Circa1865

Woodrow Wilson’s liberal arguments for a European peace after the First World War came “not from prudence, not from principle as [Edmund] Burke had described principle, but from abstraction; and the states upon which he bestowed his blessing collapsed in less than two decades, because they were constructed in defiance of history, of real interests, and of the hard facts of power.” Hitler rose from the ashes of that war and Wilson’s ideal design for Europe.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Wilson Lacked Edmund Burke’s Prudence

“Wilson did what he could to establish a better order among nations. His principles were confused, the times moved too fast for him (particularly in the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian system), and he proved far too thoroughly convinced of his own wisdom, too unyielding, to achieve anything which might endure.

Yet the errors into which he fell were not the errors of conservative policy; they were the errors of liberalism; they were the sort of errors which Gladstone made in diplomacy. The climate of 1918 and 1919 was liberal, and it is hard to say who might have done better in Wilson’s place. His failure was the failure of the nation’s political imagination in those years, a normative failure.

Certain liberal abstractions concerning the nature of political order and the nature of man lay behind Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination, behind his assumption that leagues of nations and paper constitutions and treaties might of themselves bring peace and contentment, behind his insistence upon fitting the map of Europe into his ideal design.

He had learned much from the Federalists and Burke; but he had not learned prudence, which Burke considered the highest virtue in a statesman. That aspect of Burke’s thought which defends prescription and prejudice, which perceives how dangerous it is to disturb anything that is at rest, which is prepared to tolerate an old evil lest the cure prove worse than the disease, he understood imperfectly.

Burke . . . never would have thought of approving a doctrinaire and wholesale shifting of boundaries, a vast abolition of governments and substitution of new ones, an overthrow of historical and natural groupings in favor of simple language-affinity. Burke would have perceived at once the consequence of abolishing the power which held together the heart of Europe and checked German and Russian ambition, the Austrian system.

To the conservative of Burke’s school, the world is at best a tolerable place, kept in order chiefly through respect for custom and precedent. It may be patched and pruned here and there; but the nature of man remains flawed, ambition always aspires to domination, and states are kept at peace only by a balancing of power, a recognition of the traditions of civility, and a concern for real interests. Parchment and declarations of the rights of man cannot restrain private or national concupiscence.

To the liberal, on the other hand, the world is infinitely improvable, and so is man himself; experiment and emancipation will lead to peace; and what ought to be, shall be. So Wilson thought and acted through the War and the making of the Peace.

The idea that power may be checked only by countervailing power always has been distasteful to the liberal. Wilson’s concept of self-determination, his championship of the League, and much of the rest of his program reflected that distaste. A vague confidence in Progress, Equality and the People overcame the cautionary precepts of Burke and the Federalists.

“You are a Liberal,” the Duke of Omnium says to Phineas Finn, in one of Trollope’s parliamentary novels, “because you know that it is not all as it ought to be; and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so god-like, — nay, so absolutely divine, — that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable.”

Trollope knew his Liberals. This yearning to march on toward some future universal condition of democracy and equality got the better of Wilson, when authority was his. Despite his earlier declarations that the American Republic – though a model for other states – could not be transplanted, he called upon America to make the world safe for democracy; and this same liberal universalism marked his arguments in the shaping of the evanescent Peace.”

(The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays; George A. Panichas, editor, ISI Books, 2007, excerpts, pp. 507-509)

The final breakup of the union of States in 1861 was preceded by over 80 years of conflict and compromise, and it was Southern statesmen who most often tried valiantly to save the confederation of the Founders. Just as colonial New England frequently antagonized England with its independently-minded maritime fleet, it often threatened secession and independence from the United States as it viewed its own interests as paramount to any other.  The infamous Hartford Convention of New England Federalists seriously entertained secession in late 1814, and espoused States’ rights doctrines.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Southern Statesmen Save the Union

“The period from the ratification of the treaty of peace to the adoption of the Constitution has been called the critical period of American history; and the first year of that period was scarcely less critical than the last, the year in which, to use a familiar evangelistic expression, the Constitution was hair-hung and breeze-shaken over the bottomless pit.

It is scarcely to be doubted that at that time [1784] the New Englanders in particular seriously contemplated the dissolution of Congress and the abandonment of the union of the thirteen States.

At such a time, when the bands of union were slipping, the centrifugal forces were everywhere running amuck, it was Thomas Jefferson who conceived the idea that the preservation of a “visible head” of the government was of supreme importance, lest, with the disappearance of even a symbol of the union, all faith and hope in a more perfect union should likewise perish; and it was the Southern members of Congress, nobly aided by Pennsylvania alone, who strove with might and main to combat the threatened peril.

Again, when men of the North would have hog-tied and bound the West and have delivered it into permanent subjection to the East, it was Southern statesmen, more than any others, who strove to establish the principle that the West should be carved into self-governing States, having equal rights in the union with the original thirteen.

Once more, in that long and hard-fought contest over the free navigation of the Mississippi River, when the North would have sold that American birthright for a mess of Spanish turnip greens and them frostbitten, it was Southern statesmen who saved the West to itself and to the nation.

During the contest over the navigation of the Mississippi . . . the forces of disunion again began slithering through the East. In the late summer of 1786 [James] Monroe was alarmed to discover that, in the very shadow of Congress, an intrigue was asquirm, the design of which appeared to be the disruption of the existing union and the creation of a Northern confederation that would extend, if possible, as far southward as the Potomac.

The scheme may have died a-borning . . . At all events there are grounds for suspicion that it was the same infant, waxed a bit stronger, that was exhibited at Hartford in 1814.”

(Southern Statesmen and the Confederation, Edmund Cody Burnett, North Carolina Historical Review, Volume XIV, Number 4, October 1937, NC Historical Commission, excerpts, pp. 357-359)

Frustrated at the drift of FDR into state-socialism and use of communist-dominated labor unions to buy votes for his fourth term – as he had done for his third term — Southern congressmen like Josiah Bailey (1873-1946) of North Carolina threatened a new party grounded in constitutional principles – the States Rights Democratic party, or “Dixiecrats.” The Sidney Hillman noted below was a communist labor organizer who helped FDR gain the governorship of New York, and he was brought on board in 1932 to accomplish the same on a national level. One of Bailey’s best-known quotes is: “Since we humans have the better brain, is it not our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Southern Democrats Betrayed by Their Party

“What’s wrong, Senator [Josiah] Bailey [of North Carolina] demanded, with being a “Southern” Senator or a “Southern” Democrat? [He] pointed out that the Southern States had cast their electoral votes for the Democratic candidate for President, election after election, often when they stood absolutely alone and when there was nobody else in the electoral college to vote for him. But, he warned, there can be an end of that sort of thing!

“There can be an end of insults,” he said, “there can be an end of toleration, there can be an end of patience. We can form a Southern Democratic Party and vote as we please in the Electoral College, and we will hold the balance of power in this country. We can throw the election into the House of Representatives and cast the votes of sixteen States.

We have been patient. We were tried. But, by the eternal gods, there are men in the South, and women too, who will not permit men in control of our party to betray or to insult us in the house of our fathers.

We will assert ourselves – and we are capable of asserting ourselves – and we will vindicate ourselves, and if we cannot have a party in which we are respected, if we must be in a party in which we are scorned as “Southern” Democrats, we will find a party which honors us, not because we are Southerners, and not because of politics, but because we love our country and believe in the Constitution from which it draws its life, day by day, as you, sir, draw your breath from the atmosphere round about you.”

To be sure, national managers of the Democratic Party were mildly disturbed by the Bailey speech, but not for long. It may have been a coincidence, of course, but it is a fact that early in January, 1944, about a month after the Bailey speech was delivered, Governor [J.M.] Broughton of Bailey’s own State of North Carolina told the country in a radio broadcast that while there was “great political turmoil” in the Southern States, all of them would be found in the Democratic column as usual in the Presidential election of 1944. But the “insults” of which Senator Bailey complained didn’t end and the “betrayals” continued.

