Category: War Against Southern Independence

Roots: What Are We as Individuals and Community At Our Core? Honorable?

As I read the headlines that 99% of Americans do not see, those from independent and grassroots media, across the Internet, I find a search for several things from all angles across the globe. I find words like honor, freedom, faith and reason all being bantered about as we humans attempt to make sense of this broken world.

On the one hand, we have people looking back in our broken (and sometimes covered up) history. For example, Karen Stokes writes of the type of person typical of areas of the southern USA in 1863 under the stress of war that threatened their families and their livelihood:

.. their letters also offer an inspiring story of “devotion to home, family solidarity, faith, virtue, fidelity, sacrifice, bravery, and a strength of character that makes it possible to survive terrible loss and trauma.

The character to stand up to tyranny when ones own family and way of life could be swept away like that of Job in the Old Testament of the Bible is something that was not seen in these united States since the War for Independence 80 years earlier when the same kind of people stood up to the British Empire.

A man or woman of honor were people, who in times of crisis, rose to the occasion and became unwilling leaders in their efforts to repel the forces of change that represented a foe who’s agenda was to implement their own life view on others, with force. Honor was a sought after attribute especially in the South in the decades after the War for Independence, and by the 1930s had all been but overshadowed by something new:

Earlier in the 1930s, the celebrated English writer and critic G. K. Chesterton gave his thoughts on what the “Old South” had to offer the world in his essay “On America,” in which he asserted that, although the twentieth century was the “Age of America,” there was “a virtue lacking in the age, for want of which it will certainly suffer and possibly fail.”

That missing virtue, according to Chesterton, was honor.

The Age of America emerged from the post-“Civil War” north’s view that its own victory over the South was a moral one. All one has to do is to count the atrocities and scandals in the decades that followed until the Northern GOP was forced to finally let the South go in the late 1870s, removing them from military districts and allowing them to go it alone to recover economically. It would not be until the 1970s that most of these states did recover, without much if any federal assistance. That is not honorable.

Lately, there has been yet another underground effort to capture the essence of what the history of the South could help us in the 21st century understand about the core of human nature in a world that seems out of control and bent on destroying us:

in his book Why America Failed (2012), cultural historian Morris Berman expressed similar sentiments, characterizing the antebellum South as a culture focused on “honor and community,” and further stating, “In its flawed and tragic way, the Old South stood for values that we finally cannot live without if we are to remain human.”

It does seem that hope and encouragement are sorely needed at this time in this world. Personally I take solace in reading what the 1st century Jesus-followers did as they faced persecution and yet stood with honor, grace and defended their families against all odds, with the strange by-product of having Jesus’ words ripple throughout the Roman Empire in such a way as to turn the then known world upside-down!

So in 1939, as the threat of another world war was evident, a book was offered in an attempt to give some hope from a more secular view:

What does the South have to offer that is valuable to humanity, to civilization? In 1939, the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Douglas Southall Freeman proposed an answer to this question in his book ‘The South to Posterity’ ..

.. He maintained that these works of historical literature would always stand as solid evidence that the South had “fought its fight gallantly, and, so far as war ever permits, with fairness and decency; that it endured its hardships with fortitude; that it wrought its hard recovery through uncomplaining toil, and that it gave to the nation the inspiration of personalities, humble and exalted, who met a supreme test and did not falter.”

The core of his book centers around the real war-time correspondence letters of Alexander Cheves Haskell, one of seven brothers who fought in the War Against Southern Independence:

In ‘The South to Posterity’, one man whose story Douglas Southall Freeman offered as testimony to the “court of time” was a young Confederate cavalry officer from South Carolina, Alexander Cheves Haskell. Freeman had recently read a biography of Haskell which drew heavily on his memoir and correspondence, and he singled out a letter Haskell penned in 1863 as among the finest examples of “the war-time correspondence of high souls” and “one of the most beautiful born of war.” Freeman included only a portion of this letter in his book, but all of Haskell’s wartime letters have finally been collected and published as part of his family’s correspondence in my new book An Everlasting Circle: Letters of the Haskell Family of Abbeville, South Carolina, 1861-1865.

An Everlasting Circle includes many outstanding letters written by a remarkable and prominent family that sent seven sons to war. Dr. James E. Kibler has contributed an excellent afterword to the book that comments on the literary value of the letters and the kind of civilization that could produce a family like the Haskells. It was a civilization shaped by classical learning and orthodox Christianity.

