The+South+Shall+Rise+Again!

October 22, 2002

Dear Students of American History,

I write this letter in the hopes that the few of you not brainwashed may yet retain the ability to think for yourselves. The proud grandson of a Confederate soldier here is South Carolina, I write to set the official record straight and to defend my heritage. You have been lied to. Not all is as it seems. Let me explain. Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. The history of the Civil War is not the relation of campaigns, and battles, and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles. **All that the South ever desired was that the Union of forefathers should be preserved. We were not fighting for slavery. We were fighting for independence.**

However, the victors write the history books, and it is no different when it comes to the history of the Northern War of Aggression between 1861-1865. In the history books the Confederacy has been turned into something it never was in real life, and lies and distortions need to be exposed as such and the record set straight. Americans today praise and laud the 1776 colonists for their foresight and desire for liberty. On the other hand, now Americans despise and mock the Southerners for their racism and provincialism. In the first case, since the Americans won the war against England, we are all for the “revolutionary” colonists; but since the Yanks won the war of 1861 we accept all the propaganda which we have been fed without objection or question. As Joseph Stalin claimed, "Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past." Adolf Hitler said, "The Big Lie is a major untruth uttered frequently by leaders as a means of duping and controlling the constituency." **That the Union under Abe Lincoln fought the Civil War in the name of freedom for the abolition of slavery is perhaps the biggest "Big Lie" in all of American history.**

Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight. I propose to do just that in this essay. As Jefferson Davis tells us that "truth crushed to the earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again." So be it. I intend to show how the "Civil War" should rightly be called "The War of Northern Aggression." This fight - which the Union won only because of "overwhelming numbers and resources," Southern heroism in battle being unparalleled - was never fought against slavery and for freedom, as people now claim. The Confederacy was never about keeping black people down. The assertion that the South fought for slavery is Yankee propaganda and a monstrous distortion. Instead, what the Confederacy really represented was the true legacy of the American Revolution in its defense of state sovereignty and the tyranny of big government to bully and coerce. The North waged a brutal and unholy war on a people who had done them no wrong, in violation of the Constitution and the fundamental principles of government as defined in 1776. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in "The Declaration of Independence": > When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal status to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitles them a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. > We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. > This is exactly what the Confederate States of America did in 1861; but the federal government, after 1861 and ever since, no longer acknowledges that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. It repudiated the principles of its own founding!

After 1861 the North invaded our peaceful homes, destroyed our property, and murdered our men and dishonored our women. The South proposed no invasion of the North, no attack on them, and only asked to be left alone. As Jefferson Davis stated in his "First Message to the Confederate Congress, Mar 1861: > [Our situation] illustrates the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. > This is the exact same as sentiment expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he proclaimed to the world the reason why colonists would fight for independence from England. In 1861 Southern patriots fought for the same reason. They fought for independence from a newer, and a closer, but no less oppressive government. Jefferson sounded the same tune even after the Constitution was ratified and the Union in effect. "I am for preserving to the States the powers not yielded by them to the Union," Thomas Jefferson claimed. "If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union... let them stand undisturbed, " urged Jefferson urged in his "First Inaugural Address" in 1800. Southern politicians worked night and day for twelve years to prevent this war which started in 1861, but could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came. Jefferson was overthrown.

Yet it is stated in books and papers that American schoolchildren read and study that all the blood shedding and destruction of property of that conflict was because the South rebelled without cause against the best government the world ever saw; that although Southern soldiers were heroes in the field, skillfully massed and led, they and their leaders were rebels and traitors who fought to overthrow the Union, and to preserve human slavery, and that their defeat was necessary for free government and the welfare of the human family. As the proud descendent of a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of South Carolina, I deny the charge and denounce it as a calumny. **We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.** Allow me to explain.

The South joined a loose "united States," not a "United States" - and would never have agreed to join the Union otherwise. Even with all the limitations which the constitution placed on the federal government, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and other states were hesitant to join the union. Men such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee were labeled //Anti-Federalists// because they feared that the constitution would lead to “the consolidation of the States into one national government... the State sovereignties would be eventually annihilated, though the forms may long remain as expensive and burdensome remembrances of what they were....” Virginia ratified the constitution by a slim margin (89-79). But they also passed a resolution that would allow them to secede if the national government became too tyrannical. The Southern states would never have ratified the Constitution if they thought they would never be allowed to leave it, should they desire that. If Virginia only joined the union on this condition, how could she be wrong in exercising the right of secession? The great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration is that "governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed" so if the Southern states want to secede they have a clear right to do so. If a tyrannical government justified the Revolution of 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. **The soldiers of the Confederacy fought and gave their lives for the exact same reasons as did their grandfather who fought King George and imperial England.** The sons of the Confederacy did so with less ultimate success on the battlefield than did their ancestors during the Revolution, however, and so the effort ended in defeat. But it does not follow that the cause was not worth fighting for. The South was right!

So what was the war really about? Control. And money. It was about the right of the North, grown arrogant and swollen with money and increasing numbers of citizens, to dominate the South. **The contest was really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South.** It was not about slavery, for if the South had only wanted to protect slavery, all they had to do was go along with the original 13th Amendment, offered in early 1861 after several states had seceded, which would have protected slavery for all time in the states where it then existed. This was not inducement enough to bring South Carolina or any others back into the fold. The States of the Confederacy, even today, could block the passage of the 13th Amendment, and certainly could have then. This is why the Slaveholder wanted to stay in the Union. Their "property" was protected by the Constitution. But under Federal Legislation, the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal Revenue. Virginia, the two Carolina's, and Georgia, may be said to defray three fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. That expenditure flows in the opposite direction - it flows North, in one uniform, uninterrupted and perennial stream. This is why wealth disappeared from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does this; tarrifs steal from one and give to the other. The South refused to become the economic vassal of the North. The South saw better times under its own banner, rather than subservience to the banner of the United States.

Lincoln saw as much and claimed, "I can't let them go. Who would pay for the government?" Lincoln knew who was in charge of the government he headed: "In saving the Union, I have destroyed the republic. Before me I have the Confederacy which I loath. But behind me I have the bankers which a fear." The South knew that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest. This is why the North could not let the South secede from the Union and would fight an enormously destructive and stupendously expensive war to prevent this. The North was enraged at the prospect of being despoiled of the rich feast upon which they have so long fed and fattened, and which they were just getting ready to enjoy with still greater gout and gusto. They were as mad as hornets because the prize slips them just as they are ready to grasp it. They would destroy the South to save it.

And they would do this to "end slavery"? Hardly! The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states. About //The Emancipation Proclamation// Abraham Lincoln claimed in 1862, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it." He didn't care about slaves or slavery but union and maintaining power. As early as 1858 Lincoln averred the following: > I will say, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, a social and political equality of the White and Black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people. I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race. > That should put to rest the fiction that the Northern War of Aggression was "Abraham Lincoln's Great Crusade To Free The Slaves"! The Union government liberated the enemy's slaves as it would the enemy's cattle, simply to weaken them in the conflict. The principle was not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he could own him unless he was loyal to the United States. Again, it was about control and power and subjugating the South to federal authority and to the banking interests of the industrial North. **The Northern War of Aggression was a tariff war. The war did not touch the question of slavery, or any other moral principle; and, in fact, it turns solely on the Northern lust for sovereignty and control.** All else is propaganda and obfuscation. Don't be fooled.

Take a look at "The Gettysburg Address," at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history - the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases in a swift 272 words. It is pure rhetorical genius. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it again. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, no logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. **The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.** Programmed into the human soul is a preference for the near and familiar and a suspicion of the remote and abstract; and such was the principle for which the sons of the Confederacy so nobly fought and died.

History often paints the Confederates as violent backwater racists who sought a revolution against Abraham Lincoln and the enlightened North. In truth, the Northerners were the real revolutionaries. They were self-confessed rebels against the old order of America. It was they who broke the covenant of 1789 and killed off the "Spirit of '76." Ever since Appomattox, we have never experienced true liberty or true freedom in the way that pre-1865 Americans did. Every time I look at modern Atlanta, or almost any other big Southern city today, I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent. It is factories, pollution, crime, a breakdown in community and morals - a loud ugly world where people are strangers to one another, money and materialism is the god all worship, and family is everywhere besieged. The Northern vision of the future won out in 1865 over the Southern way of life. That is a tragedy. The wrong side won.

Adolf Hitler claimed, "If a lie is large enough, everyone will believe it." Abraham Lincoln fighting to free the slaves and preserve freedom is the largest lie in American history. Keep an open mind and recognize the truth behind the lies. Not all is as it seems.

Sincerely, // Johnny Reb //

P.S. The North, sir, never whipped us, unless they were four to one! If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence. The South did not lose the war; we Confederates wore ourselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion.