So we did it once, secession that is, but the next time did not go so well for those who just wanted to live life THEIR way .. of course that time “slavery” was the excuse for not letting those 7 states go, EVEN THOUGH the Union slave states kept their slaves in bondage until the end of the war against southern independence.
Once the war was won by the Union and the Radical Republicans, the military districts set up ensured Reconstruction punished those who believed in the “consent of the governed” to put that ideal to rest and believe in “one nation indivisible”. It didn’t take, even after 100 years of economic hardship in the South, there is still injustice in the air.
Fast forward to 2021 and what have we learned? That a vast majority of Americans prefer safety to freedom. There is a lot of learning (and un-learning) to do in the years to come.
Tom Woods clarifies how wrong the state-educated Americans get the first secession of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire:
In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”
Zzzzzzzz.
The real principles were more like the following.
(1) No legislation without representation.
The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government.
This is why a Supreme Court ordering localities around is anti-American in the truest sense. It operates according to the opposite principle from the one the American colonists stood for.
(2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.
(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality. The Parliament’s view, on the other hand, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional.
So the colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution. Sound familiar?
I think these are key .. because we all know the taxes AFTER the war for independence were higher than before the war (thank you George Washington and Alexander Hamilton). NO legislation without REAL representation .. and I don’t just mean voting!
.. and this whole Pledge of Allegiance propaganda that implies one nation, indivisible .. well that could only have been written by a socialist (here is looking at you Francis Bellamy). Only empires, communist states and democracies want the largest territories to be able to tax the people from, as when you run out of other people’s money, well then that is the end of that road.
As far as Tom’s point #3, well I align more with Lysander Spooner:
I don’t care how limited you make a constitution, at the end of the day it is still a piece of paper.
Now beyond this I call attention to Peter R. Quinones’ latest:
… What did affect me was watching people just roll over and take everything that not only the State was doing to them when it came to COVID-hysteria, but how people also backed down from neighbors who turned into COVID-Karens and COVID-Kyles. THAT made me re-think just about everything.
Up until then I thought there was a chance that in my lifetime 5-8% of people would get on board with drastically reducing the size and reach of the federal government. Now, I no longer believe that’s possible… using the same tactics as before. Society has proven that it wants to be told what to do when it comes to pretty much every single action in their lives. And libertarians are the people “diligently plotting to take over the world and leave you alone.” Barf!
I’ve come to realize that any message about increases in individual liberty and contractions to government must be accompanied by an equally powerful message of personal responsibility. Does anyone reading this believe that the majority of the population wants to take responsibility for their lives? I don’t. Then maybe this message of personal liberty and responsibility needs be accompanied with a detailed plan on how to achieve that. I know, I know, we don’t tell people how to live their lives. However, if you don’t educate them someone else will, and that someone else will most likely be the State. Do you trust the State to actually help people with this goal? ..
I don’t trust the state, no way, no how.
After the past 16 months, if you still do, I recommend you get some counseling!
So the path forward includes the hard work of showing how keeping people on the government handouts is a recipe for life long servitude. It should not be a surprise how the 1960s Great Society blew up the black culture in the US .. how many black families have fathers in the home today? Not as many as they did in the 1950s.
Well, it is apparent this last go around that the US government wants even more dependent people sucked in to the state’s freedom prison. Do know that boxcars are at the end of every one of these utopian totalitarianism wet dreams. People need to understand this with their head and THEN believe it with their hearts.
I am sorry to say that churches don’t even give hope in this present trajectory, just like the 1st century Pharisees and Sadducees gave no real hope to the people, just more of the same as they allied with the state at every turn.
Grassroots one person at a time, keeping any groups very small and be on the lookout for infiltration from the state .. you can never be too careful with your circle of “friends”.
May this 4th of July inspire you toward the next real secession event here in the USA.
I will lay the blame primarily on Abraham Lincoln, whose reaction to the secession of seven states in 1861 led to this republic’s change from version 1.0 in 1781 to version 2.0 (thanks to the US Constitution(1787), a coup d’etat by any simple analysis) to version 3.0 in 1865 that rendered the states as impotent servants to the master (general/federal government), a virtual democracy (i.e. mob rule).
Lincoln’s effort to save actually destroyed!
The genius of the Articles of Confederation is that it recognized as each state was in fact a sovereign country (just like the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized). The presidential election pre-US Constitution was a non-issue, and 99% of Americans only saw the federal government when the post-rider stopped a few times a week. Furthermore, if one state had a tyrant, it would minimally impact other states.
