Bump for Dixie!
Posted on 12/24/2001 4:25:26 AM PST by 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.
Why don't you find the opposite.
"In the case now to be determined, the defendant, a sovereign state, denies the obligation of a law enacted by the legislature of the Union...In discussing this question, the counsel for the state of Maryland deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the Constitution, to consider that instrument as not emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent states. The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states, who alone possess supreme dominion. It would be difficult to sustain this proposition. "
And:
"To the formation of a league, such as was the confederation, the State sovereignties were certainly competent. But when "in order to form a more perfect union," it was deemed necessary to change the alliance into an effective government, possessing great and sovereign powers, and acting directly on the people, the necessity of deriving its powers from them, was felt and acknowledged by all... "
And:
If any one proposition could command the universal assent of mankind, we might expect that it would be this -- that the government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action. This would seem to result, necessarily, from its nature. It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all; and acts for all. Though any one state may be willing to control its operations, no state is willing to allow others to control them. The nation, on those subjects on which it can act, must necessarily bind its component parts. But this question is not left to mere reason; the people have, in express terms, have decided it, by saying, "this constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof,: shall be the supreme law of the land," and by requiring that the members of the state legislatures, and the officers of the executive and judicial departments of the states, shall take an oath of fidelity to it. The government of the United States, then, though limited in its powers, is supreme; and its laws, when made in pursuance of the constitution, form the supreme law of the land, "anything in the constitution or laws of any state, to the contrary notwithstanding."
And:
"Among the enumerated powers, we do not find that of establishing a bank or of creating a corporation. But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers; and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described. Even the 10th amendment, which was framed for the purpose of quieting the excessive jealousies which had been excited, omits the word "expressly," and declares that the powers "not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or to the people," thus leaving the question, whether the particular power which may become the subject of contest, has been delegated to the one government, or prohibited to the other, to depend on a fair reading of the whole instument...
It would probably never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objectives designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects,, be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That is the idea entertained by the framers of the American constitution, is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from its language. Why else were some of the limitations, found in the 9th section of the 1st article, introduced? ....
The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of the nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done, by confining the choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of congress to adopt any which might be appropriate, and which were conclusive to the end. "
--John Marshall, Chief Justice, writing in McCullough v. Maryland, 1819
Also consider:
"As in his opinions, Marshall's essays completely rejected the compact theory upon which the position of state's rights advocates such as Roane was based. "Our Constitution," Marshall affirmed in his essays, "is not a compact. It is the act of a single party. It is the act of the people of the United States, assembling in their respective states, and adopting a government for the whole nation."
--from "A History of the Supreme Court, p.55, by Bernard Schwartz.
And what about Chief Justice John Jay?
"...the people, in their collective and national capacity, established the present Constitution. It is remarkable that in establishing it, the people exercised their own rights and their own proper sovereignty, and conscious of the plenitude of it, they declared with becoming dignity, "We the people of the United States," 'do ordain and establish this Constitution."
Here we see the people acting as the sovereigns of the whole country.; and in the language of sovereignty, establishing a Constitution by which it was their will, that the state governments should be bound, and to which the State Constitutions should be made to conform. Every State Constitution is a compact made by and between the citizens of a state to govern themeselves in a certain manner; and the Constitution of the United States is liekwise a compact made by the people of the United States to govern themselves as to general objects, in a certain manner. By this great compact however, many prerogatives were transferred to the national Government, such as those of making war and peace, contracting alliances, coining money, etc."
--From Chisholm v. Georgia, 1793.
That's another big ouch for confederate apologists. Legal secession under our system is a fraud.
Walt
"Hey, guys, I feel pretty confident that we have the North wrapped up. What say we turn south and split the colonies and finish this thing once and for all.
BTW, anyone have any fresh fish and chips?
Signed, Lord Cornwallis, etc. etc.
P.S. Do you think that 'Lord' thing sounds too stuffy?"
WhiskeyPapa, before you take offense, its Christmas Eve and I'm trying to have fun while manning the admin. desk here at work. But think about it, why else would Cornwallis have turned his back on the northern colonies. He certainly wasn't desperate, and Hylton Head Island wasn't what it is today.
The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states, who alone possess supreme dominion. This does nothing to support your argument, but rather only serves to erode it.
As far as your question about why I don't find the opposite, I assume you are asking why I can't find positive statements to support my arguement. Again, you are overlooking the ratification documents of several sovereign states, and misinterpreting the quotations that you cut-and-paste.
You should have told General Eisenhower about you brilliant military maxim when he invaded Normandy while he still had unfinished business in Italy.
Sheeseh! Where do you guys get this stuff? The Brits had failed in splitting New England from the middle colonies at Saratoga. They had been run out of Boston. Washington's victories in New Jersey forced the British to retreat from Philadelphia. The Red Coats were pretty much bottled up in New York and the war was in a stalemate in the North. The British opened a second front in the deep South as a way of breaking that stalemate and forcing the Americans to defend across a broader front. Cornwalace marched all the way from Savannah to the Virginia tidewater. He closed every Southern port. Without the French fleet, the plan would have likely worked.
Well, of course the Union had a strong case for treason. But in the reality of the war's aftermath, what young nation, whose citizen's familiarity with the Declaration of Independence's lofty prose, penned in the generation of their grandfathers, was held much more dear, would be so foolhardy as to embark upon such a display of rank hypocracy and indecency that would ensue in trying Lee, et al, for the very same crimes Washington committed against the British?
