I Pledge allegiance to the Confederate Flag

Dixienews.com ^ | December 24, 2001 | Lake E. High, Jr.

[WhiskeyPapa]

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

by Lake E. High, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Non-Sequitur]

Grant's wife, not her father, owned the slaves. And they were not freed until after the war, six months after to be exact.

Your evidence supporting this claim, please?

[Ditto]

Did Grant's Family Own Slaves?

No. Grant's father, Jesse Root Grant, was an abolitionist Whig who detested slavery. In 1868 Jesse wrote, "I was never technically known as a abolitionist," but his actions said otherwise. When he was a young tanner, Jesse's boss was Owen Brown, the father of antislavery zealot, John Brown. The father of Grant's best boyhood friend, Daniel Ammen, was one of the more noteworthy abolitionists in the Ohio town where Grant grew up. It is interesting that during the Civil war, Julia and her four children spent considerable time with her father-in-law at his Covington, Kentucky home. Julia disliked Jesse, but remained in Covington in order to be closer to Grant, who was operating in Tennessee. Julia had at least one of her slaves with her on these occasions. How Jesse reacted to this situation is unknown, but he could not have been pleased with this arrangement.

 

Did Grant's Wife Own Slaves?

Yes, for periods in her life, Julia Dent Grant owned four slaves, Eliza, Dan, Julia and John. Whether she held title to them or her father retained ownership is still unclear. As a teenager, her personal slave was "black Julia." When she married Grant, she went north to various army posts, and had to do without her "servants," as she euphemistically called her slaves. For the first 4 years of her marriage, her slaves remained in Missouri. From 1853-1863, Julia continued to use four slaves, whom she mentions specifically in her Memoirs. They were all house "servants," and took turns attending to Grant's children, cooking and cleaning.

In a March 12, 1859 letter to his father, Grant made it plain that Julia was unable to do without her chattel. He wrote, "Julia and the children are well. They will not make a visit to Kentucky now. .. with four children she could not go without a servant and she was afraid that landing so often as she would have to do in free states, she might have some trouble." Yet Grant told Mary Robinson, one of the Dent slaves, that if he was the owner of White Haven, he would give freedom to all the family slaves.

When the Grant family moved to Galena, Illinois in 1860, Julia reluctantly left her property in Missouri and had to make do with one paid servant, Maggie Cavanaugh. Incredibly, Julia brought along one of her slaves on all of her visits to Grant's headquarters during the civil war. When Julia was with Grant, their youngest son, Jesse, was in the charge of "black Julia," the slave that Julia had used since her girlhood.

With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Julia's four slaves were set free. It is claimed in the footnotes of her Memoirs that they were not freed until December, 1865, with the passage of the Thirteenth amendment, but this doesn't concur with other primary sources of the period and Missouri's slaves were freed in January, 1865. Grant himself noted that on a visit to White Haven in 1863, Julia's slaves had already scattered and were no longer on the plantation. On extended visits to Petersburg, in 1864, Julia brought along a hired German girl to tend to 6 year old Jesse.

Did Grant Own a Slave?

Yes. For a brief period in 1858-9, Grant was the owner of a 35 year old mulatto man named William Jones. The details surrounding the ownership of Jones are still murky. We do know that Grant wrote to his father on March 21, 1858, "I have now three Negro men, two hired by the year and one of Mr. Dent's." On October 1, 1858 Grant wrote again to his father: "Mr. Dent thinks I had better take the boy he has given Julia along with me, and let him learn the farrier's business. He is a very smart, active boy, capable of making anything, but this matter I will leave entirely to you. I can leave him here and get about three dollars per month for him now, and more as he gets older."

Grant freed William Jones on March 29, 1859, though he could have sold him for approximately $1,000. At this time Grant was in significant financial straits and heavily in debt, but was unwilling to sell another human being under the hammer.

-------------------------------------------------------

Now if you want based on this information to damn Grant for slave holding, have at it. But then what are you going to with people like Jeff Davis who owned hundreds of slaves and never freed one of them by choice.

I also leave you with this;

"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true." - U.S. Grant, in his Memoirs, 1885.

Source: http://www.mscomm.com/~ulysses/page160.html

[Leesylvanian]

Now now, let's not let the truth get in the way of these Northerners feeling superior to we poor Southerners.

[Ditto]

Now now, let's not let the truth get in the way of these Northerners feeling superior to we poor Southerners.

A little sensitive, are we? You ought to do something about that inferiority complex.

[Leesylvanian]

Any loyal American is going to see those words, and it's going to grate on them, perhaps subliminally.

No, what's going to grate on loyal Americans are rectalians like you who don't understand that the United States has something called freedom of expression and freedom of thought, whereby not all people have to conform to your narrow-minded, twisted, worldview. Just because somebody has a political belief that differs from your's doesn't warrant your questioning their loyalty. If you can't accept a difference of opinion, get out of this country that my ancestors have fought and died to liberate and defend.

[Aurelius]

"The only reason he wasn't tried for treason was due to the magnaminity of the victors."

He wasn't tried for treason because the smarter among the Yankee lawyers knew that the case could not be made.

[Leesylvanian]

Hey, I heard there's this book called Mein Kampf by some guy called Holter or something like that, in which he says the Jews are to blame for all our problems. Must be true, its a published book. I suppose you believe every word of it, don't you?

If this book you have says that the Robert E. Lee helped form the Klan, then I have some real estate you may be interested in...

[Leesylvanian]

You must keep in mind that Ditto learned his "history" at the Walt Disney Institute. The North was all pious and in no way profited from the slave trade. All Southerners are fork-tongued serpents who only enslaved Africans in order to abuse them and become filthy rich. Also, America started with Plymouth Rock, there was no Jamestown, the Pilgrims came here for religious freedom and not financial profit, etc. etc.

[Aurelius]

"Lincoln is the man who saved this country from a gang of corrupt cotton barons who made their wealth by enslaving other humans.

That is an opinion which you are certainly entitled to hold. It is not a fact. Can you distinguish between fact and opinion?

[Leesylvanian]

Ahh, hello, Ditto. No, there's no inferiority complex here, only bewilderment and a gentle shaking of the head when trying to ingest and make sense of the usual bilge and claptrap. Have a good day and a merry holiday season.

[Aurelius]

"...to the majority of people it sybolizes slavery and oppression and elitism and big money made off the backs of others."

That statement may be true. It also may be true that that majority is in error, in its knowledge of history and in how it sees that flag.

[Ditto]

"You must keep in mind that Ditto learned his "history" at the Walt Disney Institute."

LOL. Maybe, but 'Disney' seems to be better sourced than any of the neo-con revisionist garbage you have been posting.

[Ditto]

All Southerners are fork-tongued serpents who only enslaved Africans in order to abuse them and become filthy rich.

I never said 'all Southerners' and you know it. It was the 5% who owned most of the slaves. That 5% did get 'filthy rich' off the misery of other humans and they also lead this country to Civil war.

[Leesylvanian]

Uh, what is neo-con revisionist garbage, and where have I been posting it? And, tongue-firmly-in-cheekly, what is your source for referring to my posts as such?

[Leesylvanian]

I never said 'all Southerners' and you know it. It was the 5% who owned most of the slaves.

That's right, it was only 5% who owned most of the slaves (does that include the numerous black and American Indian slave owners?) and duped the other 95% of the poor gullible rabble into joining the army in order to wage war just to keep them rich!

Touchy touchy about the quotes there, aren't we? I seem to recall a thread a while ago in which you put words in to my "mouth" and accused me of being a racist, and then didn't have the cojones to apologize. I didn't attribute words to you and you get all upset. Seems like you may have some sort of unwarranted superiority complex.

[Leesylvanian]

Ditto and his cohorts cannot distinguish fact from their Disney-history. They live in a delusional paradise where anyone who disagrees is inundated with endless cut-and-paste claptrap that does nothing to bolster their arguments and only serves to waste JimRob's bandwidth and the cash operating resources donated by the members of this forum. Then one of them will question your loyalty. If I wasn't borderline "obsessive-compulsive" about certain aspects of politics and history I wouldn't waste my time with them.

[Leesylvanian]

Don't take this as an attack, but how do you feel about those Americans that say the U.S. flag is no better than the Confederate flag because it flew over slavery much longer than its CSA counterpart, or is waved by the Klan, or flies over the IRS building, or flies over the Feds that killed those at Waco and Ruby Ridge?

My opinion is that people can have those opinions if they want, but that doesn't mean that all other people have to kow-tow to their ignorance and possible prejudice.

[Aurelius]

Believe me, I understand the compulsive aspect. I planned to be doing other things by now - like going to my health club.

I would like, for my own understanding, to find some objective, authoritative sources on the economic issues. Specifically to be able to evaluate the effects of the tariff and how great or small a burden it was on the South. The second economic issue is the degree of economic threat which the North felt from the existence of a Confederacy with a free trade policy.

Any suggestions.

[Leesylvanian]

My first reaction to your request for reading material would be: just do it like some of our opponents, make it up! When arguing a point just cut-and-paste anything that mentions the terms "civil war" or "slavery," no matter how unrelated it is to the original point of contention, and don't worry about wasting JimRob's bandwidth.

But as I pull my tongue from my cheek my second thought has to be for you to send a request to dixiepatriot and a few of the others (4conservativejustices, etc.) who keep up on the current literature better than I do (I simply haven't had the time in the past few years to sit and read...I'm looking forward to a time when I can).

Also, you may want to read some of the books mentioned by WhiskeyPapa. I say that because what he cuts-and-pastes usually means the exact opposite of what he thinks it means. I guess he's been marinating too long, hence the screenname.