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Free North Carolina -
“Monsters of Virtuous Pretension”
By David Aiken
When I was a child growing up in Kirkwood Baptist Church in Atlanta,
Georgia, I was fascinated by three works of Atlanta public art:
The Cyclorama [and Civil War Museum at Grant Park] next to the
Atlanta Zoo, is a 358 foot wide and 42 foot tall painting of the Battle
of Atlanta, July 1864, the largest painting in the world – longer than a
football field and taller than a four-story building. German artists
painted it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1886, but in my lifetime it was
permanently located in Atlanta. I was told a diorama was added in
1936, giving it a three-dimensional foreground. I remember it being
restored in 1979 – 1982. It is the single most impressive painting I
have ever seen, and I have seen hundreds of great paintings.
I grew up near Stone Mountain, the largest bas-relief sculpture in
the world, much larger than Mount Rushmore, and the most popular tourist
spot in Georgia. It is 90 by 190 feet, recessed 42 feet into the
mountain. In 1916, it was conceived by the United Daughters of the
Confederacy, and officially completed in 1972. Since it is carved in
granite, it will last longer than any other achievement by human beings.
In other words, when all the buildings, bridges, dams and engineering
feats of the human race fall into ruin and dust, the granite carvings of
Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson will endure. It
is fitting, I think, that the greatest ideas and the noblest heroism
should be remembered in the most enduring monuments.
I learned early in my childhood that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson fought to preserve the values of men like George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson – who created a culture of the soil based on
inalienable rights and true learning. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson led in the fight for the American Republic of George Washington
and Thomas Jefferson: for self-government and fair taxation among free
and independent states. They fought with bullets.
I understood that I would have to fight not with bullets, but with
books in the classroom and in the minds of people. Lacking a sound
knowledge of the South, of our history and literature, we are
inadequately armed when conflict arises. I learned that knowledge of
key Southern authors and books is as good as musket and shot. One of
the first great insights of my life is that people are enslaved with the
sword and with government and private debt, but with true knowledge
people are liberated.
I grew up with
Gone with the Wind — the 1936 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell. I always knew that
Gone with the Wind is about the Yankee invasion of Georgia and the burning and destruction of Atlanta.
Gone with the Wind would become the most popular American novel of the 20th century, surpassing standard academic novels like
To Kill a Mockingbird and
The Great Gatsby, and all the other novels which are currently required reading in almost every classroom in the country.
Gone with the Wind
inspired the 1939 David O. Selznick film, which has been viewed by more
people than any of the other 300,000 Hollywood films. Today it is
recognized as the biggest box office hit of all time, and the pinnacle
of the Hollywood system.
I should add that it also has the most quotable line in all those movies.
By the time I graduated from Murphy High School, I had read all 1,037 pages of
Gone With the Wind,
seen the movie six times, been to the Cyclorama at least 20 times, and
had climbed, visited or driven by Stone Mountain hundreds of times —
back in the days before the Mountain became a Georgia state park. As a
youth, I lived my life around these tributes to the Southern
Confederacy, without embarrassment or shame. They were at the heart of
my Atlanta. I can remember buying Confederate Battle Flags at Stone
Mountain, and attending the Cyclorama with my school mates.
I also knew that
Gone With the Wind and the extraordinary film it inspired were favorites of my mother.
I vividly remember a particular scene in the middle of
Gone With the Wind.
As a child, I would catch the # 18 bus from my house in Kirkwood to
the downtown Loews Grand or Paramount theaters at Five Points. I would
sit there enthralled, watching and learning. At one point in the long
four-hour movie, many of the people in those theaters jumped up out of
their seats and cheered.
We in the theater had watched young Scarlett as a courted and
pampered sixteen year old; we had seen her as a seventeen year old widow
in Atlanta during the war; we had seen her nursing wounded and dying
Confederate soldiers; we had seen her escape the burning city to return
home to Tara where – at the age of twenty-one – she had to become the
head of her surviving family and to manage the plantation of her
grieving and demented father. Then we see Scarlett do something
extraordinary.
A Yankee straggler rides up to the door of the big house at Tara. He
enters to pillage, rape and murder. We the audience see Scarlett take
the pistol Rhett Butler had given her and shoot the invader in the face.