Beyond this article, others like Bionic Mosquito, has taken sights off the distractions of today’s world and centered on the core of what each generation needs to grapple with, the tension between reason and faith:

As God is the author of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, why would any Christian agree to live with such distinctions? It seems reasonable to suggest that one reason Christianity has lost its way (and has lost many in the West) is precisely because Christian leaders have accepted and even emphasized this difference. “Oh, you just have to believe by faith; don’t ask questions.” This is too often heard.

It is interesting that non-Christian intellectuals are making this connection once again. I am thinking of Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke. It is also interesting that this has led to an increase in interest in Christianity – although I think neither of these two have ever intended to increase church attendance.

It is the case: God moves in mysterious ways….

Yes, that last quote is a teaser. You will have to go look around Bionic’s site to see the path he has traveled in his quest for truth. I may have to post about some of his works this year. He has done a great service for those around the globe who are starting to see all the government and media lies and are desperately searching for truth.

Stay tuned!

-SF1

21JUL1861 – 1st Bull Run/1st Battle Manassas Battlefield “Spring Hill Farm”

Spring Hill Farm main home after 21JUL1861

Tucked in the Virginia farmland only 30 miles west of Washington DC was the Spring Hill Farm (today called Henry Hill), a generally neglected land containing an orchard and a small garden, that was home to Judith Henry.

Judith was 84 years old and bedridden, on this farm that had been in the Henry family since before the American Revolution. Along with Judith was her daughter Ellen and a hired teenage slave Lucy Griffith. It was common practice for owners of large tracts of lands with many slaves to hire out some of their slaves to others in the vicinity.

The context can be summed up as a spurned spouse turned abuser on the former partner who desired to leave the marriage that both had entered voluntary into back in 1781 and again in 1787. There were official reasons (should the courts be considered) and unofficial reasons for the separation with the intention of divorce.

It was just a few months before in the spring of 1861 that Virginia and North Carolina had voted to stay in the Union. If the Republicans had opted for a peaceful negotiations with the seven states that had seceded, this battle would not have been necessary.

A further enlightenment is necessary to understand that Lincoln was not patient when it came to the seven states that had seceded, as pointed out by John V. Denson in a 2006 article:

… on April 4, 1861, before the start of the war on April 12, the Secession Convention in Virginia, which had convened in February of 1861, sent a delegate to visit President Lincoln in the White House to discuss the results of the action recently taken in Virginia. When the State of Virginia originally voted on its ratification ordinance approving the U.S. Constitution, it contained a specific clause protecting their right to secede in the future. The delegate was Colonel John B. Baldwin, who was a strong opponent of secession by Virginia, although he recognized the right. His message communicated privately to the president on April 4, was that the convention had voted not to secede if President Lincoln would issue a written pledge to refrain from the use of force in order to get the seceded states back into the Union. President Lincoln told Colonel Baldwin that it was four days too late now to take that action. Unknown to all except a few insiders of the administration, meaning that members of the Congress did not know, the president had already issued secret orders on April 1, to send a fleet of ships to Fort Sumter in order to provoke the South into firing the first shot in order to start the war.

President Lincoln had been in office less than a month before aggressively deciding to opt for the “nuclear” option. This is the same man that had said the following in the late 1840s:

“…Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better ..”

In addition to this, President Lincoln indicated that his primary concern was for the “Union” to be preserved, like a forever marriage.

This dovetails into what Lincoln said during the 04APR1861 visit:

Lincoln stated that he could not wait until the seceded states decided what to do and added:

“But what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery? Am I to let them go on?”

Baldwin replied:

“Yes sir, until they can be peaceably brought back.”

Lincoln then replied:

“And open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry, with their ten percent tariff . . .” (as opposed to the much higher forty percent Federal tariff). “What then would become of my tariff?”

So with a naval forces on its way to Charleston (Fort Sumter) and Pensacola (Fort Pickens) to instigate a first shot, Lincoln basically said “his way or the highway”.

The less known story of Fort Pickens included a Lieutenant Slemmer, like Major Anderson, who felt his position on the mainland, as well as that at nearby Fort McRee and the Pensacola Navy Yard, would be difficult to defend in the event of a full-scale attack, and he moved his troops and thirty sailors from the Navy Yard to the stronger, and then unoccupied, Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola Bay.

