Memorials to a Lie

Reconcile: verb – 1^st definition: restore friendly relations between; cause to coexist in harmony.

Reconciliation: noun –1^st definition: the restoration of friendly relations.

For years, many beautiful Confederate monuments and sculptures have come under attack and been dismantled and possibly even destroyed. The one presently in the WOKE culture’s cross-hairs is a monument erected in our “national cemetery” – otherwise known as the purloined property of General Robert Edward Lee – Arlington, Virginia. That monument is known by the title Reconciliation and is found within the Jackson Circle in the cemetery. A booklet on the matter was published in 1914 by the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association under the auspices of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The opening statement of the work’s preface made clear what message the monument was intended to convey:

When one considers what it is and what it stands for, there is no object in or near Washington City better worth a visit and a careful study than the Confederate Monument in the National Cemetery at Arlington. . . In its origin and in itself this memorial is entirely without a parallel in history. Its story has been here carefully told, and every effort has been made in the narrative to do justice to all the organizations that have co-operated patriotically in the production of the monument. For its full significance the writer relies much on the carefully prepared address of President Taft, welcoming the U. D. C. in 1912 to the National Capital . . . and that of President Wilson . . .

It is interesting to note that President Taft, who welcomed the U.D.C. in 1912 to the “National Capital” and President Wilson who later responded to the presentation of the memorial in 1914 were members of the two political parties, Taft, a Republican and Wilson, a Democrat. Later in the booklet, mention is made of the feelings that brought about the monument’s creation under the heading “Reconciliation in America”:

Within a single generation we in America have been able as among ourselves, “To reap the harvest of perpetual peace,” by this our bloody trial of sharp war. After our war, passion and prejudice also, but only for a time, ran riot. In 1867 the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving the National Government, and (were) true patriots. North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

Within a generation after Congressional Reconstruction, American historians condemned it, as unqualifiedly as Carlyle, after a lapse of 175 years, did the treatment of Cromwell’s memory. James Ford Rhodes has denominated Congressional Reconstruction as “a crime against civilization,” and public opinion seems to have approved the verdict. *Many causes had conduced to (help bring about) the fraternal relations that existed between the North and South when the war came on with Spain in 1898 — the exchange of visits between Union and Confederate organizations, the erection in 1895 of a Confederate monument in Chicago, the writings and speeches of broad-minded historians, editors, orators and statesmen, but more fundamental than all else had been two factors: One, the memory of the once much misunderstood Abraham Lincoln and his policies; the other, the Federal Constitution.

*This paragraph is a reference to what became known as the “Grand Bargain,” an unwritten policy created in an effort to end the ongoing hostility between the sections that came into being during this period and remained pretty much intact until the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. This quasi-official but unstated narrative meant that the North agreed that the South had fought valiantly – if wrongly! – and that their heroes, symbols, monuments etc. were worthy of respect and even veneration. Meanwhile, the South was expected to glorify the war waged by the North as lawful and worthy of respect and that the defeat of the Confederacy was, in the end, the best possible outcome. As noted, this “bargain” ceased to exist with the rise of the Civil Rights movement and many historians with an understanding of what actually did happen during the conflict and in the ante and post bellum periods acknowledge that the South did all the “compromising” given what had actually taken place.

The booklet claimed that the people of the South, having seen “the restoration of home-rule” were “flocking to defend the flag of the Union in the war with Spain.” There was then a great deal more regarding the claim that Southerners were once again Americans and therefore, “(T)he enthusiasm of the South for the flag in the war with Spain electrified the North when that war was over,” going on to claim:

President McKinley, who had himself been a gallant Union soldier, made a speech at Atlanta, December 21, 1898, that touched the heart of the South as it never had been touched before. In it he said:

“Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States, sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the National anthem, sung by a chorus of 45 States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The Union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag once again waves over us in peace with new glories which your sons and ours have this year added to its “sacred folds. . . And the time has now come, in the evolution of public sentiment and feeling under the Providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers.”

This thought was like a seed sown in rich, warm soil; it took root at once; then came the plant and its growth, and now we have, in this monument, the full flower, already fruiting into a generous harvest of fraternal feeling. On the same trip South at Macon, Georgia, an enthusiastic Southerner insisted on pinning a Confederate badge on the lapel of Mr. McKinley’s coat. The President smilingly wore it.

