New York Times
By Edward Rothstein

FORT SUMTER, S.C.

Stand atop the unexcavated mound of earth that covers part of this 19th-century fort and gaze northward over its half-disinterred ruins. Across the harbor, you can just make out the rooftops on which the inhabitants of Charleston stood 150 years ago this April, cheering as the fort — along with its some four score United States soldiers — was bombarded by the troops of the newly formed Confederate States of America. “A thrill went through the whole city,” wrote the aide de camp of the leader of the Confederate forces, Brig. Gen. Pierre Beauregard. “It was felt that the Rubicon was passed.”

It was the beginning of the Civil War. Or, as it is sometimes called here, the War Between the States. Or more provocatively: the War of Northern Aggression.

As commemorations of the war’s sesquicentennial begin this spring, with special exhibitions and symposia adding to the already extensive historical treatments that can be sampled at battlefields and museums reaching from Gettysburg to New Orleans, it might seem that the war’s heritage is relatively simple. As seen from a perch up North, the war’s purpose is morally and politically clear. Slavery’s abolition, like Lincoln’s powerful redefinition of the nation’s principles, set the United States on a path toward equality that it might have never found through antebellum thickets. The Civil War created contemporary America.

But spend some time in Southern museums, and it becomes clear that what seems evident up North is here clouded and contested. And if, in the North, the war seems part of a continuum of history, here it remains a cataclysm. The war was not a continuation of Southern history; it was a break in it. And that is still, for the South, the problem.

Even if Southern commemorations fully celebrate the Union that grew out of that war and readily repudiate slavery and its principles, disorientation is mixed with commemoration. The past is renounced, but not fully. The dead are remembered, but what about their cause? Nearly every war site and exhibition I have seen in the South wrestles with double perspectives and conflicting sentiments alien to the North.

There's more. For the full article go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/arts/design/in-the-south-civil-war-has-not-been-forgotten.html?_r=1&src=me

"The Midland Methodist " gives honor to Confederate Veterans

2011-03-18T06:24:00.004-04:00

The article below was first published in Nashville, Tennessee, several years after the War for Southern Independence. It appeared in the "THE MIDLAND METHODIST,' an official journal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and was reprinted in the 1910 Book, HISTORIC SOUTHERN MONUMENTS: REPRESENTATIVE MEMORIALS OF THE HEROIC DEAD OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY, compiled by Mrs. B. A. C. Emerson.

THE CONFEDERATES

Little, indeed, must be the soul that grows morbid with misgivings and with malice at the reunion of the grizzled veterans of the cause. Let these old battlescarred heroes have their times of revived associations and happy reminiscences. Let them march together on crutches and wooden legs, with empty sleeves dangling at their shoulders, and an occasional green patch over an eyeless socket. Let them talk of thrilling days gone by in bivouac and on battlefield. Let them compare notes of Bull Run and Chancellorsville and Chickamauga and Gettysburg. They suffered enough, and showed courage enough in those perilous days to entitle them to all of the consolation they can get now out of stirring memories.

Small the soul and mean the heart that charges these valiant men with treasonable principles. They represent the flower of the Southern manhood—as true and brave a type as breathes the air of American freedom. . . . The soldiers of the South are as loyal as any citizen of the land. Having startled the whole world with an intrepidity of spirit, a dauntlessness of daring, a brilliancy of execution, and an almost marvelous capacity of endurance in the face of overwhelming forces, they surrendered in honor, and have been living through these years in a loyal submissiveness not less heroic than their many successes which would have kindled a Napoleon's pride.

We of the South are proud of the records of those men who shouted about Lee and Jackson and Johnston and Gordon in those days gone by. We are proud of their silent comrades who sleep in unmarked graves and in unkept cities of the dead. Some of us who were entirely too little to know anything about those dreadful days of war, have read the story with patriotic pride, and we rejoice to know that honor to the memory of the brave soldiers of our sunny South does not mean dishonor to a reunited country.

—THE MIDLAND METHODIST

1896 Description of the Windsor, North Carolina, Confederate Monument

2011-03-17T06:29:00.007-04:00

The very interesting history of the Windsor, North Carolina Confederate Monument, reprinted below, was an 1896 local newspaper account, later published in the book:

Historic Southern Monuments;

Representative Memorials of the Heroic Dead of the Southern Confederacy

By Bettie Alder Calhoun Emerson

Published by General Books LLC, Jan 4, 1910

WINDSOR, N. C.

