American politics today is quite literally mindless. Think about it. Things have been tending that way for a long time, but in the last three decades a state of perfect mindlessness has prevailed. Of course, there has always been demagoguery, and at least since Martin Van Buren the predominant political parties have tended to avoid and obfuscate serious issues and stick to a vague and comfortable middle. But we have surely now reached a further stage in the collapse of meaningful self-government.

When was the last time there was any serious debate, any presentation of genuine competitive alternatives to the voters, in any presidential or congressional election? When is the last time there was a presidential candidate who could be said to be a person of real knowledge and understanding and of substantial and admirable accomplishment? We the voters, the people, who supposedly rule, decide nothing except which celebrity will be raised to office. No significant issue is ever presented to us for our opinion. In fact, there is nothing in the national debate and proceedings that constitutes any genuine politics in the true sense of that word. Since at least World War II, hardly any major government action has been decided by the will of the people. Or even by their elected representatives after serious debate rather than herd stampede.

The top political figures in our “democratic system” are creatures of telephone calls and briefings, without any significant knowledge of the world except what is presented to them in capsule form by dubious “experts.” They are marketed like toothpaste and beholden to make-up men and ghost writers. In plain fact, political power is today entirely unrelated to knowledge, intelligence, or ability to lead and govern rather than to “manage.” (Of course, George Bush did confess to reading one book, an egregiously bad and un-American one.) While European leaders are not exactly exemplars of great statesmanship, at least they are literate, have realistic experience in dealing with other countries, and do not suffer from adolescent delusions that they are all powerful and ever benevolent.

Managers juggle what is presented to them. They lack the knowledge or incentive to consider any significant alternatives. Thus the end of the Cold War resulted not in a peace dividend but merely the continuance of the military-corporate regime under new pretexts. Thus the catastrophic national debt cannot be addressed except by short-term subterfuges. Thus the proletarianization of the middle and worker classes and the replacement of the American population by immigrants are long-term issues that cannot even be noted, much less addressed, because the status quo is profitable to the actual rulers of our country. As C. Wright Mills observed more than a half century ago, the American regime is one of “organized irresponsibility.”

One is tempted to suspect that the real brains and power of the country rests in little-known people who merely co-opt the less intelligent of their ruling class associates to represent them in politics. What else can possibly explain George W. Bush holding the top political position in the world for eight years? Or such mental giants as Nelson Rockefeller, Danny Quayle, and Al Gore being a heartbeat away from the White House? A few years back, one of the elite, Averill Harriman, caught off guard when he first heard of Jimmy Carter, blurted out: “He can’t be President. I don’t even know him.”

The rise of Obama indicates that the minority elite has been admitted into at least the second level of the establishment. Despite all its radical rhetoric, the minority elite is patronage-oriented and offers no threat to elite power. Indeed the minority elite has always actually supported and comforted the rulers and would not exist without their support. The same is true of the “mainstream” media, invariably the obedient servants of power despite their claims of independence. Utterly dependable in relentlessly marginalizing any public voice that questions the regime.. It seems, however, that our rulers are afraid of “rightwing extremists,” i.e., Americans with a traditional sense of freedom and justice. We can expect the campaign to spread fear and hatred of such to increase and measures for their suppression to be presented.

The elite usually stick together. No member of the ruling class is ever punished for failure. George W. Bush and his accomplices lied to justify an unwise and illegal foreign invasion which they then badly managed. Yet none of them seem to have suffered any serious loss of public position because of it. The Supreme Court, extremely unrepresentative in its personnel, hands down one unconstitutional ukase after another and there is no challenge but rather mindless submission.

Caught up in the hurly burly of phony contests, we have failed to note the unprecedented strangeness of the basic situation. The old folklore that we have a government of, by, and for the people, and that the two parties offer a real competition, dies very hard. We should note that the ruling elite of our country today are interchangeable. They move from the corporate world to the international banks to the military to political office (usually appointive) and back again. Who has selected them to rule? What accomplishments can they exhibit other than a resume’ and having been silently co-opted into the elite without ever being submitted to the people for vetting.? Why do they, as far as we can tell, all think alike, accept the current regime as the only possible one, and collude to prevent any real issues from debate?

Yet these are the people who exercise by their own will the greatest national power the world has ever seen.

Recently by Clyde Wilson: Two More Good Books on Lincoln'sWar

American politics today is quite literally mindless. Think about it. Things have been tending that way for a long time, but in the last three decades a state of perfect mindlessness has prevailed. Of course, there has always been demagoguery, and at least since Martin Van Buren the predominant political parties have tended to avoid and obfuscate serious issues and stick to a vague and comfortable middle. But we have surely now reached a further stage in the collapse of meaningful self-government.

When was the last time there was any serious debate, any presentation of genuine competitive alternatives to the voters, in any presidential or congressional election? When is the last time there was a presidential candidate who could be said to be a person of real knowledge and understanding and of substantial and admirable accomplishment? We the voters, the people, who supposedly rule, decide nothing except which celebrity will be raised to office. No significant issue is ever presented to us for our opinion. In fact, there is nothing in the national debate and proceedings that constitutes any genuine politics in the true sense of that word. Since at least World War II, hardly any major government action has been decided by the will of the people. Or even by their elected representatives after serious debate rather than herd stampede.

The top political figures in our "democratic system" are creatures of telephone calls and briefings, without any significant knowledge of the world except what is presented to them in capsule form by dubious "experts." They are marketed like toothpaste and beholden to make-up men and ghost writers. In plain fact, political power is today entirely unrelated to knowledge, intelligence, or ability to lead and govern rather than to "manage." (Of course, George Bush did confess to reading one book, an egregiously bad and un-American one.) While European leaders are not exactly exemplars of great statesmanship, at least they are literate, have realistic experience in dealing with other countries, and do not suffer from adolescent delusions that they are all powerful and ever benevolent.

Managers juggle what is presented to them. They lack the knowledge or incentive to consider any significant alternatives. Thus the end of the Cold War resulted not in a peace dividend but merely the continuance of the military-corporate regime under new pretexts. Thus the catastrophic national debt cannot be addressed except by short-term subterfuges. Thus the proletarianization of the middle and worker classes and the replacement of the American population by immigrants are long-term issues that cannot even be noted, much less addressed, because the status quo is profitable to the actual rulers of our country. As C. Wright Mills observed more than a half century ago, the American regime is one of "organized irresponsibility."

One is tempted to suspect that the real brains and power of the country rests in little-known people who merely co-opt the less intelligent of their ruling class associates to represent them in politics. What else can possibly explain George W. Bush holding the top political position in the world for eight years? Or such mental giants as Nelson Rockefeller, Danny Quayle, and Al Gore being a heartbeat away from the White House? A few years back, one of the elite, Averill Harriman, caught off guard when he first heard of Jimmy Carter, blurted out: "He can't be President. I don't even know him."

The rise of Obama indicates that the minority elite has been admitted into at least the second level of the establishment. Despite all its radical rhetoric, the minority elite is patronage-oriented and offers no threat to elite power. Indeed the minority elite has always actually supported and comforted the rulers and would not exist without their support. The same is true of the "mainstream" media, invariably the obedient servants of power despite their claims of independence. Utterly dependable in relentlessly marginalizing any public voice that questions the regime.. It seems, however, that our rulers are afraid of "rightwing extremists," i.e., Americans with a traditional sense of freedom and justice. We can expect the campaign to spread fear and hatred of such to increase and measures for their suppression to be presented.

The elite usually stick together. No member of the ruling class is ever punished for failure. George W. Bush and his accomplices lied to justify an unwise and illegal foreign invasion which they then badly managed. Yet none of them seem to have suffered any serious loss of public position because of it. The Supreme Court, extremely unrepresentative in its personnel, hands down one unconstitutional ukase after another and there is no challenge but rather mindless submission.

Caught up in the hurly burly of phony contests, we have failed to note the unprecedented strangeness of the basic situation. The old folklore that we have a government of, by, and for the people, and that the two parties offer a real competition, dies very hard. We should note that the ruling elite of our country today are interchangeable. They move from the corporate world to the international banks to the military to political office (usually appointive) and back again. Who has selected them to rule? What accomplishments can they exhibit other than a resume' and having been silently co-opted into the elite without ever being submitted to the people for vetting.? Why do they, as far as we can tell, all think alike, accept the current regime as the only possible one, and collude to prevent any real issues from debate?

Yet these are the people who exercise by their own will the greatest national power the world has ever seen.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

Recently by Clyde Wilson: Why Save the Republican Party?

Not too long ago, historians were required to carry out extensive primary research and pay at least a token attention to objectivity and balance. Now one becomes celebrated as a worthy historian by cherry-picking out of the record whatever enhances the current PC view of human experience. That means that the best history is now being written outside the academy and will continue to be so.

Witness two good recent works by "amateurs" on the great conflict of 1861-1865, its causes and consequences. No period of American history is more pervasively under the reign of PC, but these authors have penetrated the veil to reveal some of the real story.

Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the classic Human Scale and a founder of the Second Vermont Republic, has written Emancipation Hell, available on Kindle. Knowledgeable people have always found Lincoln's revered Emancipation Proclamation to be a dubious thing. Sale's close examination of the document and its context leads to the conclusion that the emancipation of the slaves as carried out in the United States was a "stupendous fraud," initiated in the worst possible way and with the worst possible consequences.

Lincoln's Proclamation succeeded in one of its goals, favourable international propaganda for his war, and failed completely in another goal, the raising of a slave insurrection in the South. It freed not a single slave, as has long been noted. Emancipation, which was peaceful in most places in the New World, came as the result of a vicious military invasion and occupation carried out by forces pursuing their own rent-seeking agenda and without any real interest in the welfare of the people to be freed. To the conquerors, the freed people were instruments to be used, not people whose transition to a new status needed charitable planning. When the using stopped, the South was left impoverished, with a lasting hostility between the races which had not existed before, and with the black population in some respects worse off in 1900 than in 1860.

The fourth and final volume of Howard Ray White's Bloodstains: An Epic History of the Politics That Produced the American Civil War, has just appeared. There is nothing else like this remarkable work in all the vast library of writing on the Civil War. The four volumes: The Nation Builders, The Demagogues, The Bleeding, and Political Reconstruction and the Struggle for Healing are available in a print edition and through Kindle. This is definitely not just one more contribution to the guns and bugles history of the War or the celebration of Union righteousness. The work constitutes an unprecedentedly close-up history of American politics from the antebellum era to the healing presidency of Grover Cleveland.

Mr. White is by profession a chemical engineer. His interest in this matter, he tells us, was inspired by the bloodstains on the floor of a family home in Middle Tennessee which had been a hospital during the battle of Murfreesboro. How did this bloodletting come about? White has carried out his research and presented his findings with scientific precision and thoroughness. The result is a compendium of facts not to be found elsewhere, combined with a convincing, detailed narrative. There is a great virtue to this: a precise factual knowledge of the progression of events tells a story and gives a view quite different from the usual sweeping (and partisan) generalizations that pass for historical knowledge. Very few academic historians of today have given as much thought as White has done to what history is and how it is to be rightly constructed. The result is an authority and authenticity rarely achieved these days.

Another virtue is that the narrative is carried along in part by biographical accounts of major figures. This is a venerable and useful approach to history. A close account of the life stories of men like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens teaches us things about their true character and motives that can be learned no other way. To follow White through the most important part of American history is a process of almost endless discovery.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

Recently by Clyde Wilson: Recapturing an Epic Achievement

Since the election there has been much discussion of the future of the Republican party. Can it ever again win a national election, or is it doomed to permanent minority status? The most common response has been that the party must "reach out" (i.e., compete in the offer of bribes) to the exploding Hispanic population. Rather neatly and deceitfully avoiding the obvious fact that Republican sponsorship of mass immigration is the cause of their minority status.

A few fringe commentators have urged that the party instead do more for its core constituency of conservative white people. But the party leadership has already repudiated this alternative in both word and deed. They have apologized for "the Southern strategy" ( though not for the numerous elections that it won for them). The alternative strategy would not be respectable, and no people are more terrified of being thought unrespectable than the Republican leadership. The world view of the Sixties revolutionaries is now the mainstream, and to challenge it identifies one at once as a clueless or malevolent occupant of the disreputable fringe.

Conspicuously absent from this discussion is any explanation of why the Republican party should continue to survive at all, must less flourish. Why should we care?

It is easy to understand why people vote for Obama. He represents his constituents. He speaks for them. He promises them ever more goodies. He satisfies the ideological malice of leftists and gratifies the resentment of minorities against old America. If you are a bailed-out banker, a defense contractor, an employer of immigrant labor, or a politician eager for the perks of office, you might be tempted to vote Republican. But why bother? Being a Democrat would serve you just as well. There is no valid reason for anybody else to vote Republican.

True, there has been a kind of assumption for half a century now that the Republicans represent a conservative bulwark against leftist revolution. But is this true? Has it ever been the case? This impression is partly due to historical accident. The Republican leadership are elitists with no interest in "the social issues." But in the 1960s George Wallace demonstrated that there were votes to be had there, and so the party leaders grudgingly began to give lip service to them. They never had any intention of doing anything in regard to abortion, school prayer, affirmative action, the growth of federal power, or any other non-economic issue.

There is an impression that the Republican party is "pro-business" or pro free enterprise. Well, yes, if your business is big enough to buy government favors. What has the party ever done for the other businesses that make up the bulk of American enterprise?

The Supreme Court nominees who were supposed to turn the court back to a more restrained role have betrayed that promise again and again. And again. And again.

The Republican party does not represent its voters (and never has). It represents only itself. Consider: the strength of the party is now in the Southern, Plains, and Rocky Mountain states. The presidential and vice-presidential candidates were both from the deepest and most liberal North. Republican voters are conservative Christians. Neither candidate could be said to represent that viewpoint. Republican voters are much concerned about the effects of recent immigration policy. Neither candidate had any sympathy for that position—quite the contrary. Republican voters are concerned about the loss of manufacturing jobs and the ongoing proletarianization of the middle class. Both candidates are on record with contradictory policies.

Republican voters are opposed to Obamacare, perhaps the single policy inclination most widely shared among them. But the head of the Republican ticket is the inventor of Obamacare. Republican voters were clearly disturbed by the trillion dollar bailout of misbehaving bankers. No help there. While Republican voters are rather too inclined toward jingoistic responses to foreign threats, it cannot really be said that they want to start unnecessary wars, support a worldwide military empire, or watch Americans being killed abroad and pay for the privilege. Yet Romney was the most imperialist candidate in recent times.

The Republican nominations were not made in a political convention. There was no political convention. It was an infommercial. The only candidate with any principles and ideas, and who had aroused any grassroots enthusiasm, was completely shut out.

Note that the appeals for the survival of the Republican party never say why that is a good thing or what positive results might be expected from that survival. They simply assume that is something that is unquestionably desirable. The simple truth is that the Republican party survives only by the tactical employment of the great state-sponsored wealth of people who want to keep it as it is and by election laws which have made it nearly impossible to change the duopoly that controls American political action and allows the media unchallenged control of political debate. A situation which obviously violate the rules of democracy and the spirit of the Constitution.

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Those who have continued to vote Republican are perhaps not insane, but they have certainly exhibited irrational behavior and an inability to think outside the box that has been made to confine them.

All in all, the Republican party is and always has been a strange and puzzling thing. I tried to explore this subject in an essay published by LewRockwell.com in 2006. My historical survey, I like to think, may be of interest to young people in search of answers or veteran readers wanting to reprise important matters.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

Recently by Clyde Wilson: Conservatism Without Alexander, Abraham, and Irving

Americans used to have a sense that their country was an epic achievement — the settlement of a continental wilderness and building of an unprecedentedly free and prosperous society. That sense has pretty well been deliberately destroyed, at least in the younger, by those who are successfully manipulating the American majority with guilt and shame. It is hard to grasp that America was until quite recently known as the realm of "rugged individualism" and the "Land of Opportunity," and not just in the minds of Americans.

An epic by its nature requires heroes — not for hero worship but as examples to inspire the young. Brion McClanahan, one of ablest rising historians of the day and a gift to libertarian literature, strives to recover what has been lost in the just-published Politically Incorrect Guide to REAL American Heroes. He provides chapter and verse about the real character and achievements of genuine American heroes. No career politicians, showbiz celebrities, sports stars, or sob-sister TV gurus here. Rather frontiersmen, inventors, entrepreneurs, aviators, moral exemplars, courageous and skillful soldiers in real wars. Individuals, from Captain John Smith to Andrew Carnegie to "Buzz" Aldrin, who have actually done something. And usually, what they have achieved, though of value to their fellow men, has been the result of a resolute individual overcoming the odds with vision and hard work. No whiners against an unfair society.

I admit that my favorite part of the book is the section on fraudulent heroes. McClanahan's succinct expose' of John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Betty Friedan, the Kennedy thugs, and other diabolical figures is worth the price of the book.

It is important to note here that McClanahan is not singing the praises of America as "A City Upon a Hill," divinely endowed to drop bombs on other peoples until they agree to be like us. He has not written in behalf of a smug national self-satisfaction. Indeed, such an attitude is curiously often found among the same people who are tearing down the traditional America. The account of real American heroes is not a cause for self-congratulation. Rather it is a call to imitation of old virtues.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

Brion McClanahan, one of the best young historians of the day, and I have collaborated on a book that ought to be of interest to readers of this site. In fact, you were one of the audiences we had in mind as we wrote.

The book is Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican Publishers). Before you are off-put by the reference to “conservatives” in the title, consider some of the sixteen figures we have treated — John Taylor of Caroline, Condy Raguet, Grover Cleveland, William Graham Sumner. Our goal has been to establish a conservative tradition of thought that, from the War of Independence to the mid-20th century, defended the decentralist, laissez-faire, and non-interventionist regime bequeathed by the best of the Founding Fathers. The true conservatives have been those who wanted to let the American people alone and not hector and dragoon them into schemes of “progress” and foreign entanglement.

Conservatism, for us, has been a powerful and eloquent train of thinkers who have opposed the Hamilton/Lincoln regime of state-capitalism and the Roosevelt/Bush/Irving Kristol agenda of “global democracy.” Our conservatism stands strongly contra to the historic Republican party and to “neoconservative” imperialism. In this we are not so much out-of-step as some may think. Russell Kirk, “the father of modern conservatism,” considered Alexander Hamilton to be no conservative but rather a dubious “innovator.” And more than once Kirk lamented that “the conservative disposition” in the United States has too often been misunderstood by identifying it with rent-seeking behaviour.

