Posted on 12/24/2001 4:25:26 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
I Pledge allegiance to the Confederate Flag, and to the Southern People and the Culture for which it stands
by Lake E. High, Jr.
The Confederate flag is again under attack, as it has always been, and as it always will be. It is under attack because of what it symbolizes. The problem is that to many Southerners have forgotten just what it does symbolize.
The Confederate Nation of 1860 - 1865 was the intellectual, as well as the spiritual, continuation of the United States of America as founded, planned, and formed by Southerners. It was the stated, and often repeated, position of almost all Southerners in the 1860’s that they, and the South, were the heirs of the original political theory embodied in the U. S. Constitution of 1789. In 1860 their attempted to separate from the rest of the states and form their own nation since that was the only way the South could preserve the philosophy and the virtues that had made the United States the magnificent nation it had become.
In both of these contentions, that is, the South was the true repository of the original political theory that made the United States great, and the South was the true home of the people who took the necessary actions to found, make, and preserve the original United States, Southerners have been proven by the passage of time to be correct.
The Southern colonies of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Maryland were where the majority of the original American population resided until the 1700’s despite the fact Massachusetts was settled only 13 years after Virginia and New York was settled 18 years before South Carolina. As the population of the colonies grew, the New England States and the middle Atlantic states, gained population so that by the time of the American Revolutionary War the two general areas of the north and the South were generally equal in size with a small population advantage being shown by Virginia. This slight difference in population by a southern state was to have a profound effect on the development of the United States.
First of all, the New England states managed to start a war with England, which they verbalized as "taxation without representation." In truth the problem from their point of view was the taxes on their trade. Having started the war they then promptly managed to lose it. The British, after conquering the entire north from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to Boston, to Providence, to New York, to the new nation’s capital, Philadelphia, shifted their military forces to move against the Southern colonies. They secured their foothold in the South by capturing Savannah and Charleston and then proceeded to move inland to subdue the Southern population. They planed to catch the Virginia forces under General Washington in a coordinated attack moving down from the north, which they held, and up from the South that they thought they would also conquer.
The British army that had mastered the north found they could not defeat the Southern people. Once in the backwoods of the South they found themselves to be the beaten Army. The British defeats at Kings Mountain and Cowpens were absolute. Their Pyrrhic victories at Camden and Guilford Courthouse were tantamount to defeat. In both North Carolina and South Carolina they were so weakened they had to retreat from the area of their few "victories" within days. Their defeats at those well-known sites among others, along with their defeat at Yorktown in Virginia, led directly to their surrender.
Having secured the political freedom from England for all the colonists, Southerners then mistakenly sat back and took a smaller role in forming the new American government that operated under an "Articles of Confederation." That first attempt at forming a government fell to the firebrands of New England who has started the war and who still asserted their moral position of leadership despite their poor showing on the field of battle. These Articles of Confederation, the product of the Yankee political mind, gave too much economic self determination to the separate colonies (as the Northern colonies had demanded in an attempt to protect their shipping, trade and manufacturing) and too little power of enforcement to a central government.
After a period of six difficult years, when the Articles of Confederation failed as a form of government, another convention was called and a new form of government was drawn up. This time the convention was under the leadership of Southerners and they brought forth the document we all refer to as the U.S. Constitution. Even northern historians do not try to pretend the Constitution and the ideas embodied therein are anything other than a product of the Southern political mind. (Yankee historians cannot deny it, but they do choose to ignore it so their students grow up ignorant of the fact that the Constitution is Southern.) So, as it turns out, when the new nation found itself in political trouble it was the South which, once again, came to the rescue just as it had when the nation found itself previously in military trouble.
With the slight population advantage it enjoyed over other states, Virginia was able to give to the new nation politicians who are nothing short of demigods. Their names are revered in all areas of the civilized world wherever political theorists converge. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Henry, Taylor and Monroe are just a few, there are many more. These men along with the leading political minds of South Carolina, Rutledge, Heyward, and, most importantly, Pinckney, saw their new nation through its birth and establishment.
