I Pledge allegiance to the Confederate Flag, and to the Southern People and the Culture for which it stands

The Confederate flag is again under attack, as it has always been, and as it always will be. It is under attack because of what it symbolizes. The problem is that to many Southerners have forgotten just what it does symbolize.

The Confederate Nation of 1860 - 1865 was the intellectual, as well as the spiritual, continuation of the United States of America as founded, planned, and formed by Southerners. It was the stated, and often repeated, position of almost all Southerners in the 1860’s that they, and the South, were the heirs of the original political theory embodied in the U. S. Constitution of 1789. In 1860 their attempted to separate from the rest of the states and form their own nation since that was the only way the South could preserve the philosophy and the virtues that had made the United States the magnificent nation it had become.

In both of these contentions, that is, the South was the true repository of the original political theory that made the United States great, and the South was the true home of the people who took the necessary actions to found, make, and preserve the original United States, Southerners have been proven by the passage of time to be correct.

The Southern colonies of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Maryland were where the majority of the original American population resided until the 1700’s despite the fact Massachusetts was settled only 13 years after Virginia and New York was settled 18 years before South Carolina. As the population of the colonies grew, the New England States and the middle Atlantic states, gained population so that by the time of the American Revolutionary War the two general areas of the north and the South were generally equal in size with a small population advantage being shown by Virginia. This slight difference in population by a southern state was to have a profound effect on the development of the United States.

First of all, the New England states managed to start a war with England, which they verbalized as "taxation without representation." In truth the problem from their point of view was the taxes on their trade. Having started the war they then promptly managed to lose it. The British, after conquering the entire north from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to Boston, to Providence, to New York, to the new nation’s capital, Philadelphia, shifted their military forces to move against the Southern colonies. They secured their foothold in the South by capturing Savannah and Charleston and then proceeded to move inland to subdue the Southern population. They planed to catch the Virginia forces under General Washington in a coordinated attack moving down from the north, which they held, and up from the South that they thought they would also conquer.

The British army that had mastered the north found they could not defeat the Southern people. Once in the backwoods of the South they found themselves to be the beaten Army. The British defeats at Kings Mountain and Cowpens were absolute. Their Pyrrhic victories at Camden and Guilford Courthouse were tantamount to defeat. In both North Carolina and South Carolina they were so weakened they had to retreat from the area of their few "victories" within days. Their defeats at those well-known sites among others, along with their defeat at Yorktown in Virginia, led directly to their surrender.

Having secured the political freedom from England for all the colonists, Southerners then mistakenly sat back and took a smaller role in forming the new American government that operated under an "Articles of Confederation." That first attempt at forming a government fell to the firebrands of New England who has started the war and who still asserted their moral position of leadership despite their poor showing on the field of battle. These Articles of Confederation, the product of the Yankee political mind, gave too much economic self determination to the separate colonies (as the Northern colonies had demanded in an attempt to protect their shipping, trade and manufacturing) and too little power of enforcement to a central government.

After a period of six difficult years, when the Articles of Confederation failed as a form of government, another convention was called and a new form of government was drawn up. This time the convention was under the leadership of Southerners and they brought forth the document we all refer to as the U.S. Constitution. Even northern historians do not try to pretend the Constitution and the ideas embodied therein are anything other than a product of the Southern political mind. (Yankee historians cannot deny it, but they do choose to ignore it so their students grow up ignorant of the fact that the Constitution is Southern.) So, as it turns out, when the new nation found itself in political trouble it was the South which, once again, came to the rescue just as it had when the nation found itself previously in military trouble.

With the slight population advantage it enjoyed over other states, Virginia was able to give to the new nation politicians who are nothing short of demigods. Their names are revered in all areas of the civilized world wherever political theorists converge. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Henry, Taylor and Monroe are just a few, there are many more. These men along with the leading political minds of South Carolina, Rutledge, Heyward, and, most importantly, Pinckney, saw their new nation through its birth and establishment.

