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Inheritance E-zine
My newest project is Inheritance, an e-zine dedicated to making Christ our Life. Like The Stainless Banner, the e-zine is free and will be delivered to your email inboxes.  Naming the
e-zine Inheritance encompasses not only our inheritance in Christ and God’s inheritance in us, but allows us to partake of the inheritance left to us by Saints who have gone on to be with the Lord and lets us leave an inheritance to those who come after. If you want to learn more about who you are in Christ, please return this email and you will be signed up. The first issue will be out January 1, 2013.

The Stainless Banner Publishing Company
The Stainless Banner Publishing Company is now a full service small press, paying great royalties. If you or someone you know is writing a non-fiction or novel about the war, please consider The Stainless Banner Publishing Company for your publishing needs. There is a flyer in the issue that will tell you all the great benefits you will receive.

I want to take this moment and wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Cassy
--
C.L. Gray
Editor
The Stainless Banner
www.thestainlessbanner.com
a FREE e-zine dedicated to the armies of the Confederacy.

A FNC comment posted in a Forbes gun hit piece

Via Richard
 

They can kiss my ruddy, red rectum.

In a dream last night, my father, dead since 1997, was scraping the NRA sticker off the back window of his SUV.

My father loved his country and was immensely proud of his service in the United States Marine Corps. All of his brothers served in a branch of the US armed forces and, at one time or another, taught my cousins and I to safely fire rifles and pistols. In my freshman phys ed class at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, we were required to learn to shoot a rifle for target shooting purposes (although I think planting the seed of arming future inner-city pharmacists was an ulterior motive).



I loved fishing with my dad and extended family but the deer hunting genes stayed hypermethylated in my case. I even think my mother tolerated my dad’s annual hunting habit until he hung a dead buck from our backyard swing set before he could bring it to be butchered.

I had many sociopolitical disagreements I had with my father, such as when HIV/AIDS activists were protesting drug access & prices outside of nearby Roche and he said that they brought the disease on themselves. But his love of war stories, rifles, and shotguns never extended into the realm of automatic or semi-automatic weapons. *My cousins can correct me if I’m wrong but our uncles never saw fit to have firearms other than those that fired a single shot at a time.

More @ Forbes

*I didn't know your uncles, but can guarantee you are wrong, dorkhead. Please stick to your supposed expertise.

David Kroll
David Kroll, Contributor
I’m a scientist who writes about the drugs and science in your life.

David J. Kroll, JR PhD
1605 Springfield Lane Durham 27705
 
Director of Science Communications at the Nature Research Center of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Adjunct Associate Professor of English at the North Carolina State University College of Humanities and Social Science (CHASS) where I teach science writing and reporting in the MS in Technical Communication program.

Three WBTS Christmas Stories


The North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
“Christmas in Wartime -- 1861-1865”


Black Santa's Save Christmas in 1864

"It was a grim hour for all of the South when William Tecumseh Sherman (was) marching relentlessly through Georgia...(and) A young mother has caught much of the pathos of the hour in several brief entries in her diary. Dolly Sumner Lunt, from Maine, married a planter who lived near Covington, Georgia. Three years before the start of the war her husband died, and as Mrs. Thomas Burge, Dolly continued on the estate with her daughter "Sadai" Sarah. The Burges were still there when Sherman's men passed, and many of the plantation Negroes, afraid of the soldiers, slipped into the house to be with their mistress.

On Christmas Eve, Mrs. Burge described her preparations for a bleak meal, her attempts to provide the plainest of presents for her remaining servants. "Now how changed!" she wrote, "No confectionery, cakes or pies can I have. We are all sad...Christmas Eve, which has ever been gaily celebrated here, which has witnessed the popping of firecrackers and the hanging up of stockings, is an occasion now of sadness and gloom." Worse, she had nothing to put in her Sadai's stocking, "which hangs so inviting for Santa Claus."

On Christmas night Mrs. Burge penned a sorrowful afternote: "Sadai jumped out of bed very early this morning to feel in her stocking. She could not believe but that there would be something in it. Finding nothing, she crept back into bed, pulled the cover over her face, and I soon heard her sobbing." A moment later the young Negroes had run in: "Christmas gift, Mist'ess! Christmas gift, Mist'ess!"  Mrs. Burge drew the over her own face and wept beside her daughter.

