Tag: society

Face Masks = Fear Masks = Psy-op Courtesy of the CDC

Disclaimer: If you feel the need to wear a face mask .. :

  1. Because you have flu symptoms and desire to keep OTHERS protected (alternatively, you could just isolate yourself)
  2. Because you on the journey towards truth and still trust the CDC over your own research .. (alternatively, you could just isolate yourself, otherwise, please order the most effective* mask on the market above)

* – your mileage may vary, I am not a doctor so this is NOT medical advice as “effective” does not related to physical health but mental health 🙂

.. then fine, go ahead. However, you should know the ramifications of going out in public with your fear, err I mean, face mask on. Allen Stevo from Lew Rockwell’s site explains:

There’s a thing about masked faces. They freak people out. People like seeing the full, healthy, relaxed faces of those around them. Reading faces is one way our primal selves avoid danger. Masked faces increase cortisol. They tell you something is wrong. There’s a reason doctors try to avoid masks during hospital rounds: a face is more comforting to a patient.

Truth. You who proceed to don the fear mask and go into society only helps to drive UP the fear component that the CDC and US Government seems to thrive on to either ..

  1. .. hide their hideous mismanagement of the financial state of the US since 2008, since the 1970s when we went off the gold standard, the 1930s when FDR confiscated gold OR in 1913 when the Federal Reserve was established apparently to squander the value of the USD!
  2. .. or use at this point in time to double down on ensuring the masses understand their slave status on the government plantation, driving 20 million out of work and swell the unemployment roles (weren’t unemployment rates bragged about until the last few months?) and move another subset of society toward dependence on the government, sucking any remaining dignity from their life and having them resolved to just live out their remaining days with no purpose in life. Totalitarianism in general taking either the socialism or Marxism route to Communism. It is just a matter of time once you go down this path.
  3. .. or BOTH!

You see, this kind of psy-op was accomplished almost 20 years ago as well. This is the next generation surrender pose to the one we all have had to do at the airports since 9/11, you know, arms over the head as we get scanned by the TSA?

.. the pose that is drilled into you every time you pass through airport security. You must enter the naked body scanner and do the pose of submission. If you don’t you will be barked at, eye-rolled at, and huffed at until you do.

Notably, this “I surrender” pose is mere security theater. It looks like it works. It doesn’t actually work. That, alongside the dehumanizing: take off your shoes, get groped, and throw away whatever items you recently bought that happen to be more than 3.3 ounces.

Even more than this, it is the more affluent that have been morphed into sheep in the past two decades:

… it does work at is taking some of the most affluent members of society – air travelers – and bossing them around until they submit. The more affluent you are (to a degree) the more you travel by commercial air. The more you travel by commercial air, the more you get put through the compliance tester and obedience enforcer. This is a predictable way to make the most affluent in a society more compliant…

Barf right? But you can see how this first generation ‘surrender pose’ set the stage for the one we are seeing now right? Can you see this Plandemic clearly now?

Psy ops (alternately PSYOPS, Psychological Operations, or Psychological warfare) is a behavior intended to psychologically weaken a target. The US government is renowned for this.

While I don’t know what is an intentional psy op in my life and what isn’t, I know fear is psychologically harmful to me and those around me. To live in a constant state of fear is hell. It shortens life and reduces the quality of the short life you have.

The government desires a sick population so they can be society’s “savior”, whether it is managing their health, managing their fear or managing their life. Totalitarian governments desire to embed themselves in every detail of their citizen’s lives.

“When stress is prolonged,” writes Aphrodite Matsakis, “The adrenal glands and some of these helping biochemicals can become depleted. This depletion can lead to depression, panic attacks, mood swings, rage reactions, and problems responding appropriately to others.”

The government and all those entities that depend on the government (individual and corporate) do not want a healthy population with a robust immune system. If society were made up of free and responsible adults that were responsible for their own actions which respected the lives and properties of others, government would not have a place.