In 2020, I would give almost anything to have the federal politics happen hundreds of miles away and have little impact on my day to day, year to year life in my own community. Can it be that whatever “federal” power is necessary that it be with this aim:
The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever. – Article III ‘The Articles of Confederation” 1777
The US Constitution brought the executive branch to a much more powerful level encouraged by those like Alexander Hamilton who saw royalty and a central government as the path toward empire. The empire has been realized, but at what cost? The cost was the soul of this republic.
Today’s situation did not happen overnight, and most people could trace it back to the 1970s, but few realize that the real roots of this go back much further. The wedding of big government and big business was a Whig wet dream from the early 1800s that Lincoln himself believed in like a religion. Even by 1861 the US Constitution was easily raped by Lincoln himself all in the name of “safety” for the “union”. Preserving all thirty-some states with territories to the west complicit with big business barons working their behind the scenes magic with the US government to eliminate the competition.
[Michael Anton] urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California.
Personally, I find more and more people disillusioned with how the Marxist inroads into not just the colleges but also much of corporate America has been achieved in the past few decades. Many went to college for “communications” finding out that the MSM is nauseating to consider working for, and others now feel the same way about the medical fields (MIC – Medical Industrial Complex) with the Covid-19 “over-reaction”!
It is intriguing that a rather young person would see with such clarity just into what California is experiencing right now, and all the dots that line up as to the sequence of bad decisions to get to where millions are in a state of exodus there. Angelo writes in the review of Michael’s book:
[Here] in 2020 productive middle-class families are fleeing California—so much so that the state will probably lose a seat in the House of Representatives after this year’s census. And all because its government—controlled by oligarchs in the entertainment and high-tech industries, as well as the state bureaucracy and public sector labor unions—raised taxes, imposed regulations, let public services decay, stopped defending against criminals, and empowered left-wing social activists. Today’s California is for government-favored oligarchs and those who service them. You want a career? If you don’t conform every word and action to the ruling orthodoxies, your work and talents will be wasted. You want your children to grow up intelligent and decent? The schools will teach them little reasoning and much depravity. Like you, they will also learn to compete by favor-seeking rather than by performance. You see crime rising, sense that you have to protect yourself, but know that, in most of the state, the police will arrest you for it. And you are sick of paying for it all.
The bottom line it seems is that in much of middle-upper class America, most kids do not become taxpayers until they are almost 30. This allows the Marxist/totalitarian mindset to take root the longer kids are in college, making PhDs the ones with the most student debt and the most likely to be compliant in whatever corporation will have them! This is by design.
Michael Anton goes on to say:
The real power…resides not with elected (or appointed) officials and “world leaders”; they—or most of them—are a servant class. The real power resides with their donors, the bankers, CEOs, financiers, and tech oligarchs—some of whom occasionally run for and win office, but most of whom, most of the time, are content to buy off those who do. The end result is the same either way: economic globalism and financialization, consolidation of power in an ostensibly “meritocratic” but actually semi-hereditary class, livened up by social libertinism.
The intellectuals from the monarchy days is what I am reminded of. These types do NOT like competition, and government is big and bad enough to wield a club apparently. Angelo continues:
Despising any divine or natural authority and contemptuous of America’s history, those in the ruling class make war on the American people’s culture and national identity. Ironically, this ruling class, led almost exclusively by white men, has cast white men in general as the proper targets of universal vengeance—an inversion of reality sustained by a near-monopoly of power over corrupt institutions and mass communications. Anton’s section on “Propaganda and Censorship: Narrative, Megaphone, and Muzzle” is particularly worth reading.
Insightful stuff here. It is at this point where the talk turns to conservative vs. liberals .. and right away I think of the civil approach the South had with the “rule(US Constitution)-breaking” North where the ends justifies the means:
Truth-bomb time from Angelo:
They [ruling class] do not believe they have to worry about controlling their own violent troops because they are sure that they have nothing to fear from conservatives. That is because conservatives have continued to believe that the United States’s institutions and those who run them retain legitimacy. Conservative complaisance made possible a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse. The War on Poverty ended up enriching its managers while expanding the underclass that voted for them. The civil rights movement ended up entitling a class of diversity managers to promote their friends and ruin their opponents. The environmental movement ended up empowering the very same wealthy, powerful folks while squeezing the rest of America into cookie-cutter living and paying inflated energy prices. The feminist movement delivered divorce and abortion—far from benefiting women, it has made millions dependent on ruling class favor. The COVID-19 pandemic has had almost nothing to do with public health and almost everything to do with separating, impoverishing, and disconnecting people inclined to vote against the ruling class. As leftist judges rule, conservatives respond by appointing judges who pledge not to rule. As leftist governors establish their brand of effective sovereignty by decree, conservative ones obey court orders. So long as, and to the degree that, the illusion of legitimacy stands—so long as the Right obeys while the Left disobeys and commands—there is no end to what the Left can do because there is so little that conservatives do to fight back.
.. until there is physical fighting, and like with the War Against Southern Independence, all the gloves will come off.
The boomerang and blow-back are real things that the Left is not ready for, and some in rural America are hoping for, so for now Trump, just one person, is holding it all back. Federation to Democracy to Socialism/Fascism/Marxism which is a very toxic brew.
Seems like many things in life appear to be black and while, high road or the low road, religion or hell. So in this election year where plenty of evil has been uncorked, there is a thought that the only recourse is to elect a certain leader, because “never before” has there been such an important election.
If it were only that easy. You see, those American colonists threw off the British Empire to be free, however, even before the American Revolution was over there were agendas afoot toward establishing a political power that would in fact bring less freedom and more taxes. Tax slaves once again.
Our rights, given to us by our Creator, were to be protected by this thing called government. The last two decades have seen our Bill of Rights evaporate “for safety from terrorists” (thanks GOP) ..
2012 version2018 version
.. and now our ability to elect representatives is about to be removed (thanks Democrats)!
I think it is that bait-n-switch that can get under the skin of those that do more than talk about freedom. Those that have either willingly chosen to serve in the military, or being drafted, gave it their all and then some that return to the USA quite disillusioned.
This happened with the Revolutionary War militia member of South Carolina that were indispensable in getting the British forces out of their region who NEVER were paid for their efforts. This is also what happened when Daniel Shay and his veteran groups found that being paid in worthless Continental dollars yet expected to pay back property taxes in gold in Massachusetts would sow the seeds of a rebellion whose core were those veterans who already gave more than lip service to liberty and freedom efforts.
More recently, we have many vets who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 who today wonder how they could have been so willing to go and fight to “spread democracy” and yet realize that democracy was never the objective. PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] is a real thing caused by an internal fight of morals for good or for evil. No one wants to wake up to the fact that they were used .. or to hear their leaders say things like this:
So as you see, this is nothing new. Every generation has to come to terms with this when they see their country and society being raped and pillaged by the evil in their midst. When politicians restrain law enforcement from protecting private property OR the citizens (that the US Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement had no obligation to attempt), it is up to “we the people” to take back what we had delegated to those who represent and serve us.
In 2020 we are seeing this vividly in the power struggle between the “establishment” (that has a swamp of their own) and the “Woke-Left” who desires to put their politicians and employer (Soros) into the US’s driver’s seat. Here is a chart that shows the span of principles (from tyrants to woke-left to real conservative) from Vasko Kohlmayer from his post at Lew Rockwell’s site today:
It should be no surprise what direction this nation is heading, and why there are those that say only Trump can save America.
Well, in truth, America has not had a healthy society or culture for many generations, and the more the federal government thinks it can fix things both in LA and in Podunk, Louisiana with the same tools, the more ineffective and out of touch it becomes. The more money it then needs to FORCE the fix. No wonder the bloated budget, the staggering bureaucracy and the perpetual of kicking the domestic issues down the road while we go and invade some nation, any nation somewhere elect on this globe.
But I digress. Maybe it is time, past time, to go full on local!
An example of think locally / act locally is what the last part of today’s blog post is set to communicate. I would like to now go back in time and unpack an era just after WWII in Tennessee where that corrupt local government combined with a corrupt law enforcement was finally “right-sized” by people of principle, veterans that knew something had to be done.
You see, in my mind, fixing this country where life, liberty and property are valued starts with me ..not relying on the state whose only tool is force:
Once we each have researched how people can live in proximity in this world filled with scarcity, it is THEN we can go about sharing ideas of freedom, liberty and prosperity with our neighbors, our co-workers and if possible, even with family!