You may recall that Major Anderson also moved his troops from Fort Moultrie (on the mainland) to an uncompleted and unoccupied Fort Sumter under the cover of night just after Christmas 1860. This was AFTER a gentleman’s agreement had been made that indicated that all forces in Charleston Harbor, both Union and Confederate, would honor the status quo to allow peace negotiations to take place instead of hostilities.

On 15JAN1861, Colonel Chase went to Fort Pickens, a facility he had helped design and build while a captain in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, and made an unsuccessful demand for the fort’s surrender. A few days later, General Scott gave confidential orders that a contingent of Regular Army troops under the command of Captain Israel Vogdes of the First Artillery Regiment, a former professor of mathematics at West Point, be sent to Fort Pickens aboard the twenty-one gun sloop of war “U. S. S. Brooklyn”

On 04MAR1861 Lincoln was sworn into office and on 12MAR1861 secret orders were sent to Captain Vogdes by General Scott and Navy Secretary Gideon Wells that his troops were to be immediately put ashore at Fort Pickens. This action was actually carried out on 11APR1861 the day BEFORE Fort Sumter was fired upon by the Confederates.

President Lincoln in no way entertained anything but a war answer to the legal secession of seven states. His actions after Fort Sumter, where no deaths occurred during the bombardment, mandated a continued war footing.

While two men were killed manning the cannon during the 14APR1861 ceremony (see below), many, many more would follow, almost 750,000!

The terms of surrender allowed Anderson to perform a 100-gun salute before he and his men evacuated the fort the next day. The salute began at 2:00 P.M. on April 14, but was cut short to 50 guns after an accidental explosion killed one of the gunners, Pvt. Daniel Hough, and mortally wounded another.

On 15APR1861, President Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteers from the remaining states for 90-day service. This knee-jerk reaction caused a re-vote for secession in four more states including Virginia on 17APR1861 where Judith Henry lived.

The president of the United States asking the Virginia commonwealth to provide 2,340 troops to potentially march on South Carolina? Virginia says NO, South Carolinians are their ‘brothers’. Virginia will not take up arms against South Carolina, and Virginia knew South Carolina would not invade Virginia!

President Lincoln refused to call Congress into secession until 04JUL1861 to allow the military ramp-up to continue unimpeded so that Congress had little to decide but to back Lincoln’s war on the south-land.

Union forces numbering over 35,000 under Union General McDowell proceeded to invade Virginia from the area around Washington DC. Also joining the event were spectators who came out the 30 miles to watch these armies battle each other while having a picnic.

Confederate forces of 20,000 under General P.G.T. Beauregard from Richmond, VA combined with 12,000 under General Joseph E. Johnston who withdrew from the Shenandoah Valley unnoticed, boarded trains and arrived near Bull Run on 21JUL1861:

Union artillery assumed that the Spring Hill farmhouse was vacant and fired on that structure in an effort to disperse Confederate sharpshooters:

The 84 year old Judith Henry is the first (and definitely not the last) civilian casualty of this war. She is buried out in front of her house.

The peak of the battle occurred at 3pm as the Confederate reserves helped turn the tide sending the Union forces and civilian onlookers scurrying back to Washington DC.

Bull Run Battle App – First Manassas – July 21, 1861

General Bernard Bee (CSA) made an observation of how General Thomas Jackson’s troops were doing in the field and gave Jackson his new nickname, “Stonewall”:

If you ever have the opportunity to visit this battlefield 30 miles west of Washington DC, technology can guide you as you walk the grounds, even showing you where you are while on the battlefield in real time. This app is available in both the Apple and Google Play stores.

I highly recommend taking the time to explore this first major large scale military engagement in the Union’s War Against Southern Independence.

-SF1

Confederate cannon line

Total War and Unconditional Surrender: America’s Export to the World

If one were to believe the history books, the American Experience and Exceptionalism shone bright and clear from the effort and success to leave the British Empire to the rescue of Europe in WWI and WWII. Actual history shows that our exceptional export of ideas and character were not a rosy as the history books might paint.

