Contemporary Northerners Admired Lee

(June 28, 2022) Although today’s cultural elite disdain Robert E. Lee, they should realize that he was quite well respected by the Northerners of his day despite being one of the leading enemy commanders during the Civil War. If contemporary Northerners could respect him when they had far more reason to hate him, then today’s demands that his statues be torn down should be recognized for what they truly are: phony virtue signaling regarding condemnation of slavery that is more vengeance than social justice. 

Consider the following examples: 

After Lee entered Maryland with his army in a campaign that would culminate in the Battle of Sharpsburg on September 17, 1862, he encamped near Frederick on September 7^th. Many admirers showered him with invitations. He declined all but one explaining that it might go hard on the hosts after the army moved on and it became known that they had entertained him. As his soldiers marched through town some women brought out food. 

Almost a year later when Lee’s army entered the Potomac River ford at Williamsport on June 25, 1863, to begin its second Northern invasion that would end at Gettysburg on July 1 – 3, 1863, three women awaited him on the Maryland shore. Their spokesman stepped forward as Lee rode up.

“This is General Lee, I presume.”

Lee admitted his identity. 

“General Lee,” she went on, “allow me to present to you these ladies who were determined to give you this reception.”

Lee thanked her and introduced her to General Longstreet and General Pickett, whose flowing locks Lee would later offer to sacrifice. Then came flowers, fair words, and ultimately a wreath the ladies bid to put on Traveler’s neck. Lee balked, thinking a wreath might suit General Stuart, but was not proper for a leader of infantry. After a parlay, it was agreed that a staff officer would carry the wreath for the General. 

The next day as he was riding through Hagerstown on his way to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, another crowd of ladies surrounded Traveler despite a steady rain.  They asked for a lock of the General’s hair, but Lee demurred. This time, however, he pointed to General Pickett as a more suitable source compared to Lee’s thinning gray hair. Later one girl who was waving a Union flag in town square as Lee passed by was even heard to say, “Oh, I wish he were ours.”

Four days before the Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1, 1863, Lee was encamped near Chambersburg on June 27^th when a lady visited him requesting that he make provision for the hungry in the town. She remained long enough to ask for his autograph. 

“Do you want the autograph of a rebel?” he asked in surprise.

“General Lee,” she retorted, “I am a true Union woman, yet I ask for bread and your autograph.”

“It is in your interest,” he answered, “to be for the Union, and I hope you may be as firm in your principles as I am in mine.”

He added that his autograph might be a dangerous souvenir for her to possess, but when she insisted, he gave it to her. 

Surely if Northerners could think highly of General Lee during the Civil War, academics set on assassinating his reputation today are adopting a wicked intent merely to make themselves feel morally superior to those who admire Lee. Speaking from experience, I can testify that even sixty years ago, slavery was taught in the public schools of my hometown as an evil and nothing to be proud of. 

An Open Letter to the Valentine Museum

(June 27, 2022) Provided below is an open letter to Richmond’s Valentine Museum written by Bo Traywick. Bo is a former member of the VMI Board of Visitors and a Vietnam Vet. He is also an accomplished author.

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On June 24, 2022, Mr. William J. Martin, Director of the Valentine Museum in Richmond, gave notice that the damaged, desecrated, and vandalized statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis – on loan from the Black History & Cultural Center of Virginia – would be displayed by the museum within its core exhibit. The purpose stated by the Valentine is for “building a better understanding of Richmond’s history.” However, this tells us less about Richmond history and more about Richmond today – and what it shows us of Richmond today is not pretty.

Vandalism says “How dare you be above me!” In the summer of 2020 amidst the rioting, looting, and arson during the “mostly peaceful protests” over George Floyd’s death in the custody of the Minneapolis police, young residents from VCU and elsewhere downtown in the city of Richmond went on a furious orgy of vandalism and destruction of the Confederate monuments for “daring to be above them.,” while the complicit city and state governments stood idly by. As Tennyson wrote in his Idylls of the King:

Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain

            To leave an equal baseness…

Only unequal societies have heroes. Egalitarian societies do not have heroes – and cannot, by their very definition. They can only have celebrities, and to try to elevate a celebrity into a hero amounts to no more than elevating a pygmy to the top of Mt. Olympus. As everyone knows, the Confederacy was an unequal society, and it had its heroes. In the brief four years of her war-torn existence, struggling against all odds for her independence, her heroes were of a legendary mold. But in these Latter-days, their monuments came to stand as an indictment against the glorification of the mediocrity of this age, and a rebuke against the great force of Entropy that is inexorably levelling society into its lowest common denominator, so they had to come down to appease the self-righteous, egalitarian indignation of the unwashed Woke mobs. 

The Valentine Museum plans to use the display to bring together “many different perspectives to build a future we can all be proud of.” “All,” that is, except those of us whose forefathers fought to defend Richmond and Virginia against invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance to an arrogant imperialism – just as their fathers had done in 1776. We are the unreconstructed “deplorables” who will not be gaslighted by presentism, and who see clearly the truth of what George Orwell wrote in his dystopian but prophetic novel 1984: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

H. V. Traywick, Jr.

States’ Rights: Slavery versus Infanticide

(June 24, 2022) Nearly all modern historians dismiss claims that Civil War era Southerners fought to defend states’ rights by rhetorically asking, “Other than slavery, what states’ rights did Southerners want to defend?” The question reveals their one-sided perspective. 