With that, please either read the full post at the link below OR follow with me the Reader’s Digest version in the clips below from a post from Abbeville Institute’s Neil Kumar called ‘The Battle of Athens, Tennessee‘ :
Bill White, a vet, has seen the injustice and issues this declaration –
Well! Here you are! After three or four years of fighting for your country. You survived it all. You came back. And what did you come back to? A free country? You came back to Athens, Tennessee, in McMinn County, that’s run by a bunch of outlaws. They’ve got hired gunmen all over this county right now at this minute. What for? One purpose. To scare you so bad you won’t dare stand up for the rights you’ve been bleeding and dying for. Some of your mothers and some of your sisters are afraid to walk down the streets to the polling places. Lots of men, too!
The local government had secured a monopoly that terrorized the local taxpayers. No one even wanted to walk past the jail in case a lazy deputy accused you of doing something wrong and locking you up. This environment had gone on for years, and neither the state OR the federal government helped:
There were no “elections” in McMinn County through the war years. The ballot boxes were in Democratic offices, and Cantrell’s deputies served as the election officers, some of whom were brutal killers with the blood of innocent civilians on their hands. .. Word was put out among elderly voters that their pensions would be held up unless they voted “the right way.”
When the Republican election judge, a disabled veteran of the First World War, attempted to view the ballot count, he was dragged into the corridor and beaten, leaving him paralyzed. Another man who attempted to observe the ballot count was pistol-whipped, and one gunman fired at a poll worker who tried to leave the courthouse … Several Athenians petitioned the Department of Justice for relief, knowing that local and State officials would not take any action against the machine. A hardware store owner wrote Attorney General Francis Biddle, imploring, “The good people of this county are sacrificing for the cause of America’s freedom but have lost their freedom at home. Both parties have lost the freedom of the ballot box, a dictatorship has been set up, the county treasury is being raided at the expense of the taxpayers, and the good people of this county would like to sell their property and move away. Your department is our last line of defense. Please, for God’s sake come to the rescue of a helpless people.”
The (typical) response from the federal government:
The Department of Justice compiled a report, observing that “the alleged violations in McMinn County were the worst ever brought to the attention of the Department of Justice.” Despite overwhelming evidence and continuing petitions, the Feds took no action. A separate ouster lawsuit against McMinn election commissioners was finally tried by the Assistant Attorney General, largely due to the fact that the U.S. Attorney and the two U.S. Senators who had recommended him were believed to be associated with the machine, but this case was held before a judge who was also rumored to be a part of the organization. The judge dismissed most of the charges and fined the men one penny for the charges that stuck.
At the end of the day, when corruption comes local, y’all will have to be ready yourself, because:
In this case, the returning vets had skin in the game, they had been fighting for freedom and was horrified at what they came home to and decided that the first recourse was political:
.. another veteran said, “It wasn’t really a town anymore. It was a jail.” Another GI deplored the deputies, who “were nothing but a lot of swaggering, strutting, storm-troopers, drunk most of the time, beating up our citizens for the slightest reason.” Yet another observed that “if you were on the right team, why, you could get away with almost anything. If you were on the wrong team, you couldn’t get away with anything.” This should all sound all too familiar for us today.
When Cantrell announced that he was returning to Athens to “run” for Sheriff, Mansfield his handpicked successor to the State Senate seat, the GIs knew that now was the time to take action. Despite having been warned to stay away from the polls and to not even consider running for office, the veterans began organizing. As one of the soldiers put it, “We just got plain tired of being pushed around by a bunch of thugs.”
Politics however was in the back pocket of the county’s thugs, but the process brought about public relations that allowed the people to know someone was trying to save them. The Republican party was actually honorable enough to give the GIs a shot at the offices up for election:
The local Republican Party resolved to officially endorse the veterans’ ticket instead of running its own candidates; after seconding the motion in favor of the resolution, one party official delivered an excellent summation: “We are involved in a conflict with desperate enemies who have sought to subject us to tyranny and oppression…We feel a deep sense of obligation and now seek in measure to repay…Young men who have fought against oppression abroad will continue that fight for honesty and decency at home.”
However, those in power do not concede it easily, if at all:
Election Day had finally arrived. A local minister exhorted his congregation thus: “If you do not vote as your conscience dictates, then you have sold your citizenship and do not deserve to be citizens. It is the responsibility of each and every person to preserve our most cherished possession, liberty, or forever lose it.” Armed deputies “guarded” each polling place, and reports of election fraud poured in to GI headquarters almost immediately. One veteran lamented, “They already started knocking our boys in the head and putting them in jail. They’re taking this thing… At one polling place, a deputy beat and shot a sixty-year-old whose only crime had been his surplus of gumption in exercising his right to vote. Meanwhile, another deputy delivered a brutal beating to a GI election judge after he protested the brazen voter fraud happening before his eyes; the deputy tried to draw his gun, and likely would have killed the veteran, but it snagged in his holster. When he had exhausted himself, he had the man dragged to the jail bloody and insensate.
By this time, DeRose notes, “there were twelve ballot boxes: one in the jail, another inside a heavily defended courthouse, a third barricaded in the Dixie Café, a fourth in the vault in the Cantrell Bank Building, and poll watchers had been ejected at two other locations.” Inside the courthouse, deputies held a handful of GI poll watchers hostage, two of them wounded.
The powerful WILL turn to violence to keep power. Keep that in mind people of California, New York State, Michigan and other states in between! Just know, at the right time when that line is crossed, one may have to fight fire with fire:
Do you know what your rights are supposed to be? How many rights have you got left? None! Not even the right to vote in a free election. When you lose that, you’ve lost everything. And you are damned well going to lose it unless you fight and fight the only way they understand. Fire with fire! We’ve got to make this an honest election because we promised the people that if they voted it would be an honest election. And it’s going to be. But only if we see that it is. We are going to have to run these organized criminals out of town, and we can do it if we stick together. Are you afraid of them? Why, I could take a banana stalk and run every one of these potbellied draft dodgers across Depot Hill. Get the hell out of here and get something to shoot with. And come back as fast as you can. – Bill White
Inspired by White, the veterans fanned out to procure all of the weapons and ammunition that they could. They returned with an arsenal of pistols, rifles, shotguns, squirrel guns, and European souvenirs like a German Mauser. White still wasn’t satisfied: “We need some more firepower.” A group got together to raid the nearby National Guard armory, where they found revolvers, a Thompson sub-machine gun, an array of .30-caliber M1917 rifles, and plenty of ammunition. For good measure, one man drove to his hunting lodge in Asheville to collect his stash of ammunition. DeRose describes the scene well: “They draped themselves with bandoliers of bullets, took everything they could carry, and drove back to town.”
Things were about to get real, but a noble cause does sometimes require violence, sometimes more than turning tables over in a temple!
He had sworn to defend America against all of her enemies, and he meant to satisfy his vow. Later, White would explain that “if it was worth going over there and risking your life, laying it down, it was worth it here, too. So, we decided to fight.” The GIs set out, ready for action. They formed a line on a hillside across from the jail and demanded that the machine men bring out the ballot boxes. From the jail, someone called, “You’re going to have to come get them.” The GIs answered that that’s exactly what they would do. Someone else inside the jail shouted, “Why don’t you call the law?” A GI delivered the rejoinder: “There ain’t no damn law in McMinn County!” According to Byrum, the first fire was a shotgun blast from inside the jail; in any case, gunfire erupted.
Flashes pierced the night, both sides keeping up a sustained assault on one another. Athens, DeRose writes, “rattled to the roar of Tommy-guns, rifles, and pistols” and the “blunt blast of shotguns mingled with the sharper crack of rifles and the whine of ricochets.” The GIs, under the ceaseless torrent of bullets, climbed rooftops to take positions atop a ring of buildings encircling the jail. In the streets, the veterans further hemmed in the crossfire, firing from behind walls and parked cars. The soldiers shot out the transformer that supplied the jail, Byrum notes, “leaving the deputies not only low on ammunition but with the difficult task of groping around trying to load guns in the dark.”
With the National Guard on the way, White and his men stepped it up:
After receiving news that the National Guard had been mobilized, the GIs asked White what they should do. He replied immediately, vowing, “We’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to keep shooting here until we get those ballot boxes and get those people out of there.” Running out of time, they realized that they needed to pick things up. One of the veterans reminded Bill that there was an enormous stockpile of dynamite in the old county barn that the county used to clear roads and blast stumps and stones. The dynamite procured, the GIs commenced tossing dynamite in increasing amounts at the jail, aiming closer and closer with each throw, finally promising that the next would be through the window. This last threat was followed by the veterans’ ultimate volley. The machine men, outgunned and out of ammunition, surrendered, and the deputies marched out one after another, their hands held high in supplication to their victorious conquerors. A swollen crowd of townspeople cheered.
Unlike most insurrections and revolutions, this one was not followed by another team in power that sought to intimidate to maintain their position:
“They realize [that] they have taken a serious step, but do not interpret their action as [having taken] the law into their own hands. Rather, they say [that] they just put the law back in the hands of the people.”
Now that is honorable and principle-based.
On August 1, 1946, a group of Southern World War Two veterans in Athens, Tennessee, fought and won the only successful armed insurrection in the United States since the War of Independence.
May a grassroots growth of liberty and freedom-minded men and women set about to repair this land from the local and up in the weeks and months to come. Regardless if the USA remains a union is not important. The most important aspect is what these GIs fought for in Athens, TN in 1946.
I am sure this title caught your eye. The point is that rebellion is actually GOOD once in a while. Personally, teenage rebellion is good as well, otherwise the teenager stays in one’s basement for decades and no honorable person, parent or child, wants that long term. Allowing and encouraging these young adults to “be all that they can be” is a most honorable path I would think.
Countries and cultures are similar in that there comes a time when going separate ways brings out the best for all parties.
Thomas Jefferson was one that spoke to the benefits of rebellion:
God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.- Thomas Jefferson (1787)
Rebellion is a warning shot that liberties have been violated. This is an honorable recourse when peaceful approaches have been ignored time and again. Liberty can grow in the way that the American Revolution’s conclusion was conducted, not so much how the French Revolution was conducted.
If the 1776 rebellion was honorable, why not the 1860/1861 rebellion? What might help to set the context is to compare the presidential inaugural addresses of both President Lincoln and President Davis.
Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural Address 04MAR1861
Lincoln made the strongest case ever in the defense of Southern slavery even supporting its enshrinement in the text of the constitution to be a perpetual right but on the issue of tax collections he would definitely go to war to enforce the newly doubled federal tariff.
Davis defined the South as an international trading community that sought free trade with the world and promised to resort to the sword if the North were to invade to put an end to the Confederacy’s free trade policy.
Davis also set the context for the formation of an agent to work on the principle’s (13 sovereign states) behalf when he said:
The declared purpose of the compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity
He continued on why the seven states had voted to leave such a Union:
When in the judgement of the sovereign states now composing this Confederacy, it had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and it ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot box declared that so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely asserted a right that the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable .. they, as sovereigns, were the final judges, each for itself ..
What few people know is that this man was so honorable and such a Unionist up until his home state of Mississippi seceded, that his logic, actions and words were honorable to their core.
So what do we do with men like this after a War for Southern Independence is fought and lost? We honor honorable men of that day by naming military forts after them, even when they in the end were not victorious in securing an independent country against a country who secured a victory in less than honorable means.
Walter E. Williams addresses this in his article at Lew Rockwell today. He lays the groundwork as to why we have forts in the US today that bear the name of honorable Confederate generals who were fighting for their homes and families against a tyrant who violated the US Constitution left and right.
Walter addresses a statement made by an ignorant military man, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee arguing in favor of renaming Confederate named military bases:
The Confederacy, the American Civil War, was fought, and it was an act of rebellion. It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the U.S. Constitution.
Ignorance knows no bounds, as I pointed out yesterday that Lincoln himself was the one that acted treasonous and also acted violently against the US Constitution. The Southern state’s secession was NOT an act of treason, even if your feelings and emotions convince you and Gen. Mark Milley that way. He needs to find a safe space, and by renaming these forts I do hope he feels better soon.
But I digress ..
Walter E. Williams starts with context of the union in the first place:
Let’s start at the beginning, namely the American War of Independence (1775-1783), a war between Great Britain and its 13 colonies, which declared independence in July 1776. The peace agreement that ended the war is known as the Treaty of Paris signed by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay and Henry Laurens and by British Commissioner Richard Oswald, on Sept. 3, 1783. Article I of the Treaty held that “New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and Independent States.”
This fact is something that Lincoln himself ignored to retain his narrative that the “Union” preceded the states, which then dovetails into his own personal thought that the states should have asked permission of all the other states before leaving.
Walter continues:
Delegates from these states met in Philadelphia in 1787 to form a union. During the Philadelphia convention, a proposal was made to permit the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, rejected it. Minutes from the debate paraphrased his opinion: “A union of the states containing such an ingredient (would) provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”
The fact that Lincoln never acknowledged the states as having seceded, left him with the complicated aspect that he actually violated the principle above, that his making war on states still in the union meant the compact was in fact dissolved. He wanted to ask for the “divorce”, he did NOT want the spouse(s) to have that status!