The military leadership, as well as the political leadership, of the South saw the nation through its expansion. Under Southern leadership the British were defeated a second time in 1814. Under Southerners, most obviously John Tyler and Andrew Jackson, Florida was added as a state. The defeat of Mexico in 1846, under the Southern leadership of James Polk and numerous Southern military officers, established of the United States as a force to be feared. That was an astonishing accomplishment for so small and so young a nation

Thomas Jefferson, who added the Louisiana Purchase, barely escaped impeachment for his efforts. The north argued continuously against the war with Mexico that added the area from Texas to California just as they had argued against the Louisiana Purchase. One Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, was particularly vehement against Texas being made a state. Northerners, having seen Mexico defeated and the United States enlarged all the way to the Pacific Ocean, then objected to the methods and motives of the acquisition of the Washington and Oregon territories in the northwest. Polk, who had added that vast area from Louisiana to California to Colorado to the pacific northwest, served only one term as President due to the constant attacks he sufferer in the Northern press. Left to the people of the north, the French would still control from Minnesota to Louisiana and Mexico would control from Texas to the Pacific while Canada would still include Washington, Oregon Idaho and Montana.

Every square inch of soil that now comprises the continental United States was added under a Southern president, and they did it over the strenuous political objections of the north. The provincial and mercenary Yankee people fought every effort to expand the United States. The expansion of the United States became a regional political disagreement that spread ill feeling north and South. Its accomplishment by Southerners was no small feat. It was accomplished under Southern military leadership and with much Southern blood. (Which is why Tennessee is called "The Volunteer State" and the names of Southerners are almost exclusively the only ones found on memorial tablets and monuments from Texas to California.). The expansion of the original colonies into the continental power it became was completely the results of the Southern mind and Southern leadership.

Having secured the freedom of the United States from England and then having formed and led the successful government into a new political age under a written constitution that is still the envy of the whole world, the South gave the entire military and political leadership that formed the United States into the boundaries it now enjoys. But these magnificent accomplishments were soon to be overshadowed by population shifts and the ensuing results that brings in a representative government. By the early 1820s the north had finally secured just enough additional population that it had achieved enough political clout to start protecting its first love, its money. The unfair and punitive tariffs that were passed in 1828 led to the South’s first half-hearted attempt to form its own separate government with the Nullification movement of 1832. The threat of war that South Carolina held out in 1832 then caused a negotiated modification of those laws to where the South could live with them. For the time being, the political question was settled by compromise.

While those changes pacified the political leaders of the South for the time being, some statesmen could see, even then, that if the North ever became totally dominant politically, the South would be destroyed, not just economically, but philosophically and spiritually as well. Those statesmen, with Calhoun in the lead, then started planting the intellectual seeds that led to the South’s second attempt at political freedom in 1860.

Unfortunately, in the 1840’s Yankee abolitionist introduced the new poison of the "voluntary end" of slavery as a political issue. There were attempts by many Southerners to defuse this situation by offering an economic solution. That is, Southerners offered to end slavery in the South just as England had ended it in the West Indies, by having the slave-holders paid for their losses when the slaves were freed. The abolitionist Yankees would have none of that. Their position was simple, the South could give up it slaves for free and each farmer could absorb the loss personally. There was to be no payment. To the Yankee abolitionists it was either their way or war.

The fact that the abolitionist movement became a dominant presence in the northern part of the United States from the 1840’s on is primarily because a liberal can politicize any subject and enrage any body of people regardless of the level of preexisting good will. (As current liberals have turned the simple good sense argument that one should not litter one’s own environment into the political upheaval of "the ecology movement." The effectiveness of liberal methods can currently be seen in the simple instance that most people believe such nonsense as the chemical cause of "ozone depletion" and "the greenhouse effect" despite any evidence of either. Liberals are absolutely capable, by their strident, activist natures of raising any question to harmful emotional heights.)

Unfortunately, the loss of the War for Southern Independence in 1865 caused the very thing that Southern statesmen had foreseen in the 1830’s; that is, the north became dominant and the cultural, spiritual, and economic base of the South was decimated. The loss of the war was most severely felt in the South, of course, but it has also had political repercussions in the north as well.

Without the South in a position of dominance, the leadership of the United States has gone from Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler and Polk to the inept, or leftist, Grant, Harding, Arthur, Harrison and Roosevelt, among others. Plus, the ascendancy of the leftist north to national prominence has also caused the rise of leaders in the South who had to be acceptable to the north. Such spectacularly immoral or totally incompetent Southern politicians as Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are examples of the quality of the men that the South must now produce to garner northern votes. When these modern day jackals are contrasted with the demigods the South produced when unfettered by the northern voter, that in itself should be enough to make all people reject northern philosophy and northern politics and embrace all things Southern.

As the forces of the left have gained ascendancy in the United States, the pressure intensifies to completely obliterate anything that remains between them and complete leftist victory. That means that the traditional enemy of leftists, the South, must be erased in its every form. That is why leftists always demand that even symbols of the South be eradicated.

We, therefore, now have a coalition of people who want the Southern flag taken down and hidden from public view. This coalition is composed of three main groups. First of all are African-Americans, whose emotional position is totally unmitigated by any knowledge of history. Secondly, there are Yankees who have moved to the South and who, despite their remarkable political failures in their own states, have learned nothing and continue to vote leftist here too. Or either these northern imports have been transferred here to run the newspapers that are owned by the people who live outside the South. And, thirdly, there are leftist Southerners, or Southerners of "politically correct" leaning, who have apparently learned their history from the television and movies and who feel the South is a bad place because it is not egalitarian enough.

But the demands of this coalition of political thinkers need to be put in proper perspective. Before anyone starts to tell someone else how to act and how to think, it is incumbent on him to demonstrate the success of his own ideas and actions. So far the introduction and enforcement of leftist ideas in our world has led to nothing but sorrow and degeneration. The force necessary to make people live under a leftist government has been the direct cause of the murder of over one hundred million people in this century alone. Leftist political theory has enslaved and impoverished billions of people worldwide. Its introduction has weakened even such great nations as England and France and reduced them to the status of third rate nations. Socialism in Scandinavia has reduced it to an economic level even less than that of England. In the United States leftist ideas have turned our country into the increasingly sick society it has become.

So until this coalition of leftist can point to a single successful instance of where their leftist philosophy has improved a country, or a people, rather than to the spectacular political failures the left has precipitated in any place into which its poisonous philosophy has been introduced, they have no right to demand anything of anybody. Leftist, the most spectacular political failures in all of history, have no standing to demand that Southerners accept anything that flows from their false philosophy. And of all people, leftist have the least demand on Southerners, the people who formed, guided, expanded and gave them a great country.

The Confederate flag is a symbol. It stands for the people who had the spirit, the courage, and the intelligence to give the world its greatest governmental entity. As long as the Confederate flag flies there is hope that the terrible scourge leftists have placed on the world will pass. It represents the culture that produced the most wished for, the most just, and the finest political system on earth. And as long as the Confederate flies there is hope that the greatness that was once ours may someday be reestablished.

The vicious Southerners wanted to negotiate a financial settlement with the North.

In point of fact,'vicious' in not a bad choice of words for the secessionists.

"And this issue embraces more than the fact of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy--a government of the people, by the same people--can or cannot, maintain its territorial integtrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: "Is there in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?" "Must a government, of neccessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existance?"

A. Lincoln, 7/4/61

The problem with the southern states just saying, "we're leaving, and we're leaving you with obligations that we freely incurred, (there not being enough money in the whole country to compence the federal governments for the present value of the Louisiana Purchase, the state debts of Texas, the whole state of Florida and other outlays), is that it shows that men cannot govern themselves through democratic means. Lincoln and the many many loyal men, north and south, who came forward to fight for the old flag thought that a reason to risk maintaing the national fabric. And history shows -they- were right, and the slave holder/secessionists were wrong.

Walt

I never even heard any political controversy concerning the date of the [Normandy] invasion.