As we have tried to show, many of the great figures of American literature — James Fenimore Cooper, H.L. Mencken, William Faulkner — fit well into our scheme of true American conservatism. The thinkers Dr. McClanahan and I have presented are perhaps not so much forgotten as they are unheeded, but they are all good men who have warned tellingly of the march toward the regime of regimentation and exploitation that is now established. Not only established but celebrated as the glorious end of history.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

As clear and simple as these facts are and have always been, grasping them seems to be beyond the abilities of presidents, congresspersons, supreme court justices, and professors of "Constitutional Law" at the most prestigious institutions.

In recent times the abuses of these people (what the Founders would have described as "usurpations" justifying rebellion) have run amuck, distorting an already wounded constitution beyond recognition. Ambition, rent-seeking, willful historical ignorance, deceit, ideology, and the lust for power (which the Founders hoped to guard against) have rendered the real constitution of our forefathers virtually null and void. This has prompted serious citizens to re-expound what the Constitution for the United States is supposed to be. There have been good books in this vein by Professors Thomas Woods, Walter K. Wood, and Kevin Gutzman, and by William J. Watkins and Judge Andrew Napolitano.

The latest contribution to this field is The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution by Professor Brion McClanahan, just published by Regnery History. McClanahan's treatment of the subject is in many ways the best, a concise, hard hitting constitutional handbook that goes right to the true source of understanding without being diverted by later commentaries and judicial opinions. What the drafters of the Constitution meant is revealed in the first place but not exclusively or even primarily by their discussions and votes, including the ideas that were voted down. (Many of those reappeared later touted as legitimate federal powers.)

James Madison is reputed by those who don't know any better to be the "Father of the Constitution." In fact, Madison lost more votes than he won at Philadelphia, although he did more maneuvering and scribbling than any other delegate. In his almost half-century of post-ratification life Madison was all over the place, contradicting himself numerous times on constitutional interpretation. But Madison himself in one of his more lucid moments tells us where we should look for the meaning of the Constitution. The meaning of the Constitution, he avowed, is to be found in the understanding of those who ratified it, who alone gave what was merely a proposal all the authority it possesses.

So we must look for understanding at the discussions that preceded the ratification conventions and at the conventions themselves. McClanahan knows this ground thoroughly and tells us in convincing chapter and verse on each article what those who ratified the Constitution intended and, perhaps more importantly, what they did not intend.

The opponents of the Constitution feared that the document would prove an instrument for the incremental establishment of a centralized dictatorship over the people. They were right. But, as McClanahan makes clear, the proponents of the Constitution swore point by point that the powers granted were limited and no cause for alarm. These assurances persuaded some of the doubtful. Ratification would never have passed otherwise, and, as it was, it only passed with assurances that amendments would be swiftly adopted and with several States making it clear that their ratification was revocable.

So in interpretation we ought to be guided by what the proponents of the Constitution plainly said it intended. This is what McClanahan elucidates point by point. If we accept what its proponents said, then those who ratified it believed that it established a limited federal power. Third-string "political philosophers" and "Constitutional scholars," and even learned jurists, have made an icon out of The Federalist, but it is only one of many discussions of the Constitution. It was a partisan document designed to overcome the objections of New York, and was not very convincing to its audience since ratification passed in New York by the narrowest possible margin Furthermore, it discusses the Constitution as it was merely a proposal under consideration and not the Constitution as ratified by the people of the States, who made their intentions clear in the undisputable language of the 10th Amendment. The authors — Madison, Hamilton, and Jay — were all disappointed that the Constitution did not centralize power as much as they would have liked, yet realized what they had to say to win over the majority. On the part of Alexander Hamilton, contributions to The Federalist were outright dishonest, because once he got into power he worked to do all sorts of things that he claimed the Constitution did not authorize.

The Federalist, which we see cited all the time as the key to the Constitution is speculation and was never ratified by anybody. But handicapped thinkers read Madison's philosophical ruminations, nearly all of which have been proved superficial and wrong, and imagine themselves participating in deep thoughts about government and learning about the true Constitution. This is part of the long-established practice of treating the Constitution as something sacred handed down by divine wisdom rather than understanding it by its real history.

The Constitution is there. It can still be known and understood by honest citizens. As McClanahan writes, the real Constitution is a "limiting document," not a grant of limitless power. Whether that Constitution can ever be established again is a question of political will and whatever is left in the American people of a capacity for self-government.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. His forthcoming book, Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012), is co-authored by Brion McClanahan.

The Best of Clyde Wilson

So wrote Thomas Jefferson, Vice President of the United States, in a document drafted at the request of members of the Kentucky legislature in 1798. Kentucky passed Jefferson’s paper and broadcast it to the world as the definitive opinion and stand of the sovereign people of the State. The language drafted by James Madison for similar documents adopted by the Virginia legislature in 1799 and 1800 was similarly unequivoical in its constitutional position and forceful in expression.

The people, acting through their natural polities, the States, had created and given authority to the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution conferred powers on a general government to handle certain specified matters that were common to the "general welfare" of all the States. That government was an agent. It could not be the judge of its own powers. To allow it to be so would mean nothing less than a government of unlimited power, a tyranny. The partners to the Constitution, the sovereign peoples of the States, were the final judges of what they had intended the Constitution to mean. When the general government exceeded its power it was the right and duty of the State to interpose its authority and defend its people from federal acts of tyranny — yes, to render a federal law inoperative in the State’s jurisdiction…

The scholars of the rising leftist Establishment who took over American history writing beginning in the 1930s invented a self-flattering fable to render the Kentucky and Virginia documents themselves null and void. Jefferson and Madison, they said, really did not care about States’ rights. They were merely anticipating the great tradition of the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Their concern was to defend the freedom of speech of the non-conformist radicals of their time.

This established interpretation is a lie and requires a good deal of either ignorance, self-deception, or deliberate falsehood to peddle. It is true that the Virginia and Kentucky acts were not followed up by active resistance to the feds. They did not have to be, because Jefferson and his friends won the following elections, got rid of the bad laws, and compensated those who had been harmed by them. There is evidence that Virginia and North Carolina were quite willing and able to call out the militia if necessary and that grand juries were standing by to indict any offending feds.

Not interested in State rights? Jefferson reiterated the centrality of State rights to the preservation of liberty and self-government in his inaugural address (and in hundreds of letters for the rest of his life). His party and the succeeding Democratic party proclaimed "The Principles of 1798″ repeatedly as their foundational philosophy, right up to the War to Prevent Southern Independence. It could not be clearer: in the American government system State rights and liberty could not be separated. They were the same thing. They had the same defenders and the same enemies. The Sedition Act was not just an invasion of individual rights, it was an illegal invasion of a sphere that the people had left to their States.

Further, the Sedition Act, punishing criticism of federal officials with jail sentences and fines, had been passed in stark defiance of the recently adopted First and Tenth Amendments which absolutely forbade Congress to pass any law abridging the freedom of speech and press and reserved to the States all powers not specifically conferred on the government. How then could Congress pass such a law as the Sedition Act? Because the Federalists, Hamilton and Adams and their supporters, justified their legislation by invoking the Common Law’s provisions about the punishment of “sedition.” The Common Law existed in each State to the extent that State had found it worthwhile to adopt it, but it had no place in a written document of delegated powers such as the Constitution for the United States. If the feds could ignore specified power limitations by grafting Common Law jurisdiction into the Constitution, then literally everything under the sun could be brought under their power. Not only that, but everything under the sun could be ultimately disposed of by the federal courts, which would become the new sovereign. This had to be stopped.

Interposition by Virginia and Kentucky was intended to halt the Northeastern elite’s relentless agenda to become the economic and moral overseers of all Americans through the federal machine. This has always been the engine for the unconstitutional usurpation of federal power — then, since, and now. When State interposition next came into serious play in the United States, the occasion was the tariff laws, by which the Northeastern elite had perverted a constitutional power to raise a revenue into a means of excluding foreign competition and creating a captive market for their profit.

After their service as presidents, Jefferson and Madison lived by their republican ethics — they were private citizens with no special right to interfere in public affairs. But they expressed opinions on issues of the day privately to those who asked and who they trusted. When, less than a generation after the “Principles of 1798″ had been proclaimed, the possible nullification of the tariff laws by South Carolina drew attention, Jefferson was gone from the scene. Madison, in contradiction of his own plain language and the circumstances of 1798—1800, claimed that state interposition was not what they had had in mind at that time. Historians who want to trash States’ rights and the South Carolina resistance to the tariff during 1828—1833 lean heavily on Madison’s somewhat vague statements. Self-evidently, Madison contradicted himself, as he did quite often throughout his career. Unlike Jefferson, he was a superficial and inconsistent thinker who often swung from one side to the other. (That is why his pretentious speculations in The Federalist, which, by his own admission, have absolutely no constitutional authority whatsoever, are the favourite text of third string “constitutional lawyers” and would-be “political philosophers.”)

We do not have to wonder what Jefferson in his post-presidential years thought about State interposition. It is not in the least a mystery, although it is something of a secret since “scholars” have assiduously avoided exposure of the relevant documents, which are not easy to find. In 1825, the day after his last Christmas in this earthly realm, Jefferson wrote to William Branch Giles, former Senator from Virginia and stalwart Jeffersonian. He shared Giles’s concerns about the state of federal affairs. “I see, as you do, and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the federal branch of the government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the States, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic; and that, too, by constructions which, if legitimate, leave no limits to their powers.”

The minority President John Quincy Adams was pushing a large program of federal expenditures and expanded powers. Adams and his Congressional allies, Jefferson said, for an example, had construed the delegated power to establish post roads into a power to cut down mountains and dig canals. The old, evil program of the Northeastern “monarchists” to enrich themselves off the earnings of the agriculturalists was once again in the saddle. Reason and argument were no good in such a situation. “You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns” in the Capitol.

The South might well be forced into a choice between “the dissolution of the Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers. Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation.” However, not yet. “But in the meanwhile, the States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; to denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms, to protest them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments . . . .”

Jefferson mentioned that he had written a letter to Giles on Christmas about important matters, of which Giles “will be free to make use what you please.” I have not found this letter, but it may have something to do with a document Jefferson wrote out on December 24, which he titled “The Solemn Declaration and Protest of the Citizens of Virginia on the Principles of the Constitution of the United States of America and the Violation of Them.” It seems to have been intended for the use of Jefferson’s neighbours in the grand jury of Albemarle County to begin a program for Virginia once more to interpose, against Congress’s usurpation in its “internal improvements” expenditures.

Just three years after Jefferson wrote this, another Vice-President of the United States, at the request of his State, drafted a “South Carolina Exposition,” which described the illegality and injustice of the protective tariff and the proper remedy for it: State interposition upon “The Principles of 1798.” This “Exposition” was approved and broadcast to the world by the legislature of South Carolina, along with a “Protest.” The usual clamour of rent-seekers and petty political operators was raised, claiming, among other things, that Jefferson had not written the Kentucky Resolutions. In 1831 Jefferson’s son-in-law produced the draft in the great man’s own hand.

[There was so much demagoguery broadcast by the opponents of nullification and the shoddy historians who repeat their propaganda, that it is worth saying something about the roles of Jefferson and Calhoun as drafters of the Kentucky Resolutions and the South Carolina Exposition. Jefferson, as we have noted, did not publicly acknowledge his authorship. Calhoun's authorship of the Exposition was characterised as an evil, secretive political operation. This propaganda is designed by and for people who can think only in terms of politicians and parties instead of principles and are ignorant of the ethics of republican virtue that influenced many Americans before Lincoln. Authorship was not acknowledged because it was desired that the statements be understood as the voice of the people of the State, not mischaracterised as merely the position of a national politician.]

In a later generation, another minority president seemingly destroyed forever the constitutional role of the States by declaring the open, democratic, deliberative acts of fourteen States to be only “combinations” of criminals who refused to obey him. Lincoln made that stick by a brutal war of conquest that did not “preserve the Union” but changed the Union into a central state with no limits to its power. Those who hope to revive a constitutional role for the States as counters to the present U.S. Empire, must hope to make the States once more into self-conscious, viable polities who have the political will to enact nullification and stand by it.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor. Now that he is no longer a professor of history he can at last be a real historian. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

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A: I think the question of the impact of the protective tariff on South Carolina is the wrong question to ask. It is something of a diversionary tactic, for reasons I will try to explain below.

The questions to ask about that period of American history are 1) was the protective tariff just?; 2) was it good policy?; 3) was it constitutional?. A believer in free markets and constitutionally limited government can only give a resounding NO to all these questions.

It was not just South Carolina that objected to the tariff. From the earliest national period John Taylor’s writings and John Randolph’s speeches, along with many other Southern spokesman, were eloquent and firm on the unjustness of the “protective” tariff. From 1824 on, every Southern legislature strongly condemned the tariff. The only difference was that only South Carolina was willing to go to the extent of actual nullification. This was not because South Carolina had suffered any more than others, but because South Carolina was the only State in which decisions could be made without the input of national party leaders who wanted to avoid hard issues.

From 1824 on it was apparent that the manufacturers intended a high and permanent system of tariffs, which had not been obvious before, when tariffs had been thought of as revenue measures with perhaps “incidental” protection. The term “lobbyists” was first used in America in the 1820s for the agents of the New England/Pennsylvania manufacturers who began to haunt the legislative halls and hold out inducements to congressmen. The acts of 1828 and 1832 were blatant examples of log-rolling rather than policy decisions. The latter was also deceptively presented by the Jackson/Van Buren forces as a remedy to tariff opponents.

It was not only the South that vigorously opposed the tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The Northern free market men like William Gouge and Condy Raguet exposed the tariff and approved South Carolina’s action, and public meetings of Northern merchants and craftsmen denounced the protective tariff as did Democratic conventions in many Northern States at that time and later.

Historians have tried with considerable success to divert the question to an emphasis on South Carolina. The hidden assumption is that the tariff policy is so self-evidently good that there is something peculiar about South Carolina to explain the strong opposition. It must be exhausted soil and declining prosperity (or more recently fears over slavery) that drove South Carolinians to blame their problems on others. This is just a transmission of the claims of the tariffites’ propaganda of the time. New Englanders, then as now, were extremely self-centered and self-righteous. They said in Congress that the South’s economic problems were because Southerners were, unlike them, lazy and unproductive. (Calhoun pointed out that Southerners produced almost all of the country’s foreign trade in an open market while those who complained of Southern lack of enterprise enjoyed a protected domestic market.) Many New England spokesmen said that opposition to such a self-evidently good policy was itself treason. Not nullification, mind you, but opposition to the protective tariff was in itself declared to be treasonous. The historians who concentrate on “the effects on South Carolina” work from a basic assumption that Southerners are too stupid to know their own real interests, are always wrong and deceptive in their politics, and are naturally inclined to be traitors.

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So, to approach the question of the tariff as an issue of the peculiarities of South Carolina is a diversion from the larger question of the impact of the tariff on the American economy as a whole. How can any freemarketeer doubt that the impact was unjust? Even more so because it not only benefited one group of people, but it also, on phony grounds of patriotism, diverted wealth from the South to certain interests in the North in a government that was supposed to benefit all parts of the Union. It was this (far more than the slavery issue) that drove Southerners to begin to question the value of the Union. Was the North to get all the benefits and the South to bear all the burdens?

What was the impact of the tariffs on South Carolina? This is an empirical question that, like any complicated situation, can be argued all sorts of ways. It would seem to be axiomatic to advocates of free markets that a government policy that artificially raises the costs of goods for the benefit of a particular interest is harmful. But in a sense that is beside the point. What was the economic effect of the Tea Tax on the American colonists in 1775? The point was that it was an unfair imposition based on an exercise of doubted power.

You can get a good overview of the Southern case from the section on Free Trade in my The Essential Calhoun, especially Calhoun’s speech on the tariff of 1842. Also my article on “Free Trade…” in the Genovese festschrift, Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Robert Paquette.

Q. How about the constitutional question — is there really no good constitutional argument on behalf of tariffs for protection?

A. There is no question that the Constitution gave certain taxing powers for the purpose of providing the general government with a source of support. The tax on imports was the best way to do this. It was paid by the consumer to the degree of consumption of imported goods, largely luxury items or highly specialized materials and equipment. Equally there is no question that a protective tariff is anti-revenue — using a law for a different purpose than that for which the power had been granted. The Supreme Court held that it was a political question, that it could not look beneath the law itself to its intentions or effects. In the Philadelphia Convention, proposals that the new federal government have the power to lay protective tariffs and to charter corporations failed to carry. As Tom DiLorenzo has recently reminded us, the Hamiltonians cavalierly disregarded the limits on federal power in both these cases in pursuit of their mercantilist, mimic England, agenda. It is perhaps also worth pointing out in this connection that the Constitution absolutely forbade any tax on exports.

Q. And finally, do you believe nullification would have to involve convening a special convention of the people, or could it conceivably be carried out by a state legislature?

A. The South Carolina nullification of 1832 was enacted by a convention of the people especially called for the purpose. By the South Carolina constitution such a convention could only be called by a three/fourths majority of both houses of the legislature. The South Carolinians wanted to make it clear that the act was a high constitutional one — based on the primary sovereignty of the people — like the acts that had made the State independent in 1775 and had ratified the Constitution in 1788. However, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, which laid out the power and right of state interposition against unconstitutional federal acts, were done by the legislatures.

A couple more points. “Nullification” was a derogatory, negative-sounding term invented by the opponents of the right. The proper name is State Interposition.

The historians tell us that Nullification of the tariff by South Carolina failed and federal supremacy was vindicated. That is not quite the truth. One can make a good case that it was a success. The historians note Jackson’s proclamation against nullification but they never mention that there was a great outpouring of public opinion against Jackson’s proclamation. The proclamation raised the possibility of the coercion of the people of a State by the federal government. Many people, North and South, were more alarmed by that than they were disturbed by nullification. (By the way, Webster DID NOT win the Webster-Hayne Debate. In the Senate, the press, and public opinion, Webster was the clear loser).

Nullification was a success. To defuse the crisis, Congress in 1833 passed the Compromise Tariff by which the tariff would come down by stages over the next ten years after which it would be at a revenue-only. Not bad for a small State against the world. True, the Whigs sought to forget and violate the compromise in 1842 but they did not entirely succeed and the most free-trade tariff in our history was passed in 1846. This would not have happened if it had not been for the action of “our gallant little State.”

Q: What is the proper reply to the states which, objecting to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, cited Article III, Section 2 as evidence that the Supreme Court is indeed the arbiter for disputes of power between the federal government and the states?