[On July 7 -1943], the executive board of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a new labor body popularly known as the CIO . . . decreed that every Senator and Representative who had voted for the Smith-Connally bill should be defeated for re-election. And to undertake this job it created the CIO Political Action Committee.

At that time the labor leader who was closer to President Roosevelt than any other was Russian-born Sidney Hillman. Hillman had held various federal offices under the New Deal . . . His relations with Roosevelt were direct and intimate. This is of significance, because Sidney Hillman was chosen to be the Chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee. The object of the CIO-PAC at the outset was frankly that of electing a Congress that would follow the labor-union “line” and also elect President Roosevelt to a fourth term.

“We have in this country,” said Senator Bailey, “a well-organized, well-financed movement of the left-wing of American labor to capture the Democratic Party by infiltration. They propose to nominate the President for a fourth term. And they are noisy about it. They propose to defeat any Senator or member of the House [of Representatives] who does not bow to their policy of coercing the working men of America.”

(The South’s Political Plight, Peter Molyneaux, Calhoun Clubs of the South, 1948, excerpt, pp. 4-17)

Only four years after Senator Josiah Bailey’s spoke on the floor of the United States Senate below, Southern Democrats were forming their own Democratic Party dedicated to lost Jeffersonian principles. FDR had already corrupted many Democrats who supported his socialist New Deal policies and a proposed “Federal” ballot which would overthrow a State’s authority of holding elections.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Southern Democrats Defend the Constitution

“On the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1943 – Senator Josiah Bailey of [Warrenton] North Carolina, exasperated at frequent contemptuous references to “Southern” Democrats by national party leaders and disturbed over a decided anti-Southern trend in the Democratic Party, stood on the floor of the United States Senate and, in a blistering speech, warned the aforesaid Democratic leaders that there was a limit to what the South would stand from them.

At the same time, he outlined a course by which Southern Democrats could break off relations with the national party and bring about a situation in which the South would hold the balance of power in American politics.

Another presidential election was approaching and already there was a definite movement to “draft” President Roosevelt for a fourth term. For many days the Senate had debated a measure that proposed to empower the federal government to hold Presidential and Congressional elections among the men and women of the armed forces, using a federal ballot.

This measure was introduced by a Democrat and was being supported by Democrats and the Roosevelt administration, in spite of the obvious fact that it denied the fundamental Democratic Party doctrine that elections may be held only by authority of State governments and that under the Constitution the federal government has absolutely no authority to hold elections. But the most vigorous opposition also came from Democrats, principally Southern Democrats. It resulted in a notable debate on constitutional principles such as seldom been heard in Congress.

The Senate rejected this federal ballot proposal . . . But this did not prevent Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania from charging, in a newspaper statement, that the federal ballot had been defeated by an “unholy alliance” of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. Guffey designated Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia as the Democratic leader of “the most unpatriotic and unholy alliance that has occurred in the United States Senate since the League of Nations for peace of the world was defeated in 1919.”

Senator Byrd took care of Guffey on the morning of that December 7^th by giving the Pennsylvania Senator a thorough verbal skinning. It was about as neat a dressing down as could be administered within the rules of the Senate. But Guffey’s references to “Southern” Democrats had angered Senator Bailey.

What’s wrong, Senator Bailey demanded, with being a “Southern” Senator or a “Southern” Democrat? “I would remind these gentlemen who speak of us as “Southern” Democrats,” he said, “these Democrats, these high lights of the party, these beneficiaries of our victories during the last ten years – I would remind them that Southern Democrats maintained the Democratic Party and kept it alive in all the long years of its exile, when it had no place in the house which our fathers had built, when it was not permitted to serve around the altars which our forefathers had made holy.”

(The South’s Political Plight, Peter Molyneaux, Calhoun Clubs of the South, 1948, excerpts, pp. 1-4)

By 1936, Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrat Party had become a virtual duplicate of the Communist Party USA with a near-identical platform, and supported by communist labor and black voting blocs. The old Southern Democratic traditions were thrust aside and the seeds of the “Dixiecrat” party were sown as FDR used his power to unseat opponents. Charleston editor William Watts Ball rose to the occasion.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Old Lady of Broad Street Versus FDR

“[South Carolinian James] Byrnes found further cause for disagreement with [President] Roosevelt during the Congressional elections of 1938; he did not approve of Roosevelt’s attempt to unseat conservative Southern Democrats who had not supported New Deal legislation in the Senate. Some of the President’s closest advisors thought it unwise for him to dare intervene in Southern politics.

But Roosevelt would not be deterred; he undertook a “purge” trip through the South . . . [and] visited South Carolina. Since Olin Johnston had been invited to ride on the presidential train, it was obvious that Roosevelt favored Johnston for the [Senate] seat held by “Cotton Ed” Smith, presently running for reelection. Roosevelt had picked

Johnston and [News and Courier editor] Ball observed, “If the president can elect Mr. Johnston US Senator from South Carolina he can elect anybody . . . Northern Negro leaders were the masters of the national Democratic party. A vote against Smith was a victory for Walter White and the NAACP.”

Ball observed [that there] was a need for an independent Jeffersonian Democratic party in national affairs . . . to that end, on August 1 [1940] more than two hundred delegates convened at the South Carolina Society Hall in Charleston to organize the State Jeffersonian Democratic party. Almost simultaneously, “Time” magazine printed a picture of the “New Deal-hating” Ball and reported his support of [Republican Wendell] Wilkie as indicative of anti-Roosevelt rumblings in the normally Democratic Southern press.

[Ball wrote to his sister that] Election returns are coming in . . . the election of Wilkie would give me a surprise. I have no faith in “democracy” (little “d”) and the government of the United States has placed the balance of power in the hands of mendicants. I suppose the inmates of any county alms house would vote to retain in office a superintendent who fed them well and gave them beer. As for South Carolina, the South, it is decadent, spiritless; it is not even a beggar of the first class.

And in good health and bad, Ball maintained his unfaltering crusade against the New Deal. “Never was deeper disgrace for a country, in its management, than the disgrace of waste and corruption the last eight and a half years. I would not say there has been stealing, not great stealing, but the buying of the whole people with gifts and offices has been the colossal form of corruption . . . the American symbols are the night clubs of New York, the playboys and playgirls of Hollywood and the White House family with its divorces and capitalization of the presidential office to stuff money into its pockets.”

[Ball’s] News and Courier adhered steadfastly to its traditional policies: States rights; tariff for revenue only; strict construction of the Constitution; a federal government whose duties were confined to defending the republic against attack and to preserving peace and free commerce among the States. Fazed neither by depression nor by war, the “Old Lady of Broad Street” persisted in her jealousy and suspicion of all governments that set up welfare, do-good and handout agencies.

Ball claimed not to dislike [Roosevelt aide Harry] Hopkins, but [regarded] him as the embodiment of the fantastic in government: a man who “on his own initiative never produced a dollar,” a welfare worker who now was the greatest spender of the taxpayers’ money.”

(Damned Upcountryman, William Watts Ball, John D. Starke, Duke University Press, 1968, excerpts, pp. 151-201)

The Mexican War saw the sectional divide widen further as abolitionists and their allies in the North asserted that this was “simply a Southern plot to bring more slave States into the Union.” As New England sided with the enemy during the War of 1812 by selling them supplies and threatened to secede and form a separate republic, they would side with the enemy in 1846. The contingent of Americans fighting with the Mexicans noted below were the “San Patricios,” Irish Catholic immigrants in the US Army who refused to fight against Mexican Catholics. Those captured were executed for treason.  Ohio Senator “Black Tom” Corwin denounced the war in Congress and was summarily hung in effigy near Buena Vista by Ohio troops. They first dressed his likeness in a Mexican uniform.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Santa Anna Popular Up North

“Daniel Webster flung his oratory into caustic criticism of the war and he was abetted by fanatics like [Charles] Sumner. Soon, drinking of this heady fire water, Northern newspapers were fulminating against [President James] Polk and the continuance of the war. This was one of the few wars waged by the United States in which the enemy was popular.