There was a way that nations fought from the 1600s and into the 1700s that had been influenced by both Christianity as well as those who understood that war happened when politics failed, which meant that the people in general were caught in the middle of various power struggles in Europe. The American Revolution was fought mainly around large population centers usually having armies square up to each other in open fields and having at it. There were exceptions on both sides where military leaders like Banastre Tarleton and even some patriot militia would discard honorable warfare to achieve short-term military objectives, but in the end those tactics had their own “blowback”. The civilian sentiment played an important role in the way the effort for independence of each of the 13 states would play out before the British grew tired of the conflict and costs.

Even the War of 1812 was fought this way and the treaty signed a few years later involved both parties at the negotiation table just like what they did in Paris in 1783 after the American Revolutionary War. Once again, principles, honorable principles prevailed even when warfare was “in session”.

The War Against Southern Independence (called the American Civil War in US government history books) unveiled the inherit evil that is at the core of humans in a broken world. Driven by desperation, principles are cast aside in the effort to short-cut to a desired outcome.

The truth be known, the seven states that seceded actually took the high ground in formulating their reason for divorce with the federation. They knew that the US Constitution, the law of the land, was to be central in their rationale in desiring to exit, just like the 13 colonies did with England 80 years prior. Lawyer speak made these documents stress the way the slavery issue made the separation a necessity. The Constitution had allowed chattel slavery, and so the seven southern states made their case based on this “issue”.

In reality, the main issue was financial and economic in nature, but to prove that based on the Constitution would have been a tough fight. The southern region in general was the wealthiest in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was penned but by 1860 this region had seen their power be eclipsed by the North and the West (existing Midwest). Tariff revenue sources were a hot issue since the South bore the brunt of that expense. Additionally, this revenue funded not only the general government but also internal improvements, mainly in the northern states. Also, industries like the railroad and steel industry received corporate welfare at the expense of the southern businessmen. Additionally, southern plantations were financed by the Northeast elite bankers and until 1808 these same businessmen supplied the slave ships that would transport blacks rounded up by other blacks on the African continent to the United States and other areas in the Caribbean after it was illegal to do so in the US. The southern chattel slavery economic profitability was on the downward trend as most economists expected maybe 5-10 years left in this business model.

It should also be noted once more that Lincoln offered the seven southern states “perpetual legal slavery” via the proposed 13th amendment (Corwin Amendment) if they re-entered the union. Not one state considered that. They really wanted independence and all the risks that entailed instead of a continued marriage to the northern states. Even if it meant that run-away slaves making their way to the United States (all but those seven states that seceded) would indeed be free and not be required by law to be returned as the Fugitive Slave Act mandated. Most people in the North did NOT want ex-slaves fleeing north to take the lowest paying jobs, as even Lincoln feared this.

With that long introduction and setting of context, there was an article that brought to light (for me anyway) what this internal conflict offered to the world. A clip from it said:

So in a very literal sense the Civil War was the first World War. It not only created a powerful nation of organized resources and potential military might, but the greater world wars took their pattern from the American one, even to the trench system Lee set up at Petersburg .. What this country brought to Europe was unconditional surrender. The actual phrase was used by Roosevelt in the Second World War, but it was not his phrase. Grant had delivered it to the Confederate Command at Fort Donelson in February, 1862. Its implication is total surrender or total destruction, or slavery, or whatever. A strange alternative to be delivered by one Christian state to another; and yet it had precedent in Sherman’s harrying the lands of Mississippi and Georgia ..

U.S. (Unconditional Surrender) Grant or William Tecumseh (Total War) Sherman transitioned warfare to not only be brutal for military personnel and civilians in proximity, but also back to the way pre-Christian influenced empires operated, the slaughtering/slaving of the people in conquered lands.

The nineteenth century abandoned God officially, and the faith of Christian communicants was absorbed into the powerful western will; and this will set out, openly at last, to know and control not only nature but the universe. In the late stages of any society there is always the aging form and the formlessness of the new pistis, but this is no new faith; it is a perversion of faith, the final and open acceptance of Machiavelli’s science of politics, the politics whose end is absolute power, whose technique is reason without any theological restraint.

The transition from a republic that was a federation of states to a democracy that makes politics a god, will always keep evolving lower and lower in morality as the narcissist leaders practice power over principles.

Sherman said “War is Hell,” and by this he meant total war, openly carried out upon the civil population, with the shrewd understanding that if the source of supply was cut off, the armies would dwindle and perish.