The next year, Christmas came more happily to the Burge plantation. On December 24 (1865) the mother gave thanks to God for His goodness "in preserving my life and so much of my property." And on Christmas Day she added: 

"Sadai woke very early and crept out of bed to her stocking. Seeing it well-filled, she soon had a light and eight little Negroes around her, gazing upon the treasures. Everything opened that could be divided was shared with them. "Tis the last Christmas, probably, that we shall be together, freedmen! Now you will, I trust, have your own homes and be joyful under your own vine and fig tree."

(The Southern Christmas Book, Harnett T. Kane, David McKay Company, 1958, pp. 205-206)

Christmas After Fredericksburg, 1862

“After the battle of Fredericksburg [December 11-15, 1862] the fine weather, clear, cold and bracing, which we had been having, changed into a real Virginia winter with a good deal of the Northern thrown in. It snowed, froze, thawed and rained by turns, with here and there bright days. All military operations were brought to a close, and both armies went into winter quarters. The latter part of December was fearful; a long rain followed the battle , then a hard, bitter freeze came.  So intense was the cold that the men did nothing but cower over the fire piled high with wood night and day….the earth was frozen as hard as granite; the streams were solid: Ice King held all nature in a relentless grasp.

The Christmas of 1862 was cheerless indeed; the weather was frightful, and a heavy snowstorm covered everything a foot deep. Each soldier attempted to get a dinner in honor of the day, and those to whom boxes had been sent succeeded to a most respectable degree, but those unfortunates whose homes were outside the lines had nothing whatever delectable partaking of the nature of Christmas. Well! It would have puzzled [anyone] to furnish a holiday dinner out of a pound of fat pork, six crackers, and a quarter of a pound of dried apples. We all had apple dumplings that day, which with sorghum molasses were not to be despised.

Some of the men became decidedly hilarious, and then again some did not; not because they had joined the temperance society nor because they were opposed to the use of intoxicating liquors, but because not a soul invited them to step up and partake. One mess in the Seventeenth [Regiment] did not get so much as a smell during the whole of the holidays; and a dry, dismal old time it proved.

We read in the Richmond papers of the thousands and thousands of boxes that had been passed en route to the army, sent by the ladies of Richmond and other cities, but few found their way to us. The greater part of them were for the troops from the far South who were too distant from their homes to receive anything from their own families. The Virginians were supposed to have been cared for by their own relatives and friends; but some of them were not, as we all know.”

(The Christmas After Fredericksburg, Civil War Christmas Album, Philip Van Doren, editor, Hawthorne Books, 1961, page 23)


Christmas Letter to Lee’s Daughter

Coosawatchie, South Carolina, December 25, 1861

“My Dear Daughter,

Having distributed such poor Christmas gifts as I had to those around me, I have been looking for something for you. Trifles even are hard to get in these war times, and you must not therefore expect more. I have sent you what I thought most useful in your separation from me and hope it will be of some service.

Though stigmatized as “vile dross,” it has never been a drug with me. That you may never want for it, restrict your wants to your necessities. Yet how little it will purchase! But see how God provides for our pleasure in every way. To compensate for such “trash,” I send you some sweet violets that I gathered for you this morning while covered with dense white frost, whose crystals glittered in the bright sun like diamonds, and formed a brooch of great beauty and sweetness which could not be fabricated by the expenditure of a world of money.

May God guard and preserve you for me, my dear daughter! Among the calamities of war, the hardest to bear, perhaps, is the separation of families and friends. Yet all must be endured to accomplish our independence and maintain our self-government. In my absence from you I have thought of you very often and regretted I could do nothing for your comfort. Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it. I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth, its beautiful hill sunk, and its sacred trees buried rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes.

I pray for a better spirit and that the hearts of our enemies may be changed. In your homeless condition I hope you make yourself contented and useful. Occupy yourself in aiding those more helpless than yourself. Think always of your father.   R.E. Lee.” 

