June 29, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
A Neo-Reconstructionist Attack on The
Land We Love – Professor Donald Livingston Responds
Friends,
My book, The Land We
Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018) was reviewed in Chronicles Magazine by Professor Donald
Livingston back in its May 2019 issue. In that same issue Chilton Williamson,
the magazine’s editor, also spoke highly of the volume. I included a copy of
Professor Livingston’s review in the May
2 MY CORNER which also memorialized the tragically deceased Aaron Wolf who
had been managing editor of the magazine.
Fast forward to the July 2019 issue of Chronicles, and there is a letter from one Mr. Keith Burtner, of
Dallas, Texas, attacking the book as “yet another attempt to defend ‘Lost Cause’
ideology,” and asserting that the ancestors of Southerners “were morally obtuse
and on the wrong side of history.” The author of the letter goes on: “According
to the book’s author, Boyd Cathey, the real reason the South seceded had little
to do with slavery and everything to do with resisting the revolutionary,
sectional Republicans whose ‘goal was to consolidate the states into a
centralized regime of crony capitalism ruled by the emerging New York-Chicago
industrial axis’.”
Actually, he is quoting reviewer Donald Livingston here,
not me, but I fully endorse Professor Livingston’s comments.
From the tenor of his letter it appears that Mr. Burtner
may well be a Yankee transplant—what we used to call a “carpetbagger,” those avaricious
folks who come South to take advantage of our natural resources, business
opportunities, ample labor supply, better climate, and low taxes…but without
any desire or intention to appreciate or understand the heritage of our region.
Or, he could be what we term a “scalawag,” a native-born Southerner who has
turned his back on his traditions and his region for a variety of reasons
(status, lucre, bad education, bad raisin’, and so on). To read his letter he
appears to have swallowed the currently fashionable narrative shared not just by
the leftist social justice fanatics, but also maintained by the dominant “conservative
movement” Neoconservatives: folks like Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry
(editor of National Review), Victor
Hanson Davis, Dinesh D’Souza, and Brian Kilmeade (on Fox).
Professor Livingston penned a superb response to Burtner,
and that response accompanied his letter in the July 2019 issue of Chronicles.
I pass on both the letter and the response to it, and,
additionally, once again, I copy Professor Livingston’s original review…with a
recommendation that you subscribe to Chronicles
which is the oldest traditionalist conservative journal around, with some of
the finest writers and sharpest and most thoughtful commentary.
A
Memorable Secession JULY 2019 issue
JUNE 14, 2019
I haven’t read The Land We Love: The South and Its
Heritage, and judging by Donald Livingston’s review (May 2019 issue) I probably won’t. Why? Because it
sounds like yet another attempt to defend “Lost Cause” ideology. According to
the book’s author, Boyd Cathey, the real reason the South seceded had little to
do with slavery and everything to do with resisting the revolutionary,
sectional Republicans whose “goal was to consolidate the states into a
centralized regime of crony capitalism ruled by the emerging New York-Chicago
industrial axis.” The Secessionists were the true Americans who “took the
Founders’ Constitution with them, word for word, except for a few reforms…”
Reforms such as this gem in Article IV: “…the institution of negro slavery as
it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by
Congress…”
The reason many Southerners have
stopped defending Confederate monuments is not because they’ve lost their traditional
virtues as Livingston suggests, but because with the benefit of 150 years of
hindsight they realize their ancestors were morally obtuse and on the wrong
side of history. One doesn’t have to be a Cultural Marxist to believe
that while the Civil War and the Jim Crow era are a part of our heritage that
needs to be remembered, it should no longer be glorified.
—Keith Burtner
Dallas, Texas
Dallas, Texas
Prof. Livingston Replies:
Mr. Burtner says the Confederate
“ancestors” of Southerners were “morally obtuse and on the wrong side of
history.” But were they? First, slavery was a national enormity, not merely a
Southern thing. For over two centuries the wealth of the Northeast had come
from servicing the export of slave-produced staples. And New England’s brutal
slave trade lasted 170 years. Estimates are that Yankees got around 40 cents on
every dollar earned by the planters.
The morally right thing would
have been a nationally funded program of compensated emancipation (as the
British had done in 1833) and integration of the African population into
American society. But Northerners were not interested in doing their part to
abolish slavery. They were especially opposed to free blacks entering their
states or the Western territories. “What I would most desire,” Lincoln said,
“would be the separation of the white and black races.”
And he meant it. The Illinois
Constitution with his approval prohibited free blacks from entering the state
and denied basic civil rights to those within it. H. Ford Douglas, a free black
in Illinois, said that if he dared send his children to a public school,
“Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and
antislavery!”
So long as slaves were confined
to the South, Lincoln said “the institution might be let alone for a hundred
years.” He said he opposed slavery in the West because that would save the
region from “the troublesome presence of free negroes” in the future. Ohio and
Indiana passed legislation to gradually send all free blacks out of their
states by sending them as colonists to the Western territories or Africa. This
disposition prevailed throughout the North.
James Shepherd Pike, an
abolitionist correspondent for the New
York Tribune, wrote in the February 1861 Atlantic Monthly:
We say the Free States should say,
confine the Negro to the smallest possible area. Hem him in. Coop him up.
Slough him off. Preserve just so much of North America as is possible for the
white man. . . .
Likewise, the
Republican-controlled House Committee on Emancipation Policy said in its 1862
report, “the highest interests of the white race, whether Anglo-Saxon, Celt, or
Scandinavian, requires that the whole country should be held and occupied by
those races alone.” Many believed that, once freed, blacks could not compete
and would gradually leave or die out. Ralph Waldo Emerson cheerfully predicted,
“It will happen by & by that the black man will only be destined for
museums like the Dodo.”
The South did not secede to
protect slavery from a morally responsible proposal to abolish it, because no
such proposal was ever put forth. Lincoln said repeatedly that the point of the
War was merely to prevent secession. He lived in an age when centralization and
empire building were viewed as instruments of human progress. He estimated that
by 1930 America would have a population capable of competing with the great
empires of Europe. But that would not happen if there was a negotiated
separation.
There was much that was “morally
obtuse”—to use Mr. Burtner’s phrase—in the North’s refusal to acknowledge its
moral responsibility for originating, servicing, and profiting from slavery.
Also in Lincoln’s refusal to negotiate a separation from what was clearly, for
both sides, a suffocating and dysfunctional Union.
As to the right side of history,
I observe that a Zogby poll last year found that 39 percent of Americans favor
secession for their state, and 29 percent are not sure. That means 68 percent
are willing to entertain the concept of secession. Lincoln’s war to prevent a
negotiated separation cost a million lives, or the equivalent of 10 million if
adjusted for today’s population size. The Union was not “indivisible” in 1860,
nor was the Soviet Union in 1991, nor was the EU in 2016—and neither is the
United States today.
Faithful Son MAY 2019 ISSUE
APRIL 04, 2019
Boyd
Cathey is an 11th generation Carolina
Tar Heel who was mentored by and worked with Russell Kirk. The Land We Love: The South and Its
Heritage is written reverentially, just as one might reflect
on the memory of one’s mother. For the South is not just any region of
the United States, like the Midwest, the Southwest, or even New England.
From 1776 to 1860 the South was at the core of American identity. In the
first 72 years under the Constitution, only five presidents were elected from
the North. None served two terms; whereas five Southern presidents served
two terms. All the territory beyond the original 13 states was acquired
by Southern presidents.
As of 1860, the South was America: Washington,
Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, the Louisiana Purchase, the
Alamo. But this Jeffersonian America was challenged with the formation of
the Republican Party in 1854. It was a revolutionary party and a
sectional party. Its goal was to consolidate the states into a
centralized regime of crony capitalism ruled by the emerging New York-Chicago
industrial axis. This aim stood in stark contrast to the America that
Southerners did so much to create and sustain. So, they seceded and took
the Founders’ constitution with them, word for word, except for a few reforms
to prevent crony capitalism and to strengthen state sovereignty.
Unlike other regions, the South was once an
independent country. It suffered defeat in one of the bloodiest wars of
the 19th century and endured the humiliation of military occupation and
plunder. Out of this Golgotha came a tragic view of human life and human
nature that immunized the best of the Southern people against the ideological
enthusiasms of the age.
In time North and South would be reunited,
and the War would be seen as a battle over a contested American identity that
existed among the Founders themselves. This gave the Confederacy an
honorable heritage. Southern heroes such as Lee became models for
emulation by all Americans. President Eisenhower kept a portrait of Lee
in the Oval Office throughout his two terms.
But that America is as gone with the wind
as the Old South itself.
Written from the aforementioned
perspective, this book is a collection of short essays that appeared in various
journals from the 1980’s into 2018, the period in which the Cultural Marxist
understanding of America came into its own. The chapters cover a great
variety of topics: Southern Founders; the attack on Confederate monuments;
Southern writers, religion, and character; secession movements; the South in
film; the Southern Poverty Law Center; the South and Christian civilization;
race relations; and the baneful character of ideology. The essays are
short, eloquently written, and—since they range over a variety of characters,
events, and topics—continually stimulating.
Readers of this book will come away with an
understanding of Southern virtues, but they will also wonder whether the
tradition that produced those virtues still exists. Have most Southerners
been transformed into a nomadic, Sunbelted mass of deracinated Americans
wearing Ray-Bans? It might seem so. In recent years, those leading
attacks on Southern monuments have been Southern mayors, city councils,
governors, and prominent leaders of Southern churches and denominations.
Today, two years after the tragic events of
Charlottesville, one is hard-pressed to find a state or federal political
leader willing to defend the Lee monument there, though it still stands by
court order. A South whose leadership cannot (or will not) say a good
word about Lee is in serious decline, if not already dead. Have
Southerners lost their immunity to ideology? Have they internalized the
Cultural Marxist mantra that America is structurally white supremacist, sexist,
and homophobic to the point that they are morally disarmed by the dreaded
charge of racism? The question applies not only to leaders but to
rank-and-file Southerners as well, who failed to assemble en masse to protest the
desecration and tearing down of their monuments.
Traditions do die, and usually with a
whimper. Boyd Cathey is aware of this, and running throughout this book
are reflections on the Christian virtue of hope as well as two essays that
encourage recovery: “The Vigil of the Nativity: Reflections on the Hope that
Came to Us Two Millennia Ago,” and a substantial final meditation, “Reflections
on the Future.”
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