Day By Day by The Great Chris Muir

Monday, December 28, 2015

Alfred Kinsey, Child Sexuality, and Rabbitism

Alfred Kinsey, Child Sexuality, and Rabbitism

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

"The benefits of foreign labor are a lie" - Vox Day

The benefits of foreign labor are a lie 

Vox Day @ Vox Popoli

In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and I conclusively demonstrated, using official government statistics, that immigrant labor is a net negative to Americans and American workers. Others who are looking into the subject are reliably finding that the importation of foreign labor is harmful:
Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is not supposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.

Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead....

At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit.

What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit — and often the letter — of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.
I know it's painful for the devotees of free trade, who love nothing better than to compare 21st century analyses to 18th century dogma, to admit, but the increasingly undeniable empirical reality is that free trade, and the free movement of labor, are about as Marxist, globalist, socially destructive, and economically harmful as Communism.

I've read every single defense of free trade that I can find. None of them, not a single one of them, holds up. And as for those who babble childishly about a protectionist government picking winners, as if that suffices to make a rational case, what on Earth do they think is happening in the USA and in the EU now?

All that free trade accomplishes is that it allows governments to pick winners from around the world rather than from inside their own borders. And the winners are those who are willing to pay the most for the privilege, which is why the dominant figures in the U.S. media are a) an Australian and b) a Lebanese based in Mexico.

Update 1 - dc. sunsets comments on the original post:

 I used to be a free trader. I now see that virtually any "good" will be inverted if not embedded in a larger cohesive social milieu.

Shared identity (culture, heritage, etc.) is a powerful system of disciplining naked self-interest. Cultural Marxism's and Blank Slate's first effect is to destroy shared identity, freeing people to undertake individually profitable actions that utterly destroy the commons on which their lives depend.

Multi-culturalism and totalitarian anti-racism/anti-sexism produce, in fact, a monstrous Tragedy of the Commons, where a common culture, common heritage, even common belief systems and common values are the essential connective tissue of a peaceful and prosperous society.

 Maybe it makes me an aspie, but the inescapable conclusion from this logic train is that what "we" need more than anything is separatism.

My family and I will thrive best if we live our lives embedded in a homogeneous society, one where we share the same core values. Given the axioms of HBD, this means we would best live in a society of straight, culturally conservative (at least nominally Christian) people primarily of Northern European descent, and where all others would be encouraged to Go. Somewhere. Else. Such a cohesive community would embed powerful checks and balances on members' individual actions, most of them subtle and private rather than public and legalistic. Borders would be semi-permeable to goods, virtually impermeable to people.

As Hans Hermann Hoppe has noted, Job #1 would be ejecting anyone who tried to infect the Body Politic with the poisons with which it is saturated today.

 @17 Leo, sadly I'm compelled to see that while permeability to people is THE most disastrous of free trade, there must certainly be instances where The Commons of a cohesive society is threatened by certain goods as well.

My lingering libertarian quickly asks, "Who is to decide what is socially good and what is not?" but when caught in the vise between "Authority Decides" and "Naked Self-Interest Rules," I'm now forced to side with Authority.

Until humans self-segregate and geographically separate into relatively homogeneous societies there will be too little social cohesion to subtly apply moral opprobrium in enough quantity to offset naked self-interest. A relatively free society cannot emerge from or even survive amidst heterogeneity, this should now be blatantly obvious.

Until then, the path ahead that does not lead into the Valley of Lord of the Flies must pass through a totalitarian autocracy. Since we're already living in a totalitarian democratic despotism, it's possible an autocracy will actually be an improvement for most of us.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

"Cuckservative" - Review by Keoni Galt / Hawaiian Libertarian

Playing the Red Card to Trump the Cucks 



"And what of the original Americans, the natives who lived on this continent before the first Europeans arrived? What did this melting mean for them? Unfortunately, that is something that the native-born, culturally American, European-descended population is in the process of finding out as it declines in the face of ever-growing numbers of immigrants from vastly different cultures possessing rival traditions, ideologies, and agendas of their own."

There are generally two kinds of cultural change agents that work to progress society towards the utopian dystopian ideals of our Brave New World Order. The first type are those who self-identify as the liberal, progressive leftist, who openly and proudly promotes the overthrow of classic American cultural heritage aka the so-called hegemony of white-Christian-patriarchal-privilege. As detestable as they are, at least they are somewhat honest when they state their goals and objectives in attempting to change the face of the nation.

The other kind of change agent is far more insidious and has caused far more damage to the fabric of Western Civilization, and they have done so while supposedly bearing the standard of opposition against the liberal-progressive leftists. These are they who claim to be a part of the opposition of the progressive leftists and cultural marxists working to overthrow traditional American society, but their actions do not match up with their words. They are the controlled opposition that have co-opted the original conservative movement.

They have previously been called many different names, from RINOs to NeoCons, yet none of these terms have ever really had much of an effect on those who bore the mantle of "conservative" in bad faith. But the latest term they have been branded with, Cuckservative, has been the most effective rhetorical weapon to date ever devised to strike them with. In the past year, the meme wars on teh Interewebz based on the newly coined term has hit them right between the eyes.

Who are the cuckservatives? Ye shall know them by their shrieks when they are confronted with teh tweets.

Seizing upon the opportunity of the proliferation of such a popular and effective meme, John Red Eagle and Vox Day, two Indians (feathers, not dots) have just released a new book, Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America. 

As stated in my review of Vox's previous release, SJWs Always Lie: 

"I bought this book because I wanted to indulge in schadenfraude! I wanted to help the Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil punch back twice as hard at the snivelling hordes of brainwashed lickspittles and useful idiots that march under the banner of the SJW. No War but Culture War! This book is a badly needed, long overdue counterattack against the long march. For that, I consider it money and time well spent."  

For much the same reasoning, I bought Cuckservative on it's official release date this past Monday from Amazon, and finished reading it by Wednesday. I enjoyed it and I did learn a few things that I never knew before, such as the origins of the term "melting pot." But more importantly, our Injun authors give us a historical perspective on nations, cultures and heritage, and the effects mass immigration had on them in many different times and places in world history.  From antiquity to the present day, they make a strong case that mass immigration should be defined as nothing less than an act of war and conquest.

Of particular interest, was their identification of the source of American culture and heritage that is severely endangered from the continued influx of foreigners unsuited and non-amenable to America's nation-founding ideals:

As much as it has changed over the years, American culture still has very specific historical roots in English culture and history. Observe that we say "English," not British, as the latter is more of a multicultural political construct from an amalgamation of four nations than a true national culture of its own. "American" is arguably well on its way to becoming something more akin to "British" rather than "English." Those who value American culture, and who would prefer to avoid seeing that come to pass, would do well to develop an understanding of how America's ancestral English culture came to be.

While going through a brief rundown of the history of English culture, our Redskin co-authors identify two primary characteristics of this "English" culture that served as the foundation for American culture: self-reliant independence of the citizenry and the limitation of the powers of a society's rulers.

As they point out, these cultural values are primarily upheld through cultural transmission of a largely heterogeneous populace from one generation to the next, and that subsequent hordes of migrants with different values and beliefs will inevitably change them.


There was no magic dirt. There was no shining city on a hill. All that was required for irrevocable change was the arrival of sufficient numbers of people with a separate culture of their own who were both willing and able to hold onto it in the face of native opposition.