This is and always has been the dividing line between the masses and the remnant, as Allen Stevo wraps up using the word “gadfly” which is defined as:

A gadfly is a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities.

The work of the gadfly is some of the most noble work that can be done in a society, for it brings others into a more accurate relationship with reality and helps them to live a life that is more effective, more in touch, aware.

That is not readily appreciated by all.

Bloated, with inaction, expert committees, legal liability, risk mitigation, the corpulent hind quarters of the ass barely responds to the gadfly’s goading toward the truth. It seeks to pass the rest of life in slumber, to paraphrase Socrates.

The best gadfly is the one who is determined to live life honoring his own boundaries, and to be as truthful as possible with others about where those boundaries are. That person is a natural gadfly. He does not exist to sting another. His mere living of his life, however, is an affront to those who refuse to respect their own boundaries and honestly state those boundaries to others.

It can be no surprise that those who abhor truth, who contort their minds to avoid reality, who want to be coddled in the myth of riskless existence, are those most bothered by the very existence of the gadfly.

Some part of them wants to kill him.

They are “triggered” by him. They build “triggering” into an axiomatic evil, and build morality around the inability to trigger, around the inability to be a gadfly.

Here, coddled society comes into conflict with the free man.

Yes, so here we are, as we will always have the coddled society that see government as its lord and savior and the free man, the remnant who respects all but fears none.

Arrrrgh

-SF1

When the State, in Desperation, Leverages Food Resources – Food Weaponized?

I guess it may be the curse of anyone having the “bent”, or the DNA, to see, in my mind, ahead. This is a kind of forth-telling instead of fore-telling. I do not believe that I can predict the future, but I tend to have a sense of how things might be trending.

In a previous post, I lamented about the type of people who coped with seasons of crisis. Here is a quote:

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 ..

If one can imagine being in the Southern United States in 1860, reading the newspapers or hearing the winds of war. Similar to being in the Northern American Colonies in 1775, or in the Southern American Colonies in 1780 after the fall of Charleston, South Carolina, everything changes in a matter of days.

Society is turned upside-down when politics fail and warfare breaks out or economic warfare spreads as in places like Venezuela. The country’s infrastructure fails, the transportation of foods cease and deprivation spreads.

While I could “prepper-talk” y’all into stocking up on ammo, food stores and water, and encourage y’all to get into shape walking with your bug-out-bag for miles several days in a row, I do think the most important way to prepare for possible disaster scenarios is within one’s own mind and then educating others on the philosophical and psychological aspects of what might come down the pike. The other things can then fall into pace in their own time.

I have followed “The Woodpile Report” for a time but found myself fascinated in the latest post about the centrality of food in our daily lives. As the author would put it:

Calories are life.

Short and to the point. I guess that is what I like about this author even though there are many points we might not be in total agreement with. One has to be able to sift it to extract the precious jewel. Truth is not always self evident. Sometimes one is blind to it 🙂

So in this post, the author points out various times in recent history where food itself was weaponized:

[Union Gerneral] Sherman’s “scorched earth” campaign began on November 15th [1864] when he cut the last telegraph wire that linked him to his superiors in the North. He left Atlanta in flames and pointed his army south. No word would be heard from him for the next five weeks. Unbeknownst to his enemy, Sherman’s objective was the port of Savannah. His army of 65,000 cut a broad swath as it lumbered towards its destination. Plantations were burned, crops destroyed and stores of food pillaged.

The plight of both black and white in the South were of little concern for the armies as they march through this conquered land. It took over 100 years for this region to recover.

The War Orders given by the [British] Admiralty on 26 August 1914 were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany. The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful. The average daily diet of 1,000 calories was insufficient to maintain a good standard of health, resulting by 1917 in widespread disorders caused by malnutrition such as scurvy, tuberculosis, and dysentery. In December 1918, the National Health Office in Berlin [Germany] calculated that 763,000 persons had died as a result of the blockade by that time.