Black Tom Corwin said that American soldiers in Mexico should be welcomed by “hospitable graves,” and a whole nightmare school of literature sprang up. Some papers called for European intervention. One said editorially: “If there is in the United States a heart worthy of American liberty, its impulse is to join the Mexicans.” Another said: “It would be a sad and woeful joy, but a joy nevertheless, to hear that the hordes of Scott and Taylor were every man of them swept into the next world.”

Santa Anna, the rascally Mexican commander, became a hero in Boston and New York, and there was even a contingent of Americans who fought with the Mexican army.”

(Merchants of Death, A Study of the International Armament Industry, H.C. Engelbrecht & F.C. Hanighen, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1934, excerpt, pp. 28-29)

The ratification of the Constitution was a difficult and contentious process, and those in the American South saw it primarily to the benefit of the North. Rawlins Lowndes declared in South Carolina’s 1788 convention that he was satisfied with the Articles of Confederation, and assailed the Constitution because it would lead to monarchy, and that Northern majorities in Congress would cause injury to South Carolina’s interests.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Early Southern Concerns of Northern Domination

“It is a little strange, but the textbooks in general American history and political science used in American colleges and universities do not say that ratification of the Constitution was opposed in the South on sectional as well as other grounds. This even though the historians of Virginia have pointed out time and time again that fears for Southern interests played a most important role in the convention of 1788 of that State.

Perhaps the narrators of the nation’s history, being often Northerners, are not acquainted with the chronicles of the Old Dominion. Perhaps they are not so familiar even with their Jefferson as they would have us believe, for Jefferson declared that the struggle over ratification was sharper in the South than elsewhere – because of the fact that Southerners believed the Constitution did not offer sufficient protection against Northern domination.

Perhaps they have relied too much upon the Federalist Papers, which refer only briefly, although pointedly, to Southern sectionalism, saying that failure to put the Constitution into effect would probably lead to the formation of a Southern confederacy.

George Mason, sending to Northern Anti-federalists arguments against the Constitution, carefully omitted his Southern dissatisfactions, which would hardly have given strength to the enemies above the Mason-Dixon line. In Virginia he was ardent, and in Virginia the great decision regarding the Constitution was made. The issue was long doubtful in the Old Dominion; and had Virginia said nay, North Carolina would have persisted in her negative vote.

It is hardly necessary to say that an American union without the two States could hardly have been formed, could hardly have endured.”

(The First South, John Richard Alden, LSU Press, 1961, excerpt, pp. 99-100)

Lincoln’s continued military defeats caused Radical Republicans to oppose his reelection, until Gen. George B. McClellan became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1864. As Charles Sumner put it privately, “Lincoln’s reelection would be a disaster, but McClellan’s damnation.” After winning their war against the South, Republicans extended their rule over the new empire beyond the turn of the century, except for the two terms of Democrat Grover Cleveland. For further reading on Lincoln’s opponents within his party see: Ward Hill Lamon’s “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865,” published in 1895.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Power, Plunder and Extended Rule

“Surgeon [Francis Marion] Robertson equates the Union logic of war with that which was being espoused by a set of Union opponents of President Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the war.

Following the long series of Federal military disasters leading up to and including their defeats in the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in 1863, there arose a movement within the Army and Federal Congress that reached a fever pitch in its call to displace President Lincoln, in effect, by the appointment of a dictator to direct the war effort.

Members of Congress called for appointing a vigilant “committee on the conduct of the war” to watch and supervise Lincoln’s movements and decisions. Supporters of this cabal included (a), political activists who sought increased military victories and preservation of their personal and party power, (b), commercial zealots who desired spoliation and plunder of the South, and (c), religious abolitionists whose sympathy for the slave had degenerated into envenomed hostility toward his owner.

These aggressive enemies of Lincoln in the North and within his own party summed up the logic of war in the comprehensive formula, “Power, plunder and extended rule.”

This phrase summarized the vindictive motivation that the seceding Southerners both expected and feared from the Union, if they should lose the war. The collection of attitudes has later been described by historians as the Radical Republican philosophies.

So Lincoln, faced with fire in both his front and rear, finally concluded that he must assert himself. Lincoln exclaimed, “This state of things shall continue no longer. I will show them at the other end of the Avenue whether I am President or not!” From soon after this moment, “his opponents and would-be masters were now, for the most part, silenced; but they hated him all the more cordially.”

In the end, after the Southern surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, the worst apprehensions of white Southerners about “power, plunder and extended rule” at the hands of the Republican North and the carpetbaggers would largely come true.”

(Resisting Sherman, A Confederate Surgeon’s Journal and the Civil War in the Carolinas, 1865, Thomas Heard Robertson, Jr., editor, Savas-Beatie, 2015, pg. 64)

The following December 1859 editorial of the Wilmington (North Carolina) Daily Herald asks its readers “What Shall the South Do” after the Harper’s Ferry attack by John Brown, later found to be armed and financed by wealthy abolitionists.  The open warfare between North and South in Kansas had moved eastward, and the South questioned why their Northern brethren were unable to contain murderous zealots of their section. The Daily Herald was edited and published by Alfred Moore Waddell, descendant of US Supreme Court Justice Alfred Moore and Revolutionary General Hugh Waddell. A staunch Unionist editor, Waddell followed his State into the Confederacy and served as Lieutenant-Colonel of the Third North Carolina Cavalry.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“What Should the South Do?”

“The chief actor in the affair at Harper’s Ferry has expiated his crime upon the gallows. Old Brown has been hanged. What will be the result of this enforcement of the law? Will the effect be salutary upon the minds of the Northern people? Have we any reason to suppose that it will cause them, for one moment only, to pause and reflect upon the course they have persistently followed towards the South and her institutions?

It is useless to disguise the fact, that the entire North and Northwest are hopelessly abolitionized. We want no better evidence than that presented to us by their course in this Harper’s affair. With the exception of a few papers (among them we are proud to notice that sterling Whig journal, the New York Express), that have had the manliness to denounce the act as it deserved, the great majority have either sympathized with the offenders, or maintained an ominous silence.

Let us look calmly at the case: A sovereign State [Virginia], in the peaceful enjoyment of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, has been invaded by an armed force, not foreign mercenaries, but citizens of the same Confederacy, and her people shot down in the public highways. The question is a natural one — Why is this thing done? Why is murder and rapine committed? — And who are the perpetrators? — The answer is found in the fact, that the State whose territory has thus been invaded, is a Southern State in which the institution of slavery exists according to the law and the gospel; and the actors in the terrible drama were but carrying out the precepts and teachings of our Northern brethren.

The “irrepressible conflict” between the North and the South then, has already commenced; to this complexion it must come at last. It is useless to talk of the conservatism of the North. Where has there been any evidence of it? Meetings upon meetings have been held for the purpose of expressing sympathy for murderers and traitors; but none, no, not one solitary expression of horror, or disapprobation even, for the crime committed, have we yet seen from any State North of Mason & Dixon’s line.

And yet they claim to be our brethren, speak the same language, worship the same God. We yield to none in our veneration for the Union, but it is not the Union, now, as our Fathers bequeathed it to us. Then, the pulse that throbbed upon the snow-capped mountains of New Hampshire, vibrated along the Gulf and the marshes of the Mississippi; then, there was unison of feeling, brotherly kindness and affection, and the North and the South, in friendly rivalry, strove together how they could best promote the general welfare.

Now, all is changed. Do you ask why? Watch the proceedings of Congress, read the publications that are scattered by the North broadcast over the country, listen to the sentiments expressed at nearly all their public gatherings. The stereotyped cry, that these things are the work of fanatics only, will no longer answer; but if it be so, then fanaticism rules the entire North; for what has been the result of the elections held during the past summer?

Ask Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, — ask Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, and even the great State of New York; — all, all, have given in their adhesion to the “higher law” principle, and the mandate for “irrepressible conflict.” Do these things indicate affection, brotherly kindness, Union? There can be no union without affection, — there can be no Union unless this aggressive policy of the North is stopped.

We confess that we look forward with gloomy apprehension towards the future. If Congress fails to apply the remedy, then it behooves the South to act together as one man — ship our produce direct to Europe, — import our own goods, — let the hum of the spinning-wheel be heard in our homes, as in the days of the Revolution, — manufacture our own articles of necessity or luxury, and be dependent upon the North for — nothing.

If such a course does not produce a different state of affairs, then set us down as no prophet; if such a course does not cause the Conservatives of the North to give some tangible evidence of their existence, then we must of necessity conclude, that that principle has no lodgment in their midst.”

(“What Shall the South Do?”- editorial, Wilmington Daily Herald, 5 December 1859)

President William McKinley had to be goaded into war against Spain by the yellow journalism and fake news of Hearst and Pulitzer, but his dispatch of the USS Maine to Cuba provided the incident, as Roosevelt’s dispatch of the US fleet to Pearl Harbor did 43 years later. Lincoln’s bludgeoning of Americans seeking independence in 1861-1865, cleverly disguised as a war to emancipate slaves, left future imperial-minded presidents with a reusable template for war.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Remember the Maine

“Henry Luce coined the phrase “The American Century” as an expression of the militant economic globalism that has characterized American policy from the days of William McKinley. Luce, the publisher of Time and Fortune, was the child of missionaries in China – a product, in other words, of American religious and cultural globalism. It is no small irony that this preacher’s kid was the chief spokesman for a global movement which, in its mature phase, has emerged as the principal enemy of the Christian faith.

The approach to Christianity taken by the postmodern, post-civilized, and post-Christian American regime is a seamless garment: At home, the federal government bans prayer in school, enforces multiculturalism in the universities, and encourages the immigration of non-Christian religious minorities who begin agitating against Christian symbols the day they arrive; abroad, the regime refuses to defend Christians from the genocide inflicted by Muslims in the Sudan, while in the Balkans it has waged a ruthless and inhumane war against the Serbs of Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia.

The inhumanity of NATO’s air campaign against villages, heating plants and television stations reveals, even in the absence of other evidence, the anti-Christian hatred that animates the Washington regime.

Luce did not invent the American Empire, he only shilled for it. His American Century began in the Philippines 100 years ago, when the American regime refined the policies and techniques discovered in the Civil War.

The oldest and best form of American imperialism is the commercial expansion advocated by the Republicans – McKinley, Taft, Hoover and Eisenhower – who warned against the military-industrial complex. Although all of these free-traders were occasionally willing to back up the politics of self-interest with gunboats, they preferred to rely, whenever possible, on dollar diplomacy. McKinley had no hesitation about establishing American hegemony in Cuba and the Philippines, but he had to be dragged into war.

Free trade, these Babbits believed, could be the route to market penetration around the globe, and one of the early slogans of commercial imperialists was the “Open Door.” Sometimes, however, the door had to be kicked in by the Marines.

As one spokesman for American industry put it 100 years ago, “One way of opening up a market is to conquer it.” This is what Bill Clinton meant when he justified his attack on Yugoslavia on the grounds that we need a stable Europe as a market for American goods.

Even the most tough-minded Americans are suckers for a messianic appeal; it must have something to do with the Puritan legacy. Even bluff old Bill McKinley, in declaring war on the people of the Philippines, a war that would cost the lives of more than 200,000 civilians, proclaimed the aim of our military administration was “to win the confidence, respect and affection of the inhabitants . . . by assuring them . . . that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”

The new American globalism has a logic all its own, one based on universal free trade, which destroys local economies; open immigration for non-Europeans and non-Christians, who can be used to undermine a civilization that is both Christian and European; and universal human rights, which are the pretext for world government.”

(Remember the Maine, Thomas Fleming; Perspective, Chronicles, August 1999, excerpt, pp. 10-11)