This booklet is a very interesting – if dated! – look at the mood of the country that brought about the monument now being considered for destruction and indeed, there can be no doubt that to destroy a monument based upon the very concept of “reconciliation” will go very far indeed to damage and/or destroy the concept itself. It would seem that America is “back peddling” not just to the time of Reconstruction – and a worse word cannot be considered for the evils visited upon helpless Southern men, women and children by their “Northern brethren” – but to the period that led to that sanguine struggle in the first place!

The first Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies were held in Arlington’s “Confederate section” on June 7^th, 1903. Then President Theodore Roosevelt sent a floral arrangement establishing a tradition that was continued by every United States President until 2009 when President Barak Obama sent one arrangement to the Confederate Memorial and another to Washington D.C.’s African-American Civil War Memorial honoring United States black troops that fought in that war on the side of the Union. Though no one could claim that action as inappropriate, it did sound a warning that indicated that matters would not continue as they had from the time of the erection of the reconciliation monument including the continuation of the feelings that brought it into existence in the first place.

The monument was unveiled in 1914 having been designed by noted American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. It is noted not only for its beauty but for the honor paid to the men who fought and died for the same freedoms for which their ancestors had fought and died in the Revolutionary War, almost a century earlier. But just as the time between the Revolution and the War of Secession – a more accurate definition of the most sanguine of America’s many wars! – changed many things in the entity that had become known as the “United” (capital “U”) States of America, even greater changes have taken place between 1914 and 2023. Indeed, so great are the changes that have occurred during that time, it is probable that the people who attended the monument’s dedication would not recognize – or understand! – what exists today. The question that must be asked, therefore, is what does exist today? An adjunct of that question must also be, what did exist in the past? What was cancelled or “forgotten” by the Grand Bargain that has returned to bring about what we now can understand as cultural genocide not just of the history of the South, but of the history of the nation itself and what do we need to do to change or overcome the direction in which we are going as a culture and a nation – if indeed, that is even possible. And, finally, the most important question is this: do we want “reconciliation” on the basis of the narrative that produced it in the first place?

So, let us take a hard look at what our nation’s above noted “reconciliation” was based upon; that is, what was the meaning of the Grand Bargain as noted earlier and the price paid by those who embraced it. In the end, it is fairly simple: the North acknowledged the heroism and worthiness of the South in its valiant (if misguided!) efforts at independence, an acknowledgement that permitted the symbols, heroes and history of that section to be viewed with acceptance and even reverence. Hence there could be Confederate flags and monuments and heroes and celebrations that could not be viewed as any kind of an “attack on” or “criticism of” the “restored Union.”

For the South, there must be acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the war itself along with the noble behavior of the forces of the Union in carrying out that war together with the consignment of everything that happened before, during and after the conflict to oblivion – with the exception of the acknowledgement that the outcome had been “the best for all concerned.” Seems simple enough under the circumstances – simple, but oh, so very wrong! Why wrong? Because what the North acknowledged was only the truth – with the exception of the belief that the South did not have the constitutional right to leave the Union – while that which the South had to acknowledge was pure fiction from beginning to end!

Let us look at what the South had to accept as truth in order to maintain the Grand Bargain:

1. That the section had no right to leave the Union and in doing so, instituted a “rebellion” against the legitimate government of the United States. Of course, this is nonsense. The constitutional legality of any state to leave the Union had been known, understood and accepted from the time of the ratification of that document. New England had exercised that right during the War of 1812 in the Hartford Convention at which time, those states voted to remain in the Union with the end of that war shortly after the Convention. But vote they did without threat of invasion from the federal government. As the disputes between the Sections became more intense as new territories and States were added to the original thirteen, efforts had been made to forbid secession in the Congress. Later, Justice John Marshall noted that efforts to circumscribe and/or end any power, clearly testified to the existence of that power; in other words, there is no need to prevent or end that which does not exist!
2. Many of the causes that brought the Cotton States to the point of secession were economic in nature as is the case in almost all wars. But in the end, these proved not to be the true cause of the breakup of the Union, a point that will be addressed later. As for the economic matters, more use was made of the emotional issue of black slavery – though that institution remained in the North! – than the infinitely more important matter of the need by the rest of the “Union” for the money arising from the production of the commodities of cotton, tobacco, resin and sugar from the States of the South, an income that accounted for between 70 and 80% of the federal revenues. The contemplation of not only the loss of those revenues, but the further loss that would accompany a new nation’s presence on the North American continent – a nation with a 15% tariff compared to the 45% tariff about to be imposed by the ”United States” – was sufficient to assure that the much larger “nation” would not willingly permit the States of the South to form any new However, as the morality of the South as an unwilling economic colony for the rest of the country was distinctly in favor of the people of the South, the need to use slavery as a moral indictment of that section became paramount to the point at which its use continues through today and for the same purpose. Of course, in the Grand Bargain, none of these matters were permitted to influence the narrative surrounding what came to be falsely identified as “The Rebellion.”
3. But most important of all was the requirement that the people of the South overlook the type of war waged by the North against them and the military occupation that continued long after that war was over! This was the matter that resulted in the most serious of the deliberate fictions contained in the Grand Bargain. For the war waged by the Federal Union against the South was unique to Western Civilization. Codes or rules of war had been taught in West Point for years before 1861 and these all included a proscription against war on non-combatants; that is, war waged with rules preventing outrages against the innocent victims of such conflicts. Lincoln replaced these codes with his own “code,” the so-called Lieber Code or General Order 100. This code included much of what had been proscribed by the other codes, but it also included a caveat in which “military necessity” permitted atrocities that had heretofore been banned among the armies of the Christian West. Lieber’s Code had in its 157 articles, exceptions frequently nullifying the very rules it promulgated. Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon denounced its duplicity, stating that “ . . . a commander under this code may pursue a line of conduct in accordance with principles of justice, faith, and honor, or he may justify conduct correspondent with the barbarous hordes who overran the Roman Empire . . . ” and for all of its pretense of defining civilized conflict, the code openly endorsed the concept of “hard war.” According to Lieber, war is defined as a struggle not limited to armies and navies. In Article 21, Lieber states: “The citizen … of a hostile country is thus an enemy . . . and as such is subjected to the hardships of war.” And in Article 29, he further states, “The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity.” One has to wonder how Lieber defined both “better” and “humanity.” Finally, the code concludes, “The ultimate object of all modern war is a renewed state of peace.” Unfortunately, the “state” of Lieber’s “peace” was often the grave and not just for the combatants.

Much of this evil was either severely under reported or excused with the claim that the South had started the war by firing on the federal facility at Fort Sumter. However, Sumter was not being manned by the troops of the federal government at the time and there is a considerable claim that the fort had reverted to South Carolina because of a failure by Washington to keep to the tenets of the lease! Only Fort Moultrie, a land-locked base used to collect tariffs, belonged to Washington. Sumter had been invaded and invested by Major Anderson and his troops on Christmas Eve, 1860 in violation of an agreement between then President Buchanan and the State of South Carolina. So even the excuse for the conflict was a lie and known to be such from the beginning. This was soon revealed to have been a plan by the newly elected Lincoln administration to provide an excuse for preventing the formation of the Confederate States of America. Letters by Lincoln to others involved in the strategy make the matter beyond any claim to the contrary.

The horrors committed by federal forces including the intentional murder of Confederate prisoners of war must be considered the greatest of the evils of the war that were silenced by The Grand Bargain. The proof of this ongoing and intentional desecration of what were considered “Christian” standards of behavior were well known at the time. In fact, even during the war, famous federal soldiers openly spoke out on the matter. Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the famous black regiment honored in the film Glory, was commanded by a superior officer to burn Darien, Georgia. Shaw later wrote to his wife: “ . . . for myself, I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and robber—and the same applies to every officer in my regiment.” Union hero, Joshua Chamberlain, wrote to his sister on December 14th, 1864, after having burned the homes of women and children near Petersburg, Virginia at Grant’s order: “I am willing to fight men in arms, but not babes in arms.” Union General Don Carlos Buell actually resigned in protest, writing: “I believe that the policy and means with which the war was being prosecuted were discreditable to the nation and a stain on civilization.” Even Northern newspapers commented upon such atrocities. One New York paper, referring to Sherman’s “capture” and deportation of 400 young women with their children from Rosewell, Georgia cried:

“…it is hardly conceivable that an officer bearing a United States commission of Major General should have so far forgotten the commonest dictates of decency and humanity . . . as to drive four hundred penniless girls hundreds of miles away from their homes and friends to seek their livelihood amid strange and hostile people. We repeat our earnest hope that further information may redeem the name of General Sherman and our own from this frightful disgrace.” (Parenthetically, it did not.)

Many of the women reported by the newspaper were raped by their soldier captors during their journey to Marietta after which they and their children were imprisoned, starved, mistreated and then sent North without subsistence. Many were “hired out” as servants to Northern citizens by their captors which doubtless amused those who saw the matter as retribution for black slavery. Of course, these women never owned slaves. Not one of these poor unfortunates ever returned home after the war, a matter that the Grand Bargain chose to ignore.

Then there are the crimes committed against Southern prisoners of war. In 1903, Adj. Gen. F. C. Ainsworth estimated that more than 30,000 Union and 26,000 Confederates died in captivity (that is 12% died in the North and 15.5% died in the South). However, the numbers and the death rate of Confederate prisoners were vastly understated first, because many captives died without their deaths being recorded and secondly, the winners did not wish to admit to the hideous rate with which those at their mercy perished. Indeed, Rhodes admitted that there should have been a much greater disparity — even using his own numbers — in favor of survival for those imprisoned in the North, given the superior conditions existing that included physicians, hospitals, medicines, food, supplies and housing. But the simple fact is this: from the beginning of the War, the federal government intended to “make treason odious” by punishing captured Confederate soldiers as traitors and rebels rather than legitimate prisoners of war.

Even the usually chivalrous George McClellan forced Confederate prisoners to clear mine fields after some of his men were killed despite the fact that such usage of prisoners was expressly forbidden by the Lieber Code in paragraph 75. Sherman added his own perverse twist to this practice when he used civilians as well as prisoners for this purpose. Prisoners were routinely tortured, mutilated and killed in, among other places, Jackson, Tennessee and several members of the town’s clergy were arrested and threatened with like treatment until General Nathan Bedford Forrest promised to execute five federal officers in retaliation; knowing that Forrest would be as good as his word, the ministers were released. Isn’t it odd how Forrest has come down to us as a monster and a villain?

Confederate officers were used as human shields in the famous instance of the Immortal 600 and the morality rate from torture, starvation, exposure and disease in Federal prison camps is astonishing to all who have studied the matter. Elmira prison in New York had a 24% death rate, higher than any other prison on either side including the infamous Andersonville. Col. Robert Ould, who had been in charge of exchanges since the beginning of the war, wrote about the situation in Andersonville to his Union counterpart Gen. Mulford. Ould recites the efforts made by the Confederate government to succor the federal prisoners even after prisoner exchange had ended:

“My government instructs me to waive all formalities and what it considers some of the equities in this matter of exchange. I need not try to conceal from you that we cannot feed and provide for the prisoners in our hands. We cannot half feed or clothe them. You have closed our ports till we cannot get medical stores for them. You will not send us quinine and other needed medicines, even for their exclusive use. They are suffering greatly and the mortality is excessive. I tell you all this plainly, and still you refuse to exchange. What does your government demand? Name your own conditions and I will show you my authority to accept them. You are silent! Great God!, can it be that your people are monsters? If you will not exchange, I will give you your men for nothing. I will deliver ten thousand Union prisoners at Wilmington any day that you will receive them. I will deliver five thousand here on the same terms. Come and get them. If your government is so damnably dishonest to want them for nothing, you shall have them. You can at least feed them and we cannot. You can give us what you please in return for them.”

Was there a war crime at Andersonville? Yes! Upon the cessation of exchange, the Confederate government asked for medicine for the exclusive use of the imprisoned federal soldiers and were ignored! The anguish, frustration and bitterness of Ould are voiced in the sentence: “Great God! can it be that your people are monsters?!” The answer to that was, “yes!” Their own men were considered expendable in this campaign of genocide. Edward Wellington Boate was a soldier in the 42nd New York Infantry and a prisoner at Andersonville in 1864. He wrote of his experiences in the New York Times shortly after the war and commented on whom he held responsible for Andersonville’s legacy:

“You rulers who make the charge that the rebels intentionally killed off our men, when I can honestly swear they were doing everything in their power to sustain us, do not lay this flattering unction to your souls. You abandoned your brave men in the hour of their cruelest need. They fought for the Union and you reached no hand out to save the old faithful, loyal and devoted servants of the country. You may try to shift the blame from your own shoulders, but posterity will saddle the responsibility where it justly belongs.”

When the worst of the Andersonville prisoners were returned to the North without exchange, these poor animated skeletons were taken, photographed and used to generate hatred in the North for the evil, wicked, brutal people of the South. Shortly after the photographs were released, the United States Senate passed the following:

PREAMBLE TO HOUSE RESOLUTION #97 Also known as the Retaliatory Orders

“Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in the death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather.” . . . passed by both houses, January 1865.

Of course, this very policy had been ongoing in most of the federal prisoner of war camps since the beginning of the war. The Andersonville photographs merely gave an excuse for a policy of long standing. And so it goes with virtually every “argument” used to validate the actions by the “Union” government against the States and people of the South. Furthermore, none of these matters – even when they were presented! – addressed the unlawful and unconstitutional mistreatment of the South that had been ongoing for many long years before the first shot was ever fired.

But the villainies committed by the federal armies were known well after the war itself both during the time of the Grand Bargain and afterwards as we can see here:

This excerpt from the German-language magazine “Signal” from WW2 illustrates a concern that American “Yankee” troops in Europe might imitate the habits of the legendary war criminal Sherman. It is ironic though that the German Midwesterners of Sherman’s locusts were reportedly responsible for the worst of his pacification techniques. Nonetheless, Europeans viewed Sherman and his war crimes with horror though Spain sent General Valeriano Weyler to Cuba in 1896 to brutally subdue the native freedom fighters – Weyler as a young officer had been military attache’ at the US Spanish legation during the War Between the States and served as an observer during Sherman’s march through Georgia, absorbing his tactics and the bummers daily routines. He knew quite well how to apply the same “war is hell” antidote to the Cuban independence movement. Sherman’s own communications with General Grant were both well known and well proliferated: “Our method of warfare is different from that in Europe. We are not fighting against enemy armies but against an enemy people; both young and old, rich and poor must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as the organized armies. In this respect my march through Georgia was a wonderful success.” 

General Sherman to General Grant, End of January, 1865.

And as for Sherman himself, a 45-year old man from Ohio, the son of a lawyer of Puritan descent, he had reinstituted a very old type of warfare directed against the civilian population as had been waged by the Mongols and the Vikings and the Vandals who had slaughtered their way across the world before the rising of Western Civilization with its Christian foundations. Indeed, in the person of Sherman can be seen the spectre of wickedness that eventually embraced not only that general and his armies, but his very cause, a spectre that is coming to full fruition in these perhaps last days of the nation he sought to succor. In the Civil War Sherman practiced “locust strategy.” His doctrine was: Where I have been the war has ceased because all forms of life no longer exist. It is a strategy involving the murder of innocents and the suppression of humane welfare. The cruelties of the Marquis de Sade and the atrocities perpetrated by Jack the Ripper have never led to such mass “strategies.” Sherman’s strategy however, has been acclaimed as classical. After carrying out his acts of cruelty as a general, Sherman was appointed commander in chief of the Army of the United States of America and his method has become the ideal. It first infected the Anglo-Saxon world; the great von Moltke ominously predicted at the end of the century that in future wars armies would not fight against one another but peoples.

But Sherman’s strategy is the art of war employed by the unsuccessful. And it is necessary to bear this in mind when considering Sherman’s methods. He was unsuccessful in any type of acceptable war of the day but he was by no means untalented. It was his fate always to fight against enemies better than himself. He never won a success against an enemy of equal strength but when he began his mission of civilian destruction, he became wildly successful. Of course, his fight was in what became known as the War of Secession, “secession” being the term the ancient Romans used to call any effort to achieve independence. Superficially, the war was being fought on the question of the abolition of slavery but temperament and religious fanaticism converted it into one of the bloodiest massacres in history. In his book “Der Krieg ohne Gnade” (War Without Quarter), the Swiss historian Bircher says that force of arms alone could not decide that war. It was not until Sherman employed his locust strategy that the Northern States won the victory.

Of course, such strategic military “success” does not end with one war and Sherman, as general-in-chief of the army, had much to do with post-war campaigns against the American Indians. Sherman wrote in 1866, “It is one of those irreconcilable conflicts that will end only in one way, one or the other must be exterminated . . .” And again, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination of men, women and children.” With perfect moral appropriateness, Sherman became Sheridan’s superior, and his biographer Michael Fellman wrote: “Although Sherman had not ordered an extermination campaign in so many words, he had given Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men (that) Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages.  However many they killed, Sherman would cover the political and media front.  They were freed to do anything. At the same time, Sherman maintained personal deniability – he could assert in any public forum that he had not ordered any atrocities that might occur.”

Prof. Harry Stout of Yale University Divinity School recently acknowledged, “Sherman’s religion was America, and America’s God was a jealous God of law and order, such as all those who resisted were reprobates who deserved death.” This can be seen in his following statement:

“To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. Satan and the rebellious saints of Heaven were allowed a continuous existence in hell merely to swell their punishment. To such as would rebel against a Government so mild and just as ours was in peace, a punishment equal would not be unjustified.”

Below are the first two paragraphs of a letter written by Gen. Sherman to Major Sawyer dated January 31, 1864, in which Sherman writes from Vicksburg to the AAG Army of the Tenn., Huntsville, Alabama. Major Sawyer was with Sherman until the close of the war, by which time he had achieved the rank of Colonel. Now, we must remember that all of General Sherman’s “opinions” and the acts that resulted from them were well known before the Grand Bargain and never refuted or rejected by the Government of the United States! To accept the Grand Bargain is to accept General William Sherman, warts and all:

Dear Sawyer,

In my former letters I have answered all your questions save one, and that relates to the treatment of inhabitants known or suspected to be hostile or “Secesh.” This is in truth the most difficult business of our Army as it advances & occupies the Southern Country. It is almost impossible to lay down Rules and I invariably leave this whole subject to the local commander, but am willing to give them the benefit of my acquired Knowledge and experience.

In Europe whence we derive our principles of war Wars are between Kings or Rulers through hired Armies and not between Peoples. These remain as it were neutral and sell their produce to whatever Army is in possession. Napoleon when at War with Prussia, Austria and Russia bought forage & provisions of the Inhabitants and consequently had an interest to protect the farms and factories which ministered to his wants. In lake manner the Allied Armies in France could buy of the French Habitants, whatever they needed, the produce of the soil or manufactures of the Country. Therefore the General Rule was & is that War is confined to the Armies engaged, and should not visit the houses of families or private interests. But in other examples a different Rule obtained the Sanction of Historical Authority. I will only instance one when in the reign of William and Mary the English Army occupied Ireland then in a state of revolt. The inhabitants were actually driven into foreign lands and were dispossessed of their property and a new population introduced. To this day a large part of the North of Ireland is held by the descendants of the Scotch emigrants sent thereby by Williams order & an Act of Parliament.

The War which now prevails in our land is essentially a war of Races. The Southern People entered into a clear Compact of Government with us of the North, but still maintained through State organizations a species of separate existence with separate interests, history and prejudices. These latter became stronger and stronger till at last they have led to war, and have developed the fruits of the bitterest kind. We of the North are beyond all question right in our cause but we are not bound to ignore the fact that the people of the South have prejudices which form a part of their nature, and which they cannon throw off without an effort of reason, or by the slower process of natural change. The question then arises Should we treat as absolute enemies all in the South who differ from us in opinion or prejudice, kill or banish them, or should we give them time to think and gradually change their conduct, so as to conform to the new order of things which is slowly & gradually creeping into their country?**

“The Government of the United States has in North Alabama any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war – to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their everything, because they cannot deny that war does exist there, and war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact.*” (*Or, it would seem Christian decency and civilized behavior.)

Writing to his wife in 1862, Sherman said, “We are in our enemy’s country, and I act  accordingly . . . the war will soon  assume a turn to extermination not of  soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people.”

And now let us look at the real motive for the so-called Civil War. It certainly wasn’t slavery for the North offered the original 13^th (Corwin) Amendment that placed that institution into the Constitution in perpetuity. If slavery had been the problem, the Cotton States could easily have returned with the knowledge that their “peculiar institution” had eternal protection within that document. Even the tariffs were a symptom of the disease but not the disease itself! In fact, this is the most difficult part of this treatise to write because it clearly supposes two things: first, our efforts to save what remains of our Confederate heritage is not just bloody impossible, but intrinsically wrong! That is, that any effort to save the Arlington monument or any other remaining work glorifying truly heroic men and women from America’s past becomes an acceptance of the reconciliation created by The Grand Bargain and is therefore unworthy of our efforts because it is founded on the lies heretofore revealed.

On the other hand, given the situation as it presently exists – a situation that is only going to get worse! – it is not possible that these efforts can or will be crowned with success. Indeed, the present situation is merely the final result of what Sherman wrote about years earlier, that is ,“**the new order of things which is slowly & gradually creeping into their country. . .” as what little is left today of what is good and decent is clearly doomed in a world under the power of its acknowledged Prince, Lucifer. For the “civil war” was first and foremost a religious war. All of the other matters whether slavery or tariffs or sectional disputes and hatreds arose from two very different understandings not only of government, but of God Himself; that is, the “ultimate cause” of the war was two mutually exclusive understandings of human government. The South embraced the view of Aristotle and Locke: that is, that government was a natural outgrowth of communal man’s inter-relationship and that being the case, was at its most efficient and least threatening when limited and local. This nation was more or less founded on that principle albeit, there were its detractors.

The other view of government embraced by such men as Hamilton, Franklin and Adams and most of New England, was that of Thomas Hobbes. Unlike Aristotle and Locke who believed that man was communal and that government was a natural part of his being, Hobbes believed that man was basically a solitary, a creature without ties to any of his kind and that therefore government was imposed upon him rather than being a natural outcome of communal development. Hobbes also believed that man was incapable of self-government and without government imposing the “common good,” the result would be anarchy. This worldview mitigates against limited government because government has to be powerful enough to keep this mass of self-interested and amoral individuals in their place and directed (that is, forced) to do what was good for “the masses.” Of course, what was good for the masses was also what was good for the government. Hobbes and his followers believed that because civilization was only possible through government coercion, therefore “bigger was better” and that there could be no limits to the power of government imposed by it upon those whom it ruled. Lincoln was a Hobbesian. He fought for “the Union” as a hedge against anarchy, something he greatly feared. Indeed, the entire concept of an “indivisible union” is of Hobbes, not Aristotle and Locke for they believed that when a people’s culture became too diverse, the natural progression was for them to break apart and establish governments suited to each culture. This “dissolution” or “secession” when one or more cultural groups removed themselves from an existing union, did not usually end in war. War became the reality when the natural secession that should have occurred was unnaturally thwarted.

But there was even more with regard to these two mutually exclusive mindsets as was reported by author Murray Rothbard in his essay “Just War:”

“The North’s driving force, the ‘Yankees’—that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois—had been swept by . . . a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent ‘postmillennialism’ which held that as a precondition of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year-Kingdom of God on Earth. The Kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin . . . . If you didn’t stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved. This is why the Northern war against slavery partook of a fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle. They were ‘humanitarians with the guillotine, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.’”

By the middle of the 19th Century, Yankee philosophy had swept through most of the rest of the country with the exception of the South. Thus, as the majority of the States were rushing towards an American future defined by the values of New England, they found themselves continually stymied and frustrated by a people whom they considered profligate, sinful and slothful, that is, Southerners. Every issue that arose within the country found itself determined on the basis of two incompatible religious worldviews. The crux of the matter was eloquently summed up in a sermon of Pastor B. M. Palmer one week before his State (Louisiana) seceded from the Union:

“Last of all . . . we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit . . . erected its throne upon the guillotine in the days of Robespierre . . . Among a people so . . . religious as the American, a disguise must be worn . . . the . . . old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights . . . To the South the high position is assigned of defending . . . the cause of all religion and of all truth. . . We are resisting the power which wars against . . . the family, the State and the Church; . . . and rebukes the Most High for the errors of his administration; . . . if it cannot snatch the reign of empire from His grasp, will lay the universe in ruins at His feet.”

The atrocities committed against the People of the South, military and civilian, men and women, white and black, slave and free, young and old, well and ill, sound and wounded were on such a vast scale that they cannot be comprehended. There are books on the subject such as Dr. Brian Cisco’s War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, but there are also writings that strongly maintain that, in effect, the South had it coming. Given that the people of the South only wished to leave the Union without violence and not, as has been claimed, destroy the government of the United States! – and that the institution of slavery was not unique to the region, neither was the South involved in the slave trade — that was a Yankee enterprise — it would seem that such horrific treatment of a people whom Lincoln declared to be Americans, citizens of his sacred Union is inexplicable. But holy wars are vicious. The enemy is not a man or a woman or a child or a neighbor or a brother—but an apostate, a blasphemer, an infidel—and as such, is worthy of no less than death—and even annihilation! That is why Lincoln, his government and his military waged bloody jihad from April of 1861 to April of 1865. Had the war gone on longer, the people of the South might well have been reduced to the conditions of the Cheyenne, the Apache and the Lakota Sioux. Certainly, Generals Sherman and Sheridan and their leader Abraham Lincoln would have shed no tears for their plight for when the problems within a nation are based upon two completely incompatible views of God and Man and Man’s interaction with God, there can be no basis for compromise. One side must prevail and the victory of the North in the Civil War is only now coming into full fruition in our current society.

Finally, as noted, today we are coming to a slow conclusion to the war memorialized in the monuments we have been trying to preserve and defend despite the relatively short lull occasioned by the well-meaning but intellectual and spiritual deceptions of the Grand Bargain. As he did in the conflict that lasted from 1861 to 1865, the Lord of this World has prevailed. Christianity and Western civilization and the race that took man from the cave to the stars are under attack and marked for extinction. Even mankind’s dabbling in paganism, begun in the 1970s with the relatively benign nonsense of the New Age Movement has now been transformed into open satanic worship throughout the cultures of the world. This horrific path was foreshadowed by author Keven Swanson in his book, Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. What began long before the Civil War – probably long before the events that led to the founding of this country! – that is, the events written about by Swanson, were already well along toward their eventual end:

Man turns within himself, seeking to fill the “God-shaped” vacuum. However he is always disappointed with the results. In the end, he is more hopeless and suicidal than the pagan who still seeks some kind of god outside of himself. Thus pure, undiluted humanism cannot last for long. Either societies must awaken to the true faith or sink into the chaos of paganism. After five or six generations of apostasy, humanist societies turn to deconstructed language, pluralism, relativism, polytheism, and competing truth systems.

And thus today we find ourselves in a culture that embraces every evil and wages war against every good. Those who want only to “preserve” the past – or rather, the “good” of the past may be able to do so for a short time but even so, they will only prevail during that time by accepting the lies and deceptions of the Grand Bargain that permitted the very things we are now trying to save! Do we honor men like Lee and Davis and Jackson and Forrest by accepting falsehood as a means of keeping monuments of marble and bronze when what is actually worth saving are the characters and morals of those heroes? Perhaps we should pay attention to the words of one of those great men, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a great soldier, a great man and a great Christian when he spoke about the war in which he found himself:

“Colonel Stuart, if I had my way we would show no quarter to the enemy. No more than the redskins showed your troopers. The black flag, sir. If the North triumphs, it is not alone the destruction of our property. It is the prelude to anarchy, infidelity . . . the loss of free and responsible government. It is the triumph of commerce. The banks, factories. . . We should meet the invader on the verge of just defense . . . and raise the black flag. No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides. Our political leadership is too timid to face the reality of this coming war. They should look to the Bible. It is full of such wars. Only the black flag will bring the North to its senses and rapidly end the war.”

General Jackson was absolutely correct. I don’t know if his instructions had been followed if the War of Secession could have been won but certainly we would never have attempted to revive “fraternal relations” with the enemies not just of the South, but of both God and Man. Indeed, we have learned in this, the third decade of the 21^st century that you cannot “reconcile” the forces of good with the forces of evil. We know that God wins in the end, but it is up to us to continue that “war” until He comes with the final victory. Trying to achieve “reconciliation” in order to save monuments is to make of those monuments, memorials to a lie.

Valerie Protopapas

Valerie Protopapas is an independent historian and the former editor of The Southern Cavalry Review, the journal of The Stuart-Mosby Historical Society.

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