The war solved the question definitively as to what will happen if states try to secede by force. The question as to what would happen if states try to secede by petition and appeal to the supreme court and world opinion has yet to be decided.
Who knows when Southern California may become North Mexico.
Please note my ommission of Thomas Jefferson, who I honestly feel is the most overrated American of the generation we are discussing.
Actually, Jefferson didn't even stay at Monticello at times. Whenever the British entered that part of Virginia, TJ fled his home, earning him the sobriquet "The Coward of Carter Mountain." Three times the British invaded Virginia while he was our governor, and three times he failed to call out the militia to defend the homeland.
The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states, who alone possess supreme dominion. This does nothing to support your argument, but rather only serves to erode it.
What I actually said (or quoted):
"The powers of the general government, it has been said, are delegated by the states, who alone are truly sovereign; and must be exercised in subordination to the states, who alone possess supreme dominion. It would be difficult to sustain this proposition. "
I'm not sure what your point is.
Too, when I first used a word processor in 1980 that would cut and paste, I thought it was way cool, and still very high about what makes personal compters useful.
Walt
Bump for Dixie!
What I always ask when this comes up, and I don't believe I've EVER gotten a response, is what was the long train of abuses by the federal government prior t 1860 that would parallel that on King George and his government prior to 1776?
I think we can assume that the colonists had grievances that they had tried to address through the system that were rebuffed. In what way did that happen in 1860-61?
The fact is that the rebellion of the southern states was not only outside US law, it was also completely unjustified. And lest anyone have second thoughts, Davis made sure that Old Glory was fired on in order to incite further treason.
Walt
Ditto, you should know that Normandy was a third front, opened for political purposes to keep our Soviet "allies" happy, and because the front in Italy was bogged down and the Germans didn't have the resources to defend Italy, the eastern front, and Normandy.
Secondly, the British found there was not a great and deciding advantage to holding the Northern cities (except for creature comforts in the winters) as long as General Washington maintained a viable army in the field. They could have held the cities if they had concentrated all their forces in doing so, but again, there was no decisive advantage in doing so. As long as Washington remained in the North with the bulk of the British army, he was at a disadvantage because he simply couldn't win, but only survive to fight another day. It was possibly a strategic mistake on the part of the Brits to extend the war to the South. If Washington was stuck in the North with no chance of victory, how much help would the French have likely given us? Not much. It was a stroke of (divinely-inspired?) luck for the Americans that Cornwallis chose an earlier-than-usual winter quarters at the end of a peninsula with no escape.
Months before 9/11, I put up the only flag on my car and in my house - the Confederate Battle Flag. I salute it every morning, first thing when I get downstairs. I refuse to salute any flag that literally few over LBJ's head as he hoaxed the U.S. into a war that killed 58,000 Americans for nothing over his made-up Gulf Of Tonkin "incident" - or any flag that literally flew over Bill Klinton's head as he ordered GIs into a war zone while sweet Monica sucked him. I refuse to salute any flag that literally flew over or in front of the IRS building where some faceless bureaucrat started a snafu threatening my elderly mother over $700 in alleged back taxes it later admitted she never owed - after hassling her for months, even threatening criminal prosecution, in just another of the IRS's famous "snafus." The Confederate flag never flew over any official who did any of this to anyone.
I look forward to the - inevitable, not long off - day of partition from Blue Nation.
Wrong! Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri were called Southern states before the war, and Border states when they refused to join the confederacy. Refusing to join the rebels did not make those states 'Northern’. Slavery was not legal in any Northern state at that time.
On one hand you rebels want to call Lincoln a tyrant who trashed the constitution, but on the other you insist that he ignore the constitution by banning slavery when he had no constitutional authority to do so. The emancipation proclamation only ended slavery in areas that were in rebellion and under the direct control of the military. It was legal for Lincoln as CiC to issue that executive order. He had no constitutional authority to end slavery in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky or Missouri, or other areas such as Eastern Tennessee which were not in rebellion. Slavery there could only be ended by the states themselves or by a Constitutional Amendment.
And that war was all about slavery. Every last drop of blood was spilt because of the absolutely corrupt and immoral Southern ‘Royalty’ who did indeed own 95% of all the slaves. They agitated for secession for decades, and planned for war for one reason; To protect and expand that evil institution of slavery. They understood that the tide of history and morality was against them and their peculiar institution. They understood that soon, the American people would outvote them and ban the horrible practice. They started that war to keep history a bay and to continue to make money from slavery. It was about MONEY made from the chains and bondage of other humans. That was all it was ever about.
I don't think so... Make no mistake, local tyranny is just as bad as Washinton tyranny. But the beauty of our original system was, if the local folks(states, cities, counties, towns) got out of control, people would just flee to friendlier confines. This competition would be a check against local politicians.
Today with the states reduced to more or less nothing this option has been destroyed. Where are we supposed to flee when Washington gets out of control. Mexico?
It goes back to the Federalist, Anti Federalist debate. I'm afraid Jefferson was right and Madison wrong.
Sober up there boy.
The southern states almost seceded in the late 1820s and early 1830s.. and slavery didn't have anything to do with it. Taxes, Taxes, Taxes and more Taxes.
Basically, what the quote is saying is that the states are sovereign and gave limited powers to the federal gov't.
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