The disinformation campaign knows no bounds.

General Marshall proposed early in 1942 Operation SLEDGEHAMMER to aid the Russians, who were thought to be on the verge of collapse. Under this plan, 3 US and 7 Bristish divisions would land on the Cherbourg peninsula to draw off German troops.

The British were agahst, and would not even consider the plan.

SLEDGEHAMMER was superceded by GYMNAST, later renamed TORCH. FDR definitely wanted US troops in action against the Germans in 1942, and TORCH was the result.

PLanning for the Normandy operation began in earnest in 1942. It was always the main operation, and it was always the "Second Front".

Walt

Why bother to reply at all if you do not address the points I raised?

ML/NJ

Sorry, I guess I gave you to much credit. But that is my own fault, as anyone with even a partially open mind can see the common sense of Lincoln's position.

You say that the so-called seceded states were ready to settle up affairs. I say there is no equitable way to settle up affairs, if you consider the land acquired and the debts incurred --in--the--name--of--all.

I definitely addressed one of your points. I can't imagine why you would suggest otherwise, unless you, like all the neo-confederates, are fond of blue smoke and mirrors.

I like to take one point from a post and address it in its own post.

All that cutting and pasting can be tiring and confusing, I think.

Walt

"Black Confederates" is a lie on the level of Holocaust denial.

In 1863 General Cleburne of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee circulated a memo arguing that since the South was losing a war of demographic attrition, it's only hope was to enlist blacks. And the only hope of enlisting blacks lay in emancipation. For that memo, he was passed over for command of the Army of the Tennessee. Everyone soldier in that army knew that Cleburne should have been commanding the army, not Bragg or Hood which caused severe morale problems.

If there had been any Southern nationalism, blacks would have been emancipated and enlisted because the 10% of the Union Army that was black was the North's margin of victory, as Lincoln admitted. A nation does what it has to in order to survive. But minus slavery there was no real point in the Confederacy so this was never done.

And conservatives wonder why they never make any headway with black voters.

The vicious Southerners wanted to negotiate a financial settlement with the North. THEY recognized their obligations. Lincoln essentially ignored a Southern delegation, led by Martin Crawford, sent to Washington for the purpose of negotiating some sort of settlement. I guess they just forgot to tell us about this in our high school history classes. And "Honest Abe" pretends to know nothing of it.

They are lucky it was Lincoln and not Jackson. Jackson would have hung them all.

"On the question of states' rights versus supremacy of the federal government, Jackson clashed sharply with his vice president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Calhoun had earlier proposed a theory of nullification, under which a state could refuse to obey acts of Congress it considered unconstitutional. Congress then would either have to drop the disputed act or obtain its approval through a constitutional amendment. Calhoun hoped to win the president to this states'-rights view. But Jackson revealed his strong feelings on the issue at a banquet in 1830, when, looking directly at Calhoun, he offered the toast, "Our Federal Union--It must be preserved."

The Nullification Crisis

This issue came to a head the next year, when South Carolina adopted an ordinance of nullification declaring that the high protective tariffs, or taxes on imports, of 1828 and 1832 were invalid within its borders. Privately, Jackson threatened to hang Calhoun. Publicly, he prepared to use military force against South Carolina. In a proclamation he denounced nullification as treason: "I consider the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it is founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."

http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/nbk/bios/07pjack.html

Unilateral state secession is not allowed in our system of government.

It's dishonorable to think you can just walk away from your just debts, or think you can take what is not yours.

Now, will you will aver that you think that had Lincoln received these commissioners, and told them that no settlement would be made under any circumstance, that they would have subsided, and the rebellious states not attempted to overthrow the government?

Because if they --weren't-- willing to do that, they and their masters were no better than common thieves.

Walt

Sorry, I guess I gave you to much credit. But that is my own fault, as anyone with even a partially open mind can see the common sense of Lincoln's position.

