June 14, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Defend those Historic
Forts Named for Confederate Generals!
And Give the Lie to
those “Conservatives” Who Defame Lee and the South!
Friends,
In recent days there has been loud chatter about changing the
names of ten American military forts which bear the names of famous Confederate
generals. You see, those men were obviously racists and represent historic and
systemic white oppression. They were, in short, “traitors” and “racists” who
took up arms to defend a slave society and destroy the noble American
“experiment” based on equality, and we can’t have any of that: purge it now! Interestingly
it was the far leftist New York Times that
first
urged this policy back on May 23. Breitbart ran a story about it on May
24, and now it’s become the standard template of Democrats and most
Republicans.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes further advocating the removal
the statues of prominent Americans in the national Capitol who represented
states where once slavery existed: "Monuments
to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end
are a grotesque affront to these ideals. Their statues pay homage to hate, not
heritage. They must be removed."
Such a position may be expected
from the speaker.
Over in the US Senate the Armed
Services Committee, which the Republicans control, those esteemed gentlemen by a
25 to 2 tally voted to include a stipulation in the National Defense
Authorization Act to strip the iconic names of such military installations as
Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, and Fort Benning, named for famous Confederate generals.
All but two Republicans supported the measure, setting up, as Reuters
news service states, a clash with President Donald Trump, who
opposes that change and promises a veto.
Among GOP members of that
committee are Southerners Tom Tillis of North Carolina, Roger Wicker of
Mississippi, Tom Cotton and Dan Sullivan of Arkansas, David Perdue of Georgia,
Rick Scott of Florida, and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, all of whom are
reputed “conservatives.” But we know that one of two nay voting Republicans was
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, which means almost all the GOP solons,
including those from Southern states turned tail and ran, preferring like
cowards to hide in the tall grass (rather than undergo most likely charges of
“racism”).
So-called “conservative”
pundits on Fox were no better. Victor Davis Hanson, who literally
foams at the mouth with hatred
at the very mention of the Confederacy, and General Jack Keane, both weighed in.
Keane attempted
to straddle both sides,
saying the he understood the storied history of Fort Bragg (where he had once
been commander), but eventually coming round to denounce Generals Bragg, Lee,
A. P. Hill, and others as “traitors” who “took up arms against their country,”
and thus “we should have a national discussion about name changing.” Even the
mostly clear-sighted Tucker Carlson took a swipe at the Confederacy and its
leaders as “treasonable” and “on the wrong side of history.” (One wonders if
Carlson felt impelled to declare such views, given the intense pressure he’s
been under this past week for his hardline views on the racial riots?)
What we have witnessed from our
(Neo) conservative elites, those self-appointed leaders in the conservative
media and those elected Republicans was nothing less than a display of gross
ignorance—at best, and craven surrender to the progressivist Marxist left—at
worse. Given the history and ideology of
the present dominant conservative establishment, such a course was perhaps to
be expected, even if it shocks and upsets those habitual viewers of Fox News
and Republican groupies who think that national salvation will be discovered
listening to Brian Kilmeade or voting for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as
he trashes the Confederacy and its leaders as racists.
There is a grassroots effort to contact the
White House and President Trump to let them know
you do not want our military bases’
names changed (and support the president’s opposition to proposed changes).
Here is the access link to make your voice known to the president on this
question:
And to counter
the manifested ignorance and ideological falsehoods, I reproduce portions of
two essays which I authored over the past few years answering the charges
against Lee and other Confederate leaders, and against the formation of the
Confederacy itself. Both of these essays appear in full in my book, The
Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, 2018).
Those same accusations were answered more fully by Albert Bledsoe 154 years ago in his study Is
Davis a traitor; or, Was secession a constitutional right previous to the war
of 1861?
First, here are excerpts from “Was
Lee a Traitor?” (June 18,
2018):
“Were Robert E. Lee and the Confederates
“traitors” who violated their oaths to the Constitution and attempted to
destroy the American nation? Or, were they defenders of that Constitution and
of Western Christian civilization?
“Over the past 158 years those questions
have been posed and answers offered countless times. For over a century since
Appomattox the majority opinion among writers and historians was that Lee and
the Confederate leadership were noble figures of a “lost cause,” but sincerely
mistaken about what they were fighting for. They were admirable and valorous,
even to be emulated, if in the end the “righteous cause” of “national unity”
was destined to triumph.
“In the “the road to re-union” that
followed the conclusion of the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were
permitted their heroes and, up to a point, their history. Southern historians
wrote and published accounts of “the repressible conflict” (Avery Craven), of a
war that might have been avoided if reason and a spirit of compromise had
triumphed (as opposed to belief in what William Seward had called “the
irrepressible conflict”).
“We were “all Americans now,” united
around one flag. Former Confederate generals like “Fighting Joe” Wheeler,
Fitzhugh Lee, Thomas L. Rosser, and Matthew Butler served as US Army generals
during the Spanish-American War. Virginian Woodrow Wilson was elected president
in 1912. Southerners in Congress exercised a significant role in the direction
of the nation, even if the options open to them were always subsumed under the
rubric of national unity and limited by the invisible parameters of that unity.
Hollywood collaborated throughout the silent period, and up through the 1950s
the South and the Confederacy were treated generally with cinematic respect, if
not sympathy.
“That post-war truce, that modus
vivendi that recognized the nobility, sincerity, and admirability of
those Confederates, even if their “cause” and secession were best interred with
the past, began to break down by the sixth decade of the 20th century. Actually, a kind of Neo-Reconstructionist
perspective had never completely been absent from the scene. Historians
like Black Communist, W. E. B. de Bois (Black Reconstruction in America,
1935), kept alive a narrative that insisted that the War was uniquely about
slavery and racism…and the oppression of black folk by a dominant white
political and economic power structure.
“With the full-fledged emergence of a
“New Left” school of historians in the 1960s and the incredible success of what
became cultural Marxism, the tacit post-War settlement all but disappeared.
“I remember my grad school time at the
University of Virginia in the 1970s: the old liberal narrative of reunion and
unity, an appreciation for the Confederacy and its leaders, was already under
attack. Slavery—and the increasing significance of racism, almost to the
exclusion of all other considerations—was becoming the prism by which to judge
all history, not just the Confederate odyssey and the brutal war of 1861-1865
and subsequent Reconstruction. The texts in my “Civil War and Reconstruction”
seminar included works by Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, as well as C. Vann
Woodward (The Strange History of Jim Crow), all pointing to the
direction in which we were headed. Even signs of contradiction—historical
demurrers like Time on the Cross (1974) by Robert Fogel and
Stanley Engerman—were eventually either dismissed, or, more generally, ignored.
“The “race and slavery” template has
become enshrined in our contemporary historiography about “the tragic years”
(to use Claude Bowers’ words). Marxist historian Eric Foner [the favorite
historian of Republican consultant Karl Rove and other establishment
Republicans!] with his multiple works on the epoch (e.g., Reconstruction:
America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 [1988], A House
Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln [1990], and The Fiery
Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery [2010]) is now counted
the major chronicler and interpreter of the period. His works are standard in
nearly every college history classroom. And his minions and ideological allies
now dominant academia and the historical profession, to the practical exclusion
of opposing views.
“But in fascinating ways, even Foner’s
perspective is too mild for many current writers and pundits. (Foner even
argued, after the August 2017 incident in Charlottesville, that Confederate
monuments should not be removed, but instead more statues should be
installed to offer a “corrective” viewpoint.) Strikingly, the most hysterical
and unbridled attacks on the Confederacy and, in particular, on Robert E. Lee
and Confederate monuments, seem to come from those who consciously proclaim
themselves to be “conservatives,” that is, those who are known as
“neoconservatives.”
“Basically, these “conservative” critics
[see Fox News almost any time of day] of the Confederacy and Lee declare:
“Robert E. Lee and other Confederate military leaders who were in the
US Army committed treason by violating their oaths to defend the Constitution,
and Confederate leaders led a rebellion against the legitimately elected
government of the United States.”
“This accusation has become an ultimate
weapon of choice—the “ultima ratio”—for many of today’s fierce
opponents of the various monuments [and military installations] that honor
Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, P. G. T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and
other Confederate military and political leaders, and for the belief that those
monuments should be taken down. And most especially, it is spewed forth as
unassailable gospel by many neoconservative writers, publicists, pundits, and
their less distinguished camp followers in the elites of the Republican Party.
“Somehow these critics forget to mention
that Lee and the other Confederate leaders resigned
their commissions in the United States Army and from Congress prior to
enlisting in the defense of their home states and in the ranks of the
Confederate Army, or assuming political positions in the new Confederate
government. They did not violate their oaths; their states had formally left
the union [Virginia when it joined the American nation on June 25, 1788, specifically retained the right to leave
that union for cause, which is precisely what it did on April 17, 1861],
and, thus, the claims of the Federal government in Washington had ceased to
have authority over them [and over Lee].
“Recently, we have witnessed the spectacle of
Rich Lowry,
editor of the neoconservative National Review, apparently
“channeling” Robert E. Lee and declaring that if Marse Robert were alive today
he would happily join in the chorus to bring down those monuments honoring
Confederate soldiers and leaders. Thus, according to Lowry, the great general
would be there demonstrating right beside the “Antifa” Marxists and Black Lives
Matter vandals.
“Even more obtuse views come from Mona Charen, a long time Neocon publicist and Never
Trumper, who fears that the GOP is “being taken over by Trumpists and
Neo-Confederates”!
“But it is from the mouths of such
“conservatives” as Andrew Bacevitch, Max Boot, and Victor Davis Hanson that the
worst venom emits. And, fascinatingly, it could just as well have come
from a member of the communist Workers’ World Party as from Bacevitch (who
writes for The American Conservative, but voted for Obama twice),
or from Boot (who was John McCain’s foreign policy advisor during McCain’s 2008
presidential campaign), or from Hanson (who is considered a respected
conservative icon).
“My complaint
about Lee—I admit this to my everlasting shame—was not that he was a
slaveholder who in joining the Confederacy fought to preserve slavery. It was
that he had thereby engineered the killing of many thousands of American
patriots who (whatever their views on slavery and race) wished simply to
preserve the Union. At the beginning of the Civil War, Lee famously remarked
that he could not bring himself to take up arms against his home state of
Virginia. This obliged him to take up arms against the very nation that as a
serving officer he had sworn to defend? No less than Benedict Arnold, Robert E.
Lee was a traitor. This became, and remains, my firm conviction.”
“…what is it
that we are supposed to be grateful to the Confederates for? For seceding from
the Union? For, in the case of former U.S. Army officers such as Lee and
Jackson, violating their oaths to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the
United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’? For triggering the
most bloody conflict in American history? For fighting to keep their fellow
citizens in bondage?”
“But it is from the rabidly
anti-Confederate, Victor Davis Hanson, in his fanatical defense of William
Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea,” that these passions are
summarized:
“…the attack on
[Southern] property and infrastructure [by the North] was permissible, [as] the
war was an ideological one against treason and slavery….
Terror, as a weapon to be employed in war by a democratic army, must be
proportional, ideological, and rational: proportional–Southerners, who fought
to preserve men as mere property, would have their property destroyed;
ideological–-those who would destroy property would do so as part of a larger
effort of abolition that was not merely strategic but ethical as well; and
rational–-burning and looting would not be random, nor killing gratuitous, but
rather ruin was to have a certain logic, as railways, public buildings, big
plantations, all the visible and often official infrastructure of a slave
society, would be torched….”
“Now, these individuals are
well-educated, with valuable university degrees, writers of some repute. But
their hatred-laced and furious animus for Lee and the Confederacy is flagrantly
ideological, an inheritance of their own undeniable genealogy and origins on
the zealously Trotskyite Marxist Left…a legacy that continues to characterize
and color their thinking and world view.
“It was Lee, Jackson, Davis, and others
like them and with them who stood foursquare for the original Constitution, for
the vision of the Framers, and, in effect, for the continuance of the
inheritance of Western and Christian civilization. Their defeat was an
incalculable blow to that inheritance.
“The latter-day neoconservative
historical narrative implicitly, if not explicitly, furthers the goals of an
historical Marxism that threatens to overwhelm and displace the culture and
traditions of the West with a vision that owes far more to Leon Trotsky than to
George Washington. In essence, the neocons collaborate in that dissolution.”
Secondly,
here are selections from my essay, “A New Reconstruction: The Renewed Assault on
Southern Heritage,” (November 19, 2015) published originally in Confederate Veteran magazine, included
also in The Land We Love:
“…the
charge has been made that Confederate symbols must be banned [and names of
forts changed] because they represent “treason against the Federal government.”
That is, those Southerners who took up arms in 1861 to defend their states,
their homes, and their families, were engaged in “rebellion” and were
“traitors” under Federal law.
“Again,
such arguments fail on all counts. Some writers have suggested that Robert E.
Lee, in particular, was a “traitor” because he violated his solemn military
oath to uphold and defend the Constitution by taking up arms against the Union.
But what those writers fail to note is that Lee had formally resigned from the
US Army and had relinquished his commission before
undertaking his new assignment to defend his home state of Virginia, which by
then had seceded and re-vindicated its original independence [which it retained the right to do per its
original act of joining the American nation].
“[And
what of] the right of secession and whether the actions of the Southern states,
December 1860-May 1861, could be justified under the US Constitution.
“One
of the better summaries of the prevalent Constitutional theory at that time has
been made by black scholar, professor, and prolific author Dr. Walter Williams.
Here is what he writes in one his columns:
“During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a
proposal was made that would allow the federal government to suppress a
seceding state. James Madison rejected it, saying, ‘A union of the states
containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The
use of force against a state would look more like a declaration of war than an
infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked
as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.’
In fact, the ratification documents of Virginia,
New York and Rhode Island explicitly said they held the right to resume
powers delegated should the federal government become abusive of those powers.
The Constitution never would have been ratified if states thought they could
not regain their sovereignty — in a word, secede.
On March 2, 1861, after seven states seceded and
two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Sen. James R. Doolittle of
Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that read, “No state or any part
thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted into the union, shall have
the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”
Several months earlier, Reps.
Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania and Otis S.
Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession.
Here’s a question for the reader: Would there have been any point to offering these amendments if
secession were already unconstitutional?” [emphasis added]
“An
examination of the ratification processes for Georgia, South Carolina, and
North Carolina in the late 1780s, reveal very similar discussions: it was the independent states themselves that had
created a Federal government (and not the reverse, as Abe Lincoln erroneously
suggested), and it was the various states that granted the Federal government
certain very limited and specifically enumerated powers, reserving the vast
remainder for themselves (see Professor Mel Bradford, Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the
United States Constitution. University of Georgia Press, 1993). As any number of the
Founders indicated, there simply would not have been any United States if the states, both north and south,
had believed that they could not leave it for just cause.
“During
the Antebellum period there was little political support for denying the right
of secession or for the Constitutional right to suppress it. Of the
pre-war presidents, it is true, Andrew Jackson threatened South Carolina in
1833 over Nullification of the “Tariff of Abominations,” but that crisis was resolved
through compromise. Even staunch anti-slavery unionist President John Quincy
Adams advocated secession over the annexation of Texas, and in his April 30,
1839, speech “The Jubilee of the Constitution,” commemorating the 50th
anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as the first American
president, he affirmed:
“…if the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert
it) when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from
each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or
collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, the bands of political
association will not long hold together the parties no longer attracted by the
magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies; and far better will
it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each
other, than to be held together by constraint.”
“In
his address to Congress in January of 1861, lame duck President James Buchanan,
while deploring secession, stated frankly that he had no right to prevent it:
“I certainly had no right to make aggressive war upon any State, and I am
perfectly satisfied that the Constitution has wisely withheld that power even
from Congress.” Former President John Tyler served in the Confederate Congress,
and former President Franklin Pierce, in his famous Concord, New Hampshire,
address, July 4, 1863, joined Buchanan in decrying the efforts to suppress the
secession of the Southern states:
“Do we not all know that the
cause of our casualties is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the
citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern
States, cooperating with the discontents of the people of those states? Do we
not know that the disregard of the Constitution, and of the security that it
affords to the rights of States and of individuals, has been the cause of the
calamity which our country is called to undergo?”
“More,
during the antebellum period William Rawle’s pro-secession text on
Constitutional law, A View of the Constitution of
the United States (1825,) was used at West
Point as the standard text on the US Constitution. And on several
occasions the Supreme Court, itself, affirmed this view. In The Bank of Augusta v. Earl (1839), the Court wrote in an 8-1 decision:
“The States…are distinct
separate sovereignties, except so far as they have parted with some of the
attributes of sovereignty by the Constitution. They continue to be nations,
with all their rights, and under all their national obligations, and with all
the rights of nations in every particular; except in the surrender by each to
the common purposes and object of the Union, under the Constitution. The rights
of each State, when not so yielded up, remain absolute.”
“A
review of the Northern press at the time of the Secession conventions finds,
perhaps surprisingly to those who wish to read back into the past their own
statist ideas, a similar view. As historian William Marvel explains in his
volume, Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishers, 2006, pp. 19-20), very few
Northern newspapers took the position that the Federal government had the
constitutional right to invade and suppress states that had decided to secede.
Many favored peaceful separation. Indeed, were it not the New England states in
1814-1815 who made the first serious effort at secession during the War of
1812, to the point that they gathered in Hartford to discuss actively pursuing
it? And during the pre-war period various states asserted in one form or
another similar rights.
“One
last comment regarding the accusation of “treason”: after the conclusion of the
War, the Southern states were put under military authority, their civil
governments dissolved, and each state had to be re-admitted to the Union.
But, logically, a state could not be “re-admitted” to the Union unless it had
been out of it. And if it were out of it, legally and constitutionally, as the
Southern states maintained (and some Northern writers acknowledged), then it
could not be in any way guilty of “treason.” [….]
*************
Please sign the petition…and help spread the truth. We shall,
apparently, get little or no help from the establishment Yankee Republicans from north
of the Mason-Dixon Line, nor from our cowardly southern Republican solons who
fear, it seems, being called a “racist” more than the extinction of our
heritage and culture. It’s up to us, then. Let the president hear our voices…and
come November let’s remember the Scalawags in our midst who plead for our votes
but in Washington don’t give a damn about our history and traditions.