With this thought, that each of the sovereign states would voluntarily join this union one at a time, each state also understood that they each could voluntarily leave this union.
During the ratification debates, Virginia’s delegates said, “The powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” The ratification documents of New York and Rhode Island expressed similar sentiments; namely, they held the right to dissolve their relationship with the United States.
Note that northern states also expressed interest in the ability to exit. Only 16 years later, there was talk of that from that section of the federation:
Many New Englanders were infuriated by President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which they saw as an unconstitutional act. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who was George Washington’s secretary of war and secretary of state, led the movement. He said, “The Eastern states must and will dissolve the union and form a separate government.” Other prominent Americans such as John Quincy Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Fisher Ames, Josiah Quincy III and Joseph Story shared his call for secession.
Sparking secession talk again was the War of 1812 that hurt the New England commerce the most, rekindling this viable option:
While the New England secessionist movement was strong, it failed to garner support at the 1814-15 Hartford Convention.
By early 1861, many Northern government officials and presses were well aware of the dangers of not allowing an honorable rebellion to take place and voiced such before Lincoln took action to send armed reinforcements to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor:
Rep. Jacob M. Kunkel of Maryland said, “Any attempt to preserve the union between the states of this Confederacy by force would be impractical and destructive of republican liberty.”
New-York Tribune (Feb. 5, 1860): “If tyranny and despotism justified the Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.”
The Detroit Free Press (Feb. 19, 1861): “An attempt to subjugate the seceded States, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil — evil unmitigated in character and appalling in extent.”
The New-York Times (March 21, 1861): “There is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.”
Walter summarizes this so well in saying:
Confederate generals fought for independence from the Union just as George Washington fought for independence from Great Britain. Those who label Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals as traitors might also label George Washington a traitor. Great Britain’s King George III and the British parliament would have agreed.
Spot on Walter, you rock as an 80-something!
Named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg, who had previously served in the United States Army in the Mexican-American War.
Should the ten forts named after Confederate officers be renamed? No. But it seems that stupid people with a lot of feelings now rule. While the name of a fort does not do anything physically, it is a part of the culture cleansing going of to remove whatever is left of this country’s honorable past.
In my mind, the past was already being erased a little at a time over the last 100+ years. I think it is the shear momentum of this now that has many feeling that it is over the top and openly wondering when if ever will it stop.
Honestly, can we start talking secession now, or is it too early yet? Asking for a friend.
After a month away from this blog, I looked back at my last thoughts on this attempt by politics to hijack this virus scare:
Will our existing political class figure this out? Not a chance.
Will voting help? Not a chance.
The US still has the USPS and Amtrak, if they can be trusted with little things, you can safely say they can’t be trusted with MAJOR things.
This nation will have to split into many smaller republics before any of this can be addressed.
Whoever can be trusted with smallthings can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. – Luke 16:10 (Bible)
Is there any doubt by those that can critically think that our political apparatus from DC to the state’s governors and to the large (and small) city mayors are not full of want-to-be tyrants and sociopaths? When one follows the money, it gets even more immoral as the political class (BOTH sides of the so-called aisle) want to be re-elected so bad that they were all willing to place a big old pacifier in the mouths of millions of let go workers so that 65% or more would receive more weekly income than they had prior to this crisis. This is indeed immoral since to entice people to sit on their couches in their homes in time will lead to lives without any purpose. Life on the government plantation has ruined other cultures like the American Indian and the African American groups in the USA. This is how you emasculate the male population towards a purposeless life as government becomes both nanny and daddy.
But I digress. We should be in better position today to see the federal and state governments for what they really are. This “union” has been poisoned for some time. In fits and starts one can see how the federal government opted to be the “safety net”, like somehow a “neutral” entity could care for our communities and societies better than the locals could. That this safety net could extend to big business so that there was no risk in forgoing savings and instead buy back stock shares to prop up the stock prices. So whether this is individual or corporate welfare, both are immoral as one robs some people of their money and uses it to its own agenda’s purpose picking winners and losers in the marketplace as well as in towns and cities and farms across this land.