Many of the young people of Atlanta in the 1940s and 1950s would clap,
and often stand up and cheer. Even as a child in elementary school,
and then as a high school student, I understood.
I had learned that invaders were people who raped, burned, tortured,
plundered and murdered the good people of Atlanta – my people, who went
to church on Sundays; my people who worked hard, who were courteous,
well-mannered, loving and loyal; my people who paid their taxes and who
tried to be virtuous and fair; my people who took care of me and tried
to bring me up to be responsible and respectful; my people who were
deeply Southern and devoutly Christian.
To this day, when I see Scarlett shoot that Yankee criminal, coming
up the stairs to steal what little remained in that looted household and
to do Scarlett and Melanie physical and emotional harm, I applaud.
Why? Because I learned early how to recognize a monster when I saw one.
I had learned that
Gone With the Wind is not about slavery or
racism. It is not about Southern indolence or decadence, nor is the
novel just a romance or a saga of the Old South.
Gone With the Wind,
rather, is about a self-righteous and greedy minority of northern
Americans who captured the government and invaded, burned, looted, raped
and murdered another group of better Americans.
Liberal academic critics have whined, what does Margaret Mitchell
know about the destruction of Atlanta. She was born in 1900, almost
half a century after the Lincoln Administration invaded the South. What
did the 1940s and 1950s youth of Atlanta know, almost a whole century
after Sherman marched To the Sea in Georgia, and From the Sea in
Carolina? Margaret Mitchell is not a primary source, critics shout; she
is a romancer, a novelist, although she was a careful historian who
went to great lengths to check her facts.
Having been a college and university professor for thirty-six years, I
understand the importance of primary sources. What I needed for my
students was an eyewitness account, by someone who was a careful
observer, who interviewed people and preserved their personal accounts
in a readable narrative. What I needed was a dedicated writer, an
experienced journalist and a proven historian.
I have discovered many compelling historical documents about the
horrors of invasion, written by persuasive Southern authors – most of
them women, or men too old, too sick, or too disabled to fight. Some of
them were written by teenagers. They all talk about the human face of
war waged not on the battlefield, but in undefended houses, in
undefended homes, in undefended villages and plantations, and in
undefended cities of civilians.
One of these historical documents is more important than all the
rest. It was written by William Gilmore Simms from Charleston, the
Father of Southern Literature: the South’s most prolific antebellum
author. Before the war Simms was an international celebrity. His books
were well received and reviewed in England. Some were translated into
German. One was published in Aberdeen, Scotland. Others were reviewed
and collected in the last place an American would think to look for a
Simms volume today. That place was Russia where works by Simms were
reviewed in the mid-1800s and can still be found on display in rare book
collections in both St. Petersburg and Moscow libraries.
It was actually a rather cruel twist of fate that placed Simms in
Columbia shortly before Sherman’s troops reached the city. Simms did
not go there as a war journalist. He had no desire to become a war
correspondent. All he wanted to do was find a safe place to shelter
what was left of his family. His wife of twenty-seven years had just
died, and his oldest son was a Confederate soldier, fighting at the
front. But his youngest son was just a toddler. Simms also had a son
of nine and two daughters who were still in their teens and in need of
protection which Simms felt he could not provide at his Woodlands
Plantation in the Barnwell District. The state capital seemed to be the
safest place for them. And so it was that Simms found himself an
eyewitness to the destruction of the city where years earlier he had
lived and served as a state representative.
Simms’s letters have been collected into six volumes. Approximately
150 of the 1,775 collected letters of William Gilmore Simms were written
during the War for Southern Independence. They occupy over 300 of the
643 pages in volume IV. This fact alone speaks to the devotion of Simms
as a writer, because during the war paper was hard to come by. Stamps
were difficult to obtain. Simms had to make his own ink and candles.
The mail was often carried from one area to another by traveling friends
or family members. Near the end Simms entrusted his letters northward
into the hands of soldiers returning to their homes.
Early in the war Simms wrote letters to friends in high places in the
Confederate government, advising on everything from policy to
fortifications of the Charleston area. He also made a valiant attempt
to maintain a correspondence with close friends in the North, but as he
points out mailing anything North was difficult because mail required
both Confederate and Union stamps. Union stamps were almost impossible
to find in the Carolina Lowcountry.
Almost thirty years of correspondence with James Lawson of New York
ceases in 1861 and is not resumed until 1865, when it continues to the
end of Simms’s life. In the letters written to Lawson between 1860 and
1861, Simms tells us much about the way South Carolina prepared for an
invasion she was certain would come.
Simms is quite eloquent in listing the misrepresentations of the South in Northern newspapers, especially in the
New York Times:
We crave peace. But prepare for the war that is
threatened. If we are let go in peace, we shall not discriminate
against the North and our trade will still be accessible to her industry
and enterprise. Mr. Lincoln has spoken. And we are to have war.
I knew that in
Gone With the Wind, the war starts – not with
the bombardment of Fort Sumter — but when Lincoln calls for 75,000
volunteers to invade the South and coerce it back into the Union. The
war began on April 15, 1861, when Lincoln calls for an army of
volunteers, not on April 12 at Fort Sumter when South Carolina was
reclaiming control of the fort recently invaded and stolen in the
Charleston Harbor.
Simms is quite clear that the South did not want a war, and certainly did not start it:
Let us not declare it. Hostilities may exist without
war. Let us simply meet the issues as they arise. The consequences [of
starting a war] be upon the heads of those who would not suffer us to be
at peace in the Confederacy, nor leave us in peace when we withdraw
from it; whose consciences made them wretched at an alliance with us,
yet when we relieve their consciences of all responsibility, are
unwilling to be relieved, and resolve that the victims whom they have so
long robbed and reviled shall not escape them.
In one letter Simms says that he has been writing every night for six
weeks until three o’clock in the morning. In addition to advising
political and government leaders, he was contributing heavily to the
Charleston Mercury. Some of his submissions were on public affairs and domestic resources. He also published poetry in this paper.
Speaking of people in his own profession, Simms says:
I have been astonished to find that the Literary men are
generally almost wholly ignorant of politics, the Constitution, the
debates at the formation of the Confederation, and briefly of all the
principles and issues which were involved in the establishment of the
Confederacy.
He is talking about Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville – the major literary men taught to our young students today.
In his letters Simms gives us recipes for making Cherry Bounce and
Poor Man’s Soup. He tells us that May Weed can be substituted for
spinach, and Cassia for tea. He tells us that cane can be worked into
mats and baskets. When it came to collecting ideas for beating the
blockade by using native plants and resources, Simms was knowledgeable
and resourceful.
Simms’s son Gilmore was a seventeen year old cadet at The Citadel,
where cartridges, cannons, and percussion caps were being made. The
Cadets drilled daily. Even women and the elderly were armed and
practicing to perfect their marksmanship. In a touching letter, Simms
gives his son Gilmore step-by-step guidance on how to shave, carry his
equipment, and conduct himself in combat. His most often repeated
advice is to trust God and pray.
In reading these letters, we observe wealth and pride turning to
poverty and pain. In addition to the death of his wife, four of his
children die. Gilmore is wounded several times in combat and loses a
finger. Yellow fever rages through Charleston. Beloved cities are
reduced to ruins. Woodlands, his once grand plantation home, is burned
to the ground by Sherman’s men. 10,700 books in the library wing he
built to house them at Woodlands are destroyed or carried off, along
with over fifty original paintings.
At war’s end, Simms lives in a garret. His remaining children are
divided, some living in Columbia with him, some living in Bamberg with
the Rivers family.
One of Simms’s letters is particularly important. From Woodlands on
December 12, 1860, on the eve of South Carolina seceding (December 20,
1860), Simms wrote a long letter to a Northern critic. On January 17,
1861, the
Charleston Mercury published an expanded version of
the letter. In it Simms justified secession on the grounds of the
broken friendship between North and South: “Many Northerners,” he says,
“hate the South and vilify it as worthless, wanting in moral and
energy; unprosperous, grossly ignorant, brutal; uneducated, wanting
literature, art, statesmanship, wisdom – every element of intellect and
manners.” (IV, 301)
He opens this letter by stating that the people of South Carolina are not safe in this Union:
Our safety is . . . more important to us than any Union;
and, in the event of our future union with other parties, we shall
certainly look to our safety, with . . . more circumspection than our
fathers did, though they strove to guard their people, with all their
vigilance, against the danger equally of a majority and of Federal
usurpation.
Simms interprets the American Constitution framed in 1787, adopted in
1789, by the victorious Colonies as one based on friendship. He did
not believe that government should promote a proposition of any kind.
Instead, government should be founded on convivial order. A true
Federation is based on separate and distinct states which have a compact
with each other. A political order based on friendship pursues no
good, no purpose. Rather, it exists for its own sake: a bond of
friendship and sympathy. Friendships have no mission, no purpose. We
stay in government because we are friends, not because we have some
idealized world mission to accomplish, and certainly not because one
section of the country becomes wealthy at the expense of other areas.
To Simms, selfish elements in the North have broken that friendship.
As he says, “They [powerful and influential Northerners] have committed
the greatest political and social suicide that history has ever
recorded.”
Employing the image of the South as feminine, Simms compares the
cutting of the bonds to a woman leaving a selfish, and abusive man: She
“pleaded, even while she warned! She was [ever] reluctant to proceed
to extreme measures.”
For thirty years now, Simms says, the South has had to put up with
political and economic exploitation. Speaking for South Carolina, he
continues:
She will secede as surely as the sun shines in heaven.
She will rely upon the justice of her cause and the virtue of her
people. She will invade nobody. She will aggress upon no rights of
others. She has never done so. The South has never been the aggressor!
But we will no longer suffer aggression under the mask of “this
blessed Union.” We shall tear off the mask, and show the hideous
faithlessness, cupidity, lying and selfishness that lurk beneath. And
we shall do this, regardless of all consequences. For these we shall
prepare ourselves as well as we can. . . . And on our own ground, in
defense of our firesides, and in the assertion of ancestral rights, we
shall deliver no blow in vain.
To Simms, the struggle against Northern aggression would ultimately
be an issue of freedom: political freedom and economic freedom,
self-government and free trade.
Simms was convinced that the South would thrive if freed from the jealousy, hatred and abuse of Northern aggressors:
We, in the South, have all the essential elements for
establishing the greatest and most prosperous, and longest lived of all
the republics of the earth! We shall declare our ports free to the
industrial energies and productions of all the world, we subject
Northern manufactures, for the first time, to that wholesome competition
with the industry of other countries, the absence of which has made her
bloated in prosperity.
The Father of Southern Literature was in Columbia on February 17, 18,
19, and 20, 1865, when Sherman marched into the capital of South
Carolina where some 20,000 inhabitants were living and seeking refuge.
He was there when Sherman’s men began to rape and to torture and to
murder innocent civilians, and to plunder and to burn one of the most
beautiful cities in North America. During the conflagration, Simms
walked the streets, observing and remembering. Afterwards, he would
interview more than sixty people, when all the horrors were still fresh
in their minds.
One month later, in March 1865, Simms led the effort to publish a
newspaper which included his 90-page historical narrative entitled
The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia
– a primary historical document on the burning and destruction of a
prosperous American city. Simms listed names of Carolina people and the
addresses of their destroyed property. His account is a memorial to
civilian casualties. It is also the story of corruption inside American
government, and a report of American violence and crime against other
Americans. This important primary source almost disappeared. In 2005
(140 years after 1865) I brought it out in a book I entitled
A City Laid Waste.
Some of this will be shocking, because I am going to let Simms speak
for himself and for the people of Columbia, and the people of the
Confederate South. I know of six newspaper accounts of the destruction
of Columbia, but by far the most detailed, the most extensive, the most
inclusive and the most important is Simms’s. His account of American
atrocities cannot be refuted, so lovers of Lincoln and lovers of Sherman
have tried not only to discredit and repress it, but also to destroy
it. The invaders became obsessed with turning their view of the war
into historical record. In their determination, they ignored and then
destroyed testimony which contradicted their claims.
As a result, the Jeffersonian view of America, the original vision of
America dominant among the people of the founding generation up to
1861, as an experiment in justice and prosperity, has been removed from
public record. International imperialism, instead, Lincoln’s view of
America, dominates today. Lincoln’s America is currently the regnant
view of American history and culture, and all Americans are consequently
the poorer for the loss.
As a Revolutionary War historian, Simms sees America in terms of
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the founding generation. He
opens his historical narrative with an allusion to the Declaration of
Independence and an implied question: are the human rights which our
forefathers won from the British Crown being preserved or destroyed?
Simms’s answer is that Lincoln and his Administration are undermining
the great American principle stated in the Declaration of Independence:
that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the
governed.” This war, this invasion, unlawful and unconstitutional –
Simms says — is a death blow to American inalienable rights. How can
anyone say that Americans have the right to govern themselves when you
destroy our places of government? How can anyone say that Americans
have freedom of religion when you destroy our churches? How can anyone
say that Americans have freedom of expression when you destroy our
presses and burn our newspapers? How can anyone say that Americans have
the right to pursue happiness when you destroy our homes and personal
property? The “cruel and malignant enemy,” led by Sherman, is the
antithesis of the America that the Founding Fathers envisioned and
fought to establish.
We should remember that the youthful Simms studied law and passed the
bar to become a practicing attorney. Throughout his life, Simms
revered the rule of law. One of the people who reviewed
A City Laid Waste said that every cadet at West Point should not only read but also study Simms’s account of the burning of Columbia.
Simms’s document
The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia
can be summarized in a word– INVASION. Simms states the subject matter
in his title, but the meaning of this important narrative is expressed
in four words – Simms’s four words: the invasion of South Carolina and
particularly the destruction of Columbia was committed by “monsters of
virtuous pretension.” Monsters of Virtuous Pretension. The invasion of
the South, culminating in the conflagration of Columbia, was committed
by criminals who loudly proclaimed simultaneously both their innocence
and their alleged pure and lofty intentions.
We should never forget that Sherman began immediately denying that he
had burned Columbia. He willfully and arrogantly blamed the
destruction on Wade Hampton. Simms records what he observed as well as
what he received in sworn testimonies:
Newly made graves were opened, the coffins taken out, broken open, in
search of buried treasure, and the corpses left exposed. Every spot in
grave yard or garden, which seemed to have been recently disturbed, was
sounded with sword, or bayonet, or ramrod, in their desperate search
after spoil. These monsters of virtuous pretension [bold italics,
mine], with their banner of streaks and spangles overhead, and sworn to
the Constitution, which they neither understand nor read, never once
forget the greed of appetite which has distinguished Puritanic New
England for three hundred years; and, lest they might forget, the
appetite is kept lively by their women – letters found upon their dead,
or upon prisoners, almost invariable appealing to them to bring home the
gauds and jewelry, even the dresses of the Southern women, to deck the
fond feminine expectants at home, whom we may suppose to be all the
while at their devotions, assailing Heaven with prayer in behalf of
their thrice blessed cause and country.
Subsequently, the whole of American history and American literature
has been dedicated to defending monsters, to sanitizing, to
whitewashing, to glorifying criminals. In my lifetime, American higher
educated has been slavishly committed to the outrageous premise that the
invasion of the South was a good thing, and the people who perpetrated
that invasion were virtuous people. Lincoln and his Administration
along with Sherman, and all the officers, sergeants and privates who
were active in that enormity are heroes, so we teach American students
today. And anybody who disagrees with this imperial bias, anybody who
questions the fundamental premise, is called names – racist, ignorant,
unqualified, out of date, imbalanced, unprogressive, un-American and
domestic terrorists.
Any historical document that disagrees is ignored, or destroyed.
That’s why Simms’s account of invading “monsters of virtuous pretension”
was neglected for 140 years, and almost destroyed, resulting not in a
fair and historical report, but in unexamined and unconfirmed assertions
of northern righteousness and Southern degeneracy, as if Americans are
not supposed to know any history, as if knowing the past makes Americans
incapable of seeing grand universal principles.
More importantly, though, eyewitness sources contradict American
romantic myths about Lincoln and Mr. Lincoln’s War. Listen to Simms’s
detailed account of some of the sufferings of the people of Carolina:
The march of the enemy into our State was characterized
by such scenes of brutality, license, plunder and general conflagration,
as very soon showed that the threat of the Northern press, and of their
soldiery, were not to be regarded as mere brutum fulmen. Day by day,
brought to the people of Columbia tidings of newer atrocities committed,
and a wider and more extended progress. Daily did long trains of
fugitives line the roads, with wives and children, and horses and stock
and cattle, seeking refuge from the wolfish fury which pursued. Long
lines of wagons covered the highways. Half naked people cowered from
the winter under bush tents in the thickets, under the eaves of houses,
under the railroad sheds, and in old cars left there along the route.
