They Gulped the Blood and Gobbled the Flesh...

A post in the “Skewing Southern History Series”

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’d become strained doing too many things at once and finishing nothing, so last summer I took a hiatus from blogging. My historical research, however, has not suffered, only the dissemination of my findings, aside from comments and what I hope have been appropriate shares on Google Plus, Twitter, and to a lesser extent, Facebook. But as I’ve stated before, sometimes something crosses one’s path that cannot be left go. Such was a Pinterest prompt for my  “Confederacy” board on which I pin photos of Confederate soldiers, Southern memorials, and other such tidbits related to a short-lived sovereign nation to which I pay homage.

The prompt was a photo of an unidentified Confederate soldier in cavalry boots (which I would have naturally pinned). I clicked the photo and was taken to an All Things Interesting article published on 27 September 2017. The title of the article was “America’s Darkest Hour: 39 Haunting Photos of The Civil War.” Now I’m not real big on dead soldiers on the battle ground, even Yankee ones, which considering my loyalties might be considered a little more palatable...though certainly not much. All I wanted was the fella in cavalry boots. But one had to click to go somewhere else to see the photos, so I started reading the article instead. At the git-go, it appeared to be a bipartisan accounting of a terrible tragedy that happened a long time ago; in short, a quick overview to accompany the photos, an account one would write for a child or foreigner who’d just parachuted in here and knew nothing of our War Between the States [talk about fire bells clamoring in the night]. I’ve got a pretty good laywoman’s knowledge of events, so initially there was nothing in there I wasn’t aware of. Then, halfway through the article (it isn’t a long one) came something I was not familiar with. I quote:

“For four deadly years, the country endured not only its bloodiest and most vicious military conflict, but also some of its cruelest racial hatred. Adding to the already immense heap of skulls, Confederates used disease, starvation, exposure, and outright execution to kill hundreds of thousands of former slaves during the war, a figure not included in death toll estimates thanks to a deliberate lack of record keeping.”

Not “hundreds”, y’all, not even “thousands”, but hundreds of thousands. And exactly when did this “lack of evidence” proving the occurrence of genocide come to light? And speaking of creating fact from non-existent evidence, why didn’t the writer take the gruesome lie one step further and explain away the absence of hundreds of thousands of Negroid skulls? Allow me to demonstrate: “There’s no evidence of the holocaust dear gullible reader (the article’s readership) because the Confederates ate the murdered slaves.”

Ha, you see, I really can write compelling fiction! Yes siree, that’s the perfect sequel to this horror story being attributed to my Southern ancestors, and my embellishment makes so much sense. The Confederates were, after all, hungry. Shortages were rampant due to invasion and blockade, so they “gulped the blood and gobbled the flesh and greedily gorged on the lifeless corpse[s].”* And once they had eaten their fill, they boiled the fat for soap, then ground the skeletal mass into meal for bread and cake. That’s why today’s fine teams of modern investigative journalists, such as the writer of the dung defecated in the ATI article, can’t find where the bodies are buried.

Let’s break down the above paragraph further. Consider the line about “a deliberate lack of record keeping?” That alone should tell any reasonable reader how far the writer will go to insult his intelligence. Why, if one were to do such a thing, would the executioners make a record of it? It’s not as if the victims had property to account for; they were property. Maybe that explains it. The executioners were keeping the murders secret from the rightful owners who were off somewhere else fighting Yankees. Ya think? Duh. Consider, too, the time it would have taken away from the army’s defending against invaders. I wonder if the writer of the article has any idea how many Yankees were running around in the South between 1862-1865. Certainly enough to come across hundreds of thousands of murdered slaves. I wonder if he/she even knows Yankees invaded the South or where the war was fought? Besides, don’t you know [I’m being facetious here], few Southerners could read and write, so keeping a record would have been difficult.

But the underlying implications are more sinister than that. Note the use of the words “deliberate lack...” By referencing a perceived requirement for such a record, of which someone in a position of power would have made a conscious effort to forgo, the writer is implicating the Confederate government in a conspiracy to annihilate its Negro population. Where exactly is the writer of this article going with this?

Yes, well, I know, too.

Next, let’s look at the line “used disease, starvation, exposure, and outright execution....” That is blatant plagiarism of Southern charges of Federal excesses (national policy) against Southern civilians, black and white. That is precisely where the writer of the ATI article stole that line. Such policy is a component of total war and during the War Between the States was routinely carried out by Federal officers in command in the South as sanctioned by their civilian head, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and blessed by their sanctified leader Abraham Lincoln.

The charge against the Confederacy is, of course, false, and the proof (other than those yet-to-be-uncovered heaps up skulls) is evident by the simple fact that such horrendous deeds make no sense. There’s no record, not because of poor record keeping or pre-sanctioned omission, but because it didn’t happen. Why would Southerners who had, for two and a half centuries, lived intimately with the Negro: Slept with him, ate with him, nursed and been nursed by him, fought and died along side him for more than two centuries in our nation’s struggles leading up to the War Between the States suddenly start exterminating him?  I’m not talking about Negroes who fell behind enemy lines and ended up in the Federal army. They chose to take up arms as soldiers (or we could hope so, anyway) and were fair game like all soldiers taking up arms and invading the sovereign South.

The charge of premeditated extermination [and that’s what paragraph four of the ATI article is] is equally oxymoronic in light of the fallacious argument that the South seceded to preserve slavery..., then decided to exterminate its slaves? But wait! Maybe we’ve stumbled upon yet another point to ponder. Is the “all about slavery” narrative morphing into “it was all about removing the perceived inferior race from the United States?”

Sorry, folks, that exclusive “white-man’s-only nation” attitude was the battle cry of another group.

I’m not going to argue that the antebellum white Southerner wasn’t racist; he definitely was. But his racism was predominantly benevolent, and no matter how demeaning that benevolence, it falls well shy of atrocity. I say this, one, because Southerners are basically good people and, two, because that benevolence helped them justify the institution. It was the Northern attitude towards the Negro that was malevolent and that malevolence played out against the “contaminated” South and white Southerners, who had supposedly degenerated vis-à-vis their superior Northern counterparts after two hundred and fifty years of intimacy with the Negro race. In my opinion, and this is strictly my opinion, the greatest shame of the Southern Democrats and the modern Klan (not the original) is their self-aggrandizing embracing, then making truth of, a Yankee lie.

In light of the sordid tale of genocide masquerading as “fact” presented above, the rather slipshod description of Davis’ capture near the end of the article comes as no surprise.

