Why I'm In This War of Words

There are manifold reasons. To honor those who went before; to strengthen and protect what's left of my culture (it's worth saving, and it can't make a come-back if it's all gone); to correct age-old lies and slanders about my region and its people, to name a few...

As an example (we run into stuff like this. All. The. Time.) I recently ran across somebody's personal website, The Civil War in Georgia, created in 1996 and last updated in 2000. It's an amateur site -- both in design and writing (and the Internet has come a long way since then).  It's just an illustration of the dismal ignorance rampant out there today.

The site deals with several subjects related to the war in Georgia --the cause, the blockade, Sherman's march, etc.  It sez the war  ...was America's defining moment, when the rural collection "These United States" transformed into the industrial powerhouse of "The United States."  (If one is old enough to remember, one might call it the military-industrial powerhouse bully....  but I digress.)

What caught my attention, though, was  in the "causes" section: "Slavery caused the war. It was the desire of the South to keep humans enslaved for profit and the inability of the North to stomach the evil of slavery that led so many thousands to their deaths."

The inability of the north to stomach slavery?  Really?  Actually, he's partly right.  The north was unable to stomach those parts of the slavery enterprise that were no longer profitable for them -- the financial responsibilities of round-the-clock, cradle-to-grave support of slaves who did not, could not, produce round-the-clock, cradle-to-grave.

However, when they were relieved of that responsibility, and it rested solely with plantation-owners in the South to support their slaves, the north was all too happy to get rich off the products of the evils of slavery -- that is, weaving slave-grown cotton in their textile mills (i.e., the infant "industrial powerhouse" ran on "remote" slavery) and the shipping of slave-grown cotton in the cargo holds of their ships headed for England.

As long as they didn't have to come in close proximity to slaves, Northerners were fine with the "evil of slavery" -- particularly when they profited so handsomely off the work of slaves who were out of sight, out of mind.

I have said it before, and I will continue to say it.  Whatever "sins" the Confederacy committed, the Union's were just as bad, and some of them worse -- and continue to be so to this day.

Another Walk Down Memory Lane

One of my favorite 180DTS covers from back when. This was the cover for February 2001, shortly after King Roy Rat Barnes arbitrarily changed the Georgia flag (and was subsequently thrown out of office by the voters). Look closely and you can see Kerosene Billy's ghostly face above the city skyline. (Click image for a larger view.)

Test your history indoctrin-- I mean, knowledge

(Warning. This post contains language that some might find offensive.)

Who said this?

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."

Dingdingdingding! Right, we have a winner! Everyone! Because everyone knows it was Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy. It's repeated in website after website, and all over the blogosphere, and even in comment threads, as proof that the inbred, scum-sucking racist hick Confederates were fighting to keep an entire race in chains!

Okay, now, who wrote this?

The negro of the North is the ideal negro; it is the negro refined by white culture, elevated by white blood, instructed even by white iniquity; -- the negro among negroes is a coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick-skulled creature, ugly as Caliban, lazy as the laziest of brutes, chiefly ambitious to be of no use to any in the world. View him as you will, his stock in trade is small; -- he has but the tangible of instincts of all creatures, -- love of life, of ease and of offspring. For all else, he must go to school to the white race, and his discipline must be long and laborious. Nassau, and all that we saw of it, suggested to us the unwelcome question whether compulsory labor be not better than none....

Why, that sounds like the writer is saying that that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition -- a mirroring of Stephens' comment, only couched in far, far more insulting terms. So, who wrote it? Jefferson Davis? Robert E. Lee? Some other inhuman Confederate slaveholder?

Why, no. That was written by the famous abolitionist Julia Ward Howe.

Yes, she who penned the Battle Hymn of the Republic, about grape stomping and vorpal blades going snicker-snack-- wait. I'm getting my nonsense verses mixed up. Grape stomping and terrible swift swords, it was.

What kind of abolitionist advocates slavery (i.e., compulsory labor)? Well, the kind of abolitionist Julia Ward Howe was. The kind that believed negroes were inferior to whites and had to be refined by white culture, elevated by white blood, instructed even by white iniquity.

With abolitionist/friends like this, what slave needed Confederate/enemies?

Frankly, I think, as abolitionists go, Julia Ward Howe was a fraud. Even worse -- she became a feminist after the war, and anyone who knows me for a while knows what I think of feminism. (It is man-hatred; its goal the destruction of the natural family.)

Look. Confederate descendants and heritage supporters have nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever sins the Confederacy may have committed, the sins of the Union and its pet abolitionists were as bad or worse. For example, the murder of a black man by the raiders of Slave-Savior/Terrorist John Brown. I guess this is an example of the makin' omelets school of abolitionism.

Oh, one other thing. You know how South-bashers are always claiming the "traitorous rebels" wanted to "tear the Union apart" with secession and war? Next time you encounter some mad, neo-yankee blogger screeching about that, send them to this link:

A Trip to Cuba by Julia Ward Howe
Tell them to use the drop-down CONTENTS menu and to go Chapter 2 - Nassau, where they'll find this:

Now we who write, and they for whom we write, are all orthodox upon this mighty question. We have all made our confession of faith in private and public; we all, on suitable occasions, walk up and apply the match to the keg of gunpowder which is to blow up the Union, but which, somehow, at the critical moment, fails to ignite.

She and her fellow travelers wanted to blow up the Union -- and had tried to, multiple times, with their writings.

I'll say it again. Hereditary Southerners whose ancestors served the Confederacy have nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever sins the CSA may have committed, the USA was, and is, no better

Be proud you're a rebel!