Berlin 1919 – Food Riot Strikes a Butcher Shop

Again, bringing the effects of war to the innocent civilians was something that the 20th century seems to have learned from the 19th century from the War Against Southern Independence in the Americas from 1861-1865.

In September 1944, trains in the Netherlands ground to a halt. Dutch railway workers were hoping that a strike could stop the transport of Nazi troops, helping the advancing Allied forces. But the Allied campaign failed, and the Nazis punished the Netherlands by blocking food supplies, plunging much of the country into famine. By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation.

Famine in Netherlands During WWII

It is apparent that Americans, British and even Germans would cross that moral line to punish the innocent to expedite their own war agendas.

The problem [in Japan] was not just harvests and the cutting off imports, transportation problems developed. Fuel shortages made it increasingly difficult getting food from the countryside into the cities. Food Shortages had begun to appear in some parts of the country even before Pearl Harbor. By 1944 theft of produce still in the fields led police to speak of a new class of “vegetable thieves” and the new crime of “field vandalizing”. The average calorie intake per person had by late 1945 declined to far less than deemed necessary even for an individual engaged in light work.

In this case, this is a nation which is not able to facilitate, via transportation, feeding their own civilian population due primarily to USA embargoes waged in the year BEFORE Pearl Harbor in late 1940! The United States utilized economic warfare to force a conflict in the Pacific to justify joining the United Kingdom and France in their fight during WWII:

The [07OCT1940] memo [declassified in 1994], scanned below, detailed an eight step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States. President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo. Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an “intelligence failure”, and America entered World War Two.

In summary, the Woodpile Report’s emphasis on the war and food connection:

Wars are generally about food. Ancient Rome imported its food and fought epic wars to develop new sources and keep the ones it had. Medieval fiefdoms were agricultural enterprises, raiding their neighbors was common. The westward expansion of America in the nineteenth century was about food and the means to move it, as was Japan’s expanding empire in the early twentieth century. Germany explicitly cited food production to justify its aggression in the east. Their rants about fighting Bolshevism was pep rally stuff, Nazism itself was excessively patriotic Marxism.

Bingo! Just know in a potential “civil war” season in the domestic United States, where civil unrest is sparked in the metro areas first:

Seizing the nation’s food would be an obvious move. Expect them to deploy troops to secure big ag and the necessary transportation facilities, destroy anyone who got in their way and terrorize potential troublemakers.

Most ‘preppers’ suggest a year or two of food supplies without resupply. I am pretty sure a vast majority of Americans (including myself) have not accomplished this in preparation for what may happen, or may not happen in the continental United States in the next 2-10 years. The Woodpile Report’s author also contends that the footprint suited for a sustained protected food supply system needs to be very small:

Well placed and practiced survivalists could get by on a onesey-twosey basis. Two may survive where one wouldn’t. Three or four may be better, assuming an adequate reserve of food and supplies. With more than four the liabilities are likely to outweigh the advantages. It assumes the deepest of deep larders, extensive supplies and harmonious wisdom in all things. Unless each make an irreplaceable contribution of critical value it’s probably too big a footprint for this phase. Loosely allying with similar small groups for mutual benefit may be the better choice. Five or more is a crowd, a danger to itself.

“Harmonious wisdom”, probably something that is in every increasingly short supply as the clock tics and the pages of the calendar turns. I was just lamenting today how the talents of previous generations were not passed on to mine, how my wife’s grandmother could properly field dress a deer, and filet a fish. These things, taken for granted just 50 years ago are now a rare skill unless one lives primarily in rural areas. It is no wonder that the odds are stacked economically against these areas by our own government, we don’t want people to be too self sufficient now do we?

The ruling class would continue to work against middle America’s existence. As said above, they’d confiscate local stores of food on a continuing basis, seize major food producing areas intact and grab the needed transportation facilities. Make no mistake, their hirelings would be granted license for absolute ruthlessness. Free fire zones and minefields are not off the table. Skilled labor, if otherwise unwilling, would be arrested and compelled to work.