I came away with one very important idea from this work: the litmus test for determining who is and who is not a cuckservative. While they offer a twenty-two point bullet list as a field guide for identifying a cuckservative in chapter 4, all one need do is to simply look at any so-called "right" wing politician or pundit and review their statements on the issue of mass migration (both legal and illegal; documented and undocumented) from the third world to the Anglo-sphere: the US, UK, Europe, Canada and Australia.

Then compare and contrast with their stance on Israel's strict, race-based immigration policy (for which I support Israel's right to do so, 100%!) and that is all the info you need to identify a cuckservative.



The Cuckservative are the ones promoting the myths of the melting pot and magic dirt to support the continued migrations of non-white, non-Christians into all of these formerly white Christian majority countries. The reasons usually given by such cuckservatives is based mostly upon the appeal that conservatives must avoid being labelled racist by the left.

In addition to a stated fear of being labelled as racist, many cuckservatives who attribute the need for supporting mass migrations, base it on an argument of falsified doctrine of Christian charity, particularly the parable of the Good Samaritan. John and Vox use both statistics, logic and scriptural citations to totally destroy churchian-styled arguments based on the twisting of scripture.

While the book is filled with facts, statistics, charts and other evidence to make their case against "conservatives", their strongest rhetoric (at least for me personally, as I can certainly relate) comes from playing the red card:

Import people, and you import their culture. Import them on a small scale, as with the Normans, and they may assimilate, but in doing so, they will still influence yours. Import them on a larger scale, and they'll keep their own culture, which will conflict with yours. Import them on a large enough scale, as with the Saxons, and your culture will be the one assimilated. And if that happens, you find yourselves at the mercy of whatever the newcomers decide to do with you.

Trust us. We know. Both of our Native American cultures have been all but eliminated. Our tribes were forcibly expelled from their lands and forced onto reservation, where they still live today. Neither of us knows more than a few words of the languages our forefathers used to speak before the arrival of Spanish and English immigrants.

The Magic Dirt won't save you.

I've got my own brown card to play, and I'll throw it in with John Red Eagle's and Vox Day's red cards into the middle of the table. As the descendent of a marginalized, occupied, dispossessed and miscegenated-unto-near-extinction indigenous native people, I too echo the warning to those who still value the founding American ideals of self reliance and limited Government.

I see the new breed of conqueror, and their desired objectives would be far worse for us all, than the life we managed to make under the regime of the American pale face and it's original foundation of self-reliance and limited Government.

I see the new breed of conqueror and I understand their overriding goal is to bring all of the world's populations down to a lowest common denominator of miscegenated homogeneity with no discernible cultural heritage or identity that may one day serve as a rallying point to resist their emerging tyranny of global governance.

I see the new breed of conqueror and I believe it is the defining fight of our lives to resist their agenda of mass enfeeblement, arrested development and over-reliance and dependence on a centralized, global and tyrannical regime to govern every aspect of our micro-managed lives. Make no mistake about it, this is ultimately the end goal of those that the cuckservatives are working for. To get their Brave New World Order, America as it was originally founded must first be destroyed, and the cucking of conservatism is one of the primary means for THEY to accomplish it.

As John and Vox put it:

The uncomfortable truth is that cuckservatism not only betrays America's posterity, it also betrays the intent of the other clauses of the Preamble to the Constitution, including, "to form a more perfect Union","establish Justice","insure domestic Tranquility","provide for the common defence", and "promote the General Welfare", five things that adding 60 million immigrants in 50 years have manifestly not done.

One could make a very strong argument that thanks to their cuckservative ideology, America's self-styled conservatives have literally betrayed the entire purpose of the Constitution of the United States of America, and in doing so, they have put the very survival of the nation at risk.

Yes indeed, these two Native American Injuns have in fact done exactly that in writing Cuckservative - How "Conservatives" Betrayed America. 

Best heed their warning, pale face.




Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Sailer's Law of Female Journalism

Had to post this classic from Steve Sailer:

Sailer's Law of Female Journalism

A cover story on Slate.com today (#4):
Hair Raising:
Can a shocking YouTube video of a girl getting her curls brushed change attitudes about black hair?
By Teresa Wiltz

This is another example of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Technically, it might seem highly possible that somebody named "Teresa Wiltz" has naturally straight hair and is just writing out of a disinterested interest in the topic. But, decades of reading female journalism at its most passionate suggested to me that Ms. Wiltz's own looks would turn out to highly germane.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Vox Day Book - Cuckservative

The third collaboration

Yesterday Mike Cernovich announced that he would be publishing his next book, Last Man Standing, with Castalia House. He also announced that he had accepted a position as Editor-at-Large with Castalia House. What he did not mention, at my request, is that he is also working with Castalia House on a third project. I asked him not to mention it because I wanted to tell you myself.

As dark lords go, I am, as most of you know, unusually civil. Having asked one of my GGinParis co-hosts to write a foreword for one of my books, I thought it would be a grievous breach of etiquette to fail to request the same of the other. So, I am pleased to announce that the aforementioned Editor-at-Large has already written the foreword for my next book, which I have written with a fellow American Indian (albeit one from a different tribe). It is expected to be released before the end of year. It is a hard-hitting book in the vein of SJWAL, but addresses an even more important and controversial subject: the politics of American immigration.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America contains an extremely important phrase that is almost always ignored by those who appeal to it, or to the men who wrote it, in defense of immigration. It states:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The key phrase is this: “to ourselves and our posterity.” The blessings of liberty are not to be secured to all the nations of the world, to the tired and huddled masses, or to the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of other lands. They are to be secured to our children, and their children, and their children's children.


To sacrifice their interests to the interests of children in other lands is to betray both past and future America. It is to permit an alien posterity, like the newly hatched cuckoo in another bird's nest, to eliminate our own, and in doing so, defeat the purpose of the Constitution. It is, like the cuckolded husband, to raise the children of another man instead of one's sons and daughters. It is, in a word, cuckservative.


Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America will be published in December by Castalia House.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

How Pedophilia Will Be Normailsed

Quote comments from commenters at an NRO article that rationalises pedophilia, because they are insightful:

Matt:
1. Organize
2. Humanize
3. Legalize
4. Legitimize
5. Litigate
6. Repeat
Stage Two doesn't seem too unreasonable, does it? How many bloody times do we have to get rope-a-doped by the same shtick before we recognize that it's part of a much larger campaign which has been going on for generations, now?
Priests, pastors, and psychiatrists receive special training to lovingly and thoughtfully help people with terrible issues like this one who need help. Privately. There's absolutely NO reason for anybody to work through this problem publicly. There's absolutely no reason to challenge the one hysterical taboo the American people have which is fully justified.
And can we impose a permanent moratorium on atheists needling Christians on how their faith is supposed to be expressed? It's not like we go around telling atheists how they're supposed to tip their fedoras and embed cheese crumbs in their neckbeards.

Dingus Rattenberg:

Step one is chipping away at the legal and social norms associated with pedophilia. Our attention is deflected carefully away from the monstrosity of adult-child sexual attraction (calling it an "orientation," for example), and redirected toward pity for the offender. Do our laws really need to be so harsh? Is the extreme social stigma really justified? After all, look at these poor fellows. They're very sad.

Step two. Graphic tales of violence done against pedophiles or suspected pedophiles, usually by vigilantes (to shock comfortable bourgeois liberals) but also law enforcement (to shock civil libertarians), are rubbed in our noses. These cases will be easy to find, since reactionary pushback to step one is practically guaranteed. People who really hate pedophiles are nasty and evil and violent bigots will be the implied message. Meanwhile, "studies" conducted at state-sponsored universities will "find" that adult-child sexual contact really isn't all that psychologically harmful to children. Rather, our superiors will inform us, the reason children suffer post-contact depression is because of the "social stigma" attached to such relationships. We will be encouraged to be supportive and understanding "allies" of pedophilic relationships, since, after all, a simple attitude change on our parts will prevent depression and suicide.

Step three. At about this time, the real legal push to lower statutes of limitation begins. New "studies" show that children in fact benefit, in some very loosely-defined way, from early sexual contact with adults. The most progressive and forward-thinking parents in the most progressive and forward-thinking states begin lending their children for "play dates" with pedophiles, framed as mutually beneficial arrangements whereby children are therapeutically socialized into sexual maturity. Why risk letting some stranger take your child's virginity in a drunken haze, when it can all be done with the help of a vetted accomplice in the comfort of one's own home? Win-win.

Step four. Pedophiles will begin to emerge more frequently in pop culture and mass media. A record label, for instance, may promote an otherwise wild, hard-headed rapper's soulful ballad mourning society's unequal treatment of what is really the "same love." Mainline protestantism (if it still exists at this point) will ordain open pedophiles. The Catholic Church will be praised for its leading role. Cases involving the "rights" of pedophiles will have trickled up to the Supreme Court. You can fill in the rest.
Thanks to the Great Cuckservatives of the National Review Online.

UPDATE: Also see this Vox Day Post:

SJWs shift the Narrative and Thoughts on tolerance

Rejection = disbelief + opposition
Tolerance = disbelief + passivity
Submission = disbelief + support
Denialism = belief + opposition
Acceptance = belief + passivity
Celebration = belief + support

 

UPDATE UPDATE:  RAMZPAUL: NRO and Salon Fight Pedophobia

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Can atheists condemn slavery as immoral? Do atheists believe that slavery is wrong?

Can atheists condemn slavery as immoral? Do atheists believe that slavery is wrong?

By Wintery Knight

Note: For a Christian response to the complaint that the Bible doesn’t condemn slavery, see this article and this article for slavery in the Old Testament, and this article for slavery in the New Testament. These are all by Christian philosopher Paul Copan. You can watch a lecture with Paul Copan on the slavery challenge here, and buy a book where he answers the challenge in more detail. There is also a good debate on whether the Bible condones slavery here, featuring David Instone-Brewer and Robert Price. My post is not a formal logical essay on this issue, it is more that I am outraged that atheists, who cannot even rationally ground objective morality, insist on criticizing the morality of the Bible. I think that atheists who are serious about finding the truth about these issues should check out those links, if they are interested in getting to the truth of these matters.
In other posts, I’ve argued that without an objective moral standard of what is right and wrong, any judgments about right and wrong are just individual opinions. So, when an atheist says slavery is wrong, what he really means is that he thinks slavery is wrong for him, in the same way that he thinks that,say, that chocolate ice cream is right for him. He isn’t saying what is wrong objectively, because on atheism there are no objective moral rules or duties. He is speaking for himself: “I wouldn’t own a slave, just like I wouldn’t eat broccoli – because it’s yucky!”. But he has no rational argument against other people owning slaves in other times and places, because their justification for owning slaves is the same as his justification for not owning slaves : personal preference and cultural conventions.
So do atheists oppose slavery? Do they believe in an objective human right to liberty? Well, there are no objective human rights of any kind on atheism. Human beings are just accidents in an accidental universe, and collections of atoms do not mysteriously accrue “rights”. There is no natural right to liberty on atheism. Now consider abortion, which is favored by most atheists. Like slavery, abortion declares an entire class of human beings as non-persons in order to justify preserving their own happiness and prosperity by means of violence. That’s exactly what slavery does, except abortion is worse than slavery, because you actually kill the person you are declaring as a non-person instead of just imprisoning them.
So how many atheists have this pro-abortion view that it is OK to declare unborn children  as non-persons so they can kill them?
Well, according to Gallup, the “non-religious” are the group most likely to support abortion. In fact, 68% favor legalized abortion, compared to only 19% who oppose it.
Take a look at the Gallup poll data from 2012:
Atheists are OK with the strong killing the weak
Most atheists are OK with the strong killing the weak
The Gallup numbers might actually be low, because “No religion” might include people who are spiritual, but not religious. But what about atheists alone?
As a group, atheists tend to be among the most radical supporters of legalized abortion. The Secular Census of 2012 found that 97% of atheists vote for abortion. There are almost no pro-life atheists. Why is it that atheists look at unborn children and think it’s OK to kill them? Well, let’s see what atheists scholars think about morality, and from that we’ll find out why they think abortion is morally permissible.
Atheist scholars think morality is nonsense
Atheist William Provine says atheists have no free will, no moral accountability and no moral significance:
Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.
Source: http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm
Atheists Michael Ruse says atheists have no objective moral standards:
The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.(Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).
Atheist Richard Dawkins says atheists have no objective moral standards:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))
Most atheists are like this – although some affirm objective morality, without really having a rational basis for it. In general though, when atheists use moral language to condemn God, the Bible, or Christians, it’s very important to understand that it is just theater. They are trying to use words that describe realities that they do not even believe in, usually with the goal of getting you to stop judging them for their own sin. I blogged about two examples of this before – Richard Carrier and Michael Shermer.
Let’s take a closer look at Richard Dawkins’ statement that there is “no evil and no good”.
Richard Dawkins and morality
Here’s Richard Dawkins’ view of abortion:
Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism
Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism
But wait! He goes even further than mere abortion:
Dawkins believes in Darwinian evolution. Survival of the fittest. The strong kill the weak. Where is protection for the unborn in that narrative?
Richard Dawkins even advocates for adultery.
So, what Dawkins really believes is that morality is nonsense. But in order to get you to stop condemning abortion, adultery, infanticide and a whole host of other atheistic misbehaviors, he will try to condemn you using moral language to stop you from making moral judgments. But the goal here is to intimidate you into not judging. By his own words, he thinks that the whole notion of objective moral values and objective moral duties is just nonsense.
Who does oppose slavery?
How did slavery end?
Dinesh D’Souza explains:
Slavery was mostly eradicated from Western civilization–then called Christendom–between the fourth and the tenth century. The Greco-Roman institution of slavery gave way to serfdom. Now serfdom has its problems but at least the serf is not a “human tool” and cannot be bought and sold like property. So slavery was ended twice in Western civilization, first in the medieval era and then again in the modern era.
In the American South, Christianity proved to be the solace of the oppressed. As historian Eugene Genovese documents in Roll, Jordan, Roll, when black slaves sought to find dignity during the dark night of slavery, they didn’t turn to Marcus Aurelius or David Hume; they turned to the Bible. When they sought hope and inspiration for liberation, they found it not in Voltaire or D’Holbach but in the Book of Exodus.
The anti-slavery movements led by Wilberforce in England and abolitionists in America were dominated by Christians. These believers reasoned that since we are all created equal in the eyes of God, no one has the right to rule another without consent. This is the moral basis not only of anti-slavery but also of democracy.
And, in fact, you can see Christians pushing the culture hard against abortion today, just as we did with slavery. We also oppose frivolous divorce, and redefining marriage in a way that normalizes removing mothers and/or fathers away from their children. Defending the weak is what we do.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Blacks And Slavery