The military leadership, as well as the political leadership, of the South saw the nation through its expansion. Under Southern leadership the British were defeated a second time in 1814. Under Southerners, most obviously John Tyler and Andrew Jackson, Florida was added as a state. The defeat of Mexico in 1846, under the Southern leadership of James Polk and numerous Southern military officers, established of the United States as a force to be feared. That was an astonishing accomplishment for so small and so young a nation
Thomas Jefferson, who added the Louisiana Purchase, barely escaped impeachment for his efforts. The north argued continuously against the war with Mexico that added the area from Texas to California just as they had argued against the Louisiana Purchase. One Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, was particularly vehement against Texas being made a state. Northerners, having seen Mexico defeated and the United States enlarged all the way to the Pacific Ocean, then objected to the methods and motives of the acquisition of the Washington and Oregon territories in the northwest. Polk, who had added that vast area from Louisiana to California to Colorado to the pacific northwest, served only one term as President due to the constant attacks he sufferer in the Northern press. Left to the people of the north, the French would still control from Minnesota to Louisiana and Mexico would control from Texas to the Pacific while Canada would still include Washington, Oregon Idaho and Montana.
Every square inch of soil that now comprises the continental United States was added under a Southern president, and they did it over the strenuous political objections of the north. The provincial and mercenary Yankee people fought every effort to expand the United States. The expansion of the United States became a regional political disagreement that spread ill feeling north and South. Its accomplishment by Southerners was no small feat. It was accomplished under Southern military leadership and with much Southern blood. (Which is why Tennessee is called "The Volunteer State" and the names of Southerners are almost exclusively the only ones found on memorial tablets and monuments from Texas to California.). The expansion of the original colonies into the continental power it became was completely the results of the Southern mind and Southern leadership.
Having secured the freedom of the United States from England and then having formed and led the successful government into a new political age under a written constitution that is still the envy of the whole world, the South gave the entire military and political leadership that formed the United States into the boundaries it now enjoys. But these magnificent accomplishments were soon to be overshadowed by population shifts and the ensuing results that brings in a representative government. By the early 1820s the north had finally secured just enough additional population that it had achieved enough political clout to start protecting its first love, its money. The unfair and punitive tariffs that were passed in 1828 led to the South’s first half-hearted attempt to form its own separate government with the Nullification movement of 1832. The threat of war that South Carolina held out in 1832 then caused a negotiated modification of those laws to where the South could live with them. For the time being, the political question was settled by compromise.
While those changes pacified the political leaders of the South for the time being, some statesmen could see, even then, that if the North ever became totally dominant politically, the South would be destroyed, not just economically, but philosophically and spiritually as well. Those statesmen, with Calhoun in the lead, then started planting the intellectual seeds that led to the South’s second attempt at political freedom in 1860.
Unfortunately, in the 1840’s Yankee abolitionist introduced the new poison of the "voluntary end" of slavery as a political issue. There were attempts by many Southerners to defuse this situation by offering an economic solution. That is, Southerners offered to end slavery in the South just as England had ended it in the West Indies, by having the slave-holders paid for their losses when the slaves were freed. The abolitionist Yankees would have none of that. Their position was simple, the South could give up it slaves for free and each farmer could absorb the loss personally. There was to be no payment. To the Yankee abolitionists it was either their way or war.
The fact that the abolitionist movement became a dominant presence in the northern part of the United States from the 1840’s on is primarily because a liberal can politicize any subject and enrage any body of people regardless of the level of preexisting good will. (As current liberals have turned the simple good sense argument that one should not litter one’s own environment into the political upheaval of "the ecology movement." The effectiveness of liberal methods can currently be seen in the simple instance that most people believe such nonsense as the chemical cause of "ozone depletion" and "the greenhouse effect" despite any evidence of either. Liberals are absolutely capable, by their strident, activist natures of raising any question to harmful emotional heights.)
Unfortunately, the loss of the War for Southern Independence in 1865 caused the very thing that Southern statesmen had foreseen in the 1830’s; that is, the north became dominant and the cultural, spiritual, and economic base of the South was decimated. The loss of the war was most severely felt in the South, of course, but it has also had political repercussions in the north as well.
Without the South in a position of dominance, the leadership of the United States has gone from Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler and Polk to the inept, or leftist, Grant, Harding, Arthur, Harrison and Roosevelt, among others. Plus, the ascendancy of the leftist north to national prominence has also caused the rise of leaders in the South who had to be acceptable to the north. Such spectacularly immoral or totally incompetent Southern politicians as Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are examples of the quality of the men that the South must now produce to garner northern votes. When these modern day jackals are contrasted with the demigods the South produced when unfettered by the northern voter, that in itself should be enough to make all people reject northern philosophy and northern politics and embrace all things Southern.
As the forces of the left have gained ascendancy in the United States, the pressure intensifies to completely obliterate anything that remains between them and complete leftist victory. That means that the traditional enemy of leftists, the South, must be erased in its every form. That is why leftists always demand that even symbols of the South be eradicated.
We, therefore, now have a coalition of people who want the Southern flag taken down and hidden from public view. This coalition is composed of three main groups. First of all are African-Americans, whose emotional position is totally unmitigated by any knowledge of history. Secondly, there are Yankees who have moved to the South and who, despite their remarkable political failures in their own states, have learned nothing and continue to vote leftist here too. Or either these northern imports have been transferred here to run the newspapers that are owned by the people who live outside the South. And, thirdly, there are leftist Southerners, or Southerners of "politically correct" leaning, who have apparently learned their history from the television and movies and who feel the South is a bad place because it is not egalitarian enough.
But the demands of this coalition of political thinkers need to be put in proper perspective. Before anyone starts to tell someone else how to act and how to think, it is incumbent on him to demonstrate the success of his own ideas and actions. So far the introduction and enforcement of leftist ideas in our world has led to nothing but sorrow and degeneration. The force necessary to make people live under a leftist government has been the direct cause of the murder of over one hundred million people in this century alone. Leftist political theory has enslaved and impoverished billions of people worldwide. Its introduction has weakened even such great nations as England and France and reduced them to the status of third rate nations. Socialism in Scandinavia has reduced it to an economic level even less than that of England. In the United States leftist ideas have turned our country into the increasingly sick society it has become.
So until this coalition of leftist can point to a single successful instance of where their leftist philosophy has improved a country, or a people, rather than to the spectacular political failures the left has precipitated in any place into which its poisonous philosophy has been introduced, they have no right to demand anything of anybody. Leftist, the most spectacular political failures in all of history, have no standing to demand that Southerners accept anything that flows from their false philosophy. And of all people, leftist have the least demand on Southerners, the people who formed, guided, expanded and gave them a great country.
The Confederate flag is a symbol. It stands for the people who had the spirit, the courage, and the intelligence to give the world its greatest governmental entity. As long as the Confederate flag flies there is hope that the terrible scourge leftists have placed on the world will pass. It represents the culture that produced the most wished for, the most just, and the finest political system on earth. And as long as the Confederate flies there is hope that the greatness that was once ours may someday be reestablished.
You are demonstrating your ignorance. The existence of the single slave that was willed to Grant’s wife by her parents has been discussed many times here, and the idiotic charges that Grant was a 'slave owner' have been repudiated many times. Grant even came under fire at the time the 'slave' was in his procession because he paid the guy cash money to do work. The man was emancipated by Grant. And if you understood the Constitution you seem to want to wrap yourself in, you would know that under that great document, any American, north or south, owning a slave ship and transporting slaves to the US after the year 1808 was in serious violation of Federal law.
Now what other lame excuses will you come up with to justify the millions of humans kept in bondage by the same wealthy Southern landowners who designed the Stars and Bars. Whatever that flag stood for, it never stood for freedom.
Lincoln is the man who saved this country from a gang of corrupt cotton barons who made their wealth by enslaving other humans. You should fall to your knees and thank God for Lincoln instead of repeating mindless propaganda.
And doesn't now.
Walt
Yes, that was the great Virginian, General George Washington, who had the discipline, intelligence, and humility necessary to win a new kind of continental warfare against the mightiest empire on earth.
Don't get me wrong, I think Hamilton is one of the most underrated of our Founders, but, the President of the Convention was George Washington, James Madison has as much or more input into the document as anyone, George Mason wrote the Virginia Bill or Rights upon which the first ten amendments were based (and it was his resistance to signing the U.S. Const. that created the necessity of a Bill of Rights being promised to ensure ratification).
Southerners simply contributed more to the founding of the country when you look at individual contributions.
I agree with you, and am sure that I am more in tune with you on this issue than with WhiskeyPapa. However, this is really a terrible essay that is full of false assertions, and it does nothing for the southern cause.
We, therefore, now have a coalition of people who want the Southern flag taken down and hidden from public view. This coalition is composed of three main groups. First of all are African-Americans, whose emotional position is totally unmitigated by any knowledge of history.
It's the "totally" and the "any" that make the difference.
His survey of the role of Southerners in expansion is a useful antedote to the usual talk about Lincoln and the American empire, though. There was no less imperialist sentiment in the South than in the North. It took the form of settlement more than that of "Dollar Imperialism." It's not clear how colonization, rather than exploiting our economic advantages, would have made us more loved by our neighbors.
Blaming Northerners for not being fully on board in the Mexican War, isn't consistent with singling out the North as the source of American imperial feeling, as some do. But where there's a fault line and people who want to exploit it, anything is "fair" game.
It's similar with his praise of the Confederacy as the "ideal" form of government. Beware the worship of the "ideal form of government," since it eventually leads to worship of government as such and in itself.
Those who think an independent South would have been less "statist" than the Union has been are clearly mistaken. "State sovereignty" is sovereignty and "Southern Nationalism" is nationalism, and neither was apt to be more respectful of the individual than federal supremacy or American nationalism were. One could make a case that they would have been less respectful, at least in certain regards.
In our federal system, we pit the county courthouse gangs against the federal government. Independence means that those courthouse gangs make up the central government, and in time, they're likely to want to assume the same powers. The idea of some that a triumphant Confederacy would have meant blessed anarcho-capitalism is woefully mistaken.
Our country was great because it contained different regions with different strengths and weaknesses which complemented and offset each other. That was the true strength of federalism. To ascribe all virtue to one section is a mistake, since at different times the country has needed the strengths and virtues of the different sections to survive.
Keep preaching your 'it was all about slavery' while you can. We are finally seeing the fruits of lincoln's EMPIRE. Keep up your praise of lincoln and 50 years from now you'll know who to thank for the situation this country will be in.
The Brits moved south because they had most of the North wrapped up.
Trivia time: When General Washington moved south to engage Cornwallis on the Virginia peninsula in a campaign that culminated at Yorktown, he needed to move through northern Virginia very quickly despite its nearly-impenetrable woods and terrain. He called upon his decades-old friend and fellow Burgess from Prince William County, Henry Lee II of Leesylvania, who was the father of Washington's favorite dragoon (cavalry) officer, "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, and therefore, the grandfather of General Robert E. Lee. Henry Lee, Colonel of the Prince William County militia, cleared the way by building a courduroy road through the woods (note to WhiskeyPapa and Ditto: the labor was done by white militia members, not slave labor). The roadway is still in existence and known to northern Virginians today as Telegraph Road.
[...Just here it should be remarked that Sir Walter Scott's romantic, dilettante theory of life produced some most meritorious results. The Southern planters were noted for their charm of manner, for a high ideal of courage and honor and for a passionate love of individual freedom. These qualities are inherent in the Southerner but Scott greatly strengthened them. Sir Walter's South produced some splendid men.
The evil of his influence lies in the fact that he did so much to put the South out of harmony with the world by which it was surrounded. The South had stood in the full stream of eighteenth century life; it stood wholly aside from the nineteenth century. The chivalric ideal served to check the South's industrial development and social progress. Romantic dilettantism in the course of two generations curbed the energies of the Southern people to a great extent, and for this a price had to be paid.
In Europe dilettantism did not check development because the leisure class was too small in comparison with the total population; only the rich could take life quietly. But in the ante-bellum South slavery made dilettantism fatally easy. A man with a good farm and a few slaves need not bestir himself; he might more or less drift along. And since men will, at almost any cost, follow the social ideal of their community, many Southerners ceased to look on the life of strong exertion as the right fashion of living. There could be only one result to such an attitude in this struggling world, and the South began to fall behind in wealth and population.
The North, money-making and modern, though far less versed in the adornment of life, outstripped the South in all those things which are the fruits of energy. In the end it gained political power. The destinies of the American people had once lain in the hands of the South; after 1825 they lay in those of the North. It became more and more evident as the years passed that the nation was to be Northern in essence and not Southern.
And since no society can long endure fundamental differences, it was inevitable that the aggressive, nineteenth century North should attack the unmodern South. The point of assault was found in slavery, that institution supporting mediaevalism, that anachronism in an industrial, wage-earning age. The South was left the choice of conforming to modern life, or erecting its own government. It chose the latter and so we had the Civil War.
Romanticism withered in the fires of war. The South emerged from the great struggle a component part of the American nation, which is Northern in most essentials. The prosperous, matter-of-fact South of today has traveled a long distance since 1865.
It seems that the South made a sad mistake when its planters turned back from democracy, even though it evolved a civilization of much charm and many virtues. For the spirit of democracy, as we know, survived its sins and its mistakes, becoming the impelling force of the nineteenth century. The American people continued to be democratic, though in losing Southern political leadership it lost much. No second Jefferson has come out of the North. Indeed the North is too economical, too unpolitical; it is not prolific of great personalities. The American nation would be farther along the road to the solution of the great problems of human life, if the Southern planters had not lost faith in democracy and sought inspiration in the unsubstantial visions of Sir Walter Scott.]
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