Which position? That he wouldn't negotiate with the Southerners? Or pretends that they were not interested in negotiating? That he raises straw-dog arguments when he prefers to avoid some issue? That he just couldn't let them "go in peace"?

When attacking someone elses intellect it's probably best not to get to and too confused. As for open minds, I used to believe as you do, but I've read a lot of source material and have found that all they taught me in high school about this stuff isn't all there is to know. Have you read either of the books I mentioned?

I don't "say" really. This isn't an opinion. It's history. You "say" it wouldn't have worked, and you consider the land acquired and debts incurred. I'm not sure what land you are referring to. As for the debts, the people of the South were obviously responsible for their proportional share of those debts whether they seceded or not. If they could pay that share as part of the Union, why couldn't they pay it from outside? And, of course you ignore the Southerners' share of the assets of the North. I don't know that the Crawford delegation was even going to raise this point, but certainly Southerners had helped finance things like the arms that were eventually used against them.

I definitely addressed one of your points. I can't imagine why you would suggest otherwise, unless you, like all the neo-confederates, are fond of blue smoke and mirrors.

The one point you did address was maybe the date of the Lincoln quote. Big deal. What about the substance?

"Blue smoke and mirrors," indeed!

ML/NJ

Read some history boy!
Slavery had everything to do with it.

Learn some economics boy.

But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through public works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central government. It also injured the South?s trading relations with other parts of the world.

In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North?s early version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with the "tariff of abomination." Thirty year later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master.

But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to "collect the duties and imposts": he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase "free trade" was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians said at the time.

To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution, with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the executive. No, it didn?t abolish slavery but neither did the original Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in slaves).

Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.

Quoting Lincoln is no more vallid than quoting any of the original article, less so.

I will only post one time and then only to say that slavery was an evil, an evil that might have been resolved by statesmanship which was entirely lacking in the North and in short supply in the south.
Had a means of emancipating existing slaves and drawing labor (cheap Irishmen such as flooded the north) to the agrarian south, had the north not used southern taxes to fatten the then dominant half of the country, and had the north not desired to finally crush it's counter balancing opposite (and its very profitable export trade); we'd be in a hell of a lot better shape today.

Davis was a nut case also, Lincoln was the imperial dictator Washington sought to avoid, and 136 years of ongoing propaganda have left all of us with an utterly useless lesson in history.

C-S-A Bump !!

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The Klan and the Flag

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

In all the brouhaha over the Mississippi flag, it was taken as fact that the KKK had adopted the Confederate Flag as its symbol. The opponents then argued that, whether or not the Southern Cross once stood for freedom, its association with the Klan cements the opposite impression. There is nothing that can be done about it: the battle flag and racism are inextricably linked. Don’t blame us. Blame the Klan.

Is it true? The 1965 book by David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1965 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1965) was the definitive treatment at the time. It features many pictures of the Klan in operation. Not one shows a Confederate Flag.

Every picture with a flag is printed below. Shouldn’t something be done about suppressing the symbol of hate that they carry? It may have once stood for freedom, but now it stands for the opposite. Don’t blame us. Blame the Klan.

April 26, 2001

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (send him mail), is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He also edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com.

Lew Rockwell Archives

Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page

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Davis, Lee and the rest were traitors, not only to the best government yet devised, but also to the future.

Here, you make the same sort of mistake that Princeton Scholar James McPherson does. You assume some sort of continuity between the government of Madison and the Boys, and the government left to us by Lincoln. McPherson calls one of his books Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. It is more hymnal than history to my mind. It's full of the usual pap: Lincoln restored order. Lincoln saved the Union.

Lincoln didn't save or restore anything. McPherson in the preface quotes a Harvard professor, George Ticknor, four years after the war ended as saying, "It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born[in 1791]." Now you don't think this Harvard professor was referring to slavery, or even "reconstruction," do you? He was talking about the government that affected him, a professor living in Massachusetts. He was lamenting the passing of "the best government yet divised." You may think yourself in good company with McPherson, but I would suggest that neither of you are able to see beyond the history written by the Northern victors.

ML/NJ

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