Two articles for record keeping:

The First Legal Slave Owner in What Would Become the United States was a Black Man

Today I found out the first legal slave owner, in what would eventually become the United States, was a black man.
The man was Anthony Johnson.  Johnson first came over to America as an indentured servant, arriving in 1620 in the Colony of Virginia.  He did not come over willingly, as many did, agreeing to become indentured servants in exchange for passage to the New World. Rather, Johnson was captured in Angola by neighboring tribesmen and eventually sold to a merchant who transported him to Virginia, where he was then sold to a tobacco farmer.
Despite this, Johnson was not technically a slave, as most think of it.  He was simply required to serve the farmer for a time in exchange for room and board.  However, like slaves, indentured servants could be sold or lent out to someone else, and, for the most part, they could be punished how those that owned their contracts saw fit.
One of the biggest differences between slaves and indentured servants was that once the indentured servant’s contract was up, depending on the agreement made with the person paying for transport, often the former servant would be given some small compensation for their services to help them get their start as free individuals.  This might include some amount of land, food (often a year’s worth), clothing, and tools.
During their time serving, indentured servants also typically learned some trade as they worked, which was significant for many who chose to make the journey to the Americas as indentured servants- often poor, uneducated individuals, lacking a trade, and in search of the promise of a better life.  Because of this, in the early days, most indentured servants in the British colonies in America were actually Irish, English, German, and Scottish, rather than African.
Johnson, of course, didn’t choose to come over. Nevertheless, once in America, he toiled away as a tobacco farmer for the duration of his contract.  During this time, he also met a woman (soon to be his wife) named simply “Mary”, who had been brought over to America about two years after Johnson, with her contract also being purchased by the same man who owned Johnson’s contract.
In 1635, after working on the tobacco farm for about 14 years, Johnson was granted his freedom and acquired land and the necessaries to start his own farm.  Sources are conflicting on whether he purchased the remaining years on his wife’s contract or whether she completed it, but in the end, the two, with their lives now their own, began working for themselves.
They soon prospered and took advantage of the “headright” system in place for encouraging more colonists, where if you paid to bring a new colonist over, whether purchasing them at the docks or arranging it before hand with someone, you’d be awarded 50 acres of land.  Similarly, those who paid their own passage would be given land under this system.
This leads us to 1654. One of Johnson’s servants, John Casor who was brought over from Africa, claimed he was under a “seaven or eight yeares” contract and that he’d completed it. Thus, he asked Johnson for his freedom.
Johnson didn’t see things this way, and denied the request. Despite this, according to Casor, Johnson eventually agreed to allow him to leave, with pressure supposedly coming from Johnson’s family who felt that Casor should be free.  Thus, Casor went to work for a man by the name of Robert Parker.
Either Johnson changed his mind or he never said Casor could go, because he soon filed a lawsuit against Parker claiming that Parker stole his servant, and that Casor was Johnson’s for life and was not an indentured servant.
Johnson ultimately won the case, and not only did he get his servant back, but Casor became Johnson’s slave for life as Johnson had said he was.  This officially made Johnson the first legal slave owner in the colonies that would eventually become the United States. (There were other slaves before this, just not ones that were legal in the British colonies under common law).
The judge’s decision on the matter was announced as follows:
This daye Anthony Johnson negro made his complaint to the court against Mr. Robert Parker and declared that hee deteyneth his servant John Casor negro under the pretence that said negro was a free man. The court seriously consideringe and maturely weighing the premisses, doe fynde that the saide Mr. Robert Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master … It is therefore the Judgement of the Court and ordered That the said John Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of the said master Anthony Johnson, And that Mr. Robert Parker make payment of all charges in the suit.
About 7 years later, Virginia made this practice legal for everyone, in 1661, by making it state law for any free white, black, or Indian, to be able to own slaves, along with indentured servants, as they’d been able to have before.
While Johnson’s temporarily gain of being granted the services of one of his indentured servants for life no doubt had a positive affect on his thriving business, ultimately the gradual changing of attitudes in the colonies concerning slavery and race came back to hurt Johnson’s family, with slavery slowly becoming less about one’s original financial situation and more about where you or your ancestors were originally from.
When he died in 1670, rather than his thriving plantation going to his children, the court declared that “as a black man, Anthony Johnson was not a citizen of the colony” and awarded the estate to a white settler. Quite a contrast to the declaration in 1654 by the court that Johnson and his wife were “…inhabitants in Virginia (above thirty years) [and respected for] hard labor and known service.”

Bonus Facts:
  • While most of the land in Johnson’s estate was taken away, his children were allowed a small portion of Johnson’s former property to use to provide for themselves, but even that 40 acres was lost by Johnson’s grandson, John Jr., when he was unable to pay his taxes one year.
  • While Johnson is generally considered by most historians to be the first legal slave owner in what would become the United States, there was one person who preceded him in 1640 who owned a slave in all but name.  The virtual slave was John Punch, ordered to be an indentured servant for life, though by law was still considered an indentured servant with all the rights that went with that.  In Punch’s case, he was made a lifelong indentured servant owing to the fact that he tried to leave before his contract was up.  When he was captured and brought back, the judge in the matter decided a suitable punishment was to have Punch’s contract continue for the rest of his life.
  • What makes Punch’s case even more interesting (and unfair) is that when he ran away, he ran away with two white indentured servants who were also seeking to get out of their contract.  The punishment for the white indentured servants was not a lifetime of servitude, though.  Rather, they were given 30 lashes with a whip and a mere additional 4 years on their contracts.
  • The average price for bringing an indentured servant over to America in the 17th century was just £6.  Meaning that under the headright system, as long as you could afford to feed, clothe, and house them, you could acquire 50 acres of land for just over £1 per 10 acres.
  • The first Africans to be imported to the Americas were brought over in the 1560s, primarily in areas controlled by Spain.  The English colonies didn’t start importing Africans until much later, around 1619, just a couple years before Anthony Johnson was brought over. The first group to the British colonies were imported to Jamestown and comprised of 20 Africans who had been aboard a Spanish ship that was attacked by a Dutch vessel.  After the Dutch crew successfully took over the Spanish ship, they were left with 20 Africans who they took to Jamestown and declared were indentured servants, trading them for supplies.
  • In Virginia, in 1662, legislatures enacted a law stating that if you owned a slave, not only were they yours for life, but any children of a slave mother would also be a slave, regardless of whether the father was a slave or not.  Before this, the father’s status was typically what was used to determine the child’s status, regardless of race or the mother.
  • A further change of the laws came in 1670 when a law was passed forbidding those of African or Indian descent from owning any “Christian” slaves.  In this case, this did not necessarily mean literal Christian slaves; if you had a black or Indian slave who was a Christian, that was fine, as they were black or Indian, and thus “heathen”, regardless of what they said or believed or even if they were baptized.
  • A further hardening of the laws came in 1699. In an attempt to get rid of all the prominent free black people, Virginia enacted a law requiring all free black people to leave the colony, to further cement the majority of free people in the colonies as non-black, and allow the tyranny of the majority with respect to those of African descent to progress unhindered.  Many did not have the funds to actually leave, and some chose to ignore the decree, as relationships between whites and free blacks tended to be as you’d expect humans to act towards one another, namely somewhat friendly in many cases; this included some intermarrying, despite the fact that to some extent this was discouraged even then, primarily because Africans were considered “heathens”.  Obviously those either from Africa or of African descent who had married someone of European descent weren’t inclined to leave their spouses and homes. In fact, it’s estimated that about 80% of all those non-slaves of African descent in the United States between 1790 and 1810 were a product of this intermarrying in the Virginia colony.


In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.
The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).
According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.
The majority of slaveholders, white and black, owned only one to five slaves. More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop. The few individuals who owned 50 or more slaves were confined to the top one percent, and have been defined as slave magnates.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation. Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000 (3). That year, the mean wealth of southern white men was $3,978 (4).
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings (5). In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners (6).
In 1860 William Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slaveowner. In Black Masters. A Free Family of Color in the Old South, authors Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak write a sympathetic account of Ellison's life. From Ellison's birth as a slave to his death at 71, the authors attempt to provide justification, based on their own speculation, as to why a former slave would become a magnate slave master.
At birth he was given the name April. A common practice among slaves of the period was to name a child after the day or month of his or her birth. Between 1800 and 1802 April was purchased by a white slave-owner named William Ellison. Apprenticed at 12, he was taught the trades of carpentry, blacksmithing and machining, as well as how to read, write, cipher and do basic bookkeeping.
On June 8, 1816, William Ellison appeared before a magistrate (with five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission to free April, now 26 years of age. In 1800 the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail the procedures for manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of "bad or depraved" character and those who "from age or infirmity" were incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify under oath to the good character of the slave he sought to free. Also required was evidence of the slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way."
Although lawmakers of the time could not envision the incredibly vast public welfare structures of a later age, these stipulations became law in order to prevent slaveholders from freeing individuals who would become a burden on the general public.
Interestingly, considering today's accounts of life under slavery, authors Johnson and Roak report instances where free Negroes petitioned to be allowed to become slaves; this because they were unable to support themselves.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia-1995) was written by Ervin L. Jordan Jr., an African-American and assistant professor and associate curator of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia library. He wrote: "One of the more curious aspects of the free black existence in Virginia was their ownership of slaves. Black slave masters owned members of their family and freed them in their wills. Free blacks were encouraged to sell themselves into slavery and had the right to choose their owner through a lengthy court procedure."
In 1816, shortly after his manumission, April moved to Stateburg. Initially he hired slave workers from local owners. When in 1817 he built a gin for Judge Thomas Watries, he credited the judge nine dollars "for hire of carpenter George for 12 days." By 1820 he had purchased two adult males to work in his shop (7). In fewer than four years after being freed, April demonstrated that he had no problem perpetuating an institution he had been released from. He also achieved greater monetary success than most white people of the period.
On June 20, 1820, April appeared in the Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted by his attorney as a "freed yellow man of about 29 years of age," he requested a name change because it "would yet greatly advance his interest as a tradesman." A new name would also "save him and his children from degradation and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April." Because "of the kindness" of his former master and as a "Mark of gratitude and respect for him" April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His request was granted.
In time the black Ellison family joined the predominantly white Episcopalian church. On August 6, 1824 he was allowed to put a family bench on the first floor, among those of the wealthy white families. Other blacks, free and slave, and poor whites sat in the balcony. Another wealthy Negro family would later join the first floor worshippers.
Between 1822 and the mid-1840s, Ellison gradually built a small empire, acquiring slaves in increasing numbers. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin manufacturers, selling his machines as far away as Mississippi. From February 1817 until the War Between the States commenced, his business advertisements appeared regularly in newspapers across the state. These included the Camden Gazette, the Sumter Southern Whig and the Black River Watchman.
Ellison was so successful, due to his utilization of cheap slave labor, that many white competitors went out of business. Such situations discredit impressions that whites dealt only with other whites. Where money was involved, it was apparent that neither Ellison's race or former status were considerations.
In his book, Ervin L. Jordan Jr. writes that, as the great conflagration of 1861-1865 approached: "Free Afro-Virginians were a nascent black middle class under siege, but several acquired property before and during the war. Approximately 169 free blacks owned 145,976 acres in the counties of Amelia, Amherst, Isle of Wight, Nansemond, Prince William and Surry, averaging 870 acres each. Twenty-rune Petersburg blacks each owned property worth $1,000 and continued to purchase more despite the war."
Jordan offers an example: "Gilbert Hunt, a Richmond ex-slave blacksmith, owned two slaves, a house valued at $1,376, and $500 in other properties at his death in 1863." Jordan wrote that "some free black residents of Hampton and Norfolk owned property of considerable value; 17 black Hamptonians possessed property worth a total of $15,000. Thirty-six black men paid taxes as heads of families in Elizabeth City County and were employed as blacksmiths, bricklayers, fishermen, oystermen and day laborers. In three Norfolk County parishes 160 blacks owned a total of $41,158 in real estate and personal property.
The general practice of the period was that plantation owners would buy seed and equip~ ment on credit and settle their outstanding accounts when the annual cotton crop was sold. Ellison, like all free Negroes, could resort to the courts for enforcement of the terms of contract agreements. Several times Ellison successfully sued white men for money owed him.
In 1838 Ellison purchased on time 54.5 acres adjoining his original acreage from one Stephen D. Miller. He moved into a large home on the property. What made the acquisition notable was that Miller had served in the South Carolina legislature, both in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, and while a resident of Stateburg had been governor of the state. Ellison's next door neighbor was Dr. W.W. Anderson, master of "Borough House, a magnificent 18th Century mansion. Anderson's son would win fame in the War Between the States as General "Fighting Dick" Anderson.
By 1847 Ellison owned over 350 acres, and more than 900 by 1860. He raised mostly cotton, with a small acreage set aside for cultivating foodstuffs to feed his family and slaves. In 1840 he owned 30 slaves, and by 1860 he owned 63. His sons, who lived in homes on the property, owned an additional nine slaves. They were trained as gin makers by their father (8). They had spent time in Canada, where many wealthy American Negroes of the period sent their children for advanced formal education. Ellison's sons and daughters married mulattos from Charleston, bringing them to the Ellison plantation to live.
In 1860 Ellison greatly underestimated his worth to tax assessors at $65,000. Even using this falsely stated figure, this man who had been a slave 44 years earlier had achieved great financial success. His wealth outdistanced 90 percent of his white neighbors in Sumter District. In the entire state, only five percent owned as much real estate as Ellison. His wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites. And Ellison owned more slaves than 99 percent of the South's slaveholders.
Although a successful businessman and cotton farmer, Ellison's major source of income derived from being a "slave breeder." Slave breeding was looked upon with disgust throughout the South, and the laws of most southern states forbade the sale of slaves under the age of 12. In several states it was illegal to sell inherited slaves (9). Nevertheless, in 1840 Ellison secretly began slave breeding.
While there was subsequent investment return in raising and keeping young males, females were not productive workers in his factory or his cotton fields. As a result, except for a few females he raised to become "breeders," Ellison sold the female and many of the male children born to his female slaves at an average price of $400. Ellison had a reputation as a harsh master. His slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and clothed. On his property was located a small, windowless building where he would chain his problem slaves.
As with the slaves of his white counterparts, occasionally Ellison's slaves ran away. The historians of Sumter District reported that from time to time Ellison advertised for the return of his runaways. On at least one occasion Ellison hired the services of a slave catcher. According to an account by Robert N. Andrews, a white man who had purchased a small hotel in Stateburg in the 1820s, Ellison hired him to run down "a valuable slave. Andrews caught the slave in Belleville, Virginia. He stated: "I was paid on returning home $77.50 and $74 for expenses.
William Ellison died December 5, 1861. His will stated that his estate should pass into the joint hands of his free daughter and his two surviving sons. He bequeathed $500 to the slave daughter he had sold.
Following in their father's footsteps, the Ellison family actively supported the Confederacy throughout the war. They converted nearly their entire plantation to the production of corn, fodder, bacon, corn shucks and cotton for the Confederate armies. They paid $5,000 in taxes during the war. They also invested more than $9,000 in Confederate bonds, treasury notes and certificates in addition to the Confederate currency they held. At the end, all this valuable paper became worthless.
The younger Ellisons contributed more than farm produce, labor and money to the Confederate cause. On March 27, 1863 John Wilson Buckner, William Ellison's oldest grandson, enlisted in the 1st South Carolina Artillery. Buckner served in the company of Captains P.P. Galliard and A.H. Boykin, local white men who knew that Buckner was a Negro. Although it was illegal at the time for a Negro to formally join the Confederate forces, the Ellison family's prestige nullified the law in the minds of Buckner's comrades. Buckner was wounded in action on July 12, 1863. At his funeral in Stateburg in August, 1895 he was praised by his former Confederate officers as being a "faithful soldier."
Following the war the Ellison family fortune quickly dwindled. But many former Negro slave magnates quickly took advantage of circumstances and benefited by virtue of their race. For example Antoine Dubuclet, the previously mentioned New Orleans plantation owner who held more than 100 slaves, became Louisiana state treasurer during Reconstruction, a post he held from 1868 to 1877 (10).
A truer picture of the Old South, one never presented by the nation's mind molders, emerges from this account. The American South had been undergoing structural evolutionary changes far, far greater than generations of Americans have been led to believe. In time, within a relatively short time, the obsolete and economically nonviable institution of slavery would have disappeared. The nation would have been spared awesome traumas from which it would never fully recover.

NOTES
1. The American Negro: Old World Background and New World Experience, Raymond Logan and Irving Cohen New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1970), p.72.
2. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South, Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak New York: Norton, 1984), p.64.
3. The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color, Gary Mills (Baton Rouge, 1977); Black Masters, p.128.
4. Male inheritance expectations in the United States in 1870, 1850-1870, Lee Soltow (New Haven, 1975), p.85.
5. Black Masters, Appendix, Table 7; p.280.
6. Black Masters, p. 62.
7. Information on the Ellison family was obtained from Black Masters; the number of slaves they owned was gained from U.S. Census Reports.
8. In 1860 South Carolina had only 21 gin makers; Ellison, his three sons and a grandson account for five of the total.
9. Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States, Carl N. Degler (New York, Macmillan, 1971), p.39;
     Negro Slavery in Louisiana, Joe Gray Taylor (Baton Rouge, 1963), pp. 4041.
10. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner (New York; Harper & Row, 1988), p. 47; pp. 353-355.

Kindle Available
Black Slaveowners

Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860
An analysis of all aspects and particularly of the commercialism of black slaveowning debunks the myth that black slaveholding was a benevolent institution based on kinship, and explains the transition of black masters from slavery to paid labor.




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Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Southern Core Values

From the Abbeville Institute

Southern Core Values



In American higher education of the past forty years, I have observed two American histories, and two American literatures – which teach different American ideals and values, resulting in different societies and different vision of what it means to be an American. Today we have a Northern history and a Southern history; we have a Northern literature and a Southern literature. As I write, there is no consensus, nor has there been for two centuries. The Northern perspective is dominant, even though it is an aberration and even though it has become increasingly intolerant. If you don’t like the Northern/Southern dichotomy, then use a Lincolnian vision of America versus a Jeffersonian vision of American.
There are numerous way to illustrate this conflict, but I want to focus on some lost documents and wisdom primarily from the pen of William Gilmore Simms. Needless to say, Simms is a spokesman for Southern history and literature, as we would expect from the Father of Southern Literature. Simms and the South were Jeffersonian. Simms consistently defended a Jeffersonian vision of America. Nowhere do we see Simms’s views of America and the South more clearly than in his literature on Mr. Lincoln’s War.
During the Invasion of the South, Simms wrote extensively about the two major military campaigns in South Carolina: the Burning of Columbia and the Bombardment of Charleston.
With four of his children, Simms took refuge in the capital city as Sherman marched through the heart of the state, burning and looting his way to Columbia. He was in Columbia when Sherman arrived on February 17, 1865, and he was still in Columbia when Sherman left four days later. One of Simms’s responses to Sherman’s destruction of Columbia was to write a 90-page historical narrative which he published in a tri-weekly he helped create out of the ashes of the destroyed city. In the Columbia Phoenix he recorded what he and other had witnessed and experienced. This compelling account is now being read and studied in A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia. Some people – including Simms’s first biographer – claim that it is Simms’s best writing. Certainly it is a masterpiece on multiple levels, as I have argued elsewhere.
Prior to Sherman’s destruction of Columbia, Simms had spent a considerable amount of time in Charleston during the 587-day Yankee siege of the port city, a siege he criticized with passion in poetry. Simms’s response to the longest siege of the war included a series of poems, unpublished. In the following pages, I want to highlight six of these war poems. Among other things, they portray Simms’s vision of core Southern values which are consistent with a Jeffersonian vision of America.
As a war poet, Simms was exceptional, surpassing Herman Melville in Battle-Pieces and Walt Whitman in Drum-Taps, both of whom defended — even glorified – Lincoln’s invasion of the South.
Herman Melville wrote a short poem called “The Swamp Angel” to praise the 24,000 lb. cannon Yankees placed in the marshes almost five miles outside Charleston. To Melville’s speaker, Charleston is a proud city, a wicked city, guilty of secession and slavery. Melville ignored the fundamental involvement and complicity of Northern states in slavery. Facing this massive weapon of war, Melville’s Archangel Michael flees not only St Michael’s Church but also the whole city as Charleston women and children receive their just punishment from “a coal-black Angel with a thick Afric lip.” Melville’s North was establishing a consolidated, centralized, commercial Union, and not even God’s Archangel Michael could stop the power of the Northern superior white race. Melville, I remind you, was a middle-aged non-combatant who received his war news primarily from New York and Boston newspapers.
Simms’s “The Angel of the Church,” though, is a poem that portrays the Horrors of Invasion from the perspective of a Southern speaker who knows the realities of the siege. Crumbling walls, crumbling homes and crumbling churches – to Simms – would never crumble people’s spirits who had received their core values from Revolutionary War forefathers. Furthermore – Simms declares – the Biblical God of justice and righteousness is watching, and before Him no misdeeds go unpunished. Through prayer for God’s protection and through faith, the beleaguered people of Charleston can implore God to charge His guardian Archangel Michael to use his golden shield to protect the innocent, and to permit the Holy City somehow to withstand. (Today, I might add, the remains of the exploded Swamp Angel are in Trenton, New Jersey, but St Michael‘s Church still stands in the heart of Charleston.)
No city in the South was hated more by Yankees than the city of Charleston, not even Richmond. For 587 days, Charleston was under siege, including bombardments from land and sea. But firmly in the way were the Carolina Lowcountry’s defenses, which Robert E. Lee had helped conceive. (Most people do not know that General Lee began growing his famous beard while serving five months in Charleston.) These defenses included Fort Sumter, the most shelled place in the Western hemisphere. During the war, Union invaders hurled over six million pounds of projectiles at the pentagonal fort.
In “Sumter in Ruins” Simms pays tribute to the defenders who endured and saved the city. Historic Charleston would never have survived the Invasion without Fort Sumter. Simms’s speaker is a Southern patriot calling on the noble sons of freeborn patriots to resist. Even though Ft. Sumter was shelled into rubble, even though – figuratively – the lion’s den and the eagle’s nest were destroyed, still the soul of the freeborn lion and the soul of the freeborn eagle are neither defeated nor diminished, and remain fit to defend the people and to avenge the Invasion. The nobility, the courage, the inventiveness, the endurance, and the sacrifice of the Confederate defenders were monumental. Charlestonians, Simms reminds his readers, love liberty and home, receiving these gifts from their forefathers and recognizing them as the essential foundations of a humane, peaceful and virtuous society.
The other fortification that saved the wooden city of Charleston from total destruction was Fort Wagner. Simms praised the “terrible beauty” of the patriotic Southern struggle:
Glory unto the gallant boys who stood
At Wagner, and, unflinching, sought the van;
Dealing fierce blows, and shedding precious blood,
For homes as precious, and dear rights of man!
In “Fort Wagner” Simms is the national poet of the invaded South, commemorating the young men dying in defense of the sovereign Southern States in the face of unlawful, unconstitutional, and criminal Yankee invasion:
High honor to our youth – our sons and brothers,
Georgians and Carolinians, where they stand!
They will not shame their birthrights, or their mothers,
But keep, through storm, the bulwarks of the land!
Simms underscores the importance of the struggle. If Southerners were to lose their inalienable rights and be forced into a tyrannical union, then the “innocent races yet unborn shall rue it,/The Whole world feel the wound, and nations wail!” Our young patriots must succeed, but regardless our love for them will last, and we will never forget their sacrifices. To Simms, the defenders were brave; they were patriotic. Without their heroic actions at Fort Sumter and Fort Wagner, Charleston would have fallen, and at the very least the historic city we enjoy today would have disappeared. (Because of their efforts, Charleston currently boasts some 4,000 historic buildings.) Simms was not content merely praising Southern defenders at Fort Wagner; he wanted also to memorialize the grounds on which they fought. He wrote “Morris Island” to remember the Confederate defenders and the “good cause” of the South. He pays tribute to the barrier island which, he believes, will become “a shrine” to freedom “while liberty and letters find a tongue.” Now that the Lincoln Administration was invading the South, Southern men would resist the aggression, Simms claims, and defend the port city against all criminal attacks. During the long siege, this barrier island near the mouth of Charleston Harbor became the site of the fiercest fighting “against the felon and innumerous foe.”
Defending his home city against invasion was a cause dear to the heart of Simms, who spent much of his life learning about and praising Revolutionary War heroes. To William Gilmore Simms, Southern Confederates were also defending and preserving the original ideals of consensual governance, personal liberty, and prosperity based on the frugal and responsible use of natural resources. Charleston, Simms points out, had a venerable history of opposing tyranny and usurpation, and of defending American ideals.
In “South Carolina” he pays tribute to the State which had fought for freedom in 1776, 1812, and now in 1861. To Simms, South Carolina was again in a struggle for independence, similar to the struggle against Great Britain: a fight for freedom, for homes, for families. As a public voice, speaking for Southern history and identity, Simms praises his State’s “Great Soul in little frame.” As a South Carolina and Southern historian, Simms proclaims his State’s uniqueness:
To check the usurper in his giant stride
And brave his terrors and abuse his pride.
And for what?
Thou hadst no quest but freedom and to be
In conscience well-assured, and people free.
With the Lincoln Administration attacking the State and laying siege to his beloved city, Simms again calls on Southern Patriots to resist those who would do harm to the people and to the country.
On Morris Island, the fighting to destroy the city was fierce:
Earth reels and ocean rocks at every blow;
But still undaunted, with a martyr’s might,
They make for man a new Thermopylae;
And, perishing for freedom still go free!
The allusion to Thermopylae is one Simms would use again. Charleston was the front line of the phalanx, the wall of shields to protect the few against the many. The campaigns in South Carolina would determine the future of the American experiment in consensual governance, he believed, because the Invasion of the South was targeting the liberty, the rights, and the prosperity bequeathed by our Revolutionary forefathers. When Simms wrote of the two South Carolina campaigns, he consistently recorded and eulogized the courage, the honor, and the sacrifice of the Confederate defenders. This new Yankee-conceived union, “The Blessed Union,” would not be consensual, but would be conceived in deceit, and would be founded on coercion and exploitation and usurpation.
To Walt Whitman singing in Drum-Taps, though, Unionism was the new American virtue, greater than all others, sealed by the life and death of Lincoln. And secession, Whitman would chant, was “the foulest crime in history, known in any land or age.” And so a new view of American was being proclaimed by Melville and by Whitman, a view that began with the barbaric Invasion of the South.
As a war poet, Simms was defense-minded. He was involved and informed, praising Americans who continued to advocate a Jeffersonian view of America – as Simms says in his poem “Sacrifice” – not for crimes against humanity, not because they were greedy or materialistic, not because they were ambitions or crazed for power. Rather, Southerners were sacrificing and dying because they were defending the glorious republic of Thomas Jefferson, which was being attacked, vilified and replaced by a consolidated Lincolnian unitary empire. Simms’s poetic testimony is that Southerners were sacrificing and dying in great numbers only because they chose to be free and to leave a legacy and a history of freedom.
What then are those Confederate core values: morally, socially and politically?
Again, William Gilmore Simms is the one to tell us in his eyewitness account of the burning of Columbia. A City Laid Waste includes Simms’s historical narrative of the destruction of Columbia. Simms opens with an allusion to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. How can Americans claim that governments should derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” when they destroy our State Houses of government? How can Americans believe that we have inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness when they destroy our homes and rob and kill our people for plunder? How can anyone claim that Americans have inalienable rights of freedom of expression and inalienable rights of freedom of worship when they loot and burn our presses and our churches? Lincoln and Sherman are undermining the fundamental principles of what it means to be an American. Their invasion, unlawful and unconstitutional, is a death blow to American rights won for us all by the founding generation, despite the cover-ups and despite continuous propaganda to the contrary. Southerners were defending their homes, their families, and their liberties. Southerners were also defending their natural resources – their fields, their farms, their forests.
By conducting campaigns against civilians, the Lincoln Administration was undermining International Law, the Geneva Convention and Christian decency. They were also setting an example of scorched earth and total war which would become the norm and model for 20th century warfare.
In order to justify and defend these criminally immoral acts, Americans would begin to romanticize the Invasion – to distort, to obfuscate, to ignore, to destroy, to dismiss, to lie, to willfully misrepresent and to deliberately misplace blame. The victims of the Invasion would be vilified and demonized, and the Invaders would glorify and deify themselves.
The Lincoln American would begin to bow down above all else to unity and to the Leviathan State. Over the years, the Old American and Confederate values of self-defense, Biblical and Classical ideals, green harmony with nature, inalienable rights and consensual government would fall by the wayside; and Southerners, too, would be called upon to relinquish a noble history, a superior morality, and a visionary philosophy.
I begin my conclusion by quoting from an unpublished letter by a Yankee Invader in the 10th Illinois Infantry. Private Grundy writes on 26 April 1865, returning to his unit:
“I could see the routes the Army traveled by the smoke above the forests in the distance . . . which seemed to extend for many miles, and the nearer I approached the more dense and suffocating became the atmosphere all around, for we passed through burning forests & past burning cotton, cotton gins . . . barns, outhouses, rails and in fact everything in the shape of wood which came in their path.”
Speaking of Sherman in Columbia, Private Grundy says,
“Some things I saw done in that Campaign would have shocked a demon, and what more the world will remain ignorant of it, save such as the most important events, but the horrors, atrocities & crimes, I guess they will never be known save as the soldiers relate them to their friends . . . I never could describe the scenes on that night the light of the conflagration, the shrieking and weeping of women and wringing of hands, the crackling of the flames which tore mercilessly through the doomed city sparing neither the abode of the poor or the magnificent dwellings of the rich, of the shouts and yells of the drunken soldiers, and the indiscriminate plundering and pillaging of houses and stores . . . it beat anything I ever saw since the War began.”
Then Private Grundy interprets the Invasion:
“I do not care if they come to terms in such a way that their entire concern may have to be swept off the face of the earth . . . Crush them, pulverize them. Drive them into the Ohio River . . . I want to say it and do it. Either give up the Union and disgrace the National flag at once, or crush the Rebellion. Tampering with them has played out. Command them to surrender, and if they refuse to do so, let the dogs of war of the North go for them and show them no mercy, nor ask any; for as such as we are now in the field, its my opinion they of the South will always be hostile towards the North and if we don’t have another war we shall be constantly annoyed by them . . . for the Southerners are proud people and their spirit is not broken, even tho they have been overpowered, and so long as the present generation exists, just so long will there be an antagonistic feeling towards the North & its my opinion they will try and avenge this humiliation at some future day.”
This assessment comes from the mouth of a soldier in Sherman’s Army.
If you go to New York City today, you will see on Fifth Avenue a larger than life equestrian statue of Sherman, led not by Liberty, but by Victory, an apt reminder that no matter how much the invaders of the South proclaimed their love of liberty, their actions proved they loved Southern wealth and imperial dominance much more. Nothing exceptional about the motives of Lincoln and Sherman: they coveted money and power.
If you go to Washington, D.C. you will see a whole Sherman Square with a huge statue to Sherman in the center. These “half-acre monuments” were unveiled at the beginning of the 20th century, the so-called American century (more accurately the Yankee century, because it was the bloodiest in the history of mankind, when governments killed over 360 million people).
Where are the monuments to those who opposed the crimes, the atrocities, and the usurpations of the Northern invaders? Where are the monuments to those who suffered in the Burning of Columbia, the monuments to those who resisted and endured the Bombardment of Charleston?
Cultural, moral and philosophical differences between the North and the South were prevalent from the first, but it was the Invasion that created two Americas – not American slavery, nor Southern secession, but the Bombardment of Charleston and the Burning of Columbia. Yes, the brutal and unconstitutional Invasion of the South forever created two Americas.
During this Sesquicentennial, you have heard many people blame the South, blame South Carolina, and blame Charleston for the Civil War. But it was the Invasion to Prevent Southern Independence that changed America, not the efforts of Charlestonians to save their city and not the actions of Southerners to defend themselves against brutal aggression. The Northern Invasion created a Southern people and a Southern civilization forever different and forever superior, yes, superior morally, superior spiritually, and superior philosophically. Simms and Private Grundy were right: Southerners are proud; Southern spirits were not crushed by the Lincoln Invasion, and by the Grace of God, Southerners may still be free, still independent and still a sovereign people within their free and independent states.
The final Southern author I want to emphasize is Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve of Charleston. (The following pages are quoted form my book Fire in the Cradle: Charleston’s Literary Heritage.)
“After graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Gottingen, he was elected at the age of twenty-four professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, where he remained twenty years. During the war he fought for the Confederacy, serving as aide-de-camp in Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s command in 1861, as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry in 1863, and as an aide on the staff of Gen. John B. Gordon in 1864. As he said, he had earned ‘the right to teach Southern youth for nine months . . . by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three.’ He fought the war on another front as well, writing over sixty editorials for the Richmond Examiner. In September 1864 he was wounded in a skirmish at Weyer’s Cave and carried off the field. With a crippled leg as a constant reminder of the war, he began to refer to himself as the ‘lame Spartan school master Tyrtaeus.’
“As a champion of the Southern cause after the war, Gildersleeve continued to defend the South with his pen. Two essays ‘The Creed of the Old South’ and ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ are particularly eloquent defenses of his Southern countrymen. In ‘The Creed of the Old South,’ he says:
“At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of honor in the Art Annex . . . was given to Rothermel’s painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted up with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt when I was informed of the high price that the State of Pennsylvania had paid for that work of art. The dominant feeling was amusement, not indignation. But as I looked at it, I recalled another picture of a battle scene, painted by a . . . French artist, who had watched our life with an artist’s eye. One of the figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in a buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture – the souvenir that the Confederate so often received form fair sympathizers in border towns. I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush in the Confederate’s buttonhole for the most angelic smile that Rothermel’s brush could have conjured up.”
“Speaking for himself and his fellow countrymen, with the weight of his learning and experience behind him, Gildersleeve then vouches for the feeling that ‘right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own minds, and . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it.’ He concludes his tribute to the Confederate defense of states rights and civil liberty with a prediction:
“That the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves bound to maintain whenever our motives are challenged or misunderstood, if only for our children’s sake. But even that will not long be necessary, for the vindication of our principles will be made manifest in the working out of the problems with which the republic has to grapple. If, however, the effacement of state lines and the complete centralization of the government shall prove to be the wisdom of the future, the poetry of life will still find its home in the old order, and those who love their State best will live longest in song and legend – song yet unsung, legend not yet crystallized.”
According to these sources (Simms, Grundy, Gildersleeve), Southerners fought to defend homes and families, and to preserve American ideals. The values of the founding generation were wholeheartedly embraced by Southern Confederates, including the heroic defense of American inalienable rights.
The Northern invaders fought for money and power. Simms called them “monsters of virtuous pretension.” Furthermore, Simms proved that any schism of Christianity which targets innocent civilians, — women, children and the infirm – is a “deformed Christianity.” Private Grundy confessed that what he saw done to the people of South Carolina would make even a demon blush. But then to justify the consolidated Union formed by these atrocities, he proclaimed his willingness to exterminate everyone in the South in order to control the land and to seize Southern wealth and to establish a new imperial American Union. And Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve declared Southern Confederates were motivated to defend Civil Liberties and to preserve consensual government within the various and diverse free and independent states.
I have presented only three primary historical sources; not one of them is readily available or well known. Which defended and embodied the core values of a true American? The Northern American shown to be imperial, intolerant, greedy, deceitful and destructive or the Southern American whose core values are stated in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and who defended those values in the War for Southern Independence.


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. More from David Aiken