This policy was then brought to the American Indians, then to the Spanish empire after Spain was falsely accused of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba and to the Germans during WWI as well as the failure to include the Germans in the negotiated surrender, treating Germany like the North treated the South after the war with military districts, corrupt politics and the hatred of the people.

Yes, this part of the American “Exceptionalism” is rarely taught in schools or even in “approved” books. I would rather have American history taught in books like the authors of the Bible described the events of the Hebrew people, the nation Israel and the leaders of Jesus’ day .. communicating the good, the bad and the ugly.

Truth.

Truth-seekers these days have to expend a lot of effort to mine the accounts of days gone by, but it is written that “the truth shall set you free”

-SF1

 

 

Collateral Damage: Can We Make Civilians Spectators Again? Probably Not

I am fully aware that the term “collateral damage” as used by the US Empire refers to the “unfortunate” death of innocent civilians as a result of “pre-war” sanctions. The most popular clip on the Internet is Secretary of State Madeline Albright being interviewed about the 500,000 children that died as a result of sanctions on Iraq between Gulf War I and II:

The reason I ‘air-quote’ the term pre-war is that in all reality, sanctions themselves are an act of war, even though it is on the economic variety. While there are no guns used, there is force used to ensure that the economic activity sanctioned actually does not take place, and that is indeed backed by guns. It is both coercion and violence-based. The state dictates that peaceful trade can not take place and its edicts will be followed, as the consequences to any business is well known. No business can go rogue in the sanction war.

Truth be told, we in the US on the domestic front are again close to having personal conversation scrutinized for words of support towards these sanctioned countries filled with people who desire peaceful trade with American citizens. If one supports Palestinian people, one is assumed to be anti-Semitic, if one supports Russian people, one is assumed to be a Russian-bot.

There was a time when war’s harm toward civilians caught in the crossfire was recognized and attempts were made toward international rules that safeguarded citizens as much as possible from the political conflicts that broke out across the world. By the 1700s in fact, this was the norm, which is why there was such disgust when British dragoon leader Banastre Tarleton would kill both the wounded enemy as well as civilians that appeared to “aid the enemy”.

By the time seven states decided to leave the American union in 1861, this norm had not yet changed. Most of the civilized world’s battles took place on the outskirts of cities.

From an article written by one who has seen war with his own eyes since Vietnam, Tom’s Dispatch writes about this time period:

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas). “On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times. “The spectators were all excited, and a lady with an opera glass who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood — ‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

Yes, a picnic lunch adjacent to a large battle. You now know how everyone assumed that civilians would not be targeted. People in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya pretty much know the opposite is true with the US Empire in the 21st century.

Reflecting back once more:

That woman would be sorely disappointed. U.S. forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a rout of the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.

By in large, the southern armies were driven by principles. The leadership time and again desired to spare the civilian population of the havoc of war. When Robert E. Lee’s army invaded the northern states of Maryland and Pennsylvania, his men were under strict orders NOT to help themselves to the resources of these civilians but rely on their own supplies. This was even apparent at the end of the war in 1865 when a hungry, tired and destitute southern army under Robert E. Lee retreated from Richmond and came across a rare cow in the countryside. Robert E. Lee directed his hungry men to return that cow to its rightful owner.

We do however know that there were civilian deaths during this internal conflict where one section of the country desired to depart in peace. Tom’s Dispatch explains:

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a U.S. Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First U.S. Artillery, wrote in his official report. “I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.” Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

We know she was not the last to die. Many would die as Union army cut swaths through the south in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Civilian’s fields, silver and homes would not be spared, nor were their personal bodies as many women were raped by the marauding troops from the north. As in many countries in the Middle East today, these atrocities would not soon be forgotten.

Tom’s Dispatch (Nick Turse) continues:

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict — close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

So by 1865 these ratios were starting to change. Civilian deaths are hard to estimate, but you can be assured that military deaths these days are minimal when compared to those of innocent civilians.

In Vietnam, we saw this on black and white TV before the government decided to control more of what the masses would view:

A century later, U.S. troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel ..