The southern states endured the reallocation of their taxed and tariff-ed economies from at least the War of 1812 up until the so-called Civil War (War Against Southern Independence). The South attempted to be “above-board” with their last ditch effort to save themselves from economic ruin by legally seceding (at first only 7 states) from this “union” (marriage). But Lincoln would not have his cash cow as a next-door free-trade zone, so he labeled it an “insurrection” and used George Washington’s illegal put down of the Whiskey Rebellion (25% tax thanks to Alexander Hamilton, so how bad was King George for wanting 3%?) as a template for saving the union.
This HAS to sound familiar right? The whole US government (in parallel to so many other governments) is trying to “save” us from Covid-19 while actually killing society and communities in the process. From 1861-1865 the “union” lost about 800,000 lives. What will the final death count be for the Covid-19 response by 2024 when the unintended consequences of good intentions has run its course with suicides, PTSD, mental health issues from the economic fallout AFTER the unemployment checks run out (now slated for 31JUL2020 but many want this extended to 31DEC2020)?
Smaller republics are the only answer that makes sense. Not existing state lines, although that would be a start, but republics that have like-minded people geographically grouped so that government reach can be minimized for liberty folks and maximized for totalitarian minded folks.
Reflecting on the course of what the southern states sailed can be very helpful. Sure they were not perfect and should have jettisoned chattel slavery at the very start (although this would have upset both white and black slaveholders) and compensating these owners with hard currency.
Consider what the Confederate government learned in the 80 years under the US Constitution.
That unlike the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation which BOTH had God, our Creator, as whom we derived our natural rights from, the US Constitution written in 1787 failed to give such indication as its North Star
That the US Constitution failed to protect the people from the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act that made it a crime to criticize the US Government.
That the US Constitution failed to protect various regions of the land from the plundering ambitions of other region’s agenda and greed.
That the US Constitution’s Supreme Court hijacked the ability of the states to determine which laws were unconstitutional.
It is the last point that is highlighted in this article from Abbeville Institite here. I do think it is the proper time to consider what real justice is these days and know how much a failure this a-political Supreme Court has been.
Although the Court would increasingly try to narrow the realm of States Rights, Madison [author of the US Constitution] denied that “the Federal judiciary” was the ultimate judge of such limits because it was the people of the states themselves who were the final authority.
It was in fact the US Government’s (called General government in those days, now labeled the Federal Government) over-reach that set-off a push back politically:
The conflict became obvious when President John Adams pushed through the 1798 Sedition Act, making it a crime to speak ill of the President or Congress. Since it was harshly enforced for some of the mildest criticisms, strict constructionists respond. Among them was future President James Madison who is known as the Father of the Constitution. He denied that the Supreme Court was the ultimate authority on States Rights. This can be seen from the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions he helped write with Thomas Jefferson condemning the Sedition Act as unconstitutional.
Jefferson’s presidential victory in 1800 guaranteed that the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act would be eliminated, but by 1833 things were simmering again. By this stage of the republic’s life the South was losing its position as being a strong entity within this federation and saw New England culture and character make huge inroads into the federal government’s choosing of winners (railroads, canals and the steel industry) over losers in the marketplace:
Calhoun would build upon the Resolutions to formulate his nullification theory that South Carolina invoked in 1833 to nullify the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. Calhoun argued that the tariff was not uniform in terms of geographic economic impact and therefore unconstitutional. When the Federal Government crossed over constitutional lines, a state could take action as the final authority of constitutionality in its borders, not the Supreme Court. All states could only be forced to conform to such a law by passing a new amendment specifically making it constitutional.
This “one-size-fits-all” approach (sound familiar?) is a recipe for disaster, for just as all individuals are different, so too are the states.
The Supreme Court early on made a huge mistake that made it necessary to add an 11th amendment in 1795 when the US Constitution was less than ten years old:
When a 1793 Supreme Court ruling held the state of Georgia at fault in a suit brought by a South Carolina resident, Georgia denied the Court’s jurisdiction. After the adverse ruling ten other states joined Georgia to ratify a new (11th) Amendment specifying that individuals outside an applicable state could not sue that state without the state’s permission. The Amendment’s prompt ratification indicates a widespread belief that the Court was unexpectedly and quickly overstepping its authority.
Now you know why the Confederate government opted NOT to have a supreme court at least initially. Lesson learned.
Now it is our turn to learn from history and push for a government that is more commensurate to the people’s desire of liberty, freedom and self responsibility .. at least in certain geographical regions of this land we call America.