States’ rights and states’ responsibility are two sides of the same coin. The wording of the Tenth Amendment did not reserve the “rights” unenumerated in Constitution to the states. Instead, it reserved the unenumerated “powers” to the states. To be specific it starts: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Antebellum Southerners consistently objected to the Federal Government’s assumption of unenumerated powers. One example was Federal spending of public works projects. The Confederate Constitution made it clear that such projects were the responsibility of the states respectively. For example, it was the state of Georgia—not the Federal Government— that built the Western and Atlantic Railroad between Chattanooga and Atlanta. 

A second example was the Federal Government’s presumption of authority to pay subsidies to private industries such as New England fisherman. No such “power” exists in the USA Constitution. It was specifically outlawed in the Confederate Constitution. Similarly, the USA Constitution makes no mention of a power to adopt protective tariffs that benefit the economics one region over the others. Consequently, the Confederate Constitution outlawed protective (deterrence) tariffs. Moreover, the Confederate Constitution authorized taxes for only three purposes:  military defense, government operating expenses, and debt repayments.

Additionally, even though its Constitution authorized a Supreme Court, the Confederacy never organized one. During the antebellum era Southerners witnessed the USA’s Supreme Court’s tendency to make rulings, and assume jurisdiction in cases, that enlarged the Federal Government’s power. As a component of that Government, they realized it had a natural tendency to increase its power and influence of the central government at the expense of the states. Southern strict constructionists believed that the Supreme Court was only intended to be the final authority on matters pertaining to the powers specifically enumerated in the USA Constitution. None of the three Federal branches—President, Congress, and Judiciary—were intended to have final authority over the rights reserved for the states.

Finally, today’s historians will note that Southerners endorsed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law even though it conflicted with some Northern state statutes.  They fail to note that the 1789 USA Constitution included Fugitive Slave clause, which the Supreme Court neutered in its 1842 Prigg v. Pennsylvania ruling. In short, the Court ruled that a new Federal Law would need to be codified into law to ensure an unfettered right to retrieve escaped slaves. Without the new (1850) Federal Law, the 1789 rights to retrieve escaped slaves could be impeded by state laws. 

Today many observers who criticize antebellum and Civil War era Southerners for supporting a Federal Law to supersede contrary state laws regarding fugitive slaves are among those who presently favor a Federal Law to supersede state laws deeming late-stage abortion as infanticide, thereby outlawing it. Which is the greater moral transgression: A Federal law authorizing infanticide regardless of state laws, or one authorizing the return of escaped slaves?  

https://www.amazon.com/Lees-Dispatch-Other-Civil-Controversies/dp/1594162263

Debunking the Yankee Explanation for Civil War Causation

(June 21, 2022) Provided below is a statement by an online Civil War Forum participant regarding the causes of War.

Everybody who has made a serious study of the causes of the Civil War has come to the same conclusion. Slavery was 80% of the case [for] the secessionists’ actions. No single item of the remaining 20% was of any consequence. The Mississippi declaration of causes [for secession] means exactly what it says. The Mississippi delegates cited slavery & nothing else. All the other states cited slavery 70-80% in their declarations. No amount of verbiage about tariffs, of all things, can change that.

The argument has two major flaws.

First, it equates the cause of secession with the cause of the War. It fails to recognize that the North could have let the South secede in peace and thereby be rid of slavery if that was truly what they wanted. Everybody knew there was no danger the cotton states would invade the Northern states, intending to overthrow the U.S. Government. It was Lincoln’s decision to invade the cotton states to coerce them back into the Union against their will that caused the War. No Invasion = No War. 

Second, the statement also reveals ignorance regarding which side was motivated to precipitate a war over tariffs. It is also a key example of the falsehoods that result when winners write the history. When “everybody” accepts the dominant winner’s viewpoint their knowledge is like that of fish trapped in a goldfish bowl not realizing that there are oceans outside the bowl filled are bigger realities than in their aquarium curated by self-righteous historians.  

In truth, it was the North that went to war over tariffs, not the South. Arguments over which region paid most of the $53 million in 1860 tariff duties were second order considerations for the Yankees. They were much more concerned with the loss of the Southern markets for their manufactured goods and related services. Those markets totaled more than $350 million, which is over six times bigger than the total tariff duties. Northerners realized that a low-tariff Confederacy would enable more efficient European manufacturers to take over those markets. Yankee shippers likewise realized they would lose their statutory monopoly on America’s coastal shipping.

In short, the Yankees went to war because they wanted to avoid the economic consequences of disunion to their region. 

Fighting for Tradition

(June 20, 2022) In today’s video I share a letter from a recent subscriber who replied to my post on Biden’s “very fine people” hoax. He shares my frustration and makes compelling points about the current dystopia caused by our government. In response I offer a few thoughts about how to fight back.