I had never heard of All Things Interesting, but it has a substantial readership and is part of the online media, PBH Network. There are no by lines, attributions, or supporting references in the 27 September article. Whoever wrote the thing conducted only superficial research in slapping the piece together. They are unconcerned with the war, its causes, its repercussions, or the people involved. They are either convinced that all right-thinking Americans regard those who defended/still defend the Confederacy as either dead or to have seen the light and become “good” Americans, or they’re trying to convince the rest of us that’s the case. Extant defenders are nothing more than lunatics who support “proven” racist traitors and represent only a fringe of the Southern population.

Promulgation of such lies is what ATI counts on to grow its readership. That’s how propaganda works. The Left (assuming ATI isn’t financed by the Left) finds such ignorance a useful tool to achieve its agenda.  This is the legacy “neo-conservatives”, many in leadership positions across the South, have left us. A large number of Americans don’t know where this nation, or they themselves, came from. They look at America’s ante-bellum past as they do that of the Roman Republic: It was long ago, and there’s no one invested in it any longer. They feel right in saying and/or accepting whatever nonsense they “think they know,” packaging it as truth, and shouting it to the world if it furthers their agenda. These born-yesterday Americans derive from two different sources, new arrivals and the much more egregious multi-generationals who find validation in detaching themselves from ancestors who sacrificed their immortal souls, according to their progeny’s self-righteous interpretation of right and wrong, to give them what they have today. We in the South have long been blessed with a paucity of both. Disgracefully, the number among the latter is growing.

*Beowulf for those of you who have forgotten that classic example of old-English alliteration from high school.

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

Reading, Writing, and Teaching Southern History

Other Posts in my Southern History Series:
Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History


In Grand Theft History, Ilario Pantano addresses the culture war between progressives and conservatives for control of the Republic as well as the Marxists historians who are determined to dismantle the America of our Founders in support of the former. 

I maintain that the Founders’ Republic has been gone for a century and a half, no longer visible or viable with the desecration of Federalism that came with the so-called “ratification” of the 14th and 15th Amendments whereby the central government usurped civil rights and suffrage onto itself, both the sole domain of sovereign states; the 16th amendment which fed and continues to feed the insatiable monster the central government has become today; and the 17th amendment, by which the people of the states sold out state rights in return for pure democracy, thus damaging Federalism every bit as much as did the 14th and 15th amendments.  

In the fall elections of 1866, the people of the victorious North rejected our Founder’s Republic as surely as they’d rejected Southern rights. What was left has been whittled away at ever since. Trying to reconstitute our Founder’s Republic given what happened during the Civil War and Reconstruction is, in my mind, delusional. It’s gone, and I don’t think we’ll see its like again. What made us exceptional was lost, as odd as it may seem to some of you, with the Confederacy. What replaced it was the post-Civil War (and certainly post-founding) narrative on the virtues of civil rights and democracy, and we’ve been traveling that common path of democracies since, and we will meet their common fate, implosion under the social excesses and economic weight of the mob or empire under a dictator. We could hope for “imperial,” great, but not exceptional. Some folks, in fact, believe we are already there. What I haven’t lost is my unwavering conviction that the South was right, and the loss of our Founders’ Republic correlates directly to the unwarranted war waged against her. I do not want the basis for that belief lost, too, particularly to future Southerners. 

In his book, Pantano defines grand theft history as the “improper and intentional omission or distortion of historical fact to the significant detriment of one or more parties.” He begins his argument by establishing that Southerners had something of value that was taken away from them, that being their rightful place in American history by the omission and misstatement of historical facts. He further argues that these omissions and misstatements were/are intentional. Well, I maintain that the South had plenty of value taken from her long before now, but I won’t haggle over the point. This latest slight simply heaps insult on top of injury, but I'm digressing a bit...sorta.

If the reader (jury) agrees with Pantano’s argument, the miscreants are condemned to clean up their act, do their duty, and report the historical record accurately. 

It’s less that I disagree with Pantano on this last point than I believe it is a requirement that cannot and would not be enforced. Who would enforce it? The reader?  

I don’t think so. The powers that be are complicit with liberal historians’ marginalization of Southern history. In the minds of those geared to this agenda, they are doing their duty by twisting the history. Revisionism is as old as history itself.  

No, it’s time for partisan action. We Southerners need to be writing our own history. Of course, a quick perusal of the bibliography Pantano published with Grand Theft shows that we already are and always have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that the academic gatekeepers have left no room in academia for anything but negative reflection of the South. What we Southerners need to do is quit buying into it and start reading (and writing and teaching) our own history books and, for the love of Saint Peter, stop apologizing for something that was normal, accepted, and for which everyone in this nation and most of the world was complicit in, including black folk, and had been millennia before the white man ever set foot on this continent. You take away the bad things we all have done and we wouldn’t have survived as a people on this continent, much less built a nation, not to mention we, as a species, would still be living in caves—and still, no doubt, being bad to one another. Why the devil should the South carry the weight of guilt for all history—oh yeah, that’s right, I get it! Our refusal to reject the full promise of our Founder’s Republic (federalism/decentralization) renders us unrepentant on the issue of slavery—because that was the one and only issue, right? Bullshit. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Classic. Except we’re not suppose to note the baby. It’s the dirty bathwater the left has us focused on. But it’s not about the bathwater. It’s about the baby, and it always has been.

The left believes that the only way to achieve true freedom, as they perceive it to be, is by erasing everything the Republic once stood for and pretending it never was. On top of the ruins it will build its brave new Utopian world where civil rights, equality, and freedom for all is defined and enforced by a “benign” central government (the states relegated to satellites, equally benign, of course).

Ain’t it funny how that Utopian monster, no matter how often it defeats itself with its own stupidity, never ceases to raise its ugly head? Granted its appearance is periodic. I attribute that phenomenon to excess prosperity and esoteric minds, freed from the drudgery of honest labor (thanks to excess prosperity), focused on getting even more of other people’s money to fund/control the Utopian agenda. Ha! If they read more history books, they’d know it never works—oh, darn it, I forgot! That won’t work if they read the revised versions.
 

More—on the virtues of the South, that is—next time and thanks for reading, 

Charlsie

 

 

James Lusk Alcorn, The Dawn of Reconstruction

This post is number ten in a historical review of Mississippi’s Union Whig/Republican governor and senator during Reconstruction. See my earlier posts, best read in sequence from oldest to most recent, from 17 February, 16 April, 24 March, 17 July, 24 July, 18 September, 9 October, 18 October, and 5 November 2014.

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This article brings me to the period of history that initiated my interest in James Lusk Alcorn and is the setting for a number of my novels. “Reconstruction” is a term that has left a bad taste in the mouths of generations of white Southerners along with the epithet scalawag, which taints the name J. L. Alcorn to this day. After years of study, I see everything in a clearer, if not brighter light. If anything the taste of Reconstruction is fouler than ever. As a child I adhered to the simplistic approach that it was a period when a bunch of greedy, corrupt Northern opportunists and politicians, protected by the Yankee army, came South to plunder the spoils of war. Not much more to it than that. Later the “noble” ideas of civil rights for the Negro—a natural adjunct of his emancipation—seeped in. That noble idea translated, and rightly so, to Negro enfranchisement, which coupled with the disfranchisement of Southern whites, put in place a constituency designed to keep the Republican party in power for as long as it was able to hold the white South at bay. Both are true, simple concepts designed to get the blood of any self-respecting white Southerner boiling. These concepts would later be used to keep in place a constituency of a different sort—but this group, at least, was our own.

Putting aside the propaganda and ulterior motives of later generations of Southern demagogues, the tyranny and malfeasance of Reconstruction that ran rampant across the South, for over a decade in some places, were merely tools that apologists euphemistically refer to as the failure of a benign experiment in political and social awakening. My take on the apologists—smoke and mirrors in an attempt to create a faux truth from a lie.

Reconstruction was the realization of a pact loosely drawn by morally corrupt, self-righteous leaders, social, economic and political, to “Reconstruct” the South into what they thought it should be (socially) to serve their needs (economic/political)—needs reflected in the manifest destiny of the United States. The plan was not drafted with the South’s defeat in 1865. It was on the drawing table and set for necessary alterations by the 1850s. The South, its future clear within the “Union”, opted out. No war, no violence, just “you go your way and we’ll go ours”. But with its secession, the South had presented those Northern “architects” of what the United States was really meant to be with the opportunity to carry out the plan. It took some work to bring the rest of the North in line under the concepts of “Union” and “liberty and justice for all”, but ‘architects’ such as those always seem to achieve their ruthless goals. Hence a horrific war that took so many American lives, wasted the South, and destroyed the Founders’ Republic. Reconstruction was not an adjunct to the war. Reconstruction was the reason for the war.

But while research has hardened my frustration for those who view the South’s meager “victory” during Reconstruction as one of white Southerners against the defenseless and oppressed, my view of Alcorn is now more appreciative. In my opinion the term scalawag fits him less than simply noting what he was, a pragmatic Southern Whig who struggled to do what was necessary to return his Mississippi of old to its rightful place in the Union—given the terms demanded by a hate-filled victor.

It would never happen, of course, not for Mississippi nor the rest of the South. As stated above, Reconstruction did not refer to reconstructing the physical infrastructure of the devastated South. In fact, Congress (in which there was no Southern representation early on, an unconstitutional omission it later “corrected” by the introduction of Republican puppets as the Southern taxpayers’ representatives) and the powerful Northern constituents (industrialists, social engineers) that it represented went to great lengths to ensure the South’s recovery would be both slow and painful. Indeed, a case can be made that many of those people opposed recovery at all. Loyal Americans lived in the North—they’d saved the “Union” after all (Republic be damned)—and anything that would rise from the ashes of the South would be North-like in appearance and to the benefit of the North. I would like to make my point using an early example from Alcorn’s own history:

Thanks to his dealings with the occupying forces during the war, Alcorn returned to Coahoma county in the summer of 1865 with his lands intact and a supply of gold with which to rebuild. In the fall, the Union army released his home at Friar’s Point, and it is here that he brought Amelia and his children vice returning to Mound Place on the Yazoo Pass. Friar’s Point became the seat of operations for his post-war activities. He returned to his law practice and operated his plantations, acquiring new property east and south of his original holdings.

Long a Delta planter dependent on the rich alluvial land born of centuries of Mississippi River floods, Alcorn had spent his entire life in Mississippi focused on levees to control the “Father of Waters.” The river giveth, but it also taketh away—in a heartbeat. His determination to construct an adequate levee system meant constant battle with both the state and the counties making up the Delta—and interior counties that didn’t really care if the Delta flooded or not. In the early fifties, he’d become president of the Superior Board of Levee Commissioners created to coordinate all levee activity among the concerned counties. In 1861 he threw up his hands in defeat (apparently the players never, ever, all agreed) and resigned as president of the board. Disunion was on the nation by then, war followed, but Alcorn’s interest in levee construction never abated. As many of you Civil War buffs know, Grant did extensive damage to the existing levees—just one of the peacetime projects in need of real “reconstruction.”

In August of 1865, a state convention (this one blessed by President Johnson—see my 5 November 2014 post) appointed Alcorn as one of three commissioners to go to Washington to enlist Federal aid to rebuild the levees and/or find private investors. Since the state convention forbade the commissioners from pledging state funds in repaying the loans, private investors were not enthused. Needless to say, the thirty-ninth Congress was downright hostile. Regardless of Congressional sentiment, Alcorn was an optimistic Whig at heart, so it was the Federal government where he focused his hopes for support by depicting Mississippi River levees in terms of “national” interests.

In the summer of 1866, opportunity knocked when Congress began debate on a revenue bill. In 1863, when there’d been no representation of the cotton states in Congress, that body passed a law placing a 3¢ tax per pound on raw cotton. Now, the Southern states still not represented, it proposed to increase this tax to 5¢. It just so happened that at this time the U.S. District Court of Northern Mississippi was in session and contained a goodly number of the Delta’s lawyer-planters. Alcorn was one. This group took advantage of the session to hold a protest meeting against the proposed “cotton tax”. The district judge adjourned court so the protesters could hold their meeting, which Alcorn dominated. He nominated and secured the election of his friend and fellow Whig, C. D. Fontaine, as chairman and proposed a set of resolutions to be set before Congress.

One argument urged planters, in view of the tax’ probable passage, to plow up unpromising stands of cotton and plant corn since the state wouldn’t have funds to buy food from the North and West that winter anyway. That argument was countered by one that emphasized the value of cotton as wealth for the entire nation, which made it an instrument in foreign affairs. The Northern blockade during the war had forced the traditional European markets for Southern cotton to supplement their purchases of raw cotton from elsewhere. Indeed, Britain was encouraging the cultivation of cotton in her colonial possessions. Cotton, the counterargument concluded, provided the South purchase power to buy Northern goods. Southern commercial credit was based on cotton; therefore, the well-being of all Southerners, black and white, was dependent on it. A committee was appointed (Alcorn was a member) to write and present a memorial to Congress protesting the cotton tax and arguing for why it should not be.

Before the petition was drafted, the New York Chamber of Commerce memorialized Congress against the increase to 5¢, stating that taxation without representation was tyranny; the tax, at least in spirit, was unconstitutional; and the increase “lacked an impartiality which was calculated to provoke hostility at the South.” Congress, it argued, should be producing legislation to inspire the Southern people to hope for better days instead of continuing to beat them down. The tax was not removed, but was decreased to 2.5¢ per pound as of 1867.

In his annual report for the year 1867-1868, Secretary of the Treasury, Hugh McCulloch recommended repeal of the tax as a measure to restore the productive power of the Southern states as soon as possible. (Note that McCulloch was a free-market fella and perceived opponent to the “American System.”) He stated: “Even in their deplorable condition, more than two-thirds of our exports last year [1866] consisted of their products, and it is the crop of the present year [1867], small though it is, that is to save us from the ruinous indebtedness to Europe.” Don’t jump to the conclusion that this was support for the South—think of it as, “we need to jump start our new colony’s economy so we can pay the national debt we created by waging the war to destroy the South.”

Just for the record, here’s Mississippi’s share of the cotton tax, paid when the state was not represented in Congress: 

1866—3¢ per pound— $756,289.00

1867—2.5¢ per pound—$4,640,664.00

1868—2.5¢ per pound—$3,521,702.00

                For a total of—$8,918,655.00 

Between 1863-1868 when the tax was repealed, the Southern states paid $68,072,385.00 in cotton tax, all during a period when they were not represented in Congress.

Regarding Mississippi’s burden, note that the cotton crops of both 1866 and 1867 were near failures; the amount of the cotton tax paid in those years was 6 and 8 times state expenditures; and the tax was estimated to represent one quarter the value of the crops (remember that the tax was based on the weight of the cotton, not the market price).

Now, let’s go back a bit to Mississippi. That half-cent reduction in the cotton tax disarmed the 1866 planter protest, but Alcorn was not done with the tyrannical cotton tax. Now he put on his “Whig” hat and on 18 December 1866 presented a petition to both houses of Congress, which bore his name alone. In it, he cited his life-long activities with the levees in Mississippi; he highlighted the potential of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta—to include tax revenue; and he emphasized the threat of foreign cotton production to the U.S. cotton industry (I’d be willing to bet that Congress was preoccupied with U.S. industry—maybe even the cotton industry—but not in the South.).

Then he came to the crux of his address: The people of the South considered the cotton tax not only a grievance, but a wrong. If it had to be enforced he said, mitigate its existence by using that tax on the South for the South. In the case of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, spend the revenue on the levees to protect the alluvial cotton lands subject to flood. [Recall that such use of national subsidies for internal improvements was integral to the Whig platform.] The national government was being generous with subsidies to the North and West, particularly regarding railroad construction. Alcorn’s argument was to give the devastated South her share of her contribution (goodness knows she needed it).

Congress did not respond.

Point made.  

Thanks for reading, and more to come, Charlsie

 

 

Dad’s Whig Book, Michael Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party

I recently finished a tome I affectionately refer to as “Dad’s Whig Book,” and I’d like to deviate from my series on Mississippi’s Whig, John Lusk Alcorn, and do a review of Michael Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party.  I’m holding my local Whig in abeyance, so to speak, for the bigger picture. As an aside, it wasn’t me who dubbed that 985-page monster “Dad’s Whig Book.” That honor belongs to his kids. From sheer size alone, I can guess the work impacted their lives to no small extent, just as it’s had a harmless impact on mine for months now. I can no longer stay up and read until the wee hours of the morning, evening respites put me to sleep. I have, therefore, taken to rising ahead of everyone else still hanging around the old homestead and making myself a cup of coffee. I then relax for an hour or more with my book of choice. For months now, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party has helped me usher in daybreak; and though now anxious to dive into supplementary reading to build on all I’ve learned, I’m gonna miss it.

The book is neither a difficult read, nor an easy one. You need to be interested in the political history of the period leading up to the War Between the States. Doctor Holt is witty and entertaining. He also possesses extensive knowledge of his subject and is meticulous in his research. He has one hundred and ninety-three pages of footnotes nestled onto the end—I read every one (some are quite meaty)—and twenty pages of bibliography. I’ve already made my list of what to read next.

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party is a detailed history of that party from its founding in 1833 as the primary opposition to the Democratic Party, through its demise and the rise of the Republican Party, dark child of its northern wing [my take on the Republican Party, not Professor Holt’s]. The Whig Party’s tumultuous twenty plus years highlight the men and the forces that led to sectionalism and finally war. One of the things I particularly liked was the detail with which Professor Holt delves into politics within the individual states and how the needs/demands of the states affected politics/political parties at the national level. In my opinion, one can’t develop a good appreciation for what went wrong without those details.

Though the book is about the Whig Party, its story cannot be complete without reference to the Democratic Party (primarily) and the third parties prone to pop up in 19th C. politics (i.e. Free Soil, Nativist, and the Know Nothings), which proved adept at provoking a reaction from the Whigs. Over the party’s lifetime, Whig reactions led to the perversion of Whig policies until, in the end, the party no longer represented its core values—at least not with enough constituents to sustain itself. And another point: the leadership of these splinter parties did not necessarily mean new faces on the political scene—some of these characters jumped from one party to the next depending on ideals, egos, the mindset of their constituents, and/or the social mores of the day—among other reasons. I think of such lapses in character as political “expediency.”

The book deals with politics. Comparatively speaking there is less detail given to economic conditions and political corruption within both parties at the local, state, and national levels. I infer such corruption must have been rampant given the sudden rise of the Know-Nothings in the early 1850s and the havoc their “no party” philosophy created for both Whigs and Democrats. I do not fault the author for this—the book is already just under 1,000 pages and its focus is politics. I am merely informing the reader. For economics and corruption I suggest consulting Professor Holt’s bibliography.

I loved the work, but though Professor Holt admits an admiration for the Whig Party, I do not. Nor do I suffer from admiration for the Democrat or Republican Parties. For me, political parties are necessary evils—kind of like disease to keep populations in check. But political forces make and break nations, they wage war, and impact our daily lives. I simply want to understand and be able to discuss the driving forces of that era, which led to disunion and the subsequent destruction of the South and with it the Republic. In his conclusion, Professor Holt alludes to his possibly being identified as a purveyor of the now discredited argument that a “blundering generation of narrow-minded or misguided political leaders” were the cause of the Civil War. Shoot, I didn’t know it was discredited. Apparently today the official (historian’s) line is that “the war’s coming…resulted from basic social, economic, and ideological differences between the sections deriving from the presence of African-American slavery in the South and its absence from the North. In its cruder—and more common—formulation, the ‘forces’ that caused the war were self-generating and operated toward their inevitable conclusion almost without the need of human agency.”

[Gee whiz, I do believe the proponents of this argument are saying “it was nobody’s fault.” Are you kidding me? Well, darn, that pretentious, politically-correct reference to “African-American slavery” vice just “slavery” speaks volumes about not only the argument’s recent evolution but also the mindset of whoever formulated this latest analysis of the causes of the Civil War. I hope not one drop of Southern blood flows through their veins. Oh, well, no matter what, I’d bet my next paycheck it didn’t emanate from the brain of a Southern layman. We know what caused the war—Yankees, that’s what. Yankees who didn’t live up to their side of the bargain and betrayed us! There. You have it in a nutshell.]

Seriously, Professor Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party leaves no doubt in my mind that selfish, hate-filled, and “expedient” politicians played a major role in causing the Civil War—not that I believed differently when I started the book. Economics most definitely played a role as did ideological differences over slavery—fed, more often than not, by the above mentioned selfish, hate-filled, and “expedient” politicians of the day. Professor Holt, page after page, showed ’em doing it. “…self-generating and operated toward their inevitable conclusion almost without the need of human agency” my patootie!

The book is an excellent asset to any student of that period. If you like attempting to figure out what went wrong, you’ll love this work. I can’t promise you’ll come to any conclusion—other than there were alot of folks at fault—but you will enjoy the journey.

I’ll be back with my Mississippi Whig next time.

Thanks for reading,
Charlsie

James Lusk Alcorn, Prelude to War

This post is an outgrowth of my decision to correct historical mistakes I’ve discovered in my work over the years (see my post of February 10, 2014). I find the subject of J. L. Alcorn interesting and relevant to my future work, so I’ve decided to continue blogging about him for several more posts, highlighting his actions during the War, Reconstruction, and finally the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890. Before I get off the subject of confessing my historical mistakes, the implication made in my 17 February 2014 post that Alcorn was too cozy with the enemy during the War may have been hasty (I’ve been doing a lot of research during the past month). The term double agent could hit closer to the mark. 

James Lusk Alcorn was a Whig. The Northern wing of the American Whig Party became the Republican Party. Mississippi had, at the time of the War Between the States and for decades prior, been a Democratic bastion. At no time in the state’s history was its legislature comprised of more than one-third Whigs—the remaining two-thirds being Democrats. Jefferson Davis was a democrat.  Democrats and Whigs hated each other. These last two sentences are important to remember. 

There were states in the South fonder of Whigs than Mississippi—Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia represent the best examples. But all the Southern states had viable Whig parties comprised of large land owners, but also successful business people. If you think Republican of today (or even yesterday), you’ll have a general feel for Whigs. But like the Democratic Party, the Whig Party had Northern and Southern wings and the great divide—I’m sure you’ve guessed it—was slavery.  

The Whig Party began life (metaphorically speaking) in 1833-1834 dispassionate toward slavery, and the Northern and Southern wings managed to work together until the 1840s when the more adamant Free Soil Party, ineffectual on its own, began to sell its votes to the highest bidder (Democrat or Whig) in the Northern state legislatures in return for senate seats. State legislatures couldn’t change slavery; that had to be done at the Washington level. So in return for Free Soilers’ consolidation with either the Democratic or Whig legislatures, in whatever state we happen to be talking about, the victorious party would reward the “spoilers” by sending a Free Soil senator to Washington. [This was before passage of the 17th Amendment.] Too often, Northern Whigs ended up making their beds with Free Soilers, which did not rub well with their fellow Whigs in the South. 

The sectional divide was further exacerbated by all that new territory that came with U. S. victory in the Mexican War (i.e., whether slavery should be allowed or not) and the subsequent Compromise of 1850. Controversy over said Compromise led to the founding of the Union Party, put simply here, the brain-child of Georgia Whigs, Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs, and Georgia Democrat, Howell Cobb who teamed up to offset the sectional strife between the Northern and Southern Wings of the Whig Party and counter the State Rights Southern Democrats who were calling for secession. The “State Righters” were themselves offset by moderate Democrats who did not advocate secession. The “Union” movement also proved popular in the North, but its most secure foothold, though brief, was in the South and represented a moderate, pro-Union fusion of Whigs and Democrats. In Mississippi, J. L. Alcorn, along with many other influential Whigs in the state, became members of the Union Party and that party elected Henry Foote, a Union Democrat, governor in 1850. In my humble and admittedly academically limited opinion, the Southern Whigs did more to curb the secessionist movement in 1850 and get the Compromise through Congress than anyone else, North or South, because everybody had problems with it.  

Needless to say, things continued to degenerate between the North and South and both parties skewed along sectional lines. 

You know, sometimes I think it was really the political parties that, in their need for dissension in order to gain adherents, created the sectional rift, then dragged their constituents along with them into war. That would mean Calhoun of South Carolina was right. But I wax philosophical here (plus, this is hardly an original concept), and I will now desist, leaving that thought as fodder for another post. 

Officially the Whig Party fell apart. The subsequent split in the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party in 1860 resulted in the election of the (it’s just my opinion, but hemlock by any other name is still hemlock) Republican Abraham Lincoln, and we all know what happened next. And yes, Lincoln was a Whig. 

James Lusk Alcorn never stopped being a Union Whig and better informed historians than I agree. I think we can safely assume his dislike of Jeff Davis and the Democrats was reciprocated and subsequent slights by the Confederate government possibly reflect this. But most importantly, and I’m believing this more and more as my research continues, James Lusk Alcorn never stopped being a Southerner and a Mississippian. In my 17 February post, I quoted Alcorn’s speech right before he voted for the Ordinance of Secession. It was the overtly dramatic statement that ended “...I  enlist in the army that marches to Rome.”  

This, after he and a handful of fellow Union Whigs’ had spent two days arguing against secession! I don’t know if he’d prepared his allies for what he was about to do. It was a roll call vote and his was the first name called (A-lcorn—I’m assuming the delegates names were listed alphabetically). The subsequent applause brought down the house and all but one of those Union delegates voted for the Ordinance, then consecrated their “yea” vote with their signature. Alcorn, no doubt, had seen the handwriting on the wall; it was as if he thought, well, hell, they’re going and they’re not going with out me. He might have guessed he’d be on the wrong side of history, but (at least at the time) he wasn’t going to be on the wrong side of Mississippi. 

And another thought: One has to wonder what might have happened had there been an Alcorn in Richmond who realized that the army needed to march on Rome and it needed to be quick about it.  

Despite Alcorn’s dramatic capitulation in support of secession, his words qualified how he thought the coming war should be fought. It also says a lot about how well he understood the hate-filled enemy residing above the Mason-Dixon line, and I believe it explains his actions during the War, into which I will delve in my next post.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

By That, He Meant Brazil, Right?

      I fear not. I think he really was making a perfidious reference to the Deep South of the Southern United States. That would include my Mississippi, folks, and I’m not taking it lying down. 

I recently visited North Carolina, a state with which I have ancestral ties that go back so far as to exist only by word of mouth, that being the existence of a redheaded, blue-eyed Scotsman (that would be the Russell side) who came from the “Carolinas.” Ever so often he returns, my daddy told me as I was growing up. My grandmother Russell had two redheaded sons (my father wasn’t one of them) and I, too, gave birth to him twice, but my sons don’t bear the surname Russell; that’s my maiden name. Though I’d always suspected the “Carolinas” in this case referred to North Carolina, tentative research strongly indicates the family did indeed travel from North Carolina into Tennessee, then Georgia, briefly Alabama, and my branch has been in Mississippi for four generations now—six if I count my non-Russell offspring and their offspring. 

But, let me get back on point. My visit was to Buncombe County in western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Ashville specifically, a lovely, quaint little city favored by artists and flocked to by tourists and historically by those in need of the healthful mountain air to relieve whatever ailed them. I went with my daughter’s mother-in-law to visit old friends she wanted to see there, and they, knowing my interest in history, made a point of taking us to some of the local historical sites. What provided fodder for this particular blog were comments made by a tour guide at the birthplace of Zebulon Baird Vance, 37th and 43rd governor of North Carolina. His first term was during the War for Southern Independence, and he is beloved by the people of North Carolina for being “War Governor of the South.” 

Zebulon Vance was the second son of David Vance, a veteran of the Continental Army that sent the Loyalists packing at King’s Mountain. The elder Vance either built or bought the house in 1795. The family ran a wealthy, slave-owning farm. Here is what got my goat. This young man, our guide, went off on a brief tangent highlighting how slavery was different in North Carolina, where more valuable skilled slaves were the norm vice the less valuable field laborers from the more southern states, where labor was cheap and the slaves were “worked to death” then replaced. He threw his hands out in front of him and said, “No big deal.”  

I beg your pardon? Where did this double-standard, hypocritical, hogwash come from? Quentin Tarantino? Perhaps it was Harriet Beecher Stowe, but to believe the latter, I would have to credit the young man with having made some effort to research the history of slavery. I, in fact, use those same words—“worked to death”—referring to slaves, in my most recent novel Camellia Creek, spoken from the mouth of a hate-filled, bigoted abolitionist witch who didn’t know what she was talking about. There were plenty of skilled Negro slaves in the Deep South, and all slaves, skilled or not, certainly were costly, considering the slave-trade ended in 1808. Even assuming we in the Deep South were sub-human and cared nothing for human life, working slaves to death would have been economic suicide. I’m not saying such never happened, but it was not the norm and would have been as likely to happen in North Carolina as Mississippi. 

I was hoping the thoughts espoused by the tour guide were his own, but subsequent discussion with my host indicates this “slavery in North Carolina was kinder, gentler” has become a common thread among those who wish to apologize for slavery’s existence in that state. Of course, I don’t know that those North Carolinians, whose roots go back to the beginning, really swallow that “bunk”, pun intended. I hope not. My host, who is not a Southerner, snickered when he gave me that “kinder and gentler” line. I can only surmise that such tripe handed out during tours is the result of federal funding or is an effort by the politically correct crowd to whitewash something it appears to be ashamed of. To those individuals I say whitewash it if you feel a need, but do it without defaming your sister states, whose ancestors were sure the devil no worse than yours, no matter where they hailed from.  

Better yet, I would argue that when giving a tour of Governor Vance’s birthplace, place emphasis on the man himself and the time he lived, rather than gloss over it. He was a man who believed a state was sovereign, vis-à-vis a central government, in all things except those limited areas where said central government held precedent (a prominent characteristic of a number of North Carolina statesmen going back long before the War). Something all state governors should remember now, something governors in the North should have remembered then and the dark years following the War--something they all should have remembered in the 1960s. That belief is what the people of North Carolina fought for (in numbers that exceeded all others, I should add, all the while resisting Confederate conscription policies in the name of those same rights), not slavery. That autonomy as well as the inviolability of the Constitution are what were lost with the South’s defeat, and as regards the health of the Republic, those two things alone eclipse the radical and irresponsible dissolution of an institution doomed to extinction within a relatively short period of time. For all the right reasons, the South was right, something Southerners should remember and be proud of instead of hanging their heads in shame and prevaricating in the face of liberal propaganda and federal extortion.

 

 

  

The Confederacy and the Roots of American Progressivism.

This past week I began Hillsdale College's second course series on the U.S. Constitution titled "The Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism" also known as Constitution 201. I have a great deal of respect for Hillsdale College, an independent liberal arts college located in rural Michigan. My admiration stems from the school's rejection of all federal monies, thereby refusing to compromise its values and principles, which mirror my own. Founded in 1844, Hillsdale is an old school with, from what I've been able to ascertain from photographs, a beautiful, quaint campus and small student body. If I were to find fault, the only one I could muster to date is its admiration for Abraham Lincoln, which apparently extends back, well, to the days of Lincoln.

But I don't fault Hillsdale for that, the school is, afterall, located in Michigan; and if I displayed malice toward everyone who admired Lincoln, I'd spend my life bent out of shape. For the most part, if I can't come up with a good reason for arguing a point regarding the man (by that I mean, if I think I might actually accomplish something), I keep my mouth shut. But some injustices I simply can't ignore.

One such occurred in Hillsdale President Dr. Larry Arnn's introduction to Constitution 201. Dr. Arnn alluded to the seeds (at least some of them) of progressivism in the United States as having been sown in the Confederacy. He based this thought on two tenants of American progressivism: rejection of the nation's founding principles and the use of science as a liberal tool for the "betterment" of all mankind.

To support the argument, Dr. Arnn referenced the speech made by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens on March 21, 1861 in Savannah, Georgia citing the subordination of the Negro race as a corner-stone of Confederate society. Vice President Stephens stated modern science "proved" the Negro genetically inferior to the white man. I'm certainly not agreeing with Vice President Stephens or any of the other hundreds of thousands of people who agreed with that "finding" at the time. What I find umbrage with is the use of Stephens' speech defending slavery as indicative of "progressive" thought in the South.

For two hundred years before Stephens made that speech, slavery had thrived in the British colonies and had been justified using the same opinion Stephens espoused even without the "proof" of science.
More disturbing to me is the challenge that Stevens was speaking "in opposition to the equality principle of the American founding." Based on the evidence presented, opposition to the "founding" existed from the start. To add insult to injury, Dr. Arnn made no reference to the Republican Party's gross disregard for the Constitution in its subjegation of the South and its subsequent, purposeful destruction of the checks and balances critical to the survival of the Federal Republic established by our founders under said Constitution.

Now, I don't consider myself a sophisticated person. I'm not particularly well versed in political terminology, but for me the term "liberal" (synonomous with "progressive") conjurs up an individual who believes everyone should be equally successful and that government should ensure that success through regulation and wasteful expenditure of other people's money. My money. Hillsdale's introduction to Frank Goodnow's (American Political Sciences Association) paper titled "The American Conception of Liberty" echoes this concept of a liberal. The intro states, "Progressive political science was based on the assumption that society could be organized in such a way that social ills would disappear."

Now, let's think back. What is considered the great social ill on the day Vice President Stephens made that speech? Oh yes, slavery. At least it was to those not in the South. Personally, I think the "liberal" Republicans would have done well to focus that energy relieving society's ills on the North's factories, orphanages, and sweatshops, but then I don't buy the Civil War having been about slavery, either.

The equality principle referenced, of course, is found in the Declaration of Independence—"...all Men are created equal,..." It didn't matter that the clause was written by a Southerner and slave owner and that the Declaration was signed by a number of slaveowners who risked their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor so that our nation would win its independence. It doesn't take a genius to figure out there's a disconnect here and there always will be. The point I want to make is this particular "equality" principle was missing in the Constitution, and it is the Republicans'/Lincoln's bizarre adherence to the Declaration of Independence's taking precedence over the Constitution as this nation's founding document that excuses the Republicans' subsequest violations of the Constitution and destruction of the republic that to this day they are credited with saving.

I argue, as the South has for, gosh, two centuries now, that The Declaration is the document by which we informed King George we were opting out of his empire. The Constitution, written eleven years later, with the Articles of Confederation sandwiched in between, is the document, ratified by thirteen sovereign states, that formed the Federal Republic of the United States of America —under a limited central govenment, its powers granted by the consent of the governed through powers delegated by their sovereign states. It is the document our founders designed specifically to keep in check the anticipated growth of what would become, by its very nature, a large, all-powerful central government. Note that it is a large, all-powerful govenment that is critical for carrying out a liberal agenda. Equality, validated in the Declaration, formed one of the tenants of the Republican Party —not because it cared about each individual, but because representative government wasn't working for it. Sovereign states, which could counter the overreach of the central government, got in the way of its "liberal" agenda.

I've always heard it argued that the concessions made to the slave states during the writing of the Constitution were done so the Southern states would ratify it. Darn right—, we played a major role in writing the thing. If the Northern, non-slave holding states did not agree with the Constitution, they shouldn't have ratified it. They could have written their own Constitution, instead of desecrating ours. It was a bad marriage from the start with one partner, in bad faith, determined to change the other.
For eighty years the South was the bulwark against the proponents of strong central government and the tyranny of democracy over representative govenment. The most damaging attack made against the republic was that made to representative government 150 years ago by Lincoln's Republican Party. That's where the seeds of liberalism were sown, not in the Confederacy. That group of Republican tyrants created a fertile field, which continues to put forth its ever-increasing bounty of crop-choking weeds to this day. The party doesn't matter. What matters is the restraints are gone.
You want to promote the South for laying the foundation for "liberal progressivism"? Well, maybe we do deserve the blame. We lost the War.

Thanks for reading,

Charlsie

Northern Resolve? Really?

This past week, I picked up a copy of the July 2012 edition of the Civil War Society’s bi-monthly magazine North & South. One of the articles drew analogies between coaching mistakes in football and Confederate blunders in the Western theater that cost the Confederacy the war, the argument being the United States didn’t actually win the war, the Confederacy lost it. It’s not my purpose here to argue the merit’s of the South’s strategy, or lack thereof, to wage the war it did. I just did research on the battle of Shiloh for my next book, Camellia Creek, and anyone who has made even cursory study of the battles in that war (or any war for that matter) knows egregious errors were made by commanders on both sides, the crux being one side had unlimited assets with time on its side and could afford to squander both, and the other did not. It’s my humble opinion that the South had a brief window of opportunity to—maybe—win its independence. But I digress. What gave me pause to write this post was the argument put forth by a couple of the contributors to that North & South article that the war would have/could have continued if the South had been willing to keep up the fight vis-à-vis the resolve of the North’s population to continue the effort until the South was defeated. Resolve? From my corporate memory, passed to me from generation to generation, which my research builds on—the latter so I can site documented specifics vice depending on the emotional diatribes of my ancestors (mostly the womenfolk, who are passionate about their men, and yes, I am proud to say that I am one such female), I do not give much credence to the “resolve” of the Northern populace. In Claiborne County, the setting of Camellia Creek, Grant spared the town of Port Gibson as “too beautiful to burn.” [The town at the time was inhabited by women, children, the old and the sick—the men being at war. Now, I’m not going into why General Pemberton remained holed in right up the road in Vicksburg with an army of 30,000 when he could have moved out and made Grant pay dearly for every inch of Mississippi soil he violated. My purpose here is the “people’s resolve.”] Though Port Gibson was not burned, it did endure raids from Federal forces stationed in the area. Soldiers came in to the town on several occasions from 1863 until the end of the conflict and plundered it. Not just thievery of every item of food, clothing, bed linens, etc., but wanton, purposeful destruction of furniture, mirrors, windows and doors, the gardens, wells, sheds, etc. so that the means of replacing food, caring for the sick, and so forth could not easily be replaced. On at least one occasion, the white troops came in one day, but left their colored troops (USCT) outside town. After the whites plundered what they wanted, they camped outside town. The next day they let loose their colored troops to take/destroy whatever was left. In Jackson, one has simply to dig a few feet into the ground to find the phosphorous Grant used to firebomb the city that same summer of 1863. Sherman razed Meridian—that was before his march through Georgia and the burning of Atlanta, and he continued that wanton destruction against the civilians of the South all the way to the sea. And let’s not forget Phil Sheridan’s laying waste to the Shenandoah Valley. And when I turn to page 46 of my copy of The Civil War Catalog (Anthony Shaw, editor), I see an ancient photo of Richmond after its surrender—it looks like Berlin in May of 1945. Humpf, wonder why the Germans didn’t keep fighting? And oh my gosh, those wimpy Japanese! Surely they could have held out for a couple more nukes on their heads! Forced us to invade the homeland. This was not a case of rogue officers and undisciplined soldiers. This was a matter of policy made in Washington. The American way of war didn’t start in the 1940s it started in the 1860s, and the South fought until it didn’t make sense to fight anymore. The only thing gained would have been more suffering and death—oh, yeah, and getting to kill a few more Yankees. [And had they known what was to follow, they might have kept up the fight a bit longer.] Hey, I’m not faulting total war; I understand the concept all too clearly, and I’ve been on the winning end of it ever since, but I do have trouble pitting the Northern populace’s “resolve” against that of the Southern people. Moreover, this attack on all things Southern is a more recent aberration that has evolved over the past fifty years and made all the more odious in that it’s all too often perpetrated by Southerners. (Wait, I think I’ll refer to that particular segment as southerners, or as apologists who happen to live in the South). Why? Even if the allegations were true—and so much of this is conjecture as we move farther and farther from the suffering of our ancestors, why would one piss on his/her ancestors’ graves? The South was not wrong. As regards the Constitution, the law of the land, the secession, and defense of its homeland, we are on solid ground and we remained on solid ground through the tyranny and despotism of Reconstruction, which undermines to this day one of the basic tenants of this Federal Republic—state rights vis-à-vis what should be a co-equal and limited central government. What exactly tested the “resolve” of the Northern populace? Given their grand strategy, their unhindered line of communication, and the ruthless determination of their leaders, the only way they could have lost that war was to roll over and play dead—and early on they might very well have if the South had pressed harder—maybe. They were “resolved” all right, but the truth is the aforementioned “resolve” refers to a populace, virtually untouched by war’s destruction, willing to employ unlimited assets to wage unrestricted warfare against a populace which was not—and in the beginning the South could have, and looking back, should have. But to paraphrase the man who set our strategy to destruction: We simply wanted to be left alone.

Why Should People Who Pay No Federal Income Tax Have the Right to Vote?

My husband and I filed our federal income tax this past April, on schedule, a remarkable feat considering this middle class family owed in excess of $25,000 dollars. Yep, $25,000+. That’s in addition to the $29,000+ we’d already had withheld from our pay or paid into 2011 quarterly “estimated tax.” And by “paid on schedule” I mean we paid the IRS. The money to ward those sharks off still has to be paid back to the credit card we’d just gotten out from under. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with those people—I tell them how much I can afford to pay each month, then they look at my finances and tell me how much I will pay each month. That’s the point where I’d have been arrested for sedition.

The whys and wherefores of our April shocker aren’t really relative to the point I want to make. Suffice it to say a modest inheritance, early dipping into a retirement account for needed farm equipment, and contract work amounting to another forty-hour plus work week pushed us, without our realizing it, into a higher income bracket. Our actually buying a few items we’d been putting off, for years, and doing things we’d always wanted to do, but had been reluctant to spend money on, should have raised the red flag. It didn’t. We won’t make that mistake again. We need to stay home, drive dilapidated automobiles, and jury rig everything that goes wrong in this house and let our grown kids—who can’t make ends meet—go on welfare instead of trying to help them.

What we really need to do is quit working and draw social security—early. But I’m sure there’s a hitch there, too.

I’m ranting now and getting farther off point. Our taxes were, according to the law, legitimate and have been paid. But it’s less about paying an exorbitant amount like that in one fell swoop than it is about the way the politicians in Washington waste our money without making any effort to cut back. It’s about how taxpayers are the ones who are threatened with a felony conviction for failure to pay enough while someone who doesn’t even file gets hit with a misdemeanor. The IRS goes after responsible people who are paying taxes, no matter how little they have or what they need it for. But the real question is this: Why do people who pay no income tax vote? They shouldn’t. They didn’t when this nation was founded. Only those with a vested interest (property) paid taxes, and they were the ones who had the right to vote. I’m not saying we should return to the days of the landed gentry, but allowing people who pay no federal income tax and share the benefits of, even going as far as live off, those who do is tantamount to thieving politicians buying votes with the taxpayers’ money. Votes that now outnumber the taxpayer. Yeah, speaking about paying “their fair share,” how about the fifty percent of the population that pays nothing at all? They’re the ones failing to do their part. I don’t want the rich to pay more. Jiminy—I think in 2011 I must be considered among the rich. And I ain’t rich, folks.

I highlight this point in my novel Wolf Dawson, the setting of which is late Congressional Reconstruction following the South’s loss in the War Between the States. In the book, I reference a rebellion that occurred in Warren County, Mississippi in 1874 when its tax-payer league arrested a crooked sheriff (under indictment in New York for malfeasance before he ever arrived in Mississippi) and ran him out of the county. The incident ended in bloodshed and ultimately the arrival of Phil Sheridan with federal troops and the reinstatement of the crooked parties, but marshal law in Mississippi was not reinstated and with the election the following year, tax-paying Mississippians won back their state and the Republicans scurried north like cockroaches scramble for cover when the lights turn on. Truth is, Mississippians had kept cockroaches out of the state (I’m speaking metaphorically here. We’ve got plenty of cockroaches in Mississippi and always have had) until they lost the War, at which time the occupying Republicans invited them in and kept them—and themselves—well-heeled with tax-payer’s dollars. Taxpayers, I should add, who were not allowed to vote. Today Americans, even many Southerners forget that crucial point. The taxpayer was not allowed to vote. Even after returning Confederate soldiers swore allegiance to the United States and were reinstated as citizens, they couldn’t “fight” their way to the polling booth, so don’t even go there with me.

Now go back another century to Sam Adams and cohorts who dressed up like Indians and poured British tea into Boston harbor. Same thing. No vote, no tax (vice versa in our case here). It’s one of the basic tenants of this nation. Universal suffrage is not. Universal suffrage is a politician’s way of putting into place an electorate that will put and keep him in power while he, his ilk, and his constituents steal, then squander the taxpayers’ money (buying more votes).

A flat tax is necessary to capture the fifty percent of Americans who are not paying federal income tax.

No tax, no vote.

Thanks for listening to me vent,

Charlsie