No Risking Profits for Sectional Harmony

 

It was the tariff issue which had driven South Carolina to nullification thirty years earlier, and ever since it was Southern pressure in Congress that kept the grasping Yankee at bay. With a tariff increase being one of the major planks in the Republican’s Chicago platform, the South was forced to recalculate the true value of political union with the North.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

No Risking Profits for Sectional Harmony

“At the March [1861] meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce there was one item that hardly anyone noticed except the merchants. They were considering a proposal to repeal the Federal law giving American shippers a monopoly of the coasting trade and to open this lucrative business to the British on a reciprocal basis. Except to these commercial men the final disposition of the matter seemed to be of small importance during the dramatic weeks of the secession crisis.

And yet nothing illustrated more clearly the real essence of sectionalism and the tendency of Northern compromisers either innocently to deceive themselves or deliberately deceive others.

Conservative New York merchants had spent three months passing resolutions, circulating petitions, and visiting Washington to advance the cause of appeasing the secessionists. Repeatedly they had professed their friendship for the South and their eagerness to defend her rights in the Union.

Now they had an opportunity to give tangible proof of their sincerity, not by the sacrifice of some remote territory to slavery but at the cost of risking their own profits for the sake of sectional harmony. For many years Southerners had protested against the monopoly enjoyed by Northern ship owners in the coasting trade and had charged that it was one of the artificial devices by which the [Southern] States were subjected to Yankee exploitation.

The repeal of the law would reduce the freight charges levied upon the planters by exposing Northern traders to foreign competition. It would have removed one source of Southern complaint.

Nevertheless a special committee of the Chamber of Commerce reported against sharing with Britain “our great and rapidly increasing coasting trade.” Rather, the committee believed, “our interests demand we should cherish this trade, and establish our own system, irrespective of this or other nations.” Ultimately the whole subject was indefinitely postponed.

This decision of the New York merchants was no isolated phenomenon. Throughout the secession winter, the Northern compromisers generally showed great enthusiasm for concessions on matters that seemed to have no direct bearing upon their particular interests, but they displayed an unfeeling obduracy toward concessions on subjects that touched them closely.

In Congress nearly every type of sectional legislation came up for debate; and Northerners, whether radical or conservative, Republican or Democrat, refused to surrender any law which brought special benefits to their constituents. Southerners could cry out against discrimination and Northern tyranny, but Yankee congressmen were unmoved.

As a result, when Congress adjourned, the navigation laws which benefited eastern merchants were still on the statute books. So was the grant of Federal bounty to New England fishermen. Even though an Alabama congressman bitterly called the fishing bounty a device by which Northerners were “permitted to fleece” his constituents, a Southern proposal that it be repealed was defeated.”

(And the War Came, the North and the Secession Crisis of 1861, Kenneth M. Stampp, pp. 159-160)

Southern Conception of the Good Life

 

Author Donald Davidson wrote of the decline of Northern cities committed to progress and the past resistance of Southern cities like Charleston and Savannah to the relentless march of industrial capitalism. But, he observed the ruins all around us, “the ruins of societies no less than the ruins of cities. Over the ruins stream mobs led by creatures no longer really human – creatures who, whether they make shift to pass as educators, planners, editors, commissars, or presidents . . .”  point the way to the path to destruction.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Southern Conception of the Good Life

“Continuity of family, of family life, and family position – irrespective of economic status – was in fact a great distinction of Charleston among old American cities; for elsewhere that continuity had been generally broken by one cause or another. With this continuity Charleston had a stability that expressed itself in the pattern of its streets and the conservatism of its architecture. The map of Charleston in 1948 was not substantially different from the map of Charleston two centuries before.

If John Stuart, whom George III in 1763 appointed superintendent of Indian affairs in the South, could have returned in 1948 to seek his home, he would have found it at 106 Tradd Street, just where he built it in 1772 – for a brief occupancy, as it happened, since the Revolution ejected him, as a Tory, rather speedily from his new house.

The secret of Charleston’s stability, if it was any secret, was only the old Southern principle that material considerations, however important, are means not ends, and should always be subdued to the ends they are supposed to serve, should never be allowed to dominate, never be mistaken for ends in themselves.

If they are mistaken for ends, they dominate everything, and then you get instability. You get the average modern city, you get New York and Detroit, you get industrial civilization, world wars, Marxist communism, the New Deal.

Historians, noting that the antebellum South was in a sense materialistic, in that it found ways of prospering from the sale of cotton and tobacco, and relied heavily upon slave labor, have had the problem of explaining why that same South developed a chivalrous, courteous, religious, conservative and stable society quite different from that which obtained in the also materialistic, but more industrialized, rational, idealistic, progressive North.

The planters’ “aristocratic” leadership was the result, not the cause, of a general diffusion of standards of judgment that all the South, even the Negro slaves, accepted a basic principle of life. Mr. Francis Butler Simkins, in his book The South Old and New, has taken securer than the average historian when he notes that the South at the outbreak of the Civil War was almost the only true religious society left in the Western world.

That old, religious South set the good life above any material means to life and consistently preferred the kind of material concerns that would least interfere with and best contribute to the good life. Its preferred occupations were agriculture, law, the church and politics – pursuits which develop the whole man rather than the specialist, the free-willed individual rather than the anonymous unit of the organized mass.

[With] reference to material means of existence, such as money, one could clinch the discourse by pointing out the traditional attitude of the Southern Negro toward work and wages. If you paid the Negro twice the normal wage for a day’s work, you did not get more work from him – that is to say, more devotion to work within a given period, with increased production as the result. Not at all.

The Negro simply and ingeniously worked only half as many days or hours as before – and spent the rest of the time in following his conception of the good life: in hunting, dancing, singing, social conversation, eating, religion, and love. This well-known habit of the Negro’s, disconcerting to employers and statisticians, was absolutely correct according to Southern principles.

The Negro, so far as he had not been corrupted into heresy by modern education, was the most traditional of Southerners, the mirror which faithfully and lovingly reflected the traits that Southerners once all but unanimously professed.

That had been the idea in Charleston too. It was what Mr. Simkins in his book, perhaps being misled by his historical predecessors, had called the “country gentleman” idea. But Charleston, which had always been urban, always a town or a city of counting-houses, warehouses, factors, bankers, financial agents, and the like, was not a city of country gentlemen, exactly.

It had agreed with the country gentleman and with others of every sort, including the Negro, on letting the relationship between work, wages and life be determined by the metaphysical judgment indicated above. That was what made Charleston Charleston and not “The Indigo City” or something of the kind.”

(Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays, “Some Day in Old Charleston,” Donald Davidson, LSU Press, 1957, pp. 221-224)

1969 Chevrolet Corvette L88 Coupe: 2,000 Miles, Bloomington Gold Certified

- Bloomington Gold Certified in 2004

- NCRS Regional Top Flight award in 2004

- Invited to the 2008 Bloomington Gold L88 Invasion Special Collection

- Just over 2,000 original miles

- Restored in 2005 by the Nabers Brothers in Houston

- Original drivetrain

- L88 427/430 HP V-8 engine

- Late-production open chamber heads

- M22 4-speed transmission

- Power front disc brakes

- Chrome front fender louver trim

- Rare Tuxedo Black with Black interior

- Rally wheels and Firestone Super Sport blackwall tires

- Documented with the tank sticker and a letter from the service manager of Wigder Chevrolet testifying about the unusual delivery of the car

- The original owner asked the dealership not to perform the new car service for delivery

- Judging sheets and certificates, restoration receipts and owner's manual included

- 1 of 116 L88 Corvettes produced in 1969

More @ MECUM

THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Via Adam

 

 Consider for a minute the implications what has just taken place in the United States of America . . . S.L.

In the Oath of Office, the President of the United States swears that he will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of his ability. That Oath was violated last night, in plain view of millions of people all over the world. That Oath was rendered meaningless. Cast aside as meaningless as a piece of confetti at a parade.

More @ Stormbringer

ALABAMA CORPS OF CADETS CALL TO BATTLE University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa April 3, 1865

Via Billy

Re-post

It was the twilight of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865. Federal armies were tramping throughout the southern states, burning, pillaging, and destroying anything of value, with little resistance from the remnants of the Confederate army. In late March of 1865 Union General John T. Croxton was given orders to take his cavalry force of 1500 troopers to Tuscaloosa and "destroy the bridge, factories, mills, university, and whatever else may be of benefit to the rebel cause." Three hundred young men from the Alabama Corps of Cadets ranging in ages from 15 to 20 years old were all that stood before the invading force.