(Photos from the Library of Congress)

The Black Confederates Controversy

Were there black Confederates? I dunno. I don't care, either. At least, not in the sense that those involved in the Big Controversy About Black Confederates care about it.

My personal view? I think that anyone who fought for the Confederacy -- red or yellow, black or white -- whether as duly signed-up soldiers or not, should be honored and their service acknowledged. So they weren't on some official muster roll and they weren't handed a uniform and soldierly accouterments. So? What interests me is... did they pick up a gun and shoot at yankees? Then they need to be commemorated.

And not just the ones who fought, but the wives and families, the servants, the farmers and merchants, the teachers, preachers, elected officials... all who supported the new nation and its fight for independence.

When the No-They-Didn't folks cite the Confederate government's barring blacks from service as PROOF that there were no blacks fighting for the Confederacy, I have to laugh.

Do you suppose these folks also seriously believe that nobody drank alcohol during Prohibition -- because the government barred drinking alcohol?

What gets me is that so many of these No-They-Didn't folks are -- or claim to be -- intellectuals and academics. You'd think they'd know better. Oh, wait. Intellectuals... and academics... Never mind.

But what's actually fueling this controversy is not the B word (black) or the C word (Confederate). It's the S word. Slavery.

In a historical context, at least, Confederacy-bashers think of "black" and "slave" as synonyms. Thus, all blacks in the South were slaves, and it is unthinkable to them that blacks/slaves would "fight to perpetuate their own enslavement," as one of them put it For you see, slavery was the ONLY THING the Confederates were fighting for, so any blacks fighting for the Confederacy would be fighting for their own enslavement.

That's how they see it. They can't see it any other way.

Well, they probably could. But they WON'T.

This is why, bloggers at websites like this (http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/06/civil-war-was-about-slavery.html and http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2011/06/pimp-slapping-black-confederate-soldier.html) truncate the secession documents to leave out all the OTHER reasons the states cited for seceding. It has to be all-slavery, only-slavery, or they blow a gasket.

For example, Transgriot posts 136 words of Mississippi's 708 word secession document. She posts 60 words of Georgia's 3300-word secession document. Why did she leave out so much? Because they were about things she wasn't interested in? If Mississippians and Georgians didn't care about what she left out, why did they include them? If what she cut out was important enough to Mississippians and Georgians that they LISTED THEM among their CAUSES FOR SECEDING, why did Transgriot leave them out?

Yes, dear reader, that IS a rhetorical question. We KNOW why she left them out.

Once Confederacy-bashers like this see what they're looking for -- the S word -- they QUIT READING. They don't want to know the rest of the story. They don't even want to acknowledge that there IS a rest-of-the-story.

Well, there is. I have already examined Mississippi's Secession Declaration to explain it to a "journalist" here: http://one80dts.blogspot.com/2011/03/backsassin-yet-another-journalist.html

The Yes-They-Did folks seem levelheaded and motivated mostly by (1) a desire to acknowledge these men and their contribution and (2) historical accuracy, while the No-They-Didn't folks get plumb apoplectic in their denial. For me, that says a lot about the quality of the substantiation each waves before the public.

The no-folks claim that yes-folks (frequently slandered as "Confederacy worshippers" and "historical revisionists" and "slavery apologists") are attempting to "legitimize" the Confederacy by taking away the idea that the South fought to perpetuate slavery, because, as we have noted, it is unthinkable that blacks/slaves would "fight to perpetuate their own enslavement." So, if blacks fought for the South, the South couldn't have been fighting to maintain slavery.

However, that this is an accurate description of the yes-folks' motive is a bunch of baloney, as far as I'm concerned..

Now, it's true that, over the years, I've run into a few people who claim, "The war had nothing to do with slavery! It was about..." states rights, or the tariff, or whatever. Well, it was "about" all those things, including slavery, and more. However, when someone makes the distinction (as I do) that the secession of the Deep South states was over slavery and other things, but the shooting started for another reason, that is frequently characterized as saying, "The war had nothing to do with slavery...." It's dishonest, of course, and the people doing it know it is.

The reason it is so important to the anti-Confederate folks to tie the Southern cause forever to slavery, and only slavery, is their faith that slavery delegitimizes the South's struggle for independence.

It doesn't.

The reason for demonizing the Confederacy this way is to take the focus off the sins of the United States.

Whatever claim of moral superiority the north/union/United States had/has over the South because some of its states abolished slavery when it became unprofitable, that moral authority was obliterated by northern industry's accumulation of wealth processing slave-grown cotton in its textile mills and its maritime interests' accumulation of wealth shipping slave-grown cotton to Europe.

The north's moral superiority vanishes when you realize that the Confederacy had legalized slavery for four years, and the United States for 80 years -- including eight months AFTER the Confederacy ceased to exist.

The north's moral superiority vanishes when you realize that while the union army making war on the South, slaves were helping to build the U .S. Capitol in Washington D.C.

The north's moral superiority was obliterated by the military invasion of the Southern states, the barbarity with which the Union Army made war and the economic enslavement of the Southern people, black and white, for generations after the war, with purposely created poverty.

The claim of U.S. moral superiority was obliterated by the U.S. government's official policy of genocide of the Plains Indians; by herding native Americans onto reservations in conditions worse than slavery; by the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII; by the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments; by the CIA's torture and murder in Central America; by the U.S. military's herbicidal warfare program against Vietnamese civilians, and on and on and on.

The South was fighting for its political independence motivated by more than preserving its slave-based economy, but even if that had been its only motivator -- and whether or not blacks fought for the South -- the Confederacy's struggle for independence from Washington, D.C. was as legitimate as the colonies' struggle for independence from the British crown.