(And to One of His Daughters, Civil War Christmas Album, Philip Van Doren, editor, Hawthorne Books, 1961, page 19)

Charles K. Prioleau

VERBATIM




For some inexplicable reason, Charles Kuhn Prioleau was until quite recently, one of the lesser known figures of the American Civil War. Now however, thanks to research by dedicated historians, the full extent of Prioleau's importance is finally being recognised. Born on 15 April 1827 in Charleston, SC, he is best remembered as a Senior Partner of Fraser, Trenholm & Co., Liverpool, England. Known to all as the 'Friend of the Confederacy', Charles was one of the main financiers of Confederate blockade-runners during the Civil War.

The fourth of five children of a prominent Charleston, SC, Judge, Charles Kuhn Prioleau was described as "the best looking of the family - had a round face, good complexion, good blue eyes, and he grew to be of medium height..." He served with distinction with the US Army in the Mexican War and in 1854 aged 27, moved to Liverpool, England as Managing Partner of the shipping and trading company Fraser, Trenholm. He was naturalized in England in 1863 at the start of the Civil War. As a Fraser, Trenholm, partner, he was entitled to 5% of profits and ran a profitable trading business, importing cotton and exporting English goods to the Southern states.

During the Civil War conflict, Prioleau served as unofficial banker to the Confederate States Government in England. The Confederacy deposited funds with his company and the firm financed the purchase of ships, arms, ammunition and other goods for the Southern war effort. Working with Confederate Navy purchasing agents, the firm also helped acquire and outfit some sixty five ships which were subsequently engaged in blockade running and disrupting Northern shipping.

Early in the War, he took an option on ten, large steel-hulled East Indiamen available for the bargain price of two million pounds sterling in London. His proposal to Gen. Beauregard, the Charleston Area Commander, and the Confederate government in Richmond, VA, to use these to blockade Boston and therefore possibly win the War was never accepted.

In Liverpool, he married the acknowledged 'Belle of Liverpool', Mary Elizabeth Wright. They moved into a baronial mansion outside Liverpool called Allerton Hall. Later however, in early 1862, Charles hired an architect and built a large town house at 19 Abercromby Square, incorporating many South Carolina features and decorations. This house later became the Bishop of Liverpool's Mansion and can now be viewed as part of the University of Liverpool. In 1864, he bought a large ocean-going yacht, the 'Ceres', for £5,500 and kept her berthed at the Liverpool Yacht Club.

At one point, Charles Prioleau bought a modern rifled cannon which he sent to Gen. Beauregard to be used in Charleston against Fort Sumter in the first days of the war. This rifled cannon, the Galena Blakely, was bought from George Forrester & Co in Vauxhall and shipped to Charleston. It was first used in action on 12 Apr 1861 to fire on Fort Sumter.

In 1866, he represented Charleston's St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Liverpool by having the eight old church bells re-cast and shipped from Liverpool to Charleston. They had been sent to Columbia to avoid the shelling of Charleston but had been melted by the heat from the Sherman’s burning of Columbia. The bells arrived in Charleston in Feb 1867, were hung in the steeple and are used to this day.

On 18 Oct 1864, the Prioleaus' organized 'The Grand Southern Bazaar' in Liverpool's St. George Hall. Most of the Liverpool gentry, sympathetic to the South attended - and the event raised £22,000 for the Confederate wounded over the five days of the event.

After the war was lost, Fraser, Trenholm was owed 170,000 pounds by the defunct Confederacy and had to declare bankruptcy in May 1867. Following this, Charles Prioleau was involved in several litigations both as a plaintiff and defendant.

Around 1870, Prioleau moved from Liverpool to 47 Queen's Gate Gardens, Kensington, London, and formed Prioleau & Co., a banking house. Later, he moved his family to Bruges, Belgium, where Charles conducted a banking business. Sadly his health deteriorated and he was forced to return to London where, on 3 August 1887 at the age of 60 he died at Brown's Hotel, London. Charles was buried in August 1887 in Kensal Green Cemetery, London, England.  The grave of a man who bankrolled the Confederate side in the American civil war, and ended up costing the British government £3.3m in compensation to the victorious north, was largely forgotten until rediscovered in a patch of brambles in the mid 1980's.

His wife Mary moved to Biarritz in France, where she lived until her death. Two of his sons were officers in the British Army. Over 600 of his letters, telegrams, photographs, and papers dating from 1860 to 1877 are archived at the Liverpool Merseyside Maritime  Museum. These are available on microfiche from Adam Mathews Publications, Marlborough, Wiltshire, England.

Charles Kuhn PRIOLEAU and Mary Elizabeth WRIGHT were married on 3 May 1860 in Walton-on-the-Hill Church, near Liverpool, England. Mary Elizabeth WRIGHT, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Richard WRIGHT, was born in 1840 in New Brunswick. She died in 1897 at the age of 57 in Sainte Croix, Bayonne. She was buried in France. Before marriage, she lived with her parents at 'Elleslie', Breeze Hill, Liverpool, and was the acknowledged "Belle of Liverpool". Later, she and Charles lived at the baronial Allerton Hall in Liverpool and the house they built at 19 Abercromby Square in Liverpool. During the Civil war, she organized "The Grand Southern Bazaar" in St. George Hall, Liverpool, which raised over £20,000 for American Southern wounded. After her husband's death, she moved to Biarritz, France.

Charles Kuhn PRIOLEAU and Mary Elizabeth WRIGHT had the following children:

Lynch Hamilton PRIOLEAU, born 1861, England; married Frances MORRIS, 1894, London, England.
Charles Arthur PRIOLEAU, born Jan 1862, Liverpool, England; married Violet BRADSHAW, 1895; died 1912, Kingston Lisle, England.
Richard PRIOLEAU, born 1865, England; married Elise GURDON.
Major Louis St. Julien PRIOLEAU, born 1869, England; married Alexina WOMBWELL.
Margaret "May" PRIOLEAU was born about 1872. She died about 1960 at the age of 88. She lived at the Hermitage, Ilminster, Somerset, England.  
George Trenholm PRIOLEAU was born about 1874.
John "Jack" PRIOLEAU was born in 1882 in England. He died during the War about 1945 at the age of 63. He was buried in Cheltenham, England. Alexina Saunders-Davies recalls him as "Uncle Jack", a favorite of hers and her mothers. He had been Motoring Correspondent of the London Times in the late 1920s. In 1922, he made an epic journey from England across France, Italy and Morocco in a Bull-Nosed Morris called "Imshi" (Arabic for "Get out of the way, fast") and wrote a book "The Adventures of Imshi". A charming and vital person, he married in his 60s and moved to Jersey in the Channel islands.
Kindly submitted by H. Frost Prioleau, Hon. Member 290 Foundation

The March To Liberty

It has been proposed that a march take place, where law-abiding citizens march, armed, toward some destination and following the laws of the state therein on open carry or concealed carry. I suggest that the march, lets call it a March To Liberty, be a coordinated march to individual state capitols and a final gathering close to DC on a subsequent weekend highly publicized at each march on each state capitol.

The federal government has no right to restrict gun ownership as gun ownership is a right of the people through which to oppose tryanny and oppression. It is the ultimate in irony that the government officials intend to prove their fidelity to law by violating the most serious and sobering law of them all, the law, the right, that allows a free people to engage their abusive and oppressive government with weapons of war.

 Governor Cuomo of New York stated clearly that he considers a confiscation of weapons, or a mandatory buy-back program a just response to the Sandy Hook killings. That is a Marxists and wholly un-American mindset on display and the arrogance of this would-be dictator of New York to suggest such a thing in America shows a disconnect from the ideals of a republic where the people, the citizens, are supreme. Cuomo's declaration is much more worthy of Ceasar than Madison.

The re-election of Barack Obama has given legitimacy to the idea that the many may oppress and bankrupt the few for the delights of the crown. Our once great republic of responsible liberty has turned into a madhouse of organized larceny.

I suggest, therefore that any march either begin, or end in New York or DC and to hell with their laws.

--T.L. Davis  

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Oath Keeper's Ceremony & Dinner+ 09/12/09 D.C.



North Carolina’s Prescient Nathaniel Macon on the Best Safeguard to Public Liberty and Justice

US 158 at Vaughan,Warren County

Buck Springs, February 9, 1833

“Sir: I have received your letter of the 24th ulto. There can be no doubt that the United States are in a deplorable situation, and that the publication of the opinion you desire would be useless. My opinion has never been a secret,
and I have always stated it to those who wanted to know it.

In the year 1824, the Constitution was buried. The Senators who were then present will, it is believed, recollect the fact, and was never afterward quoted by me while I continued in the Senate.  The opinions of General Washington, Mr. Jefferson and Governor Clinton were known but not respected.

I never believed that a State could nullify and remain in the Union, but always believed that a State could secede when she pleased, provided she would pay her proportion of the public debt. This right I have considered the best guard to public liberty and the public justice that could be desired, and it ought to have prevented what is now felt in the South – oppression.

A government of opinion established by sovereign States cannot be maintained by force. The use of force makes enemies, and enemies cannot live in peace.”    

--Nathaniel Macon

(Letter to S.P. Carson, Reminiscences and Memoirs of North Carolina and Eminent North Carolinians, John H. Wheeler, Columbus Printing Works, 1884, page 454)

The mad numerologists of gun-control


 VERBATIM

The push to restrict magazine capacity focuses on the apparently magic number "ten". Reduce Americans to ten-round magazines and no more mass murder, they claim. Let's look at where this leads.
 
Ten rounds has been the standard capacity for military rifles for a long time. 1895 Lee-Enfield held ten, as did the Soviet SVT and the German G43 rifles. Post-WW2 SKS, FN49 and SVD held ten also. No one would claim that they aren't formidable weapons even today. So why stop at ten if the goal is to reduce capability of any rifleman?
 
The first military rifle designed for high-velocity smokeless ammunition, the 1886 Lebel, held eight rounds in the magazine. So did the first rifle with detachable box magazine, the 1888 Lee-Metford. As did the "finest battle implement ever designed", the US M1 Garand. Nobody can claim that these aren't suitable for bloody mayhem in the wrong hands, so could we claim that fewer than 8 should be the limit.
 
That brings us to six rounds. The Italian WW2 Carcano (including that which was used to shoot JFK), the superb Swiss Schmidt-Rubin, the American M1917 and many Mannlicher bolt actions held six. Too many still?
 
Five, do I hear five? That would be the capacity of Mauser, Springfield, Mosin, P1914, MAS38, Arisaka, Krag, Winchester 1895 and many other guns that were front-line military weapons until the 1950s.
 
Four? No, that would give us certain Winchester and Remington sniper rifles in common military use since the Vietnam War. No anti-gun legislator would admit sniper rifles suitable for civilian ownership. The substantial similarity of a deer hunting rifle to the military sniper rifle is purely coincidental, of course.
  
Maybe three would be the magic number? French Berthier infantry rifle with a three-shot magazine was widely used through WW1. So the real number would probably be two. At which point anit-gun propaganda would harp on the similarity to double-barreled dangerous game guns and the few remaining gun owners would end up with single-shot low-power guns grudgingly permitted after much red tape ... until the next confiscation. It's a lot easier, you see, to go after people reduced to pre-1850s defensive technology. Not that the gun-banners would go after us in person - even a musket or a pike in steady hands scare them - but they would send their uniformed thugs with modern guns. That scenario played out in Soviet Russia, in Communist China and more recently in Venezuela. Once the gap of arms between the government and the people is great enough, such minor matters as civil rights cease to matter much to the rulers.
 
The mostly disarmed British subjects may still possess a few guns of limited specifications, but they lost the right to use those for self-defense. Storage, transport and other uses are so severely restricted as to make the remaining arms of minimal use. That's the end game for the American gun banners - but they won't live to win it. Their demented numerological plots matter less than the million defensive rifles sold this week. Those gun purchases are the true vote - with money, personal time and effort - that will override the hateful propaganda broadcasts and the squawking in the bully pulpits of the legislative sessions.