A Confederate monument was unveiled, August 13, in Windsor, North Carolina. Windsor is an old Colonial town near the Atlantic coast, the capital of Bertie County, and its history antedates many years the Revolutionary War. Its public buildings were of brick from England.

It was once a wealthy and aristocratic place, but suffered much in the crucial test of reconstruction and the severe ordeal that followed it. It has recuperated, however, wonderfully, aided by its large and valuable fisheries on the Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound. It is not only historic, but enthusiastically Confederate. It furnished many more soldiers for the Confederate army than it had voters. It was in Bertie County that the celebrated "Captain Byrd's Company" was raised and equipped for the war. That company—of the 1 1th North Carolina Infantry—participated in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, with thirty-eight men besides its captain (Byrd) and two lieutenants. Thirty-four of them were killed or wounded. Captain Byrd and the four men left for service went into the fight next day, when he and two of the four men were killed.

It was the color company of the regiment, and the flag waved on although its staff was twice shot away. The flag was preserved through and survived the battle. After a time, such of the wounded as were able returned to the company and preserved its organization. Its first-lieutenant, Ed Outlaw, who on that fatal day was under detail by order of General Lee, became its captain, and, with some additions to the company, commanded it in subsequent battles and on until the surrender of Appomattox. Two of the survivors of that charge were on the speaker's stand while General W. B. Bate, of Tennessee, delivered the address at the unveiling of the monument.

Four thousand people were present to witness the ceremonies. A royal welcome was given General Bate, winding up with a public reception at night in his honor. Bertie County was the home of the paternal ancestors of General Bate for several generations, and that added much to the interest of the occasion.

On the front of the monument is this inscription:

WE RESPONDED TO

OUR COUNTRY'S

CALL.

WE FOUGHT AN

HONEST FIGHT,

WE KEPT THE

SOUTHRON'S FAITH.

WE FELL AT THE

POST OF DUTY.

WE DIED FOR THE

LAND WE LOVED.

ERECTED BY

THE CONFEDERATE

VETERANS

ASSOCIATION

OF BERTIE, 1896

OUR CONFEDERATE

DEAD

1861-1865

Photos by J. Stephen Conn

Jesse Jackson accuses Wisconsin Governor of having a Confederate Agenda

2011-03-16T06:31:00.005-04:00

The racist rabble-rouser, Jesse Jackson, speaking recently at a pro-union rally in front of the Wisconsin State Capitol, accused Governor Scott Walker of having a "Confederate agenda" in his recent dealings with labor unions and the State budget crisis.

The League of the South issued a statement on March 14, calling upon Mr. Jackson to define what he means by a "Confederate agenda," beyond general accusations of anti-labor, anti-civil rights, anti-voting rights, and pro-States Rights sentiments.

"It is clear," said League President Michael Hill, "that Jesse Jackson loves centralized power as long as it benefits him and his liberal constituency. We see that as a "Union agenda" in more ways than one. If by a Confederate agenda, he means a belief in local self-government, the rule of a fundamental law, State right-to-work laws, free markets, and the consent of the governed, then we proudly claim such a position. And we hope that a northern Governor like Scott Walker will continue to see the wisdom of doing the same."

The League of the South challenges Jesse Jackson to debate this issue at a time and place convenient both to him and to us.

You may see the statement on the League of the Southwebsite, and a video of Mr. Jackson making his accusations, here: http://dixienet.org/rights/jesse_jackson_confederate_agenda.php

HOW I SEE IT: The Truth about the Confederate Flag

2011-03-15T11:59:00.004-04:00

By Christopher H. Ezelle

Five Confederate flags flew between 1861 and 1865. The Confederate Battle Flag is the one most people know best. Some believe this flag is a sign of hate, racism and repression; but the truth is that it’s a symbol of honor, valor, truth, heritage and faith in Jesus Christ.

After confusion of flags during the Union and Confederate engagement of First Manassas, Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard charged his aide, Col. William Miles to design a battle flag.

Accepted was an adapted Scottish Cross of St Andrew-based flag, the famous battle flag known today.

St. Andrew, a disciple of Jesus Christ, was martyred by crucifixion at Patras, Greece, ordered by the Roman governor. He deemed himself unworthy of being crucified and nailed to a Latin cross like Jesus Christ. He requested crucifixion on an “X”-shaped cross and to be bound, not nailed. He preached the word of God to all that passed until he died. His martyrdom was during the reign of Nero, A.D. 60. Latin and Greek churches keep Nov. 30, his death date, as a day of feast. St. Andrew is honored as chief patron by Russia and Scotland.

Here are some more interesting facts surrounding the flag:

» In the 1860s, two-thirds of the country’s population was Scotch or Scotch Irish. This flag design was a carryover of the Scottish National Flag and ancestry.

» The Confederate States of America was a nation from 1861-65.

» The battle flag was the flag of common soldiers for only four years.

» No historical document exists to support that this flag represented hate, slavery, racism, deceit, infamy or repression. Not one flag of the Confederacy was ever described in its placement to represent anything other than the Confederate States of America.

» No Confederate ship ever ran slaves.

» The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) adopted the battle flag as part of its logo in 1896, long before “hate” groups began to abuse the flag, and they condemn misuse of any Confederate flag.

» The KKK and other “hate” groups didn’t use the flag until late 1950/early 1960s.

In his book “What They Fought For, 1861-1865,” historian James McPherson, after reading more than 25,000 letters and over 100 soldier diaries from both sides of the War for Southern Independence, concluded that Confederate soldiers "fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government."

See the original "HOW I SEE IT" piece in the Star*Exponent: http://www2.starexponent.com/news/2011/mar/14/how-i-see-it-truth-about-confederate-flag-ar-903740/

Everything you were taught about the Civil War is Wrong.

2011-03-11T09:07:00.005-05:00

Tens of thousands of books have been written about the War Between the States, and I have read more of them than I can count - mostly written from a Northern point of view. When I discovered this volume, “Everything you were taught about the Civil War is wrong, ask a Southerner,” by Lochlainn Seabrook, it immediately went to the top of my list of favorites. Being an author myself, with six published books to my credit, I must admit that I envy the ability of Seabrook to express himself on the printed page in a way that is easy to understand, yet powerful and thought provoking. I had a very hard time putting it down, and I’ve found myself going back to read many passages again and again.

Actually, if your reading schedule demands that you put this book down before you finish reading it cover to cover, that’s okay too. Each of the chapters can stand alone, making it an excellent book for either browsing or for reading straight through.

In the introduction, historian and author Lochlainn Seabrook, makes this bold assertion: “… slavery started in the North, abolition began in the South, Abraham Lincoln was a rabid white racist, Jefferson Davis adopted a black child, 95 percent of Southern blacks supported the Confederacy, and the Yanks started the war, a conflict that was illegal from start to finish.” Then, in the next 22 chapters he makes his case in a manner which no intellectually honest person can easily refute. Seabrook states much more than just his personal opinions. He backs up every page with extensive notes and bibliography, quoting primary sources instead of just rehashing the words and prejudices of court historians and mythologists.

The introduction to the book is written by the distinguished black educator from Memphis, Tennessee, Nelson W. Winbush, who said, “”I’m proud to be a real grandson, having in my possession the Confederate Battle Flag that draped my grandfather’s coffin, a reunion jacket and cap, numerous newspaper articles and reunion pictures. I was five when he passed and I still remember war stories as told me by my grandfather.” Another thing I liked about the book is that it closes with a very practical list, including contacts, entitled “How you can help preserve the South.” I found this very helpful.

I must admit that this book made me angry. Having been born in the Midwest, reared mostly in the South, and living much of my adult life in the North, I was taught, from elementary school through college, only a very one-sided version of the “Civil War.” I wish I had discovered this book and others like it much earlier.

The last three words of the title, “Ask a Southerner,” is not always the best advice. The sad fact is that the majority of Southerners learn their own history from textbooks written by Northern authors, taught by politically correct teachers and professors – blindly passing down the same misconceptions and prejudices from one generation to another. All Americans would benefit from reading “Everything you were taught about the Civil War is wrong…” Prepare to be challenged – enlightened – and maybe even made angry that you weren’t taught these truths before.

Father Ryan, Poet-Priest of the Confederacy

2011-03-10T07:11:00.002-05:00

Confederate Battle Flag

The first Confederate national flag, known
as the “Stars and Bars,” often proved
indistinguishable from the Stars and
Stripes in the thick of battle.
The battle flag, created in 1861,
became the icon of the Confederacy.