Since the 1960s, this trend has only accelerated and has not only produced more of what our own CIA calls “blowback” (I mean, when you blow up funeral processions with drones, you will multiply the number of freedom-fighters, errr I mean “terrorists” in a region) but it also has cause economic and political refugees seeking a better life in other regions of the world. For both the military-industrial complex and politicians, this is actually a win-win for them. How sick is that?

Tom’s Dispatch article winds down by saying:

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims.  Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it — often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

A safer place. I am sure this is what those imprisoned in Gaza feel, or those in Libya near Tripoli these days, or in various areas of Iraq and Afghanistan and even in areas of Syria.

This will probably all “come home to roost” as our foreign policy of intervention and disruption plus regime change causes people to uproot and move. There is always “baggage” involved when violence displaces families.

This all will not end well, nor will this country be exempt from the fallout.

-SF1

Simple Truths: Sometimes Just One Quote Can Launch One on a Research Expedition

Sometimes only a nugget of truth can cause one’s mind and heart to seek out the deeper meanings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

From Clyde Wilson comes this gem:

“there has not been a real opposition party in U.S. politics since Mr. Jefferson sent Colonel Hamilton and His Excellency John Adams heading back north.”

Source: “Annals of the Stupid Party: Republicans Before Trump” by Clyde Wilson

Think about it for a minute. I am sure going back ten or fifteen years almost everyone will lament (maybe only privately) that no matter what party or what president is elected after promising the moon, one always seems to get the same “nothing-burger”.

Well, let’s just say the further you go back in the history of the United States of America, the more you see the two or three parties bringing more of the same to this country, sometime the red team is more “progressive”, sometimes the blue team is, but at the end of the day, the politicians will just politic this nation to its eventual death. There is no major difference in the political parties of 2019, same has been the case since the early 1800s. The two parties are the wings of the same bird!

Another quote I came across that had me thinking:

“A civil war, by denotative or connotative definition, occurs when a faction wishes to overthrow or control an existing government in order to impose its own ideology upon the governed. The Southern states that seceded from the Union had neither the desire nor the plans to take command of the country. They simply wanted to withdraw from it, and arguably, according to even some modern constitutionalists and historians, had a right to do so, based upon the nation’s origins. Virginia, New York and Rhode Island demanded that the right of secession be reserved before they would even agree to the Constitution, thereby implying that secession was indeed a right reserved by individual states.”

Source: “Slavery and The Civil War: What Your History Teacher Didn’t Tell You” by Garry Bowers

It is true, and yet 99% of all Americans think, really do think, that the 1861-1865 conflict was a “civil” war. It is a myth, plain and simple.

So what was it? Well, to be honest, if someone files for divorce, is that ever a reason to be an aggressor on individual as in doing personal harm to him or her? Only psychos will “take out” the other person so “no one else can have him/her”.

To break it down properly, you have to know that EACH state acted independently to weigh the pros and cons of secession. Some state representatives said that exiting the federation was too early, others said it was past time. In the end, from December 1860 until early February 1861, seven sovereign states left the federation and others like North Carolina and Virginia decided to stay in the federation of states.

The very act of leaving verses trying to force seven state’s priorities, beliefs and convictions on the remaining 20+ states, means that they were ready to live and let live. There was zero aggression on the part of the exiting states. Even when these states came together in Montgomery, AL in February 1861, there was never the thought of pushing their agenda on the more northern states or the “union” as a whole.

This was not a civil war. People need to know that. It will become important someday, soon I hope.

Another quote from the same source as above might help convince you of a truth, as you consider whether or not to accept it as such:

“In U.S. official government records, it is known as “The War of the Rebellion.” This title, too, is incorrect. In 1867, none other than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Salmon P. Chase noted, in his declaration that Jefferson Davis (or any other Confederate) could not be tried for treason, that “Secession is not rebellion.”

There you have it. The action in 1860/1861 was the same thing as in 1775, when a year later, in 1776 it was stated:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Please notice that the word “united” is not capitalized. Words and capitalization matters. These were thirteen sovereign states that decided to separate and divorce the British Empire.

Please notice too that the dissolution of the political bands is something that happens in this broken world, and that separate and equal can be better than together and miserable and abused!

This discussion is needed today, in the USA!

If the USSR can do it (break apart into smaller republics), one would think the US, which was born of secession, could do the same. Right?

Just think about it. Research it. Consider it. You don’t have to accept it as truth you know.

-SF1