FEMA camps would lure people who get hungry, removing the more compliant and complacent from the land so that their responsibility could end for these land areas that can then be deemed “no-go” zones where military can sweep up any resistance with any method at their disposal.

Feeding their base would guarantee the loyalty of supporters, inflict mass death on the deplorables by ‘no cost’ neglect and keep armed confrontation largely confined to flyover country.

While portions of the “fly-over” country would be retained as the source of food items for those that remain, first those connected to the government (military, police, HSA, etc.), large swaths of today’s farmland would not be needed IMHO. Importing food items to supply the east and west coasts might be all that is needed to retain control.

Privation, disease, hunger, murderous chaos and high intensity combat would likely peak in the second year. This is the knothole which would separate the survivalists from dabblers and hopeful idealists.

Thinning of the herd. Everything will have changed, and for those that remain, it will be, or would be a strange new world, if all this comes to fruition.

The author ends on a note of encouragement, that no matter when or if this crisis emerges, one needs to count the cost:

Be a survivor. The who and what of a civil war would matter only occasionally. Food would matter every hour of every week. Stack food high, wide and deep where it’s secure from looters and confiscation. Backup your stash with an “iron rations” fallback stash. Stack seeds, garden tools, fishing and hunting gear to be prepared for self-resupply opportunities.

I will have to be honest and say, while I thought about these things when I left the US Navy in the early 1980s, the sheer effort to raise a family and to provide for their daily needs overshadowed my own ability to prepare for what seems to be coming down the pike.

With the events that have unfolded so far in the 21st century, I do believe that the priority to plan and strategize is upon us all. The economic trajectory this country is on is not sustainable. The US Empires days are numbered, but as with most empires, this could take years or decades. Only God knows the timing.

Finally, I also have to admit that I have failed. Here is what I wrote last year:

[During Hurricane Sandy in 2012] Sotelo also said Blackhawk helicopters patrol the skies “all day and night” and a black car with tinted windows surveys the camp while the government moves heavy equipment past the tents at night. Reporters were not allowed in the fenced complex or “FEMA camp” to report on conditions either, where lines of displaced residents formed outside portable toilets. Security guards were posted at every door, and residents could not even use the toilet or shower without first presenting an I.D. to a government official.

Yes, this is standard protocol .. and many will have no options should this day come. It might not hurt your future, your kid’s future or your grandkid’s future to think about a plan B sometime in the near term. At worst case you never use it .. best case it may save your family from government abuse or worse .. Personal goal by the end of 2018: Own a Plan B

I have no Plan B here near the end of 2019. Have I squandered my time? Will I regret my lack of planning in the years to come? (Can anyone else related?)

I guess time will tell, and that the very act of looking at my words from many months ago help to convict my heart that something has to change in the next year.

I guess I was on track in June 2019 when I wrote “Preparing (Prepping?) the Next Generation with Love” in this post, but I am not sure I heeded my own advice.

Easier said than done I guess, but stay tuned!

-SF1

1780OCT – War Amongst Us, What is that Like?

I do believe it is easy for those insulated from war to have no clue as to the short and long term impact of war on people and society. Many of the politicians, generals and admirals remain out of harms way while giving orders to troops on the ground, in the air and on the oceans treating all of this like a video game. At the end of the day they return to their suburban Northern Virginia homes have been able to compartmentalize their day’s decisions that negatively impacted hundreds if not thousands of men and women not counting tens of thousands innocent men, women and children and the lands and societies they have to deal with on a daily basis. American foreign policy is the root negative issue in most parts of this globe while free market forces are solving poverty and other societal issues worldwide in a positive light.

Returning to the 1780 South Carolina colony that is seeking independence in federation with 12 other American colonies from British rule, if one only reads and understands the dates, stats and facts of the various expeditions the British regulars, American Continentals, and militias on both sides accomplished, one misses understanding what it was like for the average family that endured this 7 or 8 year war that was not regulated to far away fields of battle but took place ‘amongst’ us [movie “The Patriot” clip]:

To learn a “Tier 1” only history about a regional conflict only exposes the tip of the iceberg.  Tier 1, if done right should tease readers and listeners to ask questions about Tier 2, a deeper insight into the daily life of the people involved and how it changed the communities involved.

Americans learn Tier 1 in this history classes in schools, Tier 2 requires one to invest the time to seek out deeper understanding, the ability to enter that period of time IN CONTEXT to fully adsorb what was won and what was lost. In the movie “The Patriot”, only the positives were communicated:

The feel good ending to this movie can only allow reality to counterbalance this by investigating, CSI if you will, how free American colonists were before and after the war. While Benjamin Martin (fictitious character that was the combination of three South Carolina militia leaders Pickens, Sumter and Marion) seems to be doing much better, Francis Marion would tell you differently, and that would be even BEFORE the end of this war!

One of the richest insights can be gained by a read of John Oller’s 2016 book “The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution“.  I have included a few clips below that related directly to the posts I have had about October 1780 recently (here, here and here):

With the quieting of the Tory threat east of Camden, Marion sat at Ami’s Mill pondering his next move. On October 4 he confessed to Gates that he had suffered many fatigues over the previous few weeks but had managed to surmount them. He had never had more than sixty or seventy men with him of all ranks, and sometimes as few as a dozen. In some cases he had been forced to fight against men who had left him to join the enemy; he regretted that he had no authority to punish them. If he had a hundred men from Gates’s army, he thought, he could “certainly pay a visit to Georgetown” and attack the British garrison there. But Gates had answered none of his letters—

So early in October, Marion felt very alone after the three wins his militia had in late September that kept the British distracted from rolling up the colonies towards Virginia and eventually toward Washington’s Continentals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey while British General Clinton totally controlled the port of New York with his troops. It had been a stalemate in the north for months now.

Marion also felt the shift in what his leadership skills had to adjust to in commanding Continental regulars who obey verses volunteer militia that could quit at anytime ESPECIALLY if a command was given that the men did not agree with. I contend that this keeps leadership personnel honest and weeds out “management” personnel who are only worried about the status quo and their own position in the politics of things.

Brilliantly, Marion makes yet another bold move ..

Marion decided to make a little probing incursion against Georgetown anyway. He heard that Micajah Ganey, the Tory whose force he had bested at the Blue Savannah, was in Georgetown to reinforce the British garrison there. On October 9 Marion entered the city unmolested with forty men on horse and, once inside, issued a rather audacious demand to the garrison commander to surrender.

So if you have been reading my Tier 1 posts, you thought that Francis Marion and the men that remained with him took three week off from the conflict when in fact, they did venture into “British occupied territory” to harass the Redcoats!

While the British did not surrender …

Before leaving, however, and to show the enemy he was a force to be reckoned with—or just to show off—he took his men on a little parade through the town. They made off with a few horses and some of the enemy’s equipment and captured several notable Tory military men whom Marion immediately paroled to their homes. If nothing else, Marion served notice that if the British wanted to hold the second-largest population center in South Carolina, they would need to keep men and resources tied down there. “This damned Georgetown business,” as the British called it, would prove an unwelcome distraction for months to come.

Marion again attempts communication in his chain of command:

Marion reported to Gates on his little foray, saying he wished to hear from him as soon as possible, for he had received no word from him in a month. As Marion explained, this lack of information forced him to act with extreme caution lest he fall into the enemy’s hands. He closed by asking Gates to excuse his “scrawl,” as he had no table to write on in “this wild woods.” (Sometimes he lacked even paper to write on, which placed a premium on brevity.)

So here you get a little insight into JUST Marion’s world (Tier 2), not even his neighbors miles away near the St. Mark’s district closer to Kingstree, the shopkeepers in Georgetown or anywhere else in South Carolina.

If you wonder why Marion might have targeted Georgetown, you do know that as a teenager he attempted being a sailor and sailed out of Georgetown decades before right? Oh that Tier 2 knowledge sure does help with the context of things. You will find that Marion has a heart for the strategic importance of this port and what it would mean to the patriot cause. However, he was well aware of his limits and would not place his few men in harms way for his dream.

I do hope you are now even more curious about what made this militia leader tick .. if so, welcome aboard!

-SF1

Pick One: Democracy, Monarchy, Theocracy, Federated Republic or Anarchy?

Most US educated people will no doubt prefer a “democracy” because that is what has been taught to them by government schools for well over a hundred years. Most people also dislike monarchies but seem to love “kings” by other names (i.e. presidents, politicians, rock stars and celebrities). Most dislike theocracies since they associate them with Islamic extremists and not the Israel of Hebrew people they might have heard about from the Bible. Most will also be confused by the term ‘federated republic’ and would absolutely nix the term “confederated” (even though the colonies had a weaker form of government governed by the Articles of Confederation). Anarchy is also a scary term for most since they think this means chaos or no rules, but they fail to understand that the local Farmer’s Market is essentially anarchy in action:

It does seem that while anarchy does yield the most freedom for responsible individuals, most will opt for the safety from some other form of government servitude and eventually want and get “democracy”, which is always a stepping stone to socialism, marxism and eventually communism.

One of my favorite writers is Hans-Hermann Hoppe who wrote a book a few years ago called “Democracy: The God that Failed“. (The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order (Perspectives on Democratic Practice)).

The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. … Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. This book complements the author’s previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy – The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.

While this is a rather intense read, it is an extremely valuable exercise in understanding not just cause and effect, but unintended consequences as well. To whet your appetite, try this YouTube video where Hans shares about this book in under ten minutes:

If there is one quote from this book that I would share at this time it would be the following:

“… Thus, privilege and legal discrimination — and the distinction between rulers and subjects — do not disappear under democracy. To the contrary. Rather than being restricted to princes and nobles, under democracy, privileges come into the reach of everyone: Everyone can participate in theft and live off stolen loot if only he becomes a public official. Likewise, democratically elected parliaments are, just like any absolute or constitutional king, not bound by any superior, natural law, i.e., by law not of their own making (such as and including so-called constitutional law), but they can legislate, i.e., they can make and change laws. Only: While a king legislates in his own favor, under democracy everyone is free to promote and try to put into effect legislation in his own favor, provided only that he finds entry into parliament or government…”

Furthermore, even worse than monarchies:

“In sharp contrast, the selection of state rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position not owing to their status as natural aristocrats, as feudal kings once did, i.e., based on the recognition of their economic independence, outstanding professional achievement, morally impeccable personal life, wisdom and superior judgment and taste, but as a result of their capacity as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of state government.”

This last quote shows how easy it is for the SWAMP to grow .. the fact is, this swamp started growing even before the thirteen sovereign colonies emerged from the American Revolution / secession from the British Empire in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was signed.

But it gets even worse:

“Worse: Under democracy the social character and personality structure of the entire population will be changed systematically. All of society will be thoroughly politicized. During the monarchical age, the ancient aristocratic order had still remained somewhat intact. Only the king and, indirectly, the members of his (exclusive) court could enrich themselves — by means of taxation and legislation — at other people’s and their properties expense. Everyone else had to stand on his own feet, so to say, and owed his position in society, his wealth and his income, to some sort of value-productive efforts. Under democracy, the incentive structure is systematically changed. Egalitarian sentiments and envy are given free reign. Everyone, not just the king, is now allowed to participate in the exploitation — via legislation or taxation — of everyone else. Everyone is free to express any confiscatory demands whatsoever. Nothing, no demand, is off limits. In Bastiat’s words, under democracy the State becomes the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. Every person and his personal property come within reach of and are up for grabs by everyone else.