More @ John Paul Strain

********************************

 

The Young Lions: Confederate Cadets at War

Young gentlemen," Confederate Major General John C. Breckinridge told the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute before the Battle of New Market, Virginia, in 1864, "I hope there will be no occasion to use you, but if there is, I trust you will do your duty."They were used at New Market, and they did do their duty, creating martyrs and a military legend.

 Throughout the Civil War the cadets of V.M.I. and the three other surviving military colleges in the Confederate South were often used in battle–always reluctantly–and they always did their duty.

More @ History

The North’s Bloody Shirt of Imperialism

 

A chief advisor to Theodore Roosevelt regarding federal patronage for black Republicans, Booker T. Washington gained great influence with Negro newspapers by guiding placement of white business advertising to them. He and those he ensconced in federal jobs “wrote Republican propaganda and placed Republican (paid of course) advertisements in the Negro press during election campaigns.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

The North’s Bloody Shirt of Imperialism

“Washington believed that Negroes belonged on the land rather than in cities, in the South rather than in the North. Now he called upon Negroes to “cast down your bucket where you are.” Southern whites, he said, would find his people “the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has ever seen.” Thus he seemed to endorse the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The next year the Supreme Court endorsed it too.

For three decades the ardor of the North for rights of Negroes had been waning. The Republicans no longer needed Southern Negro votes to win the Presidency.

And imperialist sentiment helped to swing Northerners into the anti-Negro camp. “If the stronger and cleverer race is free to impose its will upon “new-caught, sullen peoples’ on the other side of the globe, why not in South Carolina and Mississippi,” asked the Atlantic Monthly. Of the Northern reaction to Southern disenfranchisement of Negroes, the New York Times commented on 10 May 1900: “The necessity of it under the supreme law of preservation is candidly recognized.”

“No Republican leader, not even Governor Roosevelt,” exulted Senator Ben Tillman, “will now dare to wave the bloody shirt and preach a crusade against the [South] . . . The North has a bloody shirt of its own. Many thousands of them have been made into shrouds for murdered Filipinos, done to death because they were fighting for liberty.”

(Age of Excess, The United States from 1877 to 1914, Ray Ginger, MacMillan and Company, 1965, pp. 236-237)

Morici: Whites Face a Government Working Against Their Interests and Their Children's

Via Billy

 

President Obama’s decision to ignore the law by granting de facto amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants brought to America as children and those who are parents of children with legal status was a terribly foolish act. It will only serve to exacerbate racial tensions.

Polls indicate the overwhelming majority of whites view illegal immigration as threatening. Many see immigrants as taking jobs from native-born Americans, pushing down wages and contributing to cultural decline.

While many may silently harbor racial bigotry, the adverse economic consequences for whites are real and palpable.

Illegal immigration increases the supply of low-skilled workers, and that drives down wages for less educated whites and African-Americans.

More @ Breitbart

Woman, 36, who was raped, beaten and set on fire in Kansas park dies a week later from her horrific injuries

Via Nancy

A 36-year-old woman who had been sexually assaulted and set on fire died Saturday morning, police said, just over a week after she was found in a Wichita park with severe burns on more than half her body and cuts on her head.

Firefighters were responding to a late-night grass fire when they found the woman on November 14 and took her to a hospital. 

Police Lt. James Espinoza told The Wichita Eagle that she died around 9:40 a.m. Saturday.

Cornell A. McNeal, 26, of Wichita, had been charged Friday with attempted capital murder and rape in the attack, as well as with two counts of arson stemming from fires that were set that day in the park and at a garage. 

More @ Daily Mail

America Has Been Warned: Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Via Jonathan

What can a chronicler of barbarian invasions, writing in the 18th century, explain to Americans in the 21st century?What lessons can we learn today from the fall of an ancient empire? Plenty. Many.

Indeed, as immigration is a hot issue today, we might look to long-ago scholarship to remind us that the basic patriotic loyalty of the home population can never be taken for granted.  In particular, if the demography of the population changes, its loyalties will change.

Edward Gibbon’s famous work of history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes, from 1776 to 1788.   And the first appearance of that work, of course,—in that evocative year of 1776—has led many to consider its significance to American history.  Could America ever fall like that?  Could America collapse like the Roman Empire?

Gibbon was English, and yet even after the American Revolution, his work was widely read in the new republic known as the United States; we know, for example, that George Washington included Gibbon in his library.

 More @ Breitbart

Surrendering Guaranteed Indian Land for Rations

By 1875 the remaining sovereign Indian tribes were decimated by the relentless hordes of army soldiers; loss of food and shelter, and kept constantly on the move and in fear of surprise attacks, they ultimately preferred the detestable reservation life to cold and hunger.  Sherman and Sheridan’s total-war strategy against the American Indian had been validated.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Surrendering Guaranteed Indian Land for Rations

“The national stage of the United States in 1877 held a great variety of actors and actions. The values of the Indians opposed the values of white men.  The purposes of farmer and banker, of factory worker and industrialist, of railroad president and merchant, often clashed.  [This era saw] industrial bureaucracies such as Standard Oil [clash with] the hunting cultures of some Indians.

Crazy Horse was a great war chief of the Oglala Sioux.  About 35 years old in 1877, he had been the leader of the war party in Wyoming in 1866 that left behind the corpses of Captain William Fetterman and 80 other soldiers. Through the next decade he fought white troops, down to that glorious day in June 1876 when he helped to wipe out the entire detachment of Colonel Custer.

Most of the Sioux were already in government agencies, but not Crazy Horse.  After the Battle of the Little Big Horn he and his lodges went to the Black Hills, sacred to the Sioux.  Then to the Tongue River, where several couriers from the government came to urge them to lay down their arms.  At noon on 5 May 1877 Crazy Horse rode into the Red Cloud agency in Nebraska with 1,100 former hostiles, including 300 warriors. They had only 117 guns.

Even the agency Indians were wary of the army. The Federal government had recently decreed that no more rations would be given to them until they agreed to surrender much of their land including the Black Hills region, even though it had been guaranteed to them in perpetuity by a treaty of 1868.  They also had been given the choice of removing to the Missouri River or of going to the strange Indian Territory (Oklahoma).

Crazy Horse brooded. Rumors held that he planned to flee with his warriors. Spies were set on him.  His words were distorted in translation. On 4 September a large military force and some agency chiefs started from nearby Fort Robinson [and taken there after capture]. Entering a guardroom there the next day with some other chiefs, he drew a knife from his clothing [and] Crazy Horse was bayoneted in the stomach [and] died that night in the camp hospital.

Another chief, his hand on the breast of Crazy Horse, said: “It is good; he has looked for death.”

An era had died. With the suppression of the Nez Perce, the last of the great Indian wars had been fought.  Instead of hostile Indians streaming across the plains, grasshoppers came, across Dakota Territory, Kansas, Nebraska, south to Texas, eastward to Missouri, north to Minnesota. In 1874, and 1875, and 1876, and 1877, when the crops were half grown.  The cumulative weight of hordes of grasshoppers broke the limbs form trees [and] they ate everything [and] mowed crops to the ground.  Against them there was no defense.”

(Age of Excess, The United States from 1877 to 1914, Ray Ginger, MacMillan and Company, 1965, pp. 3-5.

Ironic: Ferguson Instigator Has Car Stolen After Anti-Police Protest

Via Joe

For more than three months, the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., has been targeted by violent protesters and looters upset over the police shooting that resulted in the death of Mike Brown.

Despite the fact that subsequently released evidence indicates that Officer Darren Wilson’s account of the incident was accurate, the Ferguson Police Department continues to face bitter backlash by disruptive activists.

As a grand jury prepares to determine whether Wilson should face charges related to the August shooting, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon recently declared a state of emergency ahead of a potential spike in violence throughout the community. The protests continue even during the jurors’ deliberation, however, with activists like Elizabeth Vega leading demonstrations this week.

Among Twitter posts describing the protests and disparaging authority figures, Vega informed her social media followers that her car was stolen in the aftermath of one such demonstration.

My car got stolen today it is 1998 green saturn with two Umsl stickers in the rear window tweet me if you see it.
— elizabeth vega (@chicanapoet1) November 17, 2014

The perceived irony of Vega losing her vehicle as her cohorts curse those who could assist in its recovery was not lost on numerous Twitter users.

More @ Western Journalism

FERGUSON: OFFICER WILSON INDICTED? DID FOX NEWS LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG?

Via Daniel

The question of the day is, why would Fox28 news in Indiana put out a story that officer Darren Wilson has been indicted in the Ferguson, Missouri death of Michael Brown and then take the story down.......

More with additional video @  American Freedom Fighters

The Second (Third) American Revolution

 

 

The Revolution of 2019 began, curiously enough, in fall of 2019 when Mary Lou Johnson, the nine-year-old daughter of a ranching family outside of Casper, Wyoming, came home from her sex-ed class at Martin Luther King Elementary with a banana, a packet of condoms, and a book called Sally Has Two Mommies. Her mother Janey Lou, a political reactionary, took one look and began screaming. “Goddamit! Goddamit! I’m not going to take it anymore!”

 

She grabbed the shotgun, a nice Remington 870 loaded with double-ought buck, and headed for the school.

Historians would debate just what led the surrounding population spontaneously to join her. Much of it seemed to have something to do with the schools. One father reported that he snapped when his daughter came home during Harriet Tubman Week, and he asked her about Robert E. Lee.

“Who?”

More @ Fred On Everything

Executive Amnesty’s Alinsky-inspired ‘Bishop-gate’

Via Joe

Some of Barack Obama’s most passionate Marxist minions come arrayed in priestly robes rather than business suits.

Their benign-sounding, if not downright boring name “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration” helps hide them from the spotlight of controversy.

Everyone should be aware that being far more immersed in politics than prayer, the USCCB Committee on Migration have long been waving the cheerleaders’ pom pom for President Barack Obama’s Executive Amnesty fiat.

Piety makes a perfect hide-y-hole for propaganda.

 More @ Canada Free Press

FBI: U.S. Murder Rate Fell Again In 2013 (And Other Bad News For Gun Control Supporters)

 

All categories of violent and property crime declined from 2012 to 2013, the FBI has announced, in conjunction with the release of its annual crime report for 2013.

From 2012 to 2013, the nation’s murder rate decreased five percent, to at least a 57-year low.  The 2013 rate was down 56 percent from the all-time high recorded in 1980, and down 54 percent since 1991, when total violent crime hit an all-time high.

We say that the 2013 murder rate was “at least” a 57-year low, because it may well have set an even more impressive record.  Mathematical projections accounting for the change in the FBI’s data reporting methodology in 1957 indicate that the 2013 rate was lower than any time since at least 1935, which translates into a 78-year low.  There is even reason to believe that additional computations may reveal that the 2013 rate was at or near the lowest in American history.

More @ The Daily Caller

Vindictive officials seize homeschool family's assets

 

 The Wunderlich family, with Michael Farris of the HSLDA.

More than a year ago, police in Germany obtained court permission to use “force” and arm themselves with a battering ram to take custody of four homeschooled children, only to see the parents resume homeschooling, and regain custody later.

But that ultimate defeat for the government apparently isn’t going to be the end, according to the father in the case, Dirk Wunderlich.

In an online interview from his German residence, he told WND that a local school board attorney since then has begun issuing “notices of enforcement” that come with penalties of 1,000 euros, or about $1,350. And warned that the enforcement “can be repeated basically any number of times up to … the maximum amount” of 50,000 euros, Wunderlich said.

Michael Donnelly, director of global outreach for the Home School Legal Defense Association, has been involved with the Wunderlich case from the outset, and told WND on Friday that the German government’s attitude apparently is that more prosecution, more force, more penalties is how to cause people to submit to the government’s will regarding the instruction of children.

More @ WND

Major Newspaper Pulls Cartoon Critical of Obama’s Immigration Reform After Many Call It ‘Racist’

Via Joe "Sometimes the truth hurts".

After the Indianapolis Star published a political cartoon on Friday that was decidedly against President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration reform, the paper’s executive editor Jeff Taylor said many readers were offended and called it “racist.”

So on Saturday the Star pulled the political cartoon by Gary Varvel. Taylor said Varvel “did not intend to be racially insensitive in his attempt to express his strong views” about the issue but added that ”we erred in publishing it.”

More @ The Blaze

"If just one U.S. soldier loses their life over these transfers........

President Obama has opened a new front in his hard line against the incoming Republican Congress by releasing more detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, against lawmakers' objections.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that four al Qaeda fighