Circa1865

Author Clyde Wilson asserts that “The triumph in 1861-65 of the Republican Party over the will of the American people and the invasion, destruction and conquest of the Southern States, like a foreign territory has somehow, strangely, gotten mixed up with the idea of government of, by and for the people.” The Republican president crowned his revolutionary actions with the creation of a nationalist mythology which we still live under today. The Union was preserved by Lincoln and his party in a territorial sense, but not the Founders’ Union.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Total War, Confiscation and Sheer Theft

“Another great moral cost of the War, as Richard Weaver pointed out, was inauguration by the Republicans of the “total war” concept, reversing several centuries of Western progress in restraining warfare to rules.

General Sherman himself estimated that in his march across Georgia and the Carolinas, only 20 percent of the destruction had any military value. The rest was sheer wanton terrorism against civilians – theft and destruction of their food, housing, and tools. One egregious example was the burning and sack of Columbia – a city which had already surrendered and was full of women and children and wounded soldiers – a looting which marked the emancipation of black women by their wholesale rape.

Along with destruction went immense confiscation and theft, much of it under cover of a Confiscation Act which was enforced without ever being legally passed. The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives simply declared the bill passed and adjourned. This high-handed legislative practice continued throughout the War and Reconstruction.

The Republican Governor of Indiana suspended the legislature and acted as dictator for two years. Republicans continually agitated for an open dictatorship under Fremont or some other trustworthy Radical; all of this is known but seldom acknowledged.

In addition to the Confiscation Act, for rebel property there was a mechanism for the government to collect taxes in the occupied regions of the South to finance the War. At last $100,000,000 in cotton (the most valuable commodity in North America) was seized — $30,000,000 more or less legally under the confiscation and tax acts, the rest sheer theft. The rest was stolen by Republican appointees.

A Secretary of the Treasury commented that he was sure a few of the tax agents he sent South were honest, but none remained so very long. We know, for instance, of that great war hero Admiral [David] Porter, who with General [Nathanial] Banks was badly beaten by vastly inferior Confederate forces in the Red River campaign, yet emerged from that campaign with $60,000 worth of stolen cotton for his personal profit.

The confiscation and theft continued in full force until at least 1868; they did not end with the hostilities.”

(State Rights Revisited: War, Reconstruction and the End of the Union, Clyde N. Wilson; Defending Dixie, Essays in Southern History and Culture, Foundation for American Education, 2006, excerpts pp. 142-143)

Lincoln’s desperation card of emancipation was played after it was clear the Southern States had no interest in rejoining the 1787 Union, and as Northern public opinion was building against the increasing carnage of his war. Lincoln abandoned the goal of preserving the Union and decided to follow the same strategy as Royal Governor Lord Dunmore in November 1775 – issue an emancipation proclamation to free slaves who would be loyal to the Crown and thus incite a cruel race war to win the war against American colonists. Another emancipation proclamation was issued in 1814 by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to strengthen British forces with freed black men during the War of 1812.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Desperate War Measures of Dunmore, Cochrane and Lincoln

“Well-intentioned, right-thinking people equate anyone who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has now reached the point where people from both sides of the political spectrum . . . want to have the Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery and thus should be prohibited from public display.

In the standard account, the Civil War was an outcome of our Founding Fathers’ failure to address the institution of slavery in a republic that proclaimed in its Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

But was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed its slaves by war. Every other country in the New World . . . freed them peacefully.

The war did enable Lincoln to “save” the Union, but only in a geographical sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign States. Instead, America became a “nation” with a powerful federal government.

Although it freed 4 million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say. For the nation as a whole it did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued.

The term “Civil War” is a misnomer. The South did not initiate a rebellion. Thirteen Southern States in 1860-1861 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for the war that took place between the Northern and Southern American States would be the “War for Southern Independence.”

Mainstream historiography presents the victors’ view, an account which focuses on the issue of slavery and downplays other considerations.

The rallying cry in the North at the beginning of the war was “preserve the Union,” not “free the slaves.” In his first inaugural address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

After 17 months of war things were not going well for the North, especially in its closely-watch Eastern Theater. Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the Southern States go, along with their 4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union.

Five days after the battle of [Sharpsburg], on Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation . . . a war measure, as Lincoln put it.”

(The Economic Roots of the Civil War, Donald W. Miller, Jr., Liberty, October 2001, Volume 15, No. 10, excerpts pp. 42-43)

As evidenced by sergeants and lieutenants commanding Southern regiments in early 1865, the Northern war killed off the promising political and social leadership of the South. These men would have risen to positions of authority, achievement and genius had it not been for a war against their homes, State and country, which they died defending.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

A Colossal Waste of Life

“As we prepare for another slam-dunk cakewalk preemptive war, this time with Iran, it may be well to recall that the GOP had its origins in big government, which leads to, and thrives on, war. Only weeks after the first Republican president took office, the United States were at war against their estranged sister States,

It proved to be the bloodiest war in American history, consuming 600,000 young Americans [and not including another 400,000 American civilians, black and white]. Setting moral and political questions aside, we can really never know what was lost. How many of these young men, had they lived, would have blossomed into Edisons, Fords, Gershwins and other geniuses whose fruits we would still enjoy and profit from?

All we know is that the country was perpetually impoverished by this colossal waste of life. You never hum the tunes that never got written.

Nevertheless, we still celebrate – no, deify – the man brought on this horror by refusing to countenance the peaceful withdrawal of seven States. Of course Lincoln is chiefly honored for ending slavery. It’s a nice story, but it isn’t exactly true.

When the Confederacy was formed, so many Southern Democrats left both houses of the U.S. Congress that both the House and Senate were left with were left with Republican majorities. With this near-monopoly of power, the GOP – in those days, the GYP, I suppose – passed two “confiscation “ acts in 1861 and 1862, authorizing the seizure of any private property used to assist the “rebellion.”

These powers were so vaguely defined that they permitted limitless repression, such as the closing of newspapers critical of Lincoln’s war. In combination with Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, anyone could be arrested for anything in the Land of the Free.

The 1862 act expressly declared slaves in the seceding State “forever free.” This was the real Emancipation Proclamation, but Lincoln was actually reluctant to act on it, doubting its constitutionality. For months the radical Republicans attacked him and egged him on, and finally he gave it effect in the most famous executive order of all time. He argued that in wartime he might take a punitive step that would be illegal during a time of peace.

Lincoln had other plans for ending slavery. He’d always thought it should be done gradually, with “compensation” to the slaveowners and the freed blacks to be encouraged to leave the United States. It was his conviction, repeatedly and openly stated, that though all men are created equal, abstractly speaking, the Negro – “the African,” he called him – could never enjoy political and social equality with the white man in this country; the black man would find his equality somewhere else, “without [i.e., outside] the United States.”

So Lincoln waged war to prevent the political separation of North and South, but in the hope of achieving racial separation between black and white. Both goals entailed vast expansions of federal and executive power. Limited government, anyone?

With its current Jacobin-Wilson zeal for spreading “democracy” around the globe, the Republican Party today is more or less back where it started. And once again, a Republican president is claiming wartime powers, under the Constitution, to act outside the Constitution.

Still, the myth persists that Lincoln lived his whole for the purpose of abolishing slavery, and was finally able to do this with a single inspired sovereign act. Like most historical myths, this one ignores all the interesting details. As Lincoln himself said, “I have not controlled events, but plainly confess that events have controlled me.”

(The Reluctant Emancipator, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s, Volume 13, Number 8, August 2006, excerpts pg. 12)

Lincoln’s congress passed the Enrollment Act on March 3, 1863, also known as the Conscription Act of 1863. When New York Governor Horatio Seymour feared riots against the July draft in New York City, Lincoln’s Provost Marshal General James B. Fry refused any postponement. Fry’s behavior confirmed Democrat fears that the draft’s intent was to provoke a riot as an excuse for martial law and using federal troops to supervise and manipulate votes in upcoming elections.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Fighting and Dying in an Unjust War

“On the same day it passed the new draft law in March, Congress had authorized the suspension of habeas corpus throughout the United States, enabling the administration to detain political prisoners indefinitely without charges or any other due process of law. The draft law also empowered the secretary of war to create a police arm, the office of the provost marshal general, whose assistants scoured the country arresting deserters, spies, traitors, and other people deemed disloyal to the Northern war effort.

When criticized for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln replied that the rebels and their agents in the North were violating every other law of the land and using constitutional protections – including freedom of speech and assembly – to shield their destructive, subversive activity.

During the spring of 1863, Democrats had warned that Lincoln was amassing dictatorial powers and the expanding central government was poised to wipe out what little remained of States’ rights. The draft, they said, was the ultimate expression of arbitrary federal power: the States’ role in raising troops had been supplanted, and individuals – those who could not afford a substitute – were to be coerced by the distant bureaucracies in Washington into fighting and dying in an unjust war.

[New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour] not only asserted that the draft law was unconstitutional, but complained, rightly, that the Republican administration and its newly-created Bureau of the Provost Marshal General had set disproportionately high [troop] quotas for New York City – which was predominantly Democratic.

Along with Horatio Seymour, Manton Marble’s New York World had fiercely denounced the arrest [of Democrat Clement Vallandigham in Ohio] and the central government’s “despotic power,” . . . “When free discussion and free voting are allowed, men are not tempted to have recourse to violence and relief of bad rulers,” the World asserted.

“You may stigmatize these irregular avengers as a “mob,” but there are times when even violence is nobler than cowardly apathy.”

The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America, Barnet Schecter, Walker Publishing, 2005, excerpts pp. 23-24)

With the NAACP led by a man who preached socialism and later communism, it was not surprising that Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party would later attract black voters to his fold. In 1936, the Republican Party then was denouncing the New Deal’s “communist propensities”; FDR’s labor consultant Sidney Hillman created the first political action committee – CIO-PAC – with which to funnel labor union monies into the president’s campaign chest. Despite a black man, James W. Ford, being the vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in 1936, the left-leaning Democratic Party appealed to millions of black voters.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Segregation Plans in 1936

“The year 1936 raised the issue of the Negro and national life in well-defined terms for the race’s spokesmen. First, it was the year of a presidential election . . . Negroes had traditionally decided in favor of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation. Second, this particular election may be described fairly as a referendum for the administration of a Democratic president who had repeatedly espoused the cause of the “forgotten man.”

Third, this particular election year contained several racial issues which were extremely important to Negro leaders. [The] international situation was a burning issue for Negroes in 1936 because a non-colonial African nation was being attacked by a white European nation. Negroes wanted their white national decision makers to take some firm stand toward the Italian aggression against Ethiopia.

The election year was also significant because of the first National Negro Congress which convened in Chicago on February 14, 1936. Arising from the careful scrutiny of New Deal operations by an elite Negro group calling itself the Joint Committee on National Recovery, this congress brought together the whole spectrum of Negro leadership. In 1936 the leaders were taking a new deep breath in preparation for their next attempt “to shake off the bonds which have made possible economic slavery, political disenfranchisement and social inequalities.”

Among recognized Negro leaders in 1936 none adopted a position making segregation both the means and the goal of the race’s communal existence in America. Rather, a segregationist position was closer to the moderate stance of the great compromiser, Booker T. Washington. Negro segregation would be welcomed as a vehicle of achieving racial solidarity, which in turn would aid accumulation of wealth and a rise in social and cultural status, with a final goal of acceptance of Negroes as equals among the American citizenry.

The Republican editor of the Chicago Defender, Robert S. Abbott, stated the position of the Negro business community and its segregationist policies, though the major thrust of his editorial policy was one of protest rather than acquiescence toward white community. The editorial concluded that Negroes must accept, not attempt to change, the criteria of success employed by white Americans.

[W.E.B. Du Bois], the socialist and later in his life communist, was the most notable Negro conservative of 1936. [A] self-critical glance had convinced him that educated Negroes were only parasites on white philanthropy. [Du Bois] called for a concerted Negro effort to develop segregated education, religion and culture, segregated medicine and crime prevention, and, most important, segregated consumer power. The Negro could and should develop a socialism of professional services within its own racial community.

The task was not to build a segregated Negro capitalistic society parallel to white capitalism; rather, it was to create a segregated Negro economy in a form which would be functional in producing security and power to meet the circumstances of 1936, from which power base an attack on white structures for racial discrimination could be later launched.”

(Negro Leadership in the Election Year 1936, James A. Harrell; Journal of Southern History, Volume 34, No. 4, Nov. 1968, excerpts, pp. 546-554)

Contemptible Familiarities

“Would you guys like something to drink?”

I could not help smiling at the lad and two men sitting across the table from me in this California restaurant injected into the middle of North Carolina. We had just been deploring the use of this unisex slang expression to mean “ladies and gentlemen” and debating the possibility of asking waitresses to avoid it.

The waitress cocked her head and asked if something was wrong. After a few minutes of embarrassing hesitation, I told her, “This is a lady sitting next to me, not a guy, and the rest of us are men or even gentlemen, not guys or kids or fellows.”

“Then what am I supposed to say?”

When one Southern literary gent at the table suggested “You all,” she protested, “But then I’d sound like a cracker.” We assured her that the best people said “Y’all” and added that if she wanted to talk Yankee, she should talk old Philadelphia and not suburban Des Moines.

“Guy,” whether it is derived from the effigies of Guy Fawkes burnt on the fifth of November or, as Mencken believed, from the guy-rope of a circus tent, has nothing to recommend itself as a term of address. Chesterton objected to being called a “regular guy” when he visited America – perhaps he thought he was being accused of being a Catholic terrorist.

The real point in using “guy” is that it is a weapon in the war to eliminate distinctions and to level sexes, ranks and ages into one neutral category that probably includes domestic animals.

Like “citizen” or “comrade,” guys is a political term that does nothing to elevate the waitress but only denies the social reality constructed by men and women, young and old. If pressed, the sweet young thing from Concord might had said she was doing this 50-something old man a favor by treating him as “one of the guys,” but some us old bucks are proud to have got to where we are and can barely tolerate the society of the under-35 guys, chicks, dudes, and hey-mans whose philosophy of life is “I deserve a break today.” Did somebody say “stupid”?

Humpty Dumpty

(Contemptible Familiarities, Chronicles, February 2000, pg. 12)

The author below rightfully points to the slave trade which flourished in Africa where chieftains raided neighboring tribes and sold captives – men, women and children – into slavery. In addition, Arab slave traders were well-established long before European traders found already-enslaved Africans available for purchase. As late as the 1950s, the Touareg tribe in Timbuktu was found to still hold slaves, as was its tradition for centuries. (See: The Slaves of Timbuktu, Robin Maugham, Harper & Brothers, 1961). Volkswagen named its medium-sized SUV in honor of this slave-holding tribe.

Further, New England’s transatlantic slave trade had Providence, Rhode Island as its center by 1750, surpassing Liverpool, and New England’s industrial base is said to have been built upon slave-trade profits. The State and city of New York is named after the Duke of York, founding member of the Royal African Company which existed for the purpose of importing Africans into the colonies; Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney single-handedly perpetuated slavery with his invention in 1793. These are symbols of slavery, which the South would not have had within its boundaries had it not been for their actions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Battle of Richmond

“Every record book has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell, 1984.

The history police from Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” are at it again. Robert E. Lee’s picture, among 30 planned for an historical display along Richmond’s waterfront, was briefly removed because of protests by Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin. He claims the Confederate general is an offensive symbol of slavery.

James E. Rogers, president of the Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation, was one of the cowed officials who made the decision to take down the portrait of Lee.

This and other attacks on the display of Confederate symbols show that the spirit of intolerance in Big Brother’s 1984 lives on today in campaigns to purify American history and obliterate any symbols of its past that do not pass the test of political correctness. The history police goose-stepping through our culture are quite willing to throw out the baby with the bath water.

What is the baby? For African-Americans, it is the fantastic accomplishments of blacks during the days of slavery in the South. Those accomplishments during that difficult time should engender nothing but pride in American blacks today. Yet that satisfaction is systematically and deliberately denied to black Americans by their so-called leaders.

Why? Because those leaders have more to gain by fomenting racial discord than by harmonizing the many common bonds between white and black Virginians.

[The] special target of black racists is the Confederate nation and any symbol of reverence of it. Thus we see campaigns all over the South to remove the Confederate battle flag from public view.

In a vivid testimonial to America’s declining educational standards, critics like City Councilman El-Amin take the erroneous and self-serving view that the Confederates fought for slavery and the North fought against it. That would have been news to both Bluecoats and Greybacks. Most Southerners fought because their homeland was invaded by those who refused to let them depart the Union in peace, just as both North and South had departed from Great Britain under George III.

Black radicals pick on General Lee, but they turn a blind eye to their own history. How does Mr. El-Amin reconcile the debasement of Lee and Washington with the fact that African tribal leaders enslaved and sold millions of blacks to the slave traders?

According to political correctness, white leaders who owned slaves moral lepers, but black historical figures who did so are to be honored. Why should we not be offended by displays of African dress and the celebration of African holidays? Might they not be a “painful reminder” of the horrible enslavement of blacks?”

(Letter from Virginia, Lynn Hopewell, Chronicles, February 2000, excerpts pp. 37-38)

One of the most important questions hovering over debates regarding the meaning of the Confederate Battle Flag is this one: “Precisely who instructed black people that this flag symbolized hatred of black people, and precisely who continues to speak this fallacy? And why?”

As the latter usually includes those pointing to the Klan, let’s look at that question. It is well-known that the initial Ku Klux Klan had no flag; the pre-WWI incarnation of the Klan carried the US flag and many images of their marches prove this. In the late 1950s resurrection of the Klan one sees the US flag, the Confederate Battle Flag, and the Gadsden flag prominently displayed in public. Not one flag, but three.

Add to this the fact that it was England and New England who populated the South with African slaves. Rhode Island surpassed Liverpool as the center of the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-1700s, and New England’s industrial base was built upon slave trading profits. It was Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney’s invention in 1793 which made cotton production highly profitable, and New England mill owners became wealthy from slave-produced cotton.

If enslaving Africans is considered “hatred” of this race of people, then we should rightly condemn first the African tribes who enslaved Africans, as well as the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British and New England slave traders who brought the Africans to the New World in chains. How then, is the Confederate Battle Flag a “symbol of hatred and oppression?”  The following is an insightful article by Joseph E. Fallon, writing in Chronicles Magazine in 2000.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Attacking the Confederate Battle Flag

“The Confederate flag has become a heated topic this election year. As George W. Bush and John McCain battled in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the New York Young Republican Club invited Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, to discuss the Republican Party’s prospects for November.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, Mr. Robert Hornak, the club’s president, asked Mr. Lowry why the Republican Party did not condemn the Confederate Battle Flag. Alleging the flag was a symbol of treason, sedition and slavery, Mr. Hornak maintained that, by not condemning it, the GOP alienates black voters, ensuring that they vote Democratic. Mr. Lowry agreed, adding that Republicans don’t condemn the Confederate flag because they want the “redneck” vote.

In attacking the flag, both gentlemen unintentionally aid their political opponents. For a more compelling case can be made against the “Stars and Stripes” as a symbol of slavery, treason and sedition than against the Confederate Battle Flag.

There was no legal right under British law for a colony to secede from the British Empire. The actions of the American revolutionaries, therefore, were treasonous and seditious; their flag was a symbol of treason and sedition.

The Stars and Stripes also symbolizes a country established as a slaveholding republic. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, the institution of slavery was legally sanctioned in all 13 colonies. There were twice as many slaves in New York as in Georgia. One of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence was London’s policy of freeing slaves – euphemistically phrased as “exciting domestic insurrection.”

In 1783, when the British army withdrew from an independent United States, at least 18,000 slaves freed by the Crown joined the British exodus.

The Stars and Stripes remained a symbol of sedition after the country achieved independence. Six years later, the first republic under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union was overthrown by the Constitutional Convention.

The United States recognized the right of secession even after 1789. The right of secession from the second republic was explicitly reserved by the States of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island in their documents ratifying the Constitution.

It was the Stars and Stripes, not the Confederate Battle Flag that became the symbol of sedition in 1861. Lincoln overthrew the second republic established by the U.S. Constitution when he launched his war against the South [Note: Article III, Section 3, reads: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”].

As the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the “Prize Cases” (December 1862): “[Congress] cannot declare war against a State or any number of States by virtue of any clause in the Constitution . . . [The President] has no power to initiate or declare war against a foreign nation or a domestic State . . .”

The Stars and Stripes became a symbol of total war against the innocent: Food and medicine were contraband; women, children, the sick, and the elderly became legitimate targets. The Emancipation Proclamation was not a call for liberty, but for race war [Royal Governor Lord Dunmore of Virginia emancipated slaves who would rise against their owners and join the forces of the Crown in 1775 – Lincoln emulated this in 1863].

As Lincoln stated: “I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy; nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.”

Northern whites should not dismiss the idea that the Stars and Stripes could be banned. The [United States] flag was temporarily removed from two schoolrooms – one in California, the other in Michigan – in response to the demand of Third World militants who claimed that the flag was a symbol of “racism” and “oppression.”

As Third World immigration transforms the United States from a European-American majority to a European-American minority nation, the demand to ban the Stars and Stripes will only grow. If the Stars and Stripes is banned, Northern whites will have no one to blame but themselves. For in attacking the Confederate Battle Flag, they have provided the very arguments that most effectively undermine the legitimacy of our national flag.”

(Cultural Revolutions, Joseph E. Fallon, Chronicles, August 2000, excerpts pp. 6-7)

A City Filled with the Work of Great Southerners

“Of Athens, Cicero said that its glories in stone delighted him less than the thought of the great men who lived, worked, debated, disputed, died and were buried there. In Washington the feeling of a group of great men, Washington, Jefferson, Lee and Lincoln, is tangible and the buildings express their quality. The question marks at the end of them is equally palpable. Great presidents may make a great republic, but what happens if the noble breed gives out?

The four-yearly election is not merely that of a prime minister, but of a head of state. Henry Adams thought “the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant is almost enough in itself to upset the whole Darwinian theory,” and Mr. Albert Jay Nock in 1943 added: “Had Adams lived to see the succession extended to the present time he would perhaps say it was quite enough.” Mr. Nock did not see the events of 1944-1950; he died calling himself “A Superfluous Man” in an American era which alarmed him.

Despite the still living echoes of Northern armies tramping along Pennsylvania Avenue to crush the South, Washington remains a Southern city; the memory of great Southerners and their work fills it.

[The] corrosive influence [political corruption and influence peddling displays] itself in curious ways, alien to the Christian principles on which the Republic was founded. Washington was filled with a kind of whispered, muttered tumult, that of the world’s conflicting political ambitions, nearly all pursued behind the cloak of other purposes.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts, pp. 42-45)

Author Douglas Reed writes of the South’s defeat and radical Republican rule that “The wonder is that the South ever lifted itself from that prostration, and by its own bootstraps.” And Truslow Adams said of the twelve years of postwar reconstruction that “There is no parallel for the situation in the history of modern civilized nations, and it is almost incredible that it happened in our own country.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Atlanta Compared to Warsaw and Budapest

“So strong is the memory of what the Republicans did after the war that Southerners still automatically vote Democratic. The most their representatives can do, when they reach Congress, is somewhat to retard the new campaign against the South; on the whole they promote the aim of the new immigration to “take over the future of America.”

The clear trail from the Civil War to the present [1951] was the first of my surprises in America. Like most Europeans, probably, I was ignorant of that war and when I studied it felt like an archaeologist who finds the original of the Communist Manifesto in Greek ruins.

What went with that wind was more than the political power of the South; what came with the new one was the enslavement of white men by Soviet methods. Only the particular spirit of the South prevented that condition from becoming permanent.

“That the Southern people were put to the torture is vaguely understood” (wrote Mr. Claude G. Bowers in 1929 in The Tragic Era), “but even historians have shrunk from the unhappy task of showing us the torture chambers . . . It is impossible to grasp the real significance of the revolutionary proceedings of the rugged conspirators working out the policies of Thaddeus Stevens without making many journeys among the Southern people and seeing with our own eyes the indignities to which they were subjected.”

The key-words are “revolutionary” and “conspirators” and they fit today’s situation like a glove. That the North, with its newly-discovered gold, growing industry, command of the sea and increasing population would win that war was plain to clear heads in the South from the start, and did not deter them from a war which, they believed, had to be fought. The way to the South was opened to persons recognizable today as the revolutionary conspirators we know as Communists.

Of the twelve years that followed, the miracle is that the South survived. Mr. John Gunther . . . says, “If you read the history of those days . . . Atlanta on the 1870s must have startingly resembled Warsaw or Budapest under the Nazis in the 1940s . . . Chopping up the South and ruling it by an absolute dictatorship of the military, while every kind of economic and social depredation was not only allowed but encouraged, is so strikingly like what is going on in Germany at present that the imagination staggers.

Slightly different comparisons might be more correct. The sufferings of the South compare more closely with those of Budapest, Warsaw and all of Eastern Europe under the communists after the 1939-1945 war ended than even under the Nazis in 1940.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts pp. 25-26)