All these repeated the same story of brutal outrage and great suffering,
violence, poverty and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village
after village – one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging
for it the same fate – lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson
horrors. . . . Where the families still ventured to remain, they were,
in most instances, so tortured by insult, violence, robbery and all
manner of brutality, that flight became necessary, and the burning of
the dwelling soon followed the flight of the owner. No language can
describe the sufferings of these fugitives, or the demonic horrors by
which they were pursued; nor can any catalogue furnish an adequate
detail of the wide-spread destruction of homes and property. Granaries
were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to
waste under the feet of their cavalry or consigned to the fire which
consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites
of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle,
hogs, mules and the costliest furniture. Nothing was permitted to
escape. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces,
but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy,
upon which they could conveniently lay hands, was employed to defile and
ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses. Sick people were forced
from their beds, to permit the search after hidden treasures. In
pursuit of these, the most diabolic ingenuity was exercised, and the
cunning of the Yankee, in robbing, proved far superior to that of the
negro for concealment. The beautiful homesteads of the parish country,
with their wonderful tropical gardens, were ruined; ancient dwellings of
black cypress, one hundred years old, which had been reared by the
fathers of the republic – men whose names were famous in Revolutionary
history – were given to the torch as recklessly as were the rudest
hovels; the ancient furniture was hewn to pieces; the costly collections
of China were crushed wantonly under foot; choice pictures of works of
art, from Europe; select and numerous libraries, objects of peace
wholly, were all destroyed. The summer retreats, simple cottages of
slight and unpretending structure, were equally devoted to the flames,
and, where the dwellings were not destroyed – and they were only spared
while the inhabitants resolutely remained in them – they were robbed of
all their portable contents, and what the plunderer could not bear away,
was ruthlessly hewn to pieces. The inhabitants, black no less than
white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to
be found in the abandoned camps of the enemy. The corn scraped up from
the spots where the horses fed, has been the only means of life left to
thousands but lately in affluence. It was the avowed policy of the
enemy to reach our armies through the sufferings of their women and
children – to starve out the families of those gallant soldiers whom
they had failed to subdue in battle.
An under-reported fact is that when Sherman left Columbia, he commanded 248 wagons filled with Southern treasure.
Simms reports more atrocities committed by the invading monsters:
We have been told of successful outrages of this
unmentionable character being practiced upon women [rapes] . . . . Many
are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and
two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by
the wretches and afterwards murdered – one of them being thrust, when
half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was
suffocated. . . . We need, for the sake of truth and humanity, to put
on record, in the fullest types and columns, the horrid deeds of these
marauders upon all that is pure and precious – all that is sweet and
innocent – all that is good, gentle, gracious, dear and ennobling –
within the regards of . . . Christian civilization.
And then there was the killing:
[Mayor Goodwyn] while walking with the Yankee General,
heard the report of a gun. Both heard it, and immediately proceeded to
the spot. There they found a group of soldiers, with a stalwart young
negro fellow lying dead before them on the street, the body yet warm and
bleeding. Pushing it with his feet, Sherman said, in his quick, hasty
manner, “What does this mean, boys?” The reply was sufficiently cool
and careless. “The d___d black rascal gave us his impudence, and we
shot him.” “Well, bury him at once! Get him out of sight!” As they
passed on, one of the party remarked, “Is that the way, General, you
treat such a case?” “Oh!” said he, “we have no time for courts-martial
and things of that sort!”
“Should you capture Charleston, I hope by some accident the place may
be destroyed. And if a little salt should be sown upon the site, it may
prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.”
These words advocating the centralization of American government along
with the destruction of Charleston came in 1865 from Lincoln’s Chief of
Staff, Major General Henry Halleck. The message was addressed to
Sherman, whose mode of warfare was hailed in Northern papers as genius
and decried in the South as barbaric.
Today, our children are taught not to question or to doubt, but to
praise and to glorify the so-called great democratic achievements of
Sherman in his notorious march through Georgia and South Carolina.
Simms exposes the popular glorification of Sherman, his men, and
their march, falsely represented as an army of noble Americans on a
democratic adventure, performing a great military feat. In the process
of saving this Sacred Union, the romantic myth goes, American soldiers
were outraged by haughty Southern aristocracy and by the oppression of
black people, whom the invaders heartily embraced, so on and on the
romantic myths go. As a result, the righteous invaders resolved to
destroy Southern society once and for all, and thereby bestow on the
planet a new birth of freedom.
These absurd pretensions of virtue and self-righteous justifications
for criminal acts are easily contradicted by hundreds of Southern
sources, chief among them is Simms’s account of Sherman in Columbia.
Simms reveals Sherman’s invasion as evil, as rationalized by a deformed
Christianity, as a fatal violation of the Constitution and core American
values, and as carried out by a pretentious army of plundering
criminals.
CONCLUSION
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do
nothing. Silence is the greatest shame. We must speak up, no matter
how difficult.
To protect the Constitution and the freedom and well-being of the
people of the South, the Southern states affirmed the right to disobey
the American central government: a right affirmed and established by
the founding generation, although labelled treason by Lincoln and his
Administration.
As a result of defending the values of the American founders and the
rights made explicit in the Declaration of Independence, the South was
wrongfully, criminally, and brutally invaded – not by those warring for
Christ and Christian morality, not by those building an exceptional
civilization in the Western Hemisphere, not by those defending humanity
or human rights. The South was invaded, brutalized, and conquered by
“monsters of virtuous pretension.” As eyewitnesses like Simms said over
and over again, by felons and brutes – who not only broke the rules of
warfare by attacking, raping and murdering innocent civilians, but who
also broke the rules of decency and Christian morality. I remind you
that Simms addresses his historical narrative of the destruction of
Columbia to Christians, everywhere.
Simms was present throughout this American enormity, when he recorded
the horrors of invasion, and Sherman’s repeated denials – denials
Sherman himself would eventually acknowledge. Simms not only exposes
Sherman, but he also rebukes the invaders’ virtuous pretensions to
defend and to justify their monstrous behavior.
Those who attempted to destroy the South did not succeed (although
some are still trying today), because the ideas and ideals of the South
are preserved, along with the malignant cruelty of the invaders —
preserved in Simms’s writings as well as in the writings of many
others. Southern ideals are also preserved in the Atlanta art that
influenced my youth. What kind of civilization could inspire the
Cyclorama, the carvings on Stone Mountain, and the American classic
Gone With the Wind?
These works of art spoke to me as an Atlanta youth, as well as to
millions of others. The meaning of great Southern art points to the
ideals of the American South.
The ideas and ideals of Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers
were both the inspiration and the model of the Southern Confederacy. I
was taught that Confederate ideals include the goal of the responsible,
sovereign individual, tempered by family, community, church and state. I
knew that the Southern Confederacy was intended to protect the Southern
land and the rights of the people on that land to be free from
arbitrary executive power, entangling alliances, destructive wars, and
unfair regional exploitation to benefit sectional elites.
If our teachings are false, if our art like the Cyclorama, Stone Mountain, and
Gone With the Wind
is inferior and irrelevant, and if our literary and historical sources
like Simms are wrong, then they will not withstand the onslaught of
globalism, secularism, and empire building. But if they are true, then
they will sustain us in all manner of dark and threatening times,
because we have faith in the final justice of the Good Lord Above and in
His ultimate victory. Like our Revolutionary War forefathers, we have
faith that freedom will eventually triumph over all forms of tyranny and
usurpation. Like our Confederate heroes, we have faith that the
courage, sacrifices and patriotism of men like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall
Jackson, and William Gilmore Simms will not only endure but will finally
prevail.
About David Aiken
David Aiken received a B.A. in History, Philosophy and English
from Baylor University, a M.Div. in Biblical Studies and Christianity
and Culture from Duke University, a M.A. in Southern Literature and
Classics from the University of Georgia, and a Ph.D. in American
Literature and Modern British and American Literature from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. He has written, edited or
introduced more than fifty articles and books on William Faulkner,
Flannery O'Conner, William Gilmore Simms and other Southern authors, and
is a founding member of the Abbeville Institute and the William Gilmore
Simms Society.