THE CONQUERED BANNER

by Abram Joseph Ryan
(1838-1886)

Furl that Banner, for 'tis weary;
Round its staff 'tis drooping dreary;
Furl it, fold it, it is best;
For there's not a man to wave it,
And there's not a sword to save it,
And there's no one left to lave it
In the blood that heroes gave it;
And its foes now scorn and brave it;
Furl it, hide it--let it rest!

Take that banner down! 'tis tattered;
Broken is its shaft and shattered;
And the valiant hosts are scattered
Over whom it floated high.
Oh! 'tis hard for us to fold it;
Hard to think there's none to hold it;
Hard that those who once unrolled it
Now must furl it with a sigh.

Furl that banner! furl it sadly!
Once ten thousands hailed it gladly.
And ten thousands wildly, madly,
Swore it should forever wave;
Swore that foeman's sword should never
Hearts like theirs entwined dissever,
Till that flag should float forever
O'er their freedom or their grave!

Furl it! for the hands that grasped it,
And the hearts that fondly clasped it,
Cold and dead are lying low;
And that Banner--it is trailing!
While around it sounds the wailing
Of its people in their woe.

For, though conquered, they adore it!
Love the cold, dead hands that bore it!
Weep for those who fell before it!
Pardon those who trailed and tore it!
But, oh! wildly they deplored it!
Now who furl and fold it so.

Furl that Banner! True, 'tis gory,
Yet 'tis wreathed around with glory,
And 'twill live in song and story,
Though its folds are in the dust;
For its fame on brightest pages,
Penned by poets and by sages,
Shall go sounding down the ages--
Furl its folds though now we must.

Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently--it is holy--
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not--unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people's hopes are dead!

The Catholic Church of the Most Holy Trinity, on Telfair Street in downtown Augusta, Georgia, was constructed from 1857-1863. It is one of the oldest Catholic church buildings in Georgia.

The edifice was designed by J.R. Niernsee, who was also the architect of the South Carolina State Capitol in Columbia, South Carolina. The original church building, constructed in 1814, served as the Sisters of Mercy hospital and orphanage during the Yellow Fever epidemics of 1839 and 1854. It was again pressed into service as a hospital during the War for Southern Independence (1861-1865).

Father Abram Ryan (1838-1886), the "Poet-priest of the Confederacy," was pastor of the church during the War for Southern Independence. He also served as editor of "The Banner of the South," a Catholic weekly.

Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church photo by J. Stephen Conn

Battle Flag photo from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Robert Lee, Coke County, Texas - Named for Confederate Leaders

2011-03-09T07:41:00.003-05:00

Bust of Robert E. Lee in the
Robert Lee, Texas, City Hall

When I recently had the opportunity to visit the small, remote, West Texas town of Robert Lee, I was naturally curious as to how the city got its name. Seeing the City Hall in the center of town, I stepped inside to inquire.

Before I could ask my question it was answered by this bust which holds a prominent position just inside the front door.  I learned that Robert E. Lee had served with honor and distinction in this part of Texas as a United States military officer in 1856-1861, just before the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence. The good folks of Robert Lee are still proud of their former resident and have honored him by giving their town his name.

I was also curious as to why Coke County, of which Robert Lee is the county seat, came to be called "Coke." Could it have been named for the famous beverage? But I knew that Coca Cola was invented in Atlanta, Georgia. The young woman who worked behind the front desk in the City Hall said she was born and raised in Coke County, and she didn't have a clue as to why the county was named Coke.

I thanked her and stepped outside, corssing Main Street to the Coke County Courthouse. There, just a few steps from the City Hall, was the simple monument, pictured below, which tells that the county is named for Richard Coke, a Confederate soldier and a Texas political leader both before and after the War Between the States. He served Texas at different times as Governor and as a United States Senator.

Confederate monument honoring
Governor/Senator Richard Coke

People say that if you want to know about a place, ask a local. That doesn't always work. It just goes to illustrate why diligence is necessary in telling the story of our proud Confederate heritage to each new generation.

The inscription on the monument reads:

County named for Texas Confederate

RICHARD COKE
1829-1896

Virginia Native, Leader, Texas Secession Movement, joined army, rose to captain, 15th Texas infantry company, serving in Louisiana, Arkansas, chiefly Tennessee Campaigns. Elected to state supreme court, 1866, Removed by reconstruction military authorities. Defeated Governor E. J. Davis 1873, bloodless controversy ensued. Davis retired under protest, marking political end Reconstruction in Texas. U.S. Senator 1877-1895.

A memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy, Erected by the State of Texas, 1863.

Coke County Courthouse, Robert Lee, Texas

Confederate Biography on a Tombstone

2011-03-08T07:07:00.003-05:00

Grave of Confederate Soldier John Harrod
New Hope Cemetery, Georgia

While exploring the New Hope Cemetery, Paulding County, Georgia, I was very interested to see that someone, perhaps a descendent of the deceased, has placed a biography of Confederate Lt. Col. John Harrod on his tombstone. This is a great idea, and inspires me to do something similar on the graves of my own Confederate ancestors in Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky. Wouldn't it be a great idea if many other Confederate descendents would perpetuate the memory of their ancestors in a similar manner.

The text is below:

John Harrod
1st Lt. Co. G
then Major
Then Lt. Colonel

John Harrod was born December 24, 1826 in Alabama. He was the son of William L. Harrod (October 20, 1786-September 1, 1866) and Sarah Chewning (May 5, 1785-July 16, 1856). At some point his family moved to Cadaretta, Choctaw Co., MS. At the age of 35, he was elected 1st Lieutenant of Co. G, "Sons of Liberty" which later became the "Davis Guards," of the 33rd Mississippi Infantry Regiment. On August 19, 1863 he was promoted to Major of the regiment. Compiled Service Records do not indicate the exact date he was promoted to Lt. Colonel, but it was probably early January 1864. As the war for the 33rd Mississippi Infantry moved into Georgia, it was at New Hope Church, a few miles from Atlanta, that the Lt. Colonel was wounded "while gallantly leading his regiment in an attack" and later died on June 11, 1864.

According to his daughter's recollections of the war,

"He was shot through the hand and the knee, just as he raised up from behind a tree with his hand on his knee. They had discovered the Yankee scouts on the other side of the hill. Father's boys gave the blood curdling Confederate yell and the Yankees fled; and so they were able to carry Father back to camp. The little church was used as a hospital. They amputated his leg, and when it was nearly healed, gangrene set in, and he died, like thousands of others, died for lack of proper antiseptics...They made him a coffin of one of the church doors, wrapped him in his soldiers (sic) blanket, and buried him there in a nameless grave." (1)

Prior to the war, On March 6, 1851, John had married Sophia Ann Coleman Smith (May 8, 1833-June 21, 1902) in Cadaretta, Choctaw Co., MS. They had five children. After the war she and the children moved to California.

Albany Herald reports on Black Soldiers in Confederate Gray

2011-03-07T09:25:00.003-05:00

Albany Herald
Carlton Fletcher, metro editor

ALBANY, Ga. — When Confederate Civil War hero Amos Rucker died, the city of Atlanta shut down for his funeral.

Eulogized by the state’s poet laureate with the moving “When Rucker Called the Roll,” the fallen veteran’s pallbearers included then-Georgia Gov. Allen Chandler, Judge William Lowndes Calhoun, ex-Postmaster Amos Fox and former Confederate Army Camp Commander Frank Hilburn. Rucker was laid to rest in Atlanta’s Southview Cemetary, current burial site of members of Martin Luther King’s family.

H.K. Edgerton, right, is a black Confederate

activist who works to bring the truth of

black southern heritage to people of all races.

While such ceremony was not uncommon among Southern survivors of America’s Civil War, what made Rucker’s funeral so memorable is that he was among the black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the war.

Whether Southern blacks willingly participated as Confederates against the Northern army that eventually won them their freedom is an argument that continues to be waged today in the year that marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the war. But documented stories like the ones of Amos Rucker, Bill Yopp, Holt Collier, Louis Napoleon Nelson and the all-black First Louisiana Native Guard offer evidence that African Americans did indeed take up arms alongside the men who at the time were their masters.

“I hear today — from blacks and whites — that there were no black Confederate soldiers,” said Kelly Barrow, a Henry County history teacher who has published two books — “Black Confederates” and “Black Southerners in Confederate Armies” — and is working on a third about the subject. “But the documented evidence is overwhelming.”

Barrow, who teaches and coaches soccer at Locust Grove High School, said he became passionate about researching black Confederates after a professor at Shorter College in Rome told him they didn’t exist.

“I’d find all this material about black soldiers, about blacks who were heroes during the war, and (my professor) would say I was wrong,” Barrow said. “She, of course, had her own agenda, but I kept finding more and more stuff.

“After I graduated, I was working with the General Assembly when the flag fight started kicking up. I did a lot of research for (former) Rep. Frank Redding, including genealogy, and I kept coming across more evidence of black Confederates. I eventually put an ad in a Confederate Veterans magazine asking for documentation of black Confederates and was overwhelmed with information. I guess I kind of became the clearinghouse for stuff people said they’d had for years but didn’t know what to do with.”

Historians question whether blacks would have freely fought alongside men who “owned” them and against an army that would free them, but a number of potential answers have surfaced. Noted African-American journalist Walter Williams tackled that question in a recent syndicated column.

“One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in order to preserve slavery,” he wrote. “What’s untaught in most history classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think of ourselves as citizens of ‘United States.’ For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia, citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we resided.

“(African-American Historian Charles) Wesley says, ‘To the majority of the Negroes, as to all the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be ruthlessly attacking independent states, invading the beloved homeland and tramping upon all that these men held dear.’ Blacks have fought in all of our wars, both before and after slavery, in hopes of better treatment afterward.”

Charles Lunsford, who is retired now but who once served as national spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization, said his research into the subject of black soldiers serving in the Confederate army has offered some telling information that history books have failed to mention.

“One of the truths that a lot of people don’t like to talk about is that Northerners were far more racist that Southerners until the Jim Crow era,” Lunsford, who lives in Mansfield in north Georgia, said. “That’s part of the reason so many people say there were no black Confederates. See, the Yankee army segregated its black troops, while the blacks who fought for the South fought alongside white soldiers.

“Experts — both black and white — that I’ve talked with estimate that as many as 90,000 black soldiers wore the uniform of the Confederacy and as many as 300,000 served as support personnel.

Just like the white Confederates, these men were fighting for their homeland.”

There's more. To see the entire article go here: http://www.albanyherald.com/news/headlines/A_question_of_blue_and_gray__and_black_lingers_117474833.html?ref=833

Abraham Lincoln's Reign was Evil - according to British Observers

2011-02-28T10:02:00.004-05:00

Abraham Lincoln
Considered evil by Europeans in his day.

A very interesting article in the Guardian, a newspaper in Great Britain, dares to remind it's readers that, while Abraham Lincoln is mostly venerated by the British today, anti-Lincoln sentiments were strong to the point of being an obsession when he was living in the White House and waging a ruthless war against the freedom loving citizens of the Confederate States.

The Guardian quotes it's own pages from almost 150 years ago, when in October 1862, the paper had this to say about his election:

"...it is impossible not to feel that it was an evil day both for America and the world, when he was chosen president of the United States".

And in April, 1965, upon the occasion of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Guardian opined:

"Of his rule we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty,"

Here is a link to the current Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/1865-guardian-stance-us-civil-war#start-of-comments

Eyewitness Account of a Confederate Train Wreck

2011-02-25T10:55:00.006-05:00

This monument at Fort Hill Cemetery, Cleveland, Tennessee, memorializes the 17 Confederate soldiers of the 33rd Alabama Volunteers, CSA, who died November 4, 1862, in a train wreck south of Cleveland, en route to Chattanooga, during the War Between the States. In addition to the 17 dead, another 67 soldiers were injured in the accident.

The monument, listing the names of each of the 17 soldiers, was dedicated November 4, 1989, 127 years after the accident. It stands beside another, much older monument which marks the mass grave of 270 unknown Confederate soldiers.

At the time of the accident, the Alabama 33rd had just fought a battle in Kentucky and were on their way to Chattanooga. There was no time for burials and the ded were laid in hastily dug graves beside the railroad tracks. The marker for those graves was long since lost so the exact location is known only to God.

A fascinating eyewitness account of the train wreck was written by a survivor, Pvt. Marvin L. Wheeler, Company A, 33rd Alabama Infantry Regiment. Pvt. Wheeler enlisted July 1862 at Stevenson, Alabama. He was wounded at Chickamauga. The following is taken from Pvt. Wheeler's memoirs:

"It was then the ladder part of October and first of November. Climatic conditions caused Knoxville to be the smokest place we were at, the smok from our green oak wood fires did not rise but settled and remained in a heavy black bank just above the earth and kept our eyes running water nearly all the time that we were not laying down, it being less dense just next to the earth, and we wer glad to leave there one morning early in November in box cars, a company in a car, with three days cooked rations of flour bread, fresh beef and bacon.

"The engines could pull but ten loaded box cars, say twenty four to thirty six feet long. The 33rd moved in the cars, that time by the left flank, the regimental staff officers or those who were along at the time and part of the baggage, the cooking utensils, axes and medicine chest, occupying the rear or tenth box and this time it fell to the lot of Company D, thought its place was not on the extreem right of the battalion, to occupy a box in the second section or train to our rear, the engine of which train frequently pushed our train up the grains when we stalled, as it did up the grade two or three miles south of Cleveland. And while running fast down grade our trained was wrecked about one or two p.m. the day we left Knoxville, south of Cleveland, killing nine or ten of Company G, one or two of Company E and of Company F and of Company H. Seventeen in all, whom we buried the next morning in a long ditch we dug on the southeast side of the railroad track, and built a worn rail fence around them. We pad put sixty seven crippled ones in box cars and sent them back to the hospital at Cleveland the evening of the wreck, soon after getting them out of it.

"Company B was in the box car next to the tender which was heaping full of split wood and it was supposed that a stick of wood dropped off the tender breaking the front axle under our car. At any rate all the wheels suddenling came out from under our car, causing a dreadful jar and clogged under the second car, which Company G Cooper's Co. from Daleville were in. Many were riding on top of the cars as was usual when moving by rail, and were shuck off like shaking peaches off a tree and badly jolted when they hit the ground.

"The coupling Company B's and Company G's boxes parted and the primitive engine carried Company B's box bouncing along without any wheels under it for two or three hundred yards, and it was the roughest riding we ever experienced. Those of Company B in the front end of the box got out at the doors on either side, some of the alighting on their heads.

"The company guns, accountrements, knapsacks and things soon all worked back to the rear end of the box in bouncing along would strike the rails it would us men and things a foot or more from the floor then when the floor would come in contact with us some would be beneath the pile and get bruised and mashed and were all banged up and badly frightened when the old fashioned engine stopped and after gettin out and find we had no broken bones we hurried back to where the cars were piled up in and on top of each other and assisted while men pried up or chopped to pieces the boxes in getting the crippled or dead out.

"We were delayed about twenty four hours, then we rode in a coal car to Chattanooga where we drew crackers and bacon."

Myra Inman, a local Cleveland woman whose Civil War diary has been published, made this entry on the day of the train wreck:

"Wednesday, 5: cloudy day, rained a little this morning. A gloom was spread over our town this morn. Caused by a sad accident which occurred 16 miles from here. The cable of a car broke, which caused 18 men to lose their lives, while 70 were wounded. There brought to the hospitals."

Fort Hill Cemetery, Cleveland, Tennessee
Left: Monument in memory of the 17 dead from the Alabama 33rd Volunteers train wreck.
Right: Mass Grave Marker for 270 unknown Confederate dead.

Photos by J. Stephen Conn - click on image to enlarge

Unique Tennessee Confederate Monument with a Personal Testimony

2011-02-23T06:35:00.005-05:00

Easy to overlook, but well worth finding, is the unique Confederate monument sandwiched between Grizzell's Jewelry Store and the Paul Holder Realty & Auction Co., on Main Street in downtown McMinnville, Tennessee. Known as the "Walling Monument," it was erected by a local businessman, Jesse Walling, as a testimony to the two great causes of his life. Walling was a soldier in the army of the Lord, and also a soldier who defended the Confederate States of America.

The inscription reads:

JESSE WALLING

I enlisted in the Lord's cause when young. Later I enlisted in the Confederate cause and was wounded at Murfreesboro and later discharged by President Davis. The Lord has been good to me 85 years.

Jesse "Pa-Jay" Walling was one of eight children of Smith Joseph Walling , a sheriff and judge of White county. White county is adjacent to Warren County, of which McMinnville is the County Seat. Jesse was a founder of the City Bank and Trust Company of McMinnville (1912) and was mayor three times. He operated the last stage coach line in the town, and was a founder of co-founder of the Annis Cotton MIll, the first electric power plant on the Barren Fork River and the cotton mill at Rock Island. He also owned Park House Hotel which served as the headquarters for the stage line. Mr. Walling is buried in Riverside Cemetery in McMinnville.

Click on the photo to enlarge it.