Are we seeing this in full force today or what? But I digress.

I do hope to share more about this book in the weeks to come. In the mean time, check out the video above or buy the e-book, paperback or hard cover BUT know, when a book commands $40 for paperback and $440 for hardcover .. you know it is a good one!

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” – H. L. Mencken

-SF1

28SEP1780: South Carolina’s Internal Civil War Means It’s About Family

The wars this nation (originally known as the united States of America, emphasis on States OVER “united” or ‘union’) has been involved in since the so-called “Civil War” from 1861-1865 have rarely pitted family members against each other. Sure there are many of those whose family have come over from a land where true civil war was fought. However, a war that splits families and generations only has occurred in 1775-1783 and 1861-1865 in the USA.

NOTE: The definition of civil war implies that the contestants or factions desire control of the entire country. This was NOT the case when the southern States started seceding in late 1860 and by spring 1861 had formed a federation fashioned after the original 13 States, whose goal was independence of 7 states NOT control of > 30 states! But I digress.

By 1780 in South Carolina, there were those who have switched sides (Tory to Whig or visa versa) especially after the British secured Charleston harbor. Many former militiamen were now Tory/Loyalists and backing the crown, King George, and the Redcoats.

Francis Marion’s family was no exception to the rule. One can read history and easily gloss over the names and not be aware that these people were in the same circles, were at each other’s weddings and funerals before the war.

It is essential to get some background at this point of Marion’s story as he re-enters South Carolina in late September. From the book, The Swamp Fox: How Francis Marion Saved the American Revolution, the author John Oller states pretty clearly the relationships and relational lines that connected many of these men that were shooting at each other:

… Marion knew these Tories. They were from St. James and St. Stephens Parishes, the French Santee and English Santee of Marion’s family. John Coming Ball, a local rice planter, was a half-brother of Elias Ball, the Tory whose tip had helped Banastre Tarleton defeat the rebels at Lenud’s Ferry in May. A Whig militiaman who switched sides after Charleston fell, Elias Ball was married to a Gaillard, whose sister married Marion’s brother Job (his second marriage), with Marion serving as best man…

… Peter Gaillard, another member of that prominent Huguenot family, was John Coming Ball’s second in command. Although only a lukewarm Tory, Gaillard was under the influence of his rabidly loyalist father and had served on one of the early expeditions designed to hunt down Marion. John Peyre, whose family was related by marriage to the Gaillards, Balls, and Marions, had been neutral until the fall of Charleston, after which he took British protection and became a strong Tory.

Needless to say, not only was there societal connections, there were also plenty of reasons to opt for revenge. Once again Francis Marion rises above the others and with his leadership offers a long-term view:

Although these neighbors and relatives were out to kill him, Marion took none of it personally. He would later describe the Tory militia at Black Mingo Creek as “men of family and fortune” who had shown themselves to be “good men” before the outbreak of civil war. He even hoped to convert some of them to his cause.

What a refreshing attitude to have in the middle of this life and death struggle among families. How many men (and women) today would consider the high road when faced with desperate times such as these?

Before twilight on 28SEP1780, Marion and his men had crossed the Great Pee Dee River on flatboats and camped at Witherspoon’s Ferry. Here, Marion met up with Capt. John James Jr. and Capt. Henry Mouzon (the author of the 1775 map I use in this series). Good Intel about a Tory presence was shared and again Marion chose to keep it secret and to rest his troops for a few hours before waking them up to ride south towards Dollard’s Tavern on Black Mingo Creek 15 miles away.

In a future post I will cover what happened at that tavern one of the few times Marion outnumbered his opponents. It involves a man, John Coming Ball, and his horse, and a whole lot more.

Stay tuned.

-SF1