A: The States that took the position you cite were those deeply invested in Federalist hegemony — devoted to constructing a strong federal judiciary to control what they regarded as the evil and unenlightened masses. They said so very plainly. Was not this position thoroughly repudiated in the Kentucky and Virginia documents themselves, followed immediately by the triumph of the “Principles of 1798″ party in the elections?

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] was a professor of history but is recovering nicely, thank you. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

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This is a take-home quiz. Please grade yourself.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] was a professor of history but is recovering nicely, thank you. His most recent book is The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

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For the first time in a half century and long past due, serious people are beginning to search for ways that the famous "checks and balances" of the American constitutional order might be invoked against a regime which recognizes no limits to its power. Such a search leads naturally to a new look at accepted history and "law." Prof. Wood, whose knowledge of the primary documents of early American history is astounding and incomparable, has marshaled overwhelming evidence on the matter.

There is not the least doubt in the mind of any HONEST person who has studied the record, that the preponderance of people who framed and ratified the Constitution intended to form a more perfect Union "for the United States of America," not to establish a United State, a sovereign national power. This understanding was reemphasized in the first Ten Amendments, clearly stipulated restrictions on the powers of the central apparatus. The understanding was sealed in concrete, so people mistakenly believed, when Jefferson and his party took office on "the principles of 1798," the unequivocal declarations by Virginia and Kentucky of their right to block acts of the central government that exceeded its delegated powers.

True, there was an element among the Founders who wanted an unchecked central power. Like every other push for more centralized power since, the primary motive of the Hamiltonians was rent-seeking. But, of course, rent-seekers always portray their agenda as essential for some good purpose — general prosperity, equality, national defense, or some other alleged social good. But so strong was the allegiance to a confederal understanding of the Constitutional regime, that the central power men had to lie about their intentions. In power Hamilton began to push actions that he had argued in the deceitful polemic, The Federalist, that the central government would never, ever do.

Professor Wood’s evidence is not likely to influence academic historians, political scientists, and law professors. With a few exceptions they are not interested in evidence, only in fashion. False and even childishly superficial arguments about our history and the Constitution flourish today and have long done so. The assertion that Americans’ "original intentions" were a centralized state has always rested upon coercion, chutzpah, and lies. The most egregious being when Lincoln declared the deliberate, open, democratic, and constitutional acts of secession of the Southern states to be mere "combinations" of criminals too numerous to be arrested by the marshals.

The centralists made a great rhetorical coup when they formed the argument so that their version of the Constitution seems the natural, unquestionable one, and the position of the critics is merely "a compact theory" made up after the fact by bad people for evil purposes. Wood’s evidence makes it clear that the opposite was the case. It was the centralists who made up theory post facto against established understanding. Their theory was bolstered by semantics and false history. James Madison was not the "Father of the Constitution" but a weaselly trimmer who constantly contradicted himself. Which is why he is the hero of every bad historian, "political philosopher," and tyrannical judge in the land. Daniel Webster did NOT win the famous debate with Robert Hayne of South Carolina on State rights. In the Senate and in public opinion Webster was the loser. He became the winner only by subsequent propaganda. South Carolina’s bold nullification of the tariff in 1832, against nearly the entire American establishment, is always stated by the historians to be a failure. But it accomplished its purpose — to bring down the rate of taxation.

There is a large American anti-centralist literature, entirely persuasive to anyone who will study it, which of course eliminates most American "scholars." Jefferson, Randolph of Roanoke, Taylor of Caroline, William Rawle, St. George Tucker, John C. Calhoun, Albert T. Bledsoe, Alexander Stephens, and the 20th century work of James J. Kilpatrick recently discussed here all make an irrefutable case. But never has the evidence been so massively gathered and deployed as in Wood’s Nullification: A Constitutional History. He shows an unequaled knowledge of the primary sources and of historians and their errors.

It is good to have this ammunition in our arsenal. An interest in devolution has been modestly flourishing and, it would appear, steadily increasing in recent years. Not only the Tenth Amendment resolutions, but the Free Vermont Republic, the Middlebury Institute, the Abbeville Institute, the Southern National Congress, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and other groups have achieved what was only a short time ago unthinkable — a serious discussion of checking and even escaping from the jaws of Leviathan by asserting the long dormant power of the people of the States — the multiple sovereigns who created the United States and gave it all the legitimacy that it has. When you speak of secession, devolution, nullification these days you no longer receive derisive hoots but rather looks of serious if puzzled interest.

One of the greatest of American sages and most effective critics of centralized power, John Taylor of Caroline, wrote that States do not have rights. People have rights. States are instruments by which the people may assert their rights against usurpers and oppressors. Little noticed in the national media, the governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, has been embattled with the federal power and the interest groups of his own State. He is insisting that any money received from the federal "stimulus" bounty be used to pay off debt rather than be poured down the black hole of public "education." The controversy is at this writing not settled, and Governor Sanford will probably lose. But it is a start.

Meanwhile, promoters of 10th Amendment resolutions need to understand that the 10th Amendment does not enforce itself. Nor will it ever be recognized by any of the three branches of the central apparatus or existing political parties. It will have to be enforced by the people of the States whose freedom it was intended to protect.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] was a professor of history but is recovering nicely, thank you. His most recent book is Defending Dixie.

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As the recent election indicates, Change is very much in the air these days. Here are a few modest proposals to fulfill this new spirit:

Having proved that a person of color can be elected to the highest office, President Obama announces that in the interest of racial reconciliation he will seek repeal of discriminatory and divisive affirmative action policies.

Now that the taxpayers are responsible for the welfare of the banks, Congress decides it is only fair to distribute stock in the banks to the taxpayers so they may share in the ownership and profits.

Shortly after leaving office, President Bush apologizes to the American people for the evils caused by his ignorance and arrogance. He promises to devote his fortune to caring for disabled veterans of the Iraq war and improving job opportunities for native-born Americans.

California declares itself a nation independent of the government of the U.S., announcing that its economic, demographic, and cultural characteristics and its immense population justifies becoming its own nation. The US government agrees, citing the fundamental American principle that governments rest on the consent of the governed. Mexico protests, indicating that California is more valuable to its rulers as a part of the US than as an independent country.

Israel extends full citizenship to its Palestinian inhabitants and arranges compensation for their seized property. A new Israeli administration announces that it will no longer accept American aid but will cooperate with other states in its region in defense and economic development. An Israeli peace and friendship delegation tours the United States expressing thanks for long-standing support for their country. Worldwide terrorism subsides dramatically.

The US and Russia announce friendship and cooperation on the principle that their cooperation is essential to the defense of Western civilization. They jointly guarantee the security of Iran and the orderly free market flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. The Muslim holy places are put under demilitarized international protection.

President Obama expresses regret that American selfishness has caused a brain drain from countries that badly need skilled people. Immigrants from such countries — doctors, scientists, and engineers — will be returned where they can help their own people.

In recognition that the American educational system disgracefully lags behind other developed countries, all federal laws, regulations and subsidies regarding education are repealed. Parents of children under 18 are given large tax deductions.

In belated realization that free trade in goods is a benefit to all, all trade treaties and regulations are abolished except those necessary for health, safety, and national defense. It is made clear, however, that persons are not goods to be traded internationally.

President Obama declares that America is exhausting itself in maintaining a pointless worldwide empire. He begins a phased withdrawal of all US forces outside the western hemisphere. Europe and Japan enthusiastically embrace the opportunity of providing for their own defense. The North Korean Communist leaders are driven out by the people and the North Korea/South Korea border goes the way of the Berlin Wall.

Congress resolves that wide participation is necessary for democracy. With only a few dissidents from New York and Massachusetts, the Senators and Representatives pledge to limit themselves to two terms.

By the way, don’t hold you breath.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor of history. His most recent book is Defending Dixie.

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Our foremost newsmagazine, TIME, and our foremost news network, CNN, have gathered their resources to present to the world a learned disquisition on "America’s Worst Vice Presidents." Professor Thomas DiLorenzo has already revealed the idiocy of TIME’s history in regard to John C. Calhoun, picked as the third worst VP. ("Time’s Comic Book History," LewRockwell.com, August 26.) He shows that writer Tiffany Sharples is utterly clueless about the context of the times and the history of abolitionism and nullification.

But this venture in historical enlightenment is even worse than that. Why in the world should VPs be rated at all? By what criteria does one identify a "good" or a "bad" Vice-President? Our fearless historians have not even considered this question. For instance, Elbridge Gerry is announced to be the second worst VP, not for anything he did as VP, which was nothing, but because his name got attached, somewhat unfairly, to "gerrymandering." In fact, Gerry was an admirable Anti-federalist and Jeffersonian, one of the few Massachusetts leaders to defy the nasty centralist establishment of that State. Of course, those perennial Presidential ratings are equally stupid. Andrew Jackson was a great man but not a great President. One can imagine a great President who was not a great person. And greatness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, only more so.

John C. Calhoun was a great Vice-President if there ever was such a thing. He broke tie votes to defeat tariff provisions and "internal improvements" boondoggles. He absolutely refused to be dominated by either of the Presidents of his time, and he resigned when he had better things to do.

It gets worser and worser. The whole ridiculous undertaking is totally anachronistic in that it fails to apprehend that the office of Vice-President has changed in its significance over time.

The conception of 2000 is foolishly applied to a very different world and political system of 1800 (or 1900). In the Constitution the Vice-President has only the duty to preside over the Senate, allowed to vote only to break a tie, and to fill in if the President dies. For a long time VPs did nothing much and were not thought much about. The first time a President died in office, many people considered that John Tyler was not President but merely an "Acting President."

Prior to the 20th century only one Vice-President ever became President except by death of a President. Secretaries of State were thought of as more Presidential material than VPs. The VP was not regarded as an "Assistant President." That became the case only in the 1950s, when, because of the atomic age and two Eisenhower heart attacks, attention began to be focused on the importance of a Vice-President, and Nixon was able to parlay that attention into a Presidential nomination. And only in very recent years has any VP achieved the power of Dick Cheney or has the candidate been handpicked by a Presidential nominee even before the convention.

So it is really quite stupid to evaluate 19th-century VPs by 21st-century notions.

Poor Tiffany repeats the grade school boiler-plate that John C. Calhoun was Vice-President "under" J.Q. Adams and Jackson. Actually, Calhoun was "under" nobody. In 1824 he was elected Vice-President with a large majority, twice as many electoral votes as Adams, a minority candidate who only became President because of a "corrupt bargain" when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives.

And Ms. Tiffany tells us that Calhoun fell out with Adams’s successor Jackson because Calhoun "seemed to forget the cardinal rule of the second-most powerful job in the land — keep your boss happy — and his relationship with Jackson hit the rocks over Calhoun’s decision to ostracize a Washington woman accused of adultery." Every word of this passage is either a falsehood or a complete anachronism. Jackson was not Calhoun’s boss, though Calhoun as Secretary of War had once been General Jackson’s boss. Calhoun did not have the "second most powerful job in the land." Calhoun made no decision to ostracize the adulterous woman, Peggy Eaton. Such action was a matter for ladies and the decision to ostracize (which was quite justified) had already been made by the ladies of Washington, including Jackson’s own niece and hostess, before Calhoun, or Mrs. Calhoun, even got to town. (Don’t get me started on the historians who continue to present as history a century-and-a half-old political demagoguery.)

TIME’s absurdities would scarcely even be worth notice, except for this. Ms. Tiffany probably learned all this in her history classes at Sarah Lawrence or wherever. Every day hundreds of thousands of college students are taught such ignorant and malicious lies and such a childish present-centered idea of history. Every week "scholarly" books are published that reflect the same quality of thought and knowledge. Their authors often appear on CNN to discuss their works.

Aaron Burr is picked as the worst VP. I disagree strenuously. It ought to be Cheney. After all, when Burr shot somebody, he had a good reason.

Clyde Wilson [send him mail], a recovering professor of history, is thought to know something about John C. Calhoun. His most recent book is Defending Dixie.

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Washington area residents should take caution. It will soon be January and Congress will be back in town. It is a good idea to lock up your daughters and your portable valuables. Come to think of it, this is the Amerkun Congress. Better keep an eye on your livestock and little boys, too.

Our youthful Emperor Georgie II will have to do without some of his wisest counselors for the time being. Lady Hillary and Sheik Obama are traveling on important government business. However, trusted advisors Lady Condolease and the Prime Minister, Richard, Lord Blackwater, are, as always, at the Emperor’s side. And Prince Teddy in the Senate will lead for the administration on increased immigration, universal health care, the problem of nuckler weapons, and other vital issues of Global Democratic Capitalism.

In the interest of balanced reporting, we note that one of our earlier reports has been officially denied. According to a source close to the matter, it is not true that Lady Hillary is often privately referred to by her retainers as "Lady Macbeth."

You may be sure that our noble congresspersons will soon be devoting their individual and collective wisdom and experince to the guidance of the nation in these troubled times: the next suitcase full of unmarked bills, sweet contracts for the brother-in-law, getting on the fact-finding cruise to Aruba or Bangkok, the next opportunity to hit on a society slut or a page boy, and if possible a photo-op with some Legionaires returned from the Mesopotamian front. Not any of the disabled or disfigred ones though.

Dr. Wilson’s [send him mail] most recent book is Defending Dixie.

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Our late friend Murray Rothbard used to point out to those who scoffed at "conspiracy theories" that history is indeed full of real conspiracies, and that often conspiracy provides a more satisfactory explanation for an event than the "lone nut theory" that is popular with government spokespersons.

The continuing drumbeat of speculation that 9/11 may have been a U.S. government "black ops" mission, a charge coming from what seems to be a respectable minority of seemingly informed observers, tells us much about the sad condition of the American polity.

I am inclined to think that none of us can possibly have enough information to know the full truth about 9/11. We will not have such information for years, very possibly never. Why, we still don’t know the full truth about the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. In my always humble opinion, the incompetence demonstrated by our rulers before, during, and after 9/11 would be alone enough to bring down any government, without the need for revelations of complicity — if we had a responsible democratic regime.

I am not a “conspiracy theorist,” but, like any old newspaperman, I am a skeptic. In the years of my misspent youth as a reporter I saw police chiefs, mayors, newspaper executives, and other dignitaries lie and distort and suppress the truth. I am inclined to suspect that such is even more likely among the feds, for whom the stakes are much greater.

Is the U.S. government capable of such an atrocity? I take this to be true: the politicians who wield the immense powers of the U.S. government will murder Americans if it serves their agenda and they can get away with. To think otherwise is to take an excessively nave attitude toward Power. Those politicians have a lifetime record of self-serving and lack of moral principle — else they would not be where they are. Power corrupts. Power can only be checked by counter Power. The U.S. government exercises much power that is unchecked, unresponsible, and clandestine. This has been habitual and institutionalized at least since World War II.

Can we judge that the official government story of what happened on 9/11 is unreliable?

We know that politicians lied about the sinking of the "Maine," Pearl Harbour, the Gulf of Tonkin, Waco, and Iraqi WMD. This administration has engaged in more systematic and frequent deception of the public perhaps than any other in recent times. And has been successful at it because the public has never been more ignorant and the media more craven.

Yes, thoughtful citizens have every reason to suspect some self-serving deception in the government story, though this does not necessarily imply actual complicity in the atrocities. It might imply a cover-up of incompetence, irresponsibility, negligence, and fecklessness in high places. The strongest argument against the black ops theory, it seems to me, is that such an accomplishment is beyond the imagination and the competence of the politicians in power.

The most important point here is that Power is by its nature dangerous, acquisitive, and corrupting and must always be watched and questioned by people who wish to retain their freedom. This we have nearly forgotten, but was a watchword to our Founding Fathers. So, let’s keep on doubting and challenging official “truth.”

Dr. Wilson’s [send him mail] most recent book is Defending Dixie.

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By now everyone who cares (and many who don’t) knows about the collision between the honourable Ron Paul and the vulgar demagogue Giuliani at the Republican presidential candidates "debate" in South Carolina. (These events are not really debates at all but more like joint press conferences.) Mr. Paul raised the question of whether Americans might be targets for terrorists in part because of actions of the U.S. government. The grandstanding New Yorker demanded a retraction and apology. How could anyone be allowed to doubt that everything the U.S. government has done has always been noble and good? How could anyone think that foreigners could ever have cause to hate us except for perverse resentment of our very goodness?

When the South Carolina audience applauded Giuliani’s tantrum I was not surprised at all, but felt a sting of shame. How far Calhoun’s “gallant little State” has fallen. There is no excuse for my State, but I can perhaps offer some explanation in expiation.

Remember that since 1965 our elections have been controlled by commissars from the U.S. Justice Department — an oppression carried by the votes (several times repeated) of "conservative" Republicans. One of the highest comedic points of 20th century American politics came in the mid-sixties when the windbag Republican leader, Senator Dirksen of Illinois, announced his support for the second Reconstruction of the South. It seems that during a lonely midnight stroll in the deserted Capitol, the ghost of Abraham Lincoln appeared to the Senator and instructed him how to vote.

A great deal of national force has been exerted in the last half century to make Dixie give up its peculiarities and join the American mainstream. It seems to have worked only too well.

Then too, our State has been the final destination of many, many people from elsewhere. In fact, we seem to have replaced Florida as the favourite resting place for well-heeled persons from colder climes. Half our people, nearly, are from out-of-state — which means that even a higher percentage of Republicans are and a yet higher percentage of the Republican donors likely to be invited to such events. Many of our new citizens are fine folks, but it is a sad fact that the Democrats, white and black, are more native-born than the Republicans.

Further in our defense, I might point out that Southerners came out of Reconstruction as the stepchildren and whipping boys of a corrupt and cynical national politics. The only way to get ahead was to beat the crooks at their own game — ergo, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. And thus the most important cause of the present degradation of South Carolina: the evil legacy of Strom Thurmond. Thurmond’s masterpiece of a self-centered career left us with the simple visceral reflex that politics consists entirely of two things: booty and patriotism, the latter being defined by support for the military. Unlike John C. Calhoun, no present-day South Carolina politician would ever leave the side with the patronage to dispense merely on a matter of principle or policy.

Grandmother, who was always right, said you should always have something good to say about people, even if you could not avoid calling attention to their shortcomings. To their credit, I think my Carolinians are motivated by a basically healthy instinct of loyalty. Some bad guys hurt us. Honour requires that we hurt them back. Under such circumstances, it is bad form to criticize the home team, especially if there is a losing season because the coach is something of a dunce.

We should never underestimate the power of inertia and cultural lag in public life. Most folks had their formative political experiences in the Vietnam era when opposition to the war usually looked like disloyalty in word and deed. (The real reasons for opposing the war made little impact on the people at large at the time.) The trouble with such virtue, of course, is that unguided by intelligence it can attach itself to very unworthy objects. To sum up, my people, alas, suffer from the same maladies that are epidemic among Americans in general — shallow and myopic perspective due to the scarcity of intelligent, honest, and far-sighted leadership.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] has always tended to agree with Burt Reynolds in one of his movies, when he remarked of the local crime boss that he was a murderer, a thief, and a pervert, but worst of all he was from out-of-state.

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The History Channel’s recent presentation of "Sherman’s March" has been rightly drawing a lot of criticism from those of us who care about such things. In theory, historical events should become clearer as time passes and the controversies they involved grow less heated. But that is not the case in regard to the War to Prevent Southern Independence — because the myth of a benevolent and righteous crusade against evil and its martyred saint is the essential base of American state worship. The myth also seems to be a deeply felt emotional necessity for the self-love of millions of Americans.

This TV docudrama is very peculiar. A whole team of third-string, half-baked carpetbagger "historians" of the type that now staff all Southern universities are presented to make the best possible case for the glory, brilliance, justice, and benevolence of Sherman’s operations in Georgia and the Carolinas in the winter of 1864—65. The peculiarity is that much of the actual evidence that manages to come through contradicts the rationale that is presented. Historians used to at least pretend to dig into the primary sources and examine all the evidence before making judgments, but now they are rewarded by how well they cherry pick bits to support the already established line.

Our scholars give us the official story, dressed up and paraded yet again.

Sherman’s March was a great military feat. A lie. An army of 60,000 men marched through territory undefended except for a few thousand cavalry and home guards. Even this opposition gave Sherman trouble whenever it became active. And he was checked whenever he met a real Confederate force, even one greatly outnumbered.

Sherman’s army only seized food on its march because of necessity and in keeping with recognized rules of foraging. A stupendous lie. One does not need to look at a single Southern commentary but only at the words of Sherman and thousands of his men. The expedition was deliberately intended and carried out as a campaign of terrorism against the noncombatant population. The recognized rules of foraging did not involve the wholesale burning of dwellings, schools, and churches, destruction of crops and livestock, theft of everything portable of value, molestation of women, brutality toward old men, boys, and slaves, both male and female. This had been federal practice since the first day of the war but had not been previously as systematized. But, Golly, Sherman should not be criticized for burning Atlanta. He actually destroyed only a third of it!

Sherman’s army brought benevolent emancipation to grateful slaves. A lie. Again, one need not consult a single Southern source to establish beyond a doubt that Sherman and his men overwhelmingly despised the black population of the South and preyed upon them as readily as upon white women and children. If it had been a question of being there to free the slaves they would have all gone home.

Any atrocities that Sherman ordered or allowed were only just retaliation against Southerners, because the Southerners for some unaccountable reason, perhaps their natural depravity, were "vicious." This lie speaks for itself.

The deliberate sack and destruction of Columbia, after it had been peacefully surrendered, is no big deal and Southerners are emotional and deluded to resent it. This only works if you start with the assumption that Southerners are inferior beings and have no right to resent anything their betters do to them.

Much more could be said. But let’s finish by saying that it is a bad cause that has to be defended by lies. And it can only be defended by lies, then and now. Those who want to understand the facts have an invaluable new source, just published last week by Pelican Press: Walter Brian Cisco’s War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, a concise and factual survey of a large subject, such as has long been needed.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] was a professor of history, but is recovering nicely.

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This year is Robert E. Lee’s bicentennial — the 200th anniversary of his birth. Nothing better illustrates the swift and vicious descent of Political Correctness upon American history and symbols than the shadow that has, in just the last few years, been thrown over a man regarded (rightly) for well over a century as among the greatest of Americans.

Even before the War to Prevent Southern Independence had ended, his Northern enemies were claiming Lee as a prized exhibit of America’s contribution to the world. (As they also were claiming his great lieutenant, "Stonewall" Jackson.) Such a claim could hardly be avoided since the entirety of the civilized world, watching the American bloodbath with interest, had already made that judgment. The British military commentator, Viscount Wolsely, expressed much international opinion when he wrote of Lee: "He is stamped upon my memory as being apart and superior to all others in every way."

Lee was the son of a renowned general in the Revolution, nephew of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and husband of Martha Washington’s granddaughter. His last five years were spent as a non-citizen with life and liberty at the mercy of the bounders and petty tyrants who had come exercise the power of the United States. This he endured with exemplary Christian fortitude and charity. Lee was an audacious military genius and inspired leader of men, called by Churchill the greatest captain of the English-speaking peoples, but his fame rests even more upon his character. No American leader has ever set a higher example in peace and war of what the Western world used to understand as a Christian gentleman. When the “traitor” died in 1870, the New York Herald editorialized: “Here in the North we . . .have claimed him as one of ourselves. . . have extolled his virtue as reflecting upon us — for Robert E. Lee was an American, and the great nation which gave him birth would be today unworthy of such a son if she regarded him lightly.”

That judgment had become pervasive national opinion by 1907, when Charles Francis Adams Jr., the only Adams to have seen active service in the war, celebrated Lee in a speech in Boston and other cities called “Lee the American.” Adams admitted that the Constitutional position of Lee’s cause had been correct (but had to be defeated, he claimed, because it stood in the way of national progress and greatness). More recently President Truman picked a large equestrian portrait of Lee for the lobby of his Presidential library and President Eisenhower went out of his way to vindicate admiration for Lee against complaints that he was honouring a “traitor.” They were merely expressing mainstream American sentiment.

How the times have changed — and suddenly. The official doctrine of the MSI (Mainstream Intellectuals) now condemns Lee as a traitor and oath-violator and his cause as little better than Hitler’s. This interpretation rests upon either a deliberate or a vastly ignorant misinterpretation of everything important in American history. The orchestrated blackening of Lee and his cause exhibits the triumph of Marxist categories in American historiography and public discussion. The War to Prevent Southern Independence has become not a great, tragic, historic drama of Americans, but a matter of the destruction and continued demonization of a “class enemy.” This now semi-official view warps the understanding not only of The War but of all of American history — which is its purpose.

A powerful answer to the demonization of Lee and the distortion of American history will be given in a program scheduled for Arlington, Virginia, on Saturday April 28, not far from the Washington-Lee home illegally seized and turned into a cemetery by the U.S. government. The program, called “Lee: Hero or Traitor?” will involve some of the same sponsors and speakers who participated in the immensely successful “Lincoln Reconsidered” conference in Richmond in 2003. It will be an unprecedented exploration of Lee and his cause, which Murray Rothbard called the last of America’s just wars. Thomas DiLorenzo, Donald Livingston, Kent Masterson Brown, John J. Dwyer, Thomas Moore, Robert Krick, and Yours Truly will explore “Lee and Liberty,” “Lee and Slavery,” “Lee and the True Nature of the Union,” “Lee’s Military Genius,” “Lee as Man and Christian,” and “Lee’s Relevance Today.” A certain Congressman from Texas whose name is quite familiar to readers of this site is expected also to participate if his schedule allows.

Full details can be accessed and reservations made at 1-800-MY SOUTH or at scv.org.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor of history.

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The historians have put out another one of those ratings of Presidents — the great, the near great, etc. I always hoped that I would be asked to participate in that survey so I could start a boomlet for the truly greatest — John Tyler. But, alas, I was never asked. My disappointment has been assuaged, however, on seeing that LewRockwell.com has drawn attention once more to the important book Reassessing the Presidency, edited by John V. Denson. This book puts the subject into proper perspective.

Of course, the greatest Presidents, according to the Mainstream Intelligentsia (MSI), are those who grew the federal government the most and who exercised the most dictatorial power — that being their definition of greatness. The whole enterprise of such ratings has always seemed fishy to me. What do we mean, for instance, by Great? Genghis Kahn, Hitler, and Mao were great — in the sense that they made a great impact on history. Being Great in history is not necessarily a good thing. And greatness is surely a matter of perspective. Many may have profited from the doings of a great President, but there are also many who suffered. I doubt if very many of the 600,000 Americans who died in the War to Prevent Southern Independence would be all that enthusiastic about the greatness of Honest Abe Lincoln if they were allowed to vote.

As John Denson has written, the Presidency is a mirror of the progressive loss of freedom that has marked the history of the United States. The air is full of claptrap about presidential legacies. It is full of the declarations of fools that the current occupant of the executive mansion in the federal city is my president and our president, and our commander-in-chief.

The Founders of the American Union would have regarded all this as a sign of servility. In our worse times it is fearfully portentous of the spread of Fhrer worship. Constitutionally, the President is not the commander-in-chief of the country. He is not even the commander-in-chief of the government. He is merely the commander-in-chief (operations director) of the armed forces. And, constitutionally, the armed forces exist only as created by the Congress which must re-authorize their funding every two years.

Why does a President need a legacy? Isn’t it legacy enough that he did his job — that he obeyed and executed the laws honestly and competently and avoided getting the country into any unnecessary trouble? He was not supposed to be an object of worship, but simply a citizen who was to exercise power for a stated time and then retire once more to the body of the people.

When the MSI blather on about presidential legacies and presidential greatness, they reveal, among other things, their historical ignorance. The idea of presidential "greatness" hardly existed before Lincoln and really did not get a firm hold over national discourse until Teddy Roosevelt. Further, they fail to understand the reversal of values that has taken place. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and even Andrew Jackson became president because they were great men; they were not great men because they became president or even necessarily great Presidents. Whereas their successors usually owe their greatness only to their luck in being able to manipulate a corrupt system well enough to be elected.

The lower end of presidential performers, according to the utterly predictable historians of the MSI, is occupied by those who failed to exercise dictatorial power. This reveals how ignorant of American history they are and how disdainful of democracy and Constitutionalism.

The worst of all Presidents, we are told, was James Buchanan, who failed to use force against the South to quash secession in 1860—61. This only works if we accept two assumptions: 1) Southerners are nonpersons who should be killed by the government if they resist it; 2) the government is a power eternal and self-justifying without any reference to limitations or to the consent of the governed. And of course, these are things that the MSI assume without question and without even noticing.

But James Buchanan’s world was not like that. Southerners were not criminals to be suppressed but Americans and fellow citizens — indeed good fellow citizens who had always contributed loyally and mightily to the American Union. They had enacted secession in an open, democratic, and constitutionally-based manner. A great many Northerners, like Buchanan himself, believed that the South had just grievances even if it had acted too rashly. In Buchanan’s world neither the President nor the federal government enjoyed unlimited power — he had been nominated and elected by a party that had made state rights its centerpiece since the time of Jefferson. The President and the federal government were limited to the powers expressly delegated to them, which did not include the power to make war on legitimate state governments and private citizens. Further, the government was not an eternal self-justifying force but rested on the "consent of the governed" — such consent being the bedrock American principle.

As a practical matter, Buchanan was aware that there were as yet more Southern people and states within the Union than out of it. They were not eager to rush into secession nor were they willing to countenance a brutal war of conquest against the seceded states, which they rightly regarded as an unprecedented atrocity that would destroy the Union in the guise of preserving it — and all in the interest of the state capitalist agenda of certain Northern elements. Not to mention that half of the officers of the army, and the better half, had already resigned or were in agreement with the Southern states that had not yet departed. With the position of the upper South and of vast numbers of Northerners who did not wish for the horror of civil war, there was plenty of room for negotiation. The obstacle to peace was the Republican party and its leader, who was glorying in his rise to power even as a minority candidate.

The Republican leader called for the invasion and conquest of the South, pretending that seven states were merely combinations of lawbreakers to be suppressed. The upper South seceded, more than doubling the resources of the rebels, the border states were put into bloody play, and the minority president reached for greatness by a seizure of powers that was previously unthinkable to Americans. Lincoln, in his narrowness and inexperience, seemed to think that 75,000 men could crush the rebellion though it eventually took a million men. It was either the biggest mistake or the biggest crime in American history. Heaven save us from such Greatness.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is a recovering professor of history.

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I want to take a look at this strange institution we know as the Republican party and the course of its peculiar history in the American regime. The peculiar history both precedes and continues after Lincoln, although Lincoln is central to the story.

It is fairly easy to construct an ideological account of the Democratic party, what it has stood for and who it has represented, even though there has been at least one revolutionary change during its long history. I generalize broadly, because all major political parties since at least the early 19th century have most of the time sought to dilute their message to broaden their appeal and avoid ideological sharpness. But we can say of the Democratic party that through most of its history it was Jeffersonian — it stood for, at least in lip service, a limited federal government and laissez-faire economy, and it represented farmers and small businessmen, the South, the pioneer West, and to some extent the Northern working class. This identity for the most part even survived the War to Prevent Southern Independence. Clearly, the party in the 20th century came to represent a very different platform — social democracy as defined by the New Deal and the Great Society — and a considerably different constituency. In either case, onlookers have had a pretty good general impression of what the party stood for.

It is nearly impossible to construct a similar description of the Republican party. The party that elected Lincoln was pretty clear about some things, like the tariff, although it may have been less than honest about the reasons. It was obfuscatory about other things. Since Lincoln took power, it has been difficult to find a clear pattern in what the party has claimed to represent. The picture becomes even cloudier when you compare words and behaviour. This, I believe, is because its real agenda has not been such that it could be usefully acknowledged.

Apparently millions continue to harbor the strange delusion that the Republican party is the party of free enterprise, and, at least since the New Deal, the party of conservatism. In fact, the party is and always has been the party of state capitalism. That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence. By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government. The Republican party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favour labour unions or threaten Big Business. Consider that for a long time it was the party of high tariffs — when high tariffs benefited Northern big capital and oppressed the South and most of the population. Now it is the party of so-called “free trade” — because that is the policy that benefits Northern big capital, whatever it might cost the rest of us. In succession, Republicans presented opposite policies idealistically as good for America, while carefully avoiding discussion of exactly who it was good for.

There is nothing particularly surprising that there should be a party of state capitalism in the United States. And certainly nothing surprising in the necessity for such a party to present itself as something else. Put in terms the Founding Fathers would have understood, the interests Republicans serve are merely the court party — what Jefferson referred to as the tinsel aristocracy and John Taylor as the paper aristocracy. The American Revolution was a revolt of the country against the court. Jeffersonians understood that every political system divides between the great mass of unorganized folks who mind their own business — that, is, the country party — and the minority who hang around the court to manipulate the government finances and engineer government favours. It is much easier and quicker to get rich by finding a way into the treasury than by hard work. That is mostly what politics is about. Of course, schemes to plunder society through the government must never be seen as such. They must be powdered and perfumed to look like a public good.

Contrary to what we might hope, there was nothing in the New World to inhibit the formation of a court party. In fact, the immense riches of an undeveloped continent merely increased incentives for courtiers. The number of projects that could be imagined as worthy of government support was infinite. In America there were not even any firmly established institutions of credit and currency, control of which was always the quickest route to big riches. Neither was there anything in a democratic system to inhibit state capitalism. The great mass of the citizens could usually be circumvented by people whose fulltime job was lining their pockets by swindling the voters. Lincoln’s triumph is most realistically seen as the permanent victory of the court party, a victory that had been sought ever since Alexander Hamilton. The Lincoln regime eliminated all barriers to making the federal government into a machine to transfer money to those interests the party represented (and as many others as needed to be paid off to support the operation).

Hamilton had justified the government enriching his friends at no risk to themselves because “a public debt is a public blessing.” The Whigs sometimes argued that the paper issued by their banks was “the people’s money” and therefore morally superior as a currency to “government money.” Lincoln presented himself as a candidate for the presidency with the slogan “Vote Yourself a Farm!” Once the obstructionism of those troublesome Southerners was broken, ordinary folks could get themselves a farm for free out of the public lands. Some ordinary folks did get land — but most of the free land, millions of acres, went to government-connected corporations. Saving the Union, freeing the slaves but keeping them out of the North, and giving opportunity to the common people, when filtered through Lincoln’s masterful rhetoric, gave the party of Big Business a lock on the righteous vote for a long time to come.

The most consistent aspect of Republican party has been its role as the respectable party, without much attention to principles and policies. Its voters have been those who think of themselves as more respectable and more patriotic than the voters of the other party. What I am trying to describe is captured by the pejorative label the Republicans long used for their Democratic opponents. The Democrats were said to be the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," that is, of wastrels, Catholics, and Southerners. The bloody shirt was waved through decades in which the party definitely had an agenda, but one which was not described too frankly. There are plenty of good reasons for disliking liberals, but when the current Republican radio demagogues anathematize liberals they are merely appealing to the same vague feelings of superior virtue that fueled “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” The one attitude that Republicans have most consistently displayed is disdain for the South, because such an attitude has been always highly respectable and was the basis of their first rise to power. In their platform of 1900 they justified the slaughter then going on in the Philippines by likening the rebels there to the Southern traitors of earlier times who deserved death for the evil deed of resisting the best government on earth. Very recently, the national chairman of the Republican party went before a civil rights group to apologize for that party’s “Southern strategy.” As far as I know he did not repudiate the seven out of the last ten national elections that were won by that strategy.

The Republican party has had to live with a large gap between what it says and what it does. Deceit has become a habit and a fixed policy. Republican leaders always, and I mean always, act as if truth is the worst possible strategy — always opt for the gimmick instead of straight talk. Richard Nixon — like Lincoln a crackpot realist — thought only of damage control when simple truth-telling might have saved him. It might occur to some observers that the crackpot realist mode describes pretty well the way a recent war was started and carried on. What I am trying to describe here is something more than the usual elasticity of politicians who lie as a tool of the trade. When Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States was published, suggesting that theretofore unseen profit-seeking had had a major role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, Republican President William Howard Taft is said to have commented that what Beard wrote was true but it should not have been told to the public.

The very name of the Republican party is a lie. The name was chosen when the party formed in the 1850s to suggest a likeness to the Jeffersonian Republicans of earlier history. This had a very slender plausibility. One of the main goals of the new party was "free soil" — preventing slavery (and Negroes) from existence in any territories, that is, future states.

It is quite true that in the 1780s Jefferson, and indeed most Southerners, had voted to exclude slavery from the Northwest Territory — what became the Midwest, a region to which Virginia had by far the strongest claim by both charter and conquest. However, the sentiments and reasoning that supported that restriction were very different from those of the Republican Free-Soilers of the 1850s.

To detect the lie, all you have to do is look at the stance of Jefferson himself and most of his followers, Northern and Southern, in the Missouri controversy of 1819—1820. The effort to eliminate slavery from Missouri and all the territories, the first version of Lincoln’s free-soil policy, was denounced by Jefferson as a threat to the future of the Union and a transparent Northern power grab. It was "the fire-bell in the night." In the 1780s the foreign slave trade was still open. In 1819 no more slaves were being imported and the black population was increasing naturally in North America at a greater rate than anywhere else in the world (as it always has). At that point, Jefferson said, the best course for the eventual elimination of slavery was not to restrict it but to disperse it as thinly as possible.

The Southern Republicans who had criticized and sought to restrict slavery in the 1780s had in mind the long-term welfare of all Americans. The Northern Republicans of the 1850s who raised a truly hysterical and exaggerated campaign against what they called "the spread of slavery" were entirely different people with entirely different motives Not even to mention, of course, that the Northern Republicans were totally committed to a mercantilist agenda, every plank of which Jeffersonians had defined themselves by being against. The Republicans of the 1850s exactly represented those parts of the country and those interests that had been the most rabid opponents of Jefferson and his Republicans. (Interestingly, the areas of the country today that are the most liberal — the northeast, upper Midwest, and west coast, are exactly the areas that from the 1850s to the 1930s were the most solidly Republican — and "respectable." (Old-fashioned Democrats used to say that the change from a small government party to a leftist one was a take-over of the Democrats by Republican Progressives.)

In 1860 the Republicans promoted their candidate as the "rail-splitter," the poor boy who had made good, an example and representative of the "common people." This image, of course, had nothing to do with the Lincoln of 1860, with his agenda, or with the important issues of the time. This was not new. It was a mimicry of the Whig campaign of 1840. For a long time our New England-dominated history books have portrayed the election of the natural aristocrat Andrew Jackson in 1828 as beginning a vulgarization of American politics. But it was actually the Whig campaign of 1840 that successfully pioneered the transformation of national political campaigns into mindless mass celebrations. It showed how it is done. The party did not trouble itself to adopt a platform nor to nominate for President any of its well-known leaders. It put up the elderly General Harrison of Ohio, who had been a hero in the War of 1812 and a senator and governor some time back. General Harrison entertained company but issued no position papers. His candidacy was promoted by a slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" and by mass torchlight parades and rallies featuring the log cabin in which Harrison supposedly lived, the coonskin cap he supposedly wore, and the jug of home-distilled from which he supposedly sipped. The general actually lived on quite a considerable estate near Cincinnati and was a Virginia aristocrat by birth. In fact, he and his running mate, John Tyler, had both been born in the same small county in Tidewater Virginia — Charles City County (which was a part of my rookie news reporter’s beat long ago and far away in my misspent youth).

As a further obfuscation, Tyler had been added to the ticket to appeal to Southerners who were opposing the controlling Van Buren Democrats for quite different reasons than were the Whigs. Harrison swept the Middle States and Midwest, though his victory probably owed as much to a bad economy and Van Buren’s lack of appeal as to the Whig campaign. Immediately Henry Clay, hero and Congressional leader of the Whigs, announced that the election was a mandate for the Whig program — raising the tariff up again, re-establishing the national bank, and distributing lavishly from the treasury to companies that promised to build infrastructure. All this, although the issues had never been set forth in a platform nor mentioned in the campaign. Remind you of any more recent Presidential mandates for things that were never discussed before the voters?

The “log cabin” gambit has been used and re-used as when the Wall Street lawyer Wendell Wilkie was promoted as a simple Hoosier country lad, and two rich Connecticut candidates were marketed as “good ole boys” from Texas.

Let’s look at Lincoln’s party as it was born in the 1850s. In March of 1850, William H. Seward, the chief architect of the Republican party and its foremost spokesman until Lincoln maneuvered him out of the Presidential nomination, made a speech against compromise, anticipating his later famous remarks: “the irrepressible conflict” between the North and the South. This speech was not a somber warning about impending trouble as is usually assumed. It was a celebration of the coming certain triumph of the North over the South. James K. Paulding, New York man of letters and former Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, wrote about Seward’s oration:

I cannot express the contempt and disgust with which I have read the speech of our Senator Seward, though it is just what I expected from him. He is one of the most dangerous insects that ever crawled about in the political atmosphere, for he is held in such utter contempt by all honest men that no notice is taken of him till his sting is felt. He is only qualified to play the most despicable parts in the political drama, and the only possible way he can acquire distinction is by becoming the tool of greater scoundrels than himself. Some years ago, after disgracing the State of New York as Chief Magistrate, he found his level in the lowest depths of insignificance and oblivion, and was dropped by his own party. But the mud was stirred at the very bottom of the pool, and he who went down a mutilated tadpole has come up a full-grown bull frog, more noisy and impudent than ever. This is very often the case among us here, where nothing is more common than to see a swindling rogue, after his crimes have been a little rusted by time, suddenly become an object of public favour or executive patronage. The position taken and the principles asserted by this pettifogging rogue in his speech would disgrace any man — but himself.

Paulding adds: “I fear it will not be long before we of the North become the tools of the descendants of the old Puritans . . . .”: He means that the well-known and much despised New England fanaticism was encroaching upon the whole North.

This is one Northern commentary on the origins of the Republican party and on the sad public conditions that made it possible. Failed politicians of both parties, like Lincoln, had seized the occasion of the acquisition of new territory from Mexico to launch themselves forward in a way destructive of the comity of the Union. The opportunity they made the most of had two parts: the discontent of major Northern economic interests over free trade and separation of the government from control of the bankers that had been accomplished by the Democrats; and the hysterical and false claims that Southerners were conspiring to spread slavery to the North, given plausibility by three decades of vicious vituperation against the South. The Republican success depended on a Northern public that was unsettled by economic change, religious ferment, and immigration. Thus these politicians were able to form for the first time in American history a purely sectional party, something that every patriot had warned against.

Almost all current interpretations of the meaning of the Republican war against the South 1861—1865 come to rest on pretty phrases from Lincoln’s speeches. If you look at primary sources, as historians used to do, you get a very different picture. In their private letters and sometimes in public speeches the Republican leaders reveal themselves to be just the ruthless villains that several previous generations of historians knew them to be. They boast about their intention to keep control of the government by any means, to keep the South captive for economic exploitation, sometimes about their intent to exterminate the Southern people. (Those in favour of the last-mentioned are usually clergymen.) They revel triumphantly in conquest in a manner that puts one in mind of Nazis. As for the glory of emancipation that so long lent righteousness to their war, as Frederick Douglass pointed out, Lincoln’s party was pre-eminently the party of white men. Before, during, and after the war the Republicans never did anything with a primary motive of the welfare of the black people. The black people were for use for higher purposes, for keeping down the South and keeping the Republicans in power. Most importantly, they were to stay in the South. Millions of acres of vacant western land could be given away to corporations who could provide the representatives of the people with the proper cash incentives, but there was not a patch for the freedmen.

In the free-soil debates before the war Republican leaders dwell not on the evil of slavery but on their intention to keep the black scourge out of the new territories, which must be reserved for white men only. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, stalwart Radical Republican, writes his wife that he hates to go to Washington because of all the n-words there. If you look at the iconography of Emancipation, what you see is not a celebration of black freedom but a celebration of Northern nobility of which the blacks are the passive and slavishly grateful beneficiaries.

What other elements besides opportunistic politicians went into making this new party? Obviously the powers of industry and finance that would know how to profit from a new regime. And the New England intelligentsia for whom, by common consent, we can cite Ralph Waldo Emerson as the representative. Emerson who said he was more concerned about one white men corrupted by slavery than about a thousand enslaved blacks; who also said that the inhabitants of the Massachusetts penitentiary were superior to the leaders of the South; and that serial killer John Brown was a great man.

Another major ingredient in the Republican confection were the nativists formerly of the American party. Lincoln was too shrewd to come right out as a nativist, but he gladly accepted the support of the people who had torched convents in Boston and Philadelphia. It is not very well known that nativist vigilantes called “Wide-Awakes” carried out mob action against enemies of the Republican party before and during the war. And you thought only Southerners were guilty of mob violence.

Another founding block of the Republican party, often overlooked, were German refugees from the 1848 revolutions. Their numbers in the Midwest, as much as fifteen per cent of the population in some states, were great enough to form a major voting block and to account for the change of the Midwest from Democrat to Republican between 1850 and 1860. In other words, there were just as many state rights democrats in the Midwest in 1860 as there had been in 1850, but they could now be outvoted. Lincoln cultivated this cohort early by secretly subsidizing its newspapers and involving its leaders as activists in his behalf. For the new Germans the predominant nativist Puritans of the North made an exception to their dislike of all non—Anglo-Saxons. In the German revolutionaries they found spiritual kinsmen.

Pre-1848 German immigrants, German Catholics, and those belonging to quieter Protestant sects did not participate in Republican fervor. Let’s understand who these German Republicans were. They were military nationalists. You can call them proto-communist or proto-fascist, it doesn’t matter. It amounts to the same thing. When the foremost among them, Carl Schurz, arrived in America he complained that the Americans were too laid-back and unideological in their politics and he vowed to change that. These Germans believed that the unified and aggressive nation-state was the height of human existence, that progress toward it was inevitable, and that obstacles to centralization and revolution should be violently destroyed like the provincial aristocracies and petty princes of Europe. These Germans were among the most active and aggressive of Republican orators and campaigners and motivated Union soldiers. Before they arrived, America had been marked by a regional conflict between Northerners and Southerners with contradictory interests and inclinations. With the rise to influence of the Forty-Eighters the manageable competition of different regions became in the Northern mind an ideological class conflict.

On one side was Freedom and the nation. On the other side an evil force called the Slave Power, a deadly enemy that must be destroyed like any other obstacle to the ascent of the nation toward perfection.

So that, as he records in his memoirs, General Richard Taylor of the Confederate Army, son of a President of the United States and grandson of a Revolutionary officer, when he surrendered in 1865, was lectured by a German in a federal general’s uniform about how Southerners were now going to be forced to learn the true principles of America. (I always think of the “scholarship” of Harry Jaffa when I recall this incident.)

Let us always come back to the fundamentals. The Republican party engineered and carried out a bloody war against Americans that revolutionized the basis on which our liberty had been built. They maintained a cold war for another decade, governing by force and fraud, unprecedented in American history. While in power they bribed, swindled and looted themselves to private wealth that still underpins many fortunes. Historians of the first half of the twentieth century, whether liberals or conservatives, read the sources and understood this. They regarded what had occurred as a great national tragedy. But now it is all rendered in Marxist terms (whether those who are following the line realize it or not) as a great revolution that unfortunately failed to go far enough. Historians now see nothing in the experience but the race question. They condemn the evil Southerners who sometimes intimidated black voters in attempting to bring about an end to the disorder and blatant “legal” stealing of Reconstruction. That during Republican rule there had been pervasive fraud and terror and never an honest election in the occupied territories is not worth mentioning.

I doubt if even Lincoln and his stoutest supporters would agree that their pursuit of power and profit amounted to an unfortunately incomplete Marxist revolution. That was not exactly what they had in mind.

A speech given at the Abbeville Institute conference on “Re-Thinking Lincoln,” July 7—12, 2006 at Franklin, Louisiana.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history emeritus at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry of Alabama (1825—1903) was one of those fairly numerous 19th century Americans whose lives of astounding talent and energy put to shame the diminished leaders of the U.S. in the 21st century. Or rather would put them to shame if they had sufficient intelligence to distinguish their own inferior quality.

Learned and articulate, a lawyer, Baptist minister, college president, diplomat, member of the U.S. and Confederate congresses, Confederate combat officer, prolific and eloquent writer and orator, Curry was a significant public figure from the 1850s to the 1890s. (Put beside Curry or any of his contemporary peers, George W. Bush and Teddy Kennedy look like dull-witted adolescents.)

Mr. Chodes’s libertarian work on Curry’s career is a rich source of understanding of many aspects of 19th century American history. Having the good fortune not to be a “professional historian,” the author is able to see many things that the professionals have been socialized not to see. Fine as Mr. Chodes’s work is, however, it leaves me with a serious unanswered question. Shall I put it on the shelf with the DiLorenzo school of revisionist Civil War history? Or with works on the evils of Reconstruction? Or beside John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History Of American Education?

The chapter on “Reconstruction as Re-Education” is alone worth the price of the book. The Marxist class/conflict perspective, with a Gramscian twist, is now “mainstream” American history. All of American history has been distorted but no part more so than Reconstruction. Chodes shows that Reconstruction was more than a horror of military domination and economic exploitation. It was also a program of ideological and ethnic cleansing which continues to damage the American people in our own time.

The many observers who seem to think that militarism and abuse of citizens is an innovation of the Bush administration have evidently not familiarized themselves with President Grant and the Reconstruction Congress.

Those who think that federal control of education was an invention of the Democrats and the Great Society have a lot to learn. It was the Republican President Hayes who declared education to be one of “the rights of man” to be supported by taxation and devoted to inculcating national unity. His successor, the Republican Garfield, devoted his first message to Congress to promotion of federal funding of public schools. “It is the voice of the children of the land,” declaimed Garfield, “asking us to give them all the blessings of our civilization.”

Legislation to answer the voice of the children was pushed in Congress by New England Republicans in 1882—83 and barely failed of passage. This was seven years after the formal end of Reconstruction. The strongest public rationale, but not the only motive, was to alleviate the illiteracy of the freed people of the South. This rationale, like that of all the Reconstruction measures, was based on calculated misrepresentation of conditions in the South. Great strides were being made in education in the Southern states, which were devoting more of their resources to the effort, in proportion to their wealth, than Northern states (as they have ever since). Even greater progress would have been made if the funds Southerners had appropriated out of their poverty in the first years after the war had not been systematically stolen by the same Republicans who decried the South’s ignorance. The National Bureau of Education, which from the 1880s was the chief instrument for carrotting and sticking American public schools into conformity with elitist plans, originated lock, stock, barrel, and personnel out of the Reconstruction Freedmen’s Bureau which had been to a large extent the irresponsible and coercive de facto government of the South.

The Republican proponents of federal education were clear about their desire to create a system on the statist, militarized models of Europe. No American educational ideas that preceded Horace Mann’s Prussian/Massachusetts school system were to be considered. Black voters had to be subsidized enough to vote Republican and to be content where they were, else they might migrate to the North and West. They had to be kept in the South, which was the main theme of Northern politics throughout the 19th century, an even stronger imperative than the desire to loot the productive Southern economy. Further, federally-controlled, “free,” universal, compulsory public schools were needed to control the immigrant masses of the northeast.

Behind it all, as Chodes shows, was a commanding assumption and necessity. As one New England promoter of federal education put it, “But for ignorance among the nominally free, there would have been no rebellion.” If Southerners had not been too ignorant to understand the benefits of patterning themselves after New Englanders, there would have been no bloody war. To prevent decentralization in the future, Southern whites had to be cleansed of their “ignorance,” that is of their un-New England thoughts. Federal public schooling was also needed to confront the “hordes coming from beyond the great oceans.” It had nothing to do with learning and everything to do with control of the population by their betters.

While the Republican plan for centralized and regimented public schools failed in the House of Representatives and had to wait some years before full implementation, all was not lost. The Morrill Act of the Lincoln administration took a long step toward federalizing higher education. The Lincolnian Department of Agriculture was able to work itself into the public schools by “extension” agents. The philosophy of education that governed the department, as Chodes conclusively shows, was behaviorist, fully anticipating the psychological manipulation of children by the self-appointed wise and good that was the essence of Deweyism and is now entrenched national policy. Again, the barely vanquished Southern demon spurred on the effort. Southern devotion to such immaterial, reactionary ideals as courage and honour had been responsible for rebellion. Future generations must be made into pragmatic American materialists suitable for labour and production.

If the elite wise and good could not get sweeping federal legislation to further the control and conformity of education, they had another string to their bow. This is where the sad paradox of Jabez Curry comes in. This eloquent and indefatigable defender of the South and of the constitutional principles of the old republic spent the last two decades of his long life as head of the Peabody Educational Fund, a northern charity with several millions of dollars to be devoted to the advancement of education in the South. The work of Curry and the other elitists who controlled the great instruments of charitable wealth was devoted entirely to fostering a certain kind of education — universal, compulsory, “free,” tax-supported graded public schooling. Besides relentless propaganda, their chief tool was the “matching” grant. Substantial amounts of cash were available to local and state authorities who would match the gifts out of tax-paid funds.

Thus were established, step by step, universal, compulsory state school systems, whose content and direction were essentially provided by Deweyite “normal schools.” It should be noted that indirect control of public policy by institutions of great wealth (accumulated before the income tax) is now a norm of American government. Such leveraging of wealth into elitist political dictation is unconstitutional and undemocratic, but the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, etc. foundations dictated much of the domestic social legislation and foreign policy of the United States in the 20th century. Their power is nearly as great and even more irresponsible than that of the Supreme Court or the media. And it is never mentioned. George Wallace is the only public figure, to my knowledge, has ever called attention to this unelected power over the people of the United States.

The governing board of the Peabody endowment, supposedly a private charity, met in the White House and also counted the sitting President as a member. The nature of the whole enterprise is perhaps revealed in the fact that Grant, though a civilian, attended the meetings in full military regalia. Part of Peabody’s fortune had been accumulated through the manipulation of fraudulent bonds of Southern carpetbagger state legislatures. J.P. Morgan was the manager of the trust. How did the ex-Confederate Curry become an instrument for the undoing of his own principles and his own people? For doing the bidding of rich inveterate South-haters? It was not simply a case of a defeated Confederate making the best of a bad situation. Education is, of course, a good thing. The South was poor and needed money for education. But why did a man like Curry buy the whole hog — not just education but universal, compulsory, “free,” tax-supported schooling on a model dictated by the relentless Bostonian enemies of his blood?

Other articulate Southerners saw what was going on. Possibly Jabez Curry saw it also but refused to acknowledge the truth. John Chodes shows us in revealing context and detail what happened. Why is perhaps one of those mysteries buried deep in the human heart.

It has long been an accepted article of faith among Americans that education is a good thing. That, indeed, it is a necessity for a free and self-governing people. But when and by whom was it determined that this desirable thing was to be universal, compulsory in attendance and tax support, “free,” and devoted to inculcating government-coerced conformity? Destroying the Republic provides much of the answer to this vital question.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Decentralization. Anti-war. Anti-Empire. Evil federal agents thwarted in the 21st century. Lincoln’s handiwork unraveling. Gold standard restored. There is nothing for LewRockwell.com readers not to like in Thomas Moore’s novel released July 21. The author is a disillusioned former Pentagon official and Republican insider who has accepted that the Empire is irredeemable and knows where some of its weak spots are. He has given us a near-plausible, near future, hope-raising scenario of how it might be driven into retreat.

It would be very wrong of me to give away the plot of Moore’s truly gripping tale. Let me say that there are two stories, one set in the last days of the War for Southern Independence and the other in the present. Suspense is sustained beautifully in both stories as they approach intersection. There are brave but believable heroes (and a brave and beautiful heroine) resisting evil government. There is adventure on the sea, a coded treasure message from the past, and a cliffhanger climax that promises a sequel. Some of it even takes place in the South Carolina swamps that harbored Francis Marion’s famous partisans of the Revolution.

I am making The Hunt for Confederate Gold sound a bit like Indiana Jones, which is not the right idea at all. It is more like a story of the French Resistance. Or better still, it is Atlas Shrugged without the nastiness and atheism and by an author who actually knows something about America. Unlike the other anti-Empire novels that I can recall, this is not a fantasy of apocalypse and Randian super-heroes. The author has created a real world and real people, or rather what the real world might be with just a slight providential spin off its present course. The characters, good and bad, are plausible beings. That is, except for one character, Professor Parker Hastie, who is thought to be based on a notorious Southern scholar who sometimes writes for LewRockwell.com. From what I know of the real man, the character is far superior in quality.

I guarantee that after reading The Hunt for Confederate Gold you will have a new and more hopeful feeling about the future of the United States of America.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Reclaiming Liberty

Here is a new book from one of the Kennedys. No, I don’t mean another ghost-written socialist screed from the Massachusetts criminal gang of that name. I mean a lively and provocative contribution to the literature of freedom by the Louisiana Kennedys. They who previously gave us best-sellers like The South Was Right! And Why Not Freedom!

Reclaiming Liberty is a detailed response to the frequently heard complaint: "You have told us what’s wrong with the country. Now why don’t you tell us what we can do about it?"

The author dedicates his work to "two of the intellectual giants on whose shoulders I stand to see before us a day of liberty" — Murray N. Rothbard and M.E. Bradford. That should tell where Ronnie Kennedy is "coming from," as they say. Not to mention that his text is supported by short supplementary essays by the likes of Hulsmann, Anderson (William L.), Trask, Reisman, and Edmonds, writers whose names and wisdom might ring a bell with readers of LewRockwell.com.

The author has sought to develop a sound Constitutional and free market diagnosis of the defects of the current United State — in terms that are ready for common discourse. But in a much rarer effort, he has offered concrete positions that are usable in such practical pursuits as election campaigns — "an audacious vision and a plan to implement it." This is how a Presidential campaign platform conducted in the interest of liberty might look. In fact, there is reason to believe that the work is part of an exploratory gambit for a presidential effort by the author’s twin brother, Walter Donald (Donnie) Kennedy.

A few chapter titles give a good idea of the contents: "Conservatism: A Century of Failure," "Taxes and Other Ways to Steal," "The Health Care Tooth Fairy," "Secession: Treason or Patriotism?," "The Bipartisan War Machine," and "Voting: A Privilege to be Earned."

We may not agree with all of the prescriptions, but they are well worth contemplation. Many of us have given up on the electoral process entirely, I suspect. Nonetheless we ought to respect Reclaiming Liberty’s political realism and understanding that an electoral campaign, even if doomed to losing, can be a mighty educational tool.

My great concern over the publication of this platform is that the Republicans will have plenty of time to steal its rhetoric and bury its principles before 2008. They cynically stole and then buried the anti-government anti-Liberal ideas that George Wallace had demonstrated were vote- getters. They performed the same trick with the religious and moral concerns that became a power in the Eighties. That is what Republicans do and have always done: preach to the concerns of decent folks, get elected, and then serve the real interests they represent: plundering politicians, petty fascists, and government-connected "free enterprise" corporations.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

I quoted the warnings of Richard Weaver and Alesandr Solzhenitsyn on the descent into brutality that beckoned. The points made then seem to me a little prophetic and still valid. I would add that the American military has always swung back and forth between two modes or spirits. The Washington/Lee mode and the Grant/Sherman mode. The first emphasizes skill, enterprise, and courage in achieving objectives with an economy of force and strives to keep warfare as honorable as possible. The second relies on marshalling overwhelming materiel to crush a weak opponent, heedless of the cost in life and taxes, and rewards its commanders appropriately. The Grant/Sherman mode is self-righteous and recognizes no ends except boastful triumph. Our bureaucratized, politicized, technocratic armed forces have been in the amoral Grant/Sherman mode for a long time now. What kind of a regime sends women into harm’s way and makes them into prison guards? Surely one not worth the allegiance of a civilized person.

Whom the Gods Would Destroy

by Clyde Wilson
October 29, 2001

"The Afghan air defences still pose a threat to the United States." So Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, the latest in a long line of robotic technocrats who have held his post (remember McNamara?), informed the world on the airways recently. If you resist Americans bombing you, then you are a threat to the United States. To resist the U.S. government is to embrace prima facie evil and to deserve destruction. Doubtless, General Sherman is smiling through the sulfur fumes. You can hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in the background.

And the President himself is so incoherent that he can nasal on about enemies that are "cowardly," "faceless," and to be understood simply and only as "evil" attackers of "freedom." The first moment of clear thought tells anyone that the perpetrators were not cowardly, whatever else may be said about them. And they were not "faceless" either. They were known to the government and had been operating freely in our country. September 11 was a vicious attack on life and property. It was an attack on freedom only if we allow it to be. To misconceive your enemy is a dangerous fault.

Words are not everything, and can be used for evil (remember Clinton). However, Bush’s crippled style indicates more than a problem of articulation. It indicates a lack of thought, a lack of focus, a disconnection between the words and the realities for which they are counters. And that betrays an inability to encompass the big picture, to grasp the essential elements of the situation, which is the sine qua non of good leadership and administration. Every successful statesman (and soldier) that I can think of in history has been eloquent (though often laconic) in crisis, for eloquence is simply clear thought. In the President we have not a lack of articulateness, but a lack even of simple plain-speaking shrewdness.

Was ever so much deadly power at the command of one so lacking in wisdom and gravitas?

After briefing by his handlers, the President shifted from describing the situation as terrorism to describing it as "war." In law, international and domestic, "war" has a rather exact meaning. Constitutionally, that grave evocation can come only from a declaration by Congress of the existence of such a state between the United States and another state.

But the rhetorical "war" allows a shift from hunting terrorists to a war against the institutions and civil population of another state alleged to have sheltered the terrorists and one that is surely not on board the "New World Order" proclaimed by George Senior.

George Senior had the same disconnect. I recall his fuming about Panamanian rowdies harassing the wife of an American officer. There was an unacknowledged racist implication, but the disconnect was that, thanks to the federal government, such incidents occur a thousand times a day in the United States. And Senior was "sickened" by the video of Los Angeles police officers’ tactics in subduing a muscular felon high on PCP. At the same time he was authorizing the "turkey shoot" that murdered thousands of unresisting non-felonious Iraqi soldiers (not to mention the civilians).

And then, our born-again leader proclaims "Operation Infinite Justice." One would think that a Christian would understand that there is only one Source of infinite justice. But America and God are the same thing in minds like those of our leaders. We had to get rid of that slogan, not because it offends a Christian majority but because it offends Muslim sensibilities.

And while fighting a war against Muslim terrorists, we must be so obedient to ethnic sensibilities that airport security must body search little old ladies whose families have been in the country since the 1600s — to avoid "profiling." And how about the disconnect between fighting Muslim terrorists in the East while killing Christian men, women, and children in the Balkans in aid of Muslim terrorists?

A few weeks ago, our long-time member of the US House of Representatives from my district in South Carolina, Floyd Spence, passed away. He was, as politicians go, a pretty plain and honest man. He left instructions that a Confederate flag be displayed and "Dixie" be played at his funeral in the country town near which I live. However, one of the princes, Vice Emperor Cheney, refused to make his ceremonial appearance at the occasion if anything reflecting the South appeared. So, the family, the community, and the wishes of the dead must defer to the ideology of an imperial government that, with billions in treasure, cannot fend off murderous mass attacks on the population. One would think that in a crisis, some of the best American symbols of courage and loyalty would be celebrated (as they were in World War II).

Instead of correcting and punishing the incompetence and failures of the bureaucrats, Congress rises to the crisis by voting them still more billions. And our solons, in peacetime, blithely vote away personal liberties against search and seizure that are the products of a millennium of struggle, in pursuit of an illusory security.

I hope I am wrong, but so far as one can tell, the people at large have not displayed much reason or morality in their responses to the crisis. Enthusiasm to get the enemy (never mind which) resembles the fervor displayed for the favorite athletic team — a stupid but potent force. (In my area lots of people now have two flags on their vehicles — the Stars and Stripes and the banner of their favorite college team.) In decadent Rome the citizens engaged in bloody battles over the respective merits of the Blue and Green chariot racing teams with the same zeal they held against the foreign enemy.

"The increase in barbarity goes on until everything is dissolved in blind violence…and the pleasure of destroying and punishing," wrote Richard Weaver in contemplation of World War II. The end result, he said, is nihilism, the loss of all humane values. Long before Weaver it was common wisdom that: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Equipped with an abundant knowledge of history, Michael Tuggle has cast a discerning eye on the trends of the present. Not the u2018trendy’ trends but the real ones, those which can guide our steps into the future (as far as the future can be known to us mortals). The trends suggest to him something very hopeful — the probability and suitability of a change in the principle by which human affairs are governed. We have been living for a long time by the organising principle of command from the top down — something the American Founding Fathers decried as u2018consolidation’— and the opposite of liberty.

Throughout most of the course of Western Civilisation, until a little over two centuries ago, centralised government was regarded as something bad and alien, characteristic of u2018Oriental despotism.’ The Greeks, for example, were divided into self-governing city-states. They were never united under one authority during the time when their excellence in knowledge, art, and government reached levels that still astonish the world. Herodotus, the first historian, ascribed the Greeks’ defeat of the Persian Empire to the resilience flowing from their freedom from arbitrary control. In typical fashion, government-worshipping historians of the nineteenth century forward preached the contrary: that the decline of the ancient Greeks resulted from their lack of unity.

However, a more reasonable interpretation is that, although they were damaged by fighting among themselves, the Greeks met with irredeemable disaster only after Athens had centralised a dangerous power to dictate to the other city-states. Thus, the Greeks’ liberties and creativity ended precisely when they were united under the Macedonian monarchy.

John C. Calhoun, one of the great anti-consolidationist thinkers of the nineteenth century, pointed out that the Romans achieved their greatest freedom and strength as a people when there existed two centres of power — the Senate and the Tribunes — each with an absolute veto over the other’s actions. The workings of the state required co-ordination and agreement among the elements of society rather than dictation from above. Contrary to government-worshippers who complained that the lack of a commanding central authority made society helpless, Calhoun observed that an independent consensus of the parts led to actions that were highly effective and more satisfactory to the whole. No central authority could match the strength of free men who co-operated willingly. Mr. Tuggle enlightens us as to the current appropriateness of Calhoun’s insight.

Even under the Roman Empire (while it was healthy), although policies were sent out from the centre, vast areas of initiative remained in the provinces and cities — in military affairs, taxation, local government, and religion.

The Middle Ages were par excellence the age of decentralisation; there was scarcely any real power that was not local. Kings and lesser lords essentially depended upon the voluntary co-operation of their vassals. The Church, at least in appearance, was centralised in its own affairs, but it preached the rightness of subsidiarity in government. Our modern thinkers who extol the necessity and glory of the nation-state consolidated under one supreme authority tell us that decentralisation was the cause of the u2018darkness’ of those times. Looked at another way, perhaps it was the creative force of many different points of light that illuminated the way of the West out of the darkness — a darkness brought on by the inevitable collapse of the muscle-bound inflexibility of the imperial government. Certainly, the lights came on earliest in the free and self-governing cities, while the Renaissance blazed most brightly in the free and independent cities of northern Italy — not in some centrally-managed society.

In the seventeenth century it was thought that the u2018Sun King’ of France, Louis XIV, had brought centralised government to the height of its possibilities. Louis could oppress individuals; however, he could not — except through the traditional hodgepodge of taxes — oppress entire classes. He could declare wars, but he could no more command all the manpower and resources of the kingdom for his wars than he could the rotation of the planets. It was his nationalist successors of the Revolution and the Empire who marshalled the ability of a centralised government to command a whole society. Their handiwork was copied all over the Western world. The consolidated nation-state became the material and psychological focus of entire peoples while the ensuing conflicts among such states became the prevailing pattern of history. The American Revolution — and the Articles of Confederation and Constitution which followed — preceded the triumph of the nation-state. During the long colonial period, Americans enjoyed the benign neglect of the British Crown. The thirteen colonies barely felt the hand of central government (their citizens scarcely feeling the controlling hand of any government). It was the British governments attempt to end this happy condition that brought them to declare that the thirteen u2018are and ought to be free and independent states.’

The American Founders intended to create a Union which would institutionalise bonds of co-operation among those states and among the new commonwealths that their descendants would create out of wilderness in the future. They did not intend to establish a central authority, such as the one they had just thrown off, from which there was no escape or appeal except by the sword. They dreaded the spectre of u2018consolidation’ which, if allowed, would bring an end to their individual freedom and the self-government of their natural communities. Human associations in community were distinct from and took precedence over governments. Good governments were the servants of society, not its master.

The forces that reshaped the States United into the United State in the middle of the nineteenth century did so only as the result of the destruction of the essential elements of self-government and a holocaust of American lives.

The supposed deep thinkers of the nineteenth century (especially in Germany and the United States) celebrated the brutality employed against their fellow countrymen that was necessary in order to establish the nation-states they desired. Each sang the praises of his own country’s new ability to mobilise the property and allegiances of the masses to the ends of the central state. Nationalist mania stipulated that the centralised state was a prerequisite for the liberation and progress of humanity.

Lord Acton, an immensely learned historian of liberty, was, like Calhoun, a nay-sayer of the nineteenth century, bringing into common reference the phrase u2018Power corrupts.’ The progress of man depended upon ordered liberty; and liberty depended upon the restraint and dispersal of power. Acton demonstrated that freedom in the Western world was a product of restrictions on power that had been painfully accumulated bit by bit over the course of centuries. Taking the long view, Acton wrote, the crushing of the principle of states’ rights in the American war of 1861—1865 was not a victory for liberty, but a defeat.

One wonders why in the twenty-first century anyone should continue to give devotion to the principle of consolidation. The postulate of the all-commanding central government has resulted, for the first time in mankind’s long and painful existence, in what were literally World Wars. The central state has given rulers the power to murder the innocents of their own and other countries by the millions. Even at its least destructive, the central state inevitably, as Calhoun also observed, preys upon the people, or a part of them, for the benefit of those who hold power and their clients.

Surely the premier empirical truth that emerged from human affairs in the twentieth century is that free markets are better than central planning. At least better for society as a whole, aside from those who profit from the Plan. As Tuggle makes clear, confidence in the necessity of centralised power in industrial management, education, and the organisation of many other human affairs has proved to be a delusion over the past two centuries. The wisdom of experience and of insight into the real trends of the present which the author has brought to bear tells us that centralisation has not fulfilled the promises of its apologists. Command from the top down has proven itself to be not only arbitrary and inimical to freedom, but also inefficient and unable to adapt to changing circumstances.

The wave of the future, the cutting edge, the hope of efficiency, abundance, and freedom for societies is just what the Western tradition has always told us — devolution of power to competing and co-operating authorities. There is no lesson that it is more important to take to heart at this moment in time. It seems that John C. Calhoun was right after all.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Nevertheless, I wonder if the "Blame the Neocons" chorus hasn’t become as excessive as it is belated and repetitive — a diversion from more fundamental problems. These people have never received a single vote in any election. They are courtiers who owe all their power to manipulation of people who have been voted for. The neocons are opportunists of power. Opportunists go where there is opportunity. Who gave them the opportunity to pursue an agenda that has never been presented honestly to the people?

While their power seems to have become particularly apparent lately in foreign affairs, there is nothing new about it. It has been there since Reagan took office, when neocon gophers like Bill Bennett took over all the cultural and educational functions of the federal government. It was startlingly evident when Vice President Dan Quayle was appointed gopher to neocon Bill Kristol. (I liked him much better on "Saturday Night Live" than in politics.)

Could it be that the neocons are not the problem, but merely a symptom of the problem? Would they even exist in their present form if they had not seen the chance presented by the vast gaping vacuum of ideas and principles that is the Republican Party, and particularly its current leader?

Think back to 2000, when "conservative" spokesmen, some of whom were honest people who should have known better, exhorted us that we must vote for Bush, even if we had to hold our nose. The alternative was unthinkable! The Democrats might get in! Then we would have abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, judicial tyranny, socialized medicine, needless foreign war, massive spending, deficits, and debt! Save what is left of America! Vote Republican! Yeah, right.

I often raised objections in conversation to this exhortation. What reason did we have to think that George W. Bush would avert all those disasters? Exactly none. The evidence was all the other way — massively and conclusively. The best response I ever got from the reluctant Bush warriors (which I still hear all the time) was "at least Bush is a good Christian man" who would cleanse the White House of the sewage left behind by the long incumbency of Clinton. As if Bush were running against Clinton rather than Gore. This about a man who professed a shallow, carnival-tent version of Christianity. A Christian who has subsequently altered the American creed of "Protestant, Catholic, and Jew" to "Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and Muslim." And given his stand on immigration, we will soon have Santeria and Hinduism added.

It seems to come down to this: Bush was elected (sort of) because of name recognition (son of a former, if failed, President) and because he seemed less depraved than Clinton.

What did we know for certain about George W. Bush in 2000?

We knew that he was not very bright, guaranteeing that as President he would be managed by others more intelligent. He seldom spoke coherently and had never expressed a thought that was other than a slogan or showed even a normal, every-day moral and intellectual maturity.

Intellect is not everything. Character is vital. Who knew it and when did they know it, as repentant Communists used to ask? What did we know about Bush’s character in 2000? An under-achieving rich boy who, as far as one could tell, had never done a day’s work in the real world or dealt with a real-world hardship in his life. An alcoholic who had shirked his military duties. A moral adolescent who smirked and snickered over the grave matter of capital punishment.

But, after all, he was a successful "conservative" governor, wasn’t he? Knowledgeable conservatives in Texas told us that as governor he had shunned conservatives at every turn and collaborated with the left on every spending and social issue. He was enthusiastic for affirmative action and the Mexification of the country. Whatever the Republican platform might say, and he repudiated that even before his formal nomination. There was not the tiniest reason to hope that the son of "Read My Lips" would do anything other than betray conservatives on every social issue. It was blatantly plain to all but liars and the willfully blind that his campaign statements were not expressions of belief or intent but merely stunts to gull a segment of the voters. Looking carefully, you could find no principle and only one large-scope policy proposal in his campaign for the seat of George Washington — that great conservative desideratum: nationalization of education!

No one in American history can more truly be said to have bought the office of President. His campaign chest, not his popularity, bought a quick nomination. The Republican convention of 2000 was not a convention — it was an infomercial. Not a single unpackaged idea appeared. Not a single real issue was debated or even mentioned. In fact, any member of the party who threatened to utter an unapproved thought was literally barred from the platform in favor of endless boilerplate from media-approved celebrities. A travesty on the very essence of government of the people and a relay station on the road to emperor worship.

Then there was the election, which the Democrats tried to steal by a transparent fraud over a few votes in Florida. The conservative (i.e., honest) response to this would be to point out that the Democrats got as close as they did only because they had voted felons and aliens, bribed black preachers to get out the vote (something they learned from Reconstruction Republicans), and committed all their other usual felonies. That would have been a healthy dose of realism, but far too honest and forthright for Republicans. The proper authority, the state legislature, should have settled the disputed election. Instead, the Bushies ran to the most arbitrary and centralized power they could find, the Supreme Court, providing new validation for judicial activism and leaving the charge of a stolen Presidency hanging in the air. All that counted was grabbing the office. The democratic integrity of the process was of no interest even when it was on their side.

Bush voters are now complaining about his appointments — the evils perpetrated by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Perle, etc. But why should they be surprised? There has been no unexpected coup. Neocons like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have impeccable credentials as Republican appointees going back to Reagan. As for Ashcroft and his zealous pursuit of a police state, why he is just a standard-issue Republican politico, interchangeable with several dozen other governors and congressmen. Substitute any of them for Ashcroft and they would still be supporting "my President" in all. For that matter, why should anyone who has ever heard of Edwin M. Stanton, William H. Seward, Earl Warren, or Thaddeus Stevens be surprised at Republican indifference to individual liberty?

For that matter, there is nothing in Bush’s action and rhetoric of benevolent aggression that is radically incompatible with the tradition of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Nixon, Reagan, or Bush the Previous, who declared himself to be Prince of The New World Order.

Hard leftists understood the neocons from the beginning and dismissed them contemptuously as opportunists. Some of the leftists are intelligent and realistic about power. So the neocons had to go where there were "leaders" vacuous enough to regard them as brilliant thinkers and policy architects. Taking over the Republican "leaders" was child’s play. The Republicans have always had a liking for empty brains behind pretty faces. We are talking here about the party of such intellectual giants as William McKinley, Warren Harding, Nelson Rockefeller, Dan Quayle, and Jack Kemp. Sam Francis recently wrote that the left preferred the neocons as their official opposition because the neocons are not really conservative. True. They also prefer them because they are either mentally challenged or conspicuously unattractive, unlike, say, Ronald Reagan or Pat Buchanan.

The leftists have made some cogent criticisms of Bush imperialism, some of which have appeared on LewRockwell.com, but I wish they would stop attributing his sins to his being a Christian and a Texan. The Republican religious right has nothing to do with Christianity and Bush is no more a Texan than Hillary Clinton is from Arkansas, even if his fellow Yalies made him feel less than a true blue Yankee because his family had emigrated to the colonies. Thinking that God has chosen you to make war to purify the world is pure Connecticut, as is making a show of it. We are talking here about Connecticut’s two greatest contributions to American culture — John Brown and P.T. Barnum. Not that Texans don’t have their own faults to answer for. Lyndon Johnson probably did more irreparable damage to our country than even Lincoln or Roosevelt, or anybody before George W.

Why do people who should know better keep invoking the strange fallacy that to choose a Republican over a Democrat is to strike a blow for conservatism? The Republican Party came to power in a Jacobin revolution, implemented by the wholesale murder of dissenting Americans. Its "conservatism" has always consisted of support for one version of "capitalism" — not free markets and free enterprise but private ownership with government subsidy. The only government involvement in the economy it has ever opposed is that of which favored corporations disapproved.

And it has always covered up that real agenda with appeals to the respectable but not too bright part of the population, marketed in demagogic packaging that pointed to the alleged evils of its opponents: "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," i.e., the perils presented by un-American Catholics and Southerners; or made claims to be the keeper of prosperity: "Vote Yourself a Farm" (Lincoln), or "A Chicken in Every Pot" (Hoover). Millions of people were apparently convinced that being against Clinton was the same thing as being in favor of something worthwhile.

There are, of course, some actual conservatives in the Republican Party, mainly in the House of Representatives where the officeholders have to make some connection with real, living constituents. During the 1930s and 1940s, some Republican conservatives, of a breed now nearly extinct, did heroic service opposing the government’s plunge into international mayhem. However, they never had sufficient strength to nominate a presidential candidate or prevent very many evils.

The 1960s saw an upsurge of real conservatism in response to the closely related phenomena of ongoing breakdown of civilization and unbridled expansion of federal greed and power. The consequence of that upsurge was the Goldwater nomination. As with Reagan later, the party tilted in a conservative direction mainly because of the influx of expelled Democrats, like Reagan himself, who had inherited ideas, however attenuated, of such un-Republican things as state’s rights and limited government.

But the Republican Establishment made short work of the rebellious canaille who had nominated Goldwater. He was killed off, even before he was nominated, by the "respectable" powers in his own party collaborating with the leftist media to brand him as extremist. The only states he carried were traditionally Democratic ones. The real Republicans never actually lost control of the party. The mantle then fell to Nixon, who, like the Bushes, was compelled to make dishonest and unwelcome conservative noises for one reason and one reason only: because the Democrat George Wallace had brought some genuine issues into the public discourse.

Nostalgists still hearken back to the Reagan Revolution, which never took place except in imagination. The Reagan Revolution was over before the nomination was formalized, when the bankers forced him to accept a "mainstream" Republican on the ticket. The crusade to restrain the federal government, to correct the fraud, incompetence, insolence, and extravagance of its departments, never even got out of port, much less sailed for the Holy Land. And whatever moral capital was left was picked up by the Establishment Republicans once more. Clearly Bush the Previous had no affinity for the social conservatives he had to pretend to care for. Like his son, his instincts on the social questions were pure northeastern Liberal Republican. Previous Bush’s Liberal Republican appointee to head the National Endowment of the Arts subsidized Mapplethorpe and the other abominations. Out in the provinces there were many very talented, under-recognized artists who might have been encouraged, some of whom had even voted Republican, but of course they were not Establishment.

The only hope for conservatism, that is, for preservation of some semblance of civilized order and liberty, is a populist party along the lines of the real Reagan coalition of 1980 — economic freedom and social conservatism. And the first essential objective of such a party must be to destroy and replace the Republican Party. All else is sound and fury.

I can already hear the Bush re-election bandwagon in the distance. "Get on Board! Vote Bush and Save America from Hillary Clinton!" Will the millions of our fellow citizens yet again clamber aboard and hosanna their way down the road to perdition? If so, I fear it will prove that we suffer not from bad leadership but from a fatal defect of national character.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Then someone discovered that the building is named for the Rev. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, one time president of the University’s predecessor institution, South Carolina College. And, Horrors! Mr. Longstreet in the period before the War for Southern Independence defended slavery and advocated secession! Of course, the august aspirants for World Emperor could not be expected to meet on such unhallowed ground, so the gathering was shifted to another building, about which more in a moment.

Let’s set aside the fact that the Longstreet Theatre has been the scene previously of numerous public occasions in which at least two Presidents of the United States, the current Pope, and numerous other world dignitaries have appeared. Even William F. Buckley used to televise his orchestrated debates from that very place since it is not too far from the family winter palace in Camden. No one ever complained about the name before.

What strikes most is the astounding ignorance of and contempt for American history that the political leaders and the press exhibit on this and similar occasions. They act as if some dark and terrible secret had been discovered. It is true that Longstreet, who was a Methodist minister, newspaper editor, college president, and author, believed, accurately, that the Scripture, while it condemned bad masters, did not condemn servitude per se. There was nothing surprising about this — every member of the clergy in the South at that time — Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Catholic, and Jewish — said the same thing. So did orthodox clergymen of the North (those opposed to evangelical hysteria and the overturning of society according to the alleged divine revelations of individuals). A number of distinguished Northern clergymen wrote learned treatises against the abolitionists.

The defenders of slavery were, unfortunately, forced into making these unseemly statements because society was under attack by abolitionists. Let’s be clear about this. Abolitionists were not people with rational and moral objections to slavery who were anxious to find measures to get rid of it, as the previous generations, including many Southerners, had been. They were secularized post-Christian Puritans conducting a malicious, slanderous, hate-filled, totalist propaganda campaign against every aspect of Southern life with the ruthless irresponsibility of religious zealots. (Remember, Lincoln was always careful to claim that he was not an abolitionist!)

Abolitionists proposed no practical steps for the end of slavery, an institution inherited from early colonial times and intricately intertwined in very basic ways with economics, society, and everyday life. Emancipation, however desirable, posed problems for which not even Lincoln could propose a real solution. Abolitionists were not concerned about the welfare of black people. They wished to expunge their sinful Southern fellow citizens from the earth, which they believed would lead to a pure and heavenly America. Their leading egghead, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said he was less concerned for the fate of a thousand blacks (who he expected to disappear with the end of slavery) than with one white man corrupted by slavery. Daniel Webster, the greatest man of the North no less, said that the abolitionists were solely responsible for destroying the prospects for eliminating slavery.

During the brief press furor over the Rev. Mr. Longstreet, there were two interesting (to me at least) facts about the situation that did not come out. No one knew or bothered to mention that in spite of his sins, Longstreet was the author of Georgia Scenes, one of the classics of early American literature. And that the Longstreet building, built in the 1850s as a gymnasium, was used as a stable by the U.S. Army during the war and Reconstruction (which saved it from being torched).

Also, most people, if they think about it at all, think the building was named for the Rev. Mr. Longstreet’s nephew, General James Longstreet.

But it gets funnier. The carnival has been moved to the theatre in a nearby campus building, Drayton Hall. I do not know for which member of the Drayton family Drayton Hall is named. I do know that the Draytons, who produced prominent leaders from the Revolution to the Southern war, including a Confederate general, were for generations among the largest slaveholders of South Carolina.

Drayton Hall is bordered by College Street, Main Street, Greene Street, and Sumter Street. Greene Street is named for General Nathaniel Greene of the American Revolution, who was awarded a large Georgia plantation for his services (the plantation on which, by the way, Eli Whitney perfected the cotton gin). Sumter is named for General Thomas Sumter, one of the heroic South Carolina partisan leaders of the Revolution. He was also a large slaveholder and as an old man in the late 1820s advocated the secession of South Carolina from the Union.

In fact, it is not easy to find a building built on the campus before the 20th century, or a street in the central area of the capital city of South Carolina that is not named for a slaveholder or a secessionist! Obviously we have not gone nearly far enough in expunging the evils of the past. While we are at it, let’s make a clean sweep. Why should we wait for the civil rights groups and the press to pick off these abominations one by one. Why should our national capital, Washington, be named for that old slaveholder, and the District of Columbia named for a dead white male exploiter and genocidist? For that matter, does not the "States" in United States suggest evil, exploded notions of State rights? It is long past time that these matters be attended to.

*Dwarf (noun), a little devil. Webster’s New World Dictionary.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

As indicated by these books (listed at the end), scholars are at last starting to pay some attention to one of the most important and most neglected subjects in United States history — the Yankee problem.

By Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have always been good folks. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees. I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee — self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants.

The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?

Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?

According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the "Puritan Fathers." Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled "Robert E. Lee’s soup tureen.") And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.)

Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that "Southern" was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners.

When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the "Headless Horseman," he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in Moby Dick, the New York Democrat Herman Melville modeled the fanatical Captain Ahab on the Yankee abolitionist. In fact, the term "Yankee" appears to originate in some mingling of Dutch and Indian words, to designate New Englanders. Obviously, both the Dutch New Yorkers and the Native Americans recognized them as "different."

Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with "Yankee jokes," stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones.

Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing.

Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority.

The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North’s military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue.

Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the "Puritan Fathers," but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence — they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle.

Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do.

In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the "Western Reserve" in Ohio).

Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson’s well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints.

When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science.

The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.

During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses.

Historians have endlessly repeated that the "Era of Good Feelings" under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed.

Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as "American literature."

In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of American Geography. The trouble was, it was not an American geography but a Yankee geography. Most of the book was taken up with describing the virtues of New England. Once you got west of the Hudson River, as Morse saw it and conveyed to the world’s reading public, the U.S. was a benighted land inhabited by lazy, dirty Scotch-Irish and Germans in the Middle States and lazy, morally depraved Southerners, corrupted and enervated by slavery. New Englanders were pure Anglo-Saxons with all virtues. The rest of the Americans were questionable people of lower or mongrel ancestry. The theme of New Englanders as pure Anglo-Saxons continued right down through the 20th century. The alleged saints of American equality operated on a theory of their racial superiority. While Catholics and Jews were, in the South, accepted and loyal Southerners, Yankees burned down convents and banished Jews from the Union Army lines.

A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence.

As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of "America."

The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)

This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into).

Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!

George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since.

It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley’s use of "Conservative Leaders" in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for "the transformation of America."

Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to "the West" in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston.

So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel, The Virginian.

To fully understand what the Yankee is today — builder of the all-powerful "multicultural" therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary — we need a bit more real history.

That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions.

The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.)

The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson’s guillotine.

The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history — a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees.

We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian "Liberalism" so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the "New Man" who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America.

From the point of view of Christianity, this "American" doctrine is heresy. From the point of view of history it is nonsense. But it is powerful enough for Ronald Reagan, who should have known better, to proclaim America as the shining City upon a Hill that was to redeem mankind. And powerful enough that the United States has long pursued a bipartisan foreign policy, one of the guiding assumptions of which is that America is the model of perfection to which all the world should want to conform.

There is no reason for readers of Southern Partisan to rush out and buy these books, which are expensive and dense academic treatises. If you are really interested, get your library to acquire them. They are well-documented studies, responsibly restrained in their drawing of larger conclusions. But they indicate what is hopefully a trend of exploration of the neglected field of Yankee history.

The highflying Yankee rhetoric of Emerson and Hillary Rodham Clinton has a nether side, which has its historical origins in the "Burnt Over District." The "Burnt Over District" was well known to antebellum Americans. Emersonian notions bore strange fruit in the central regions of New York State settled by the overflow of poorer Yankees from New England. It was "Burnt Over" because it (along with a similar area in northern Ohio) was swept over time and again by post-millennial revivalism. Here preachers like Charles G. Finney began to confuse Emerson’s future state of perfection with Christianity, and God’s plan for humanity with American chosenness.

If this were true, then anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. The threatening evil at various times was liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic order, meat-eating, marriage. Within the small area of the Burnt Over District and within the space of a few decades was generated what historians have misnamed the "Jacksonian reform movement:" Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon from the Angel Moroni; William Miller began the Seventh Day Adventists by predicting, inaccurately, the end of the world; the free love colony of John Humphrey Noyes flourished at Oneida; the first feminist convention was held at Seneca Falls; and John Brown, who was born in Connecticut, collected accomplices and financial backers for his mass murder expeditions.

It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness.

Most abolitionists had little knowledge of or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South. Slavery promoted sin and thus must end. No thought was given to what would happen to the African-Americans. In fact, many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees.

The darker side of the Yankee mind has had its expression in American history as well as the side of high ideals. Timothy McVeigh from New York and the Unabomber from Harvard are, like John Brown, examples of this side of the Yankee problem. (Even though distinguished Yankee intellectuals have declared that their violence was a product of the evil "Southern gun culture.")

General Richard Taylor, in one of the best Confederate memoirs, Destruction and Reconstruction, related what happened as he surrendered the last Confederate troops east of the Mississippi in 1865. A German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured him that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught "the true American principles." Taylor replied, sardonically, that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him true American principles. Yankeeism was triumphant.

Since the Confederate surrender, the Yankee has always been a strong and often dominant force in American society, though occasionally tempered by Southerners and other representatives of Western civilization in America. In the 1960s the Yankee had one of his periodic eruptions of mania such as he had in the 1850s. Since then, he has managed to destroy a good part of the liberty and morals of the American peoples. It remains to be seen whether his conquest is permanent or whether in the future we may be, at least to some degree, emancipated from it.

• Sheidley, Harlow W. Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservatives and the Transformation of America, 1815—1834. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
• Grant, Susan-Mary. North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
• Bensel, Richard F. Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Tuveson, Ernest L. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
• Norton, Anne. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

A
proverbial put-down of historical works which presume to be original
and important goes like this: the part that is original
is not accurate and the part that is accurate is not original.
The reverse is nearer true for TAE. What is new is the
only accurate and interesting part: that is Bill Kauffman’s review
of the movie along with his informative interview with the film’s
creator, Ronald Maxwell. But then, Bill Kauffman is not a neocon
but a Western New York populist stranded far from home.

Historian
Jay Winik contributes a piece on the current Lincoln criticism
which makes the standard, respectable case of historians
who actually know something about the subject but are loath to
disturb the Lincolnian nationalist mythology: Yes, some bad things
happened under Abe, but they were unavoidable necessities, and
after all the end justifies the means.

Dinesh D’Sousa
contributes a sermon on Lincoln as “A True Philosophical Statesman” that
is also standard fare. D’Sousa actually knows less about the
real history, the real lived human experience, of his adopted
country than I do about Paraguay.

But in ignorance
is strength, because by the Straussian cult ritual, which
D’Sousa here popularizes, you are not supposed to know any history.
In fact, knowing history and giving it any weight is prima facie
evidence of fascist tendencies. It demonstrates that you are
incapable of seeing the universal principles by which proper
interpretations are made. That is, the universal and eternal
meaning of history is only to be obtained by Straussian exegesis
of a few sentences which Straussians select, from a few documents
which they select, written by a few men they select.

This methodology
is perfection when one wants to sacralize Lincoln and what he
wrought. All one need do is quote a few pretty phrases that evoke
nationalist and egalitarian sentimentality. Though the methodology
does tend to break down when challenged by the well-informed,
as when Professor Harry Jaffa, in his debate with Professor Thomas
DiLorenzo, was reduced to irritable denials of plain historical
facts.

Most of
the rest of TAE’s “Just War”contribution to understanding
the central event of American history is fluff designed to catch
Civil War hobbyists, including a pointless and less-than-coherent
exposition of Mr. Robert Duvall’s historical wisdom.

And
now we come to TAE’s piece de resistance, as they say, “A
Class War,” by the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who
has had quite a bit of attention lately among all the Usual Suspects.

Hanson first
came to notice by pointing out how Greek democracy was a product,
not of theory, but of the importance to the state of the body
of armed citizen-soldiers. There was not much really original
about this — it is the old story of the Anglo-American yeoman — but
it was useful to point it out.

Since
then, Professor Hanson has gone on to writings about modern history
that appear to glorify war, at least war as carried out by the
armed forces of what he regards as democratic societies. This
celebration (not too strong a word, I think), of the allegedly
wholesome benefits of war has obviously provided comfort to the “democratic” global
imperialists with which America is cursed today — and has thus
made Hanson something of a celebrity.

In “A Class
War” Hanson glorifies the great democratic achievements
of General Sherman’s notorious March through Georgia and South
Carolina in the winter of 1864-1865. Let us quote the blurb: "How
60,000 armed Midwestern men, in a 300-mile march taking less
than 40 days, squashed aristocracy in America, and changed the
entire psychological and material course of our national history.”

One might
ask where, exactly, General Sherman got the moral and constitutional
authority to change the psychological and material course of
American history, but such questions do not occur to those
who are preaching crusades. This is not a new story. It is the
same old stamping-out-the-grapes-of-wrath rationalization: Northerners
rising in righteous might to put down the treason of Southerners
who, corrupted by slavery, harbored an evil desire not to
want to belong to The Greatest Nation on Earth. It’s the same
familiar story, but the old girl has had a make-over. She has
a new hair-do and different cosmetics.

Here is
a fair summary of Hanson’s description of Sherman’s March:
a brave and democratic army of sturdy, idealistic Midwesterners
performed a great military feat. In the process their democratic
spirit was outraged by haughty Southern aristocracy and by the
oppression of black people, whom they heartily embraced. As
a result they resolved to destroy Southern society once
and for all, and thereby bestowed on the universe a new birth
of freedom.

There
are so many things wrong about this paean to Sherman’s March
that
it amounts to a fantasy. Historians, before the era of PC, were
expected to study primary sources, documents of the time, before
they expounded on the meaning of historical events.

Anyone who
has spent some time with the primary sources knows what a dubious
characterization Hanson has made. That war was an immense event,
occupying a huge area and involving several million people, and
one can snip quotations to provide examples of anything one wants
to find. I am referring here to the bulk and weight of the evidence
and only the evidence left by Northern soldiers.

You do not
have to pay heed to a single Southern testimony to understand
what happened on Sherman’s March and why. It is all in the letters
and diaries of the participants. I urge anyone who lives above
the Ohio and Potomac to go to your local historical society or
state library and read some of those letters and diaries for
yourself. You will see how “A Class War” creates a fantasy of
righteous virtue and intention that badly distorts the weight
of the evidence.

Why would
anyone who wanted to celebrate American military prowess pick
out one of the US military’s most inglorious episodes, and one
which involved brutality against other Americans? When there
are a hundred more edifying examples?

To begin
with, the march was not a military feat. What was left of the
main Confederate army, after self-inflicted wounds at Atlanta,
was in Tennessee trying to attack Sherman’s supply lines and
deal with two huge federal armies that were holding down the
people of Tennessee and Kentucky. Sherman’s advance from Chattanooga
to Atlanta, opposed by a small but seasoned Confederate army,
had not been so easy. The March through Georgia and Carolina
was contested only by a few thousand cavalry and old men and
boys of the home guard. When Sherman got to North Carolina he
was met by the remnants of a genuine Southern army and was defeated
by a small force at Bentonville.

Three hundred
miles in 40 days against slight opposition is no feat of arms.
It is rather slow progress — unless you allow for the time consumed
by looting and burning out civilians. There was never any
doubt as to the purpose of the March. It was to bring as much
destruction as possible to the civilian population of an area
of the South not previously invaded and occupied. And there
is no doubt that Sherman was not acting against “aristocracy” but
against the entire population. And no doubt that his motive was
not “democracy, democracy, democracy,” but “authority, authority,
authority,” that is, enforced obedience to government.

Many of
Sherman’s men were veterans who had been occupying (and burning
and looting) parts of the South for over three years. Yet we
are supposed to believe that their experiences on the March suddenly
opened their eyes to the evil of “Southern aristocracy” and drove
them to relish its destruction. Charges of domination by “Southern
aristocracy” were a part of Republican party propaganda before
and during the war, but seldom a main theme. Lincoln himself
never spoke of class conflict, tended to blame Northern and Southern
Democratic politicians, and said: “The Southern people are exactly
what we would be in their situation.” The real complaint
against the “Southern aristocracy” was not elitism but the fact
that they kept a brake on surrendering the federal government
completely to mercantilism.

In generalizing
about Southern society and the Confederate army, Hanson, alas,
is in a numerous company of historians who feel free, on this
subject if no other, to declaim grand interpretations on “knowledge” that
consists mostly of the propaganda of one side of a conflict.
(The righteous side, which is their side, of course.)

Into the
heart of this allegedly class-ridden Southern society marched
the great democratic army of Midwesterners, where officers and
men were seen strolling arm and arm and pitching in to do the
chores together. We are supposed to assume such never happened
in the Confederate army, where units were all from the same neighborhood
and officers were elected in the first part of the war? The clandestine
insinuation is false, and egregiously so.

During the
war, many Union generals, even subordinate ones, went about with
a squadron of cavalry for personal escort, lavish ceremonial
uniforms, and elaborate staffs and headquarters. Robert E. Lee
fought the war in a colonel’s field jacket with a tent, two staff
officers, and a few couriers. (Many of the Union generals were,
after all, not soldiers but Lincoln’s political patronage appointees.)
A foreign military observer who dined with Joseph E. Johnston’s
Confederate army headquarters staff found that there was a scarcity of
tableware, so that its use had to be rotated among the officers,
including the commanding general.

If one wants
to declare that the Union fought against “aristocracy,” then
accept the obvious corrollory: the Union fought not for democracy
but for plutocracy. One wonders if those sturdy Midwesterners
didn’t feel a little class resentment of their draft-exempt factory
owners who paid them large bonuses to enlist. Or of the Wall
Streeters who dined every day at Delmonico’s, lit their cigars
with $50 greenbacks, and grew rich off government war contracts
and loans, the tariff, and national bank charters. If Northern
soldiers didn’t notice this, they were a little naive, and perhaps
even deluded by propaganda.

There was,
however, at least one significant difference between the top
echelon of the North and the South. General Sherman complained
explicitly that rich men who had sacrificed everything were fighting
as private soldiers in the Confederate army, while Northern men
of property showed no such willingness.

Hanson is
operating with the old propaganda claim that since only a quarter
of the white population was involved in slave owning, the South
must have been dominated by a minority. Even worse, it was dominated
by the 5 per cent of large slave-owners. (A fourth is a bigger
percentage than Northerners who owned industrial or national
bank stock.)

In fact,
the richest planters were opponents of secession, nor did the
greater part of Sherman’s March pass through the areas where
they were concentrated. The South had universal white male suffrage.
If Hanson really believes that the men who carried out the
feats of Confederate soldiers were bossed around by a few snobs,
then I invite him to spend an evening discussing the question
with their descendants in a blue-collar bar anywhere from Southern
Maryland to West Texas.

Hanson
would have us believe that the Union army was concentrating its
destruction only on wealthy estates. This is not true, and to
the extent that it happened, it was because the bigger farms
had more valuable loot.

Letter from
a Union soldier to the home folks in Indiana, one of hundreds
of a similar import:

It is a shocking
sight to see how the soldiers sarve the farmers[.] Tha take everything before
them[.] I saw them today go into a hous and take everything tha
cood lay their hands on and then went for the chickens out adoors
and the worst of all it was a poor widow woman with fore little
children. I was mity sorry for her.

She begged
them not to take her things for her little children would starve
. . . . I have saw a heepe such cases as that tell (sic) I am
tired out of such doings. . . . if I was at home I cood tell
you a heepe such things as I hav seen . . . .

It is true that Sherman’s force contained many good Midwestern
Americans who were doing what they believed was right. It also had
larger contingents of mercenaries, criminals, and foreigners than
any American army before or since. Why would such good Americans
want to destroy the statue of Washington at the South Carolina capital
and burn up William Gilmore Simms’s library with its hundreds of
irreplaceable manuscripts of Washington, Nathaniel Greene, Francis
Marion, and other Revolutionary
heroes?

Or
destroy churches and schools and convents? Put pistols to the heads
of women and black servants to frighten them into disclosing
the whereabouts of the valuables? Open fresh graves (of which
there were a great many in the South) as possible hiding places
for silver and jewelry. Or, like the foreign-born, syphilitic
Union general Kilpatrick, force women to dance to gay tunes with
his men while their homes and their town was being forever wiped
off the map by fire. Or tear up little girls’ dolls and nail
the family pet to a door? One Georgia lady was visited by several
wives of Union officers who choosily selected and divided
up her possessions. When she protested she was called a spy
and sent without ceremony to a brutal prison in Tennessee.

The
simple and ought-to-be-obvious truth is that the Confederate
army, an
extended network of kinsmen, neighbors, and friends fighting
the invaders of their country and the threateners of their
freedom, much more resembled Hanson’s ideal citizen
soldiers than did the forces of the federal government.

Union
soldiers fighting to destroy aristocracy? In letters by the
hundreds,
in the midst of campaigns and nearly to the end of the war,
Northern soldiers blamed the war on abolitionists and Lincoln!
I believe
these men greatly outnumbered Hanson’s starry-eyed idealists
destroying “aristocracy.”

General
Sherman writes General Grant:

the amount
of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes
me ashamed of it. I would quit the service if I could for I fear
we are drifting toward vandalism . . . .thus you and I and every
commander must go through the war justly chargeable of crimes
at which we blush.

Some crusade
for democracy.

Professor
Hanson is certain that after Sherman had passed on his way, “every
child of the South knew that the will of the Confederate people,
as well as their army had been crushed.” This is not strictly
true, but more to the point, we are assured, that ” Sherman killed
very few, and with genuine reluctance. Rapes during the march
were almost unknown.”

If
Professor Hanson wished to tell us that Sherman’s March was a
mild affair
compared to the Rape of Nanking or to the Nazis and Communists
in Poland, and that not all Union soldiers were guilty of atrocities
and many were shamed by what they did or saw, then he would have
a point. But the statement as it stands, by the standards of
the time, is absurd.

Prussian
officers were shocked by the accounts of Union campaigns, and
indeed, in the Franco-Prussian war which followed a few years
later, there was no deliberate war on private persons and property.
Thirty years after the war the American public was outraged by
the newspaper accounts of of the methods of the Spanish General “Butcher” Weyler
in Cuba. But Weyler was merely applying what he had learned as
an observer with the US army during the Civil War.

It never
seems to occur to Sherman apologists, that when a plantation,
or a whole agricultural area, is devastated, not only the white
women and children but the much more numerous blacks are left
without food and shelter. It is true the Union army fed some
refugee slaves, but no one knows to this day how many more thousands
of the uprooted died in the wake of the devastation. Just the
masses of wantonly killed livestock left a disastrous ecological
and public health situation.

Nevertheless,
for the next twenty years newspapers will be reporting that: “Distinguished
military historian Victor Davis Hanson has proved that Union
army atrocities were negligible and largely the creation of frantic
Southern propaganda.” Such is the reign of PC.

One can
know for certain that our that our historian is working from
his active imagination rather than from historical sources by
his treatment of the subject of cotton:

The pragmatic
Sherman scoffed at these paternalistic rationalizations. [Huh?]
He demonstrated how much he thought cotton was really worth to
the United States when one head of local Confederate forces in
South Carolina offered to cease burning cotton if Sherman’s men
would in turn stop torching estates. Sherman replied: “I hope
you will burn all the cotton and save us the trouble. We don’t
want it; it has proven a curse to our country. All you don’t
burn, I will.

What Hanson
wants us to learn from this quote is sheer unfounded silliness
from beginning to end. The Confederate officer offered to stop
burning cotton, which he knew the Northerners lusted after, if
Sherman would stop burning houses, not “estates.” Cotton was
the most valuable commodity in North America and had made up
the bulk of American exports for decades previously. Sherman’s
statement was merely one of his frequent attempts at dark-humor
hyperbole. Northerners wanted cotton very much. This is why federal
generals and officials stole literally millions of bales of it
during and after the war. At that very moment, some of Lincoln’s
biggest industrial supporters were buying cotton illegally from
the Confederates in exchange for materiel.

We
come at last to the worst but also the hoariest part of the Hansonian
fantasy
history. We are told that the Union army on this expedition was
characterized by “revulsion” against Southern aristocracy and
that we are to rejoice in “the Union army’s embrace of the slaves.” False,
on the overwhelming weight of evidence.

Sherman’s soldiers did
not feel a lot of revulsion at Southern whites, except for some
of the most backward and isolated people perhaps, though they
often found them unfamiliar. Mostly they felt irritation at the
continued stubborn recalcitrance of all classes of the population
to being conquered and governed by Northerners.

To say that
Sherman’s army “embraced” the slaves is to propose a proposition
that is laughable to any body who will spend half a day with
the primary sources. When Northern soldiers felt “revulsion” it
was for the slaves. Amidst the flames of Columbia, federal soldiers
were seen often driving away blacks with blows: “We are Western
men and we don’t want your damned black faces among us.” This
is far more representative of what happened than a happy tale
of friendly GIs in blue handing out candy bars to children.

One could
easily compile a volume of Union soldiers’ unfriendly and unflattering
comments on the black people of the South that would rival the
collected works of Joseph Goebels for racist invective. This
sentiment was stronger and more widespread than what genuine
compassion there was.

Blacks were
robbed and killed as readily as whites, and could be beaten without
reserve. Black women were more vulnerable to rape and rape-murder
than white. The army, it is true, absorbed part of the black
refugee population, while raising their status to that of camp
laborers, and servants and concubines of Union officers. And,
of course, each able-bodied black man enlisted in an
all-black regiment saved one Massachusetts or Connecticut Republican
from having to dirty his hands in the service.

Hanson’s
Sherman is just a crusty old Walter Brennan, tough on the outside
but with a heart of gold within. He sometimes complained
about the masses of refugee blacks interfering with army operations,
but really he “embraced” them and fed them.

Not at all
a fair characterization of Sherman’s well-documented attitude,
which was a desire to eliminate Africans out of the pure white
man’s country he was fighting for, and in the meanwhile to keep
them hard at work.

But perhaps
we should not blame TAE and its writers too much.
They are giving the customers what they want, and they will find
many takers. A more basic question is why do so many
Americans, or at least American “spokespersons,” feel compelled
to force our history into a pattern of collective self-glorification?
All peoples tend to mythologize their important experiences,
but it would be hard to find one more self-righteous and uncritical
and so much in need of cosmetology as triumphal American exceptionalism.
History, after all, is the remembrance of the usually ambivalent
and complicated struggles of us poor fallen creatures in
a fallen world. As two of Faulkner’s characters say to each other,
in contemplating the human race: “the poor sons of bitches.”

I think
the sanitizing of evil comes from the deformed Christianity
of Puritanism, which was planted in Boston in the 17th century
and has been a cancerous growth in America ever since. (Though,
of course, material interests always play a part as well.) I
am of the elect, so it goes, and therefore my will is righteousness,
and undoubted righteousness is my license to annihilate the unelect.
Or in the public form: America = Democracy = God. That’s my hypothesis,
though I’ll gladly listen to yours.

Clearly,
this kind of thing is stronger at some times than others, and
sometimes it sweeps all before it. And clearly it is a rising
curve in the United States today, which Professor Hanson has
caught and is riding. And even more basic question is what does
this kind of militant self-righteousness portend for us, both
concretely and morally?

February
17, 2003

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

However, I think the critique of Kirk is overdone, and that his legacy is not so negative or so far from the readers of LewRockwell.com as has been argued. I venture there are many of the most sterling libertarians who regard some of the dubious hangers-on of their cause with a similar and even stronger disdain.

Dr. Kirk never wrote a word against private property or free markets, although he did criticize capitalists who showed bad taste and cultural insensitivity. The core of the argument seems to be that Kirk was at fault for decrying ideology and thereby stultifying rigorous thought on the Right. It depends on what you mean by ideology. Surely anyone, during the century of fascist and communist terror, can be forgiven for being wary of Burke’s “terrible simplifiers,” and for preferring inherited wisdom to projections of ideal worlds.

That is not the same thing as eschewing systematic thought. I have always thought that the strength and appeal of Austrian economics was precisely that it is not an ideology. It deals not with abstractions but with real behaviours and conditions in the world, which are to be known primarily by history — that is, by tradition. So I see more congruence between the ways of Mises and Kirk of looking at the world than do his LRC critics.

We stand on the shoulders of giants and we ought to claim all our heroes and use all of our patrimony. Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk came from different directions. Murray was the more rigorous thinker. Russell’s weakness was that he was sometimes too eclectic and facile, but anyone who makes his living writing will fall into that some of the time. Both left devoted followers and an influence that continues to succeeding generations. Their careers resembled each other in that each made his way as a scholar and man of letters in a hostile world.

We have to give some credit to Kirk for celebrating Randolph of Roanoke (“liberty and not equality") and Calhoun to a doubting world. And to the anti-establishment courage Russell so often displayed. I have heard him defend Southern plain folk who objected to being integrated by the federal government — before an elite university audience. He condemned the Israeli Lobby and the Gulf War on a public occasion in the bowels of the Heritage Foundation — and endured the usual smear and blockade as a result.

And, folks, it really isn’t fair to illustrate Kirk by picturing him with William F. Buckley — a bit like putting together Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. Kirk, like every other solid thinker and honest man, was ejected from the Buckley realm. That it came late tells us more about Buckley’s caution than it does about Kirk.

Kirk’s main message, I believe, was not so much to condemn ideology as it was to preach a return to the “moral imagination.” The old way of looking at the world as a spiritual struggle rather than as an abstract utilitarian proposition that was to be understood and managed by a Plan. I would say that possession of “the moral imagination” is exactly what distinguishes the message of LewRockwell.com from the immense babble that drowns the good sense of the world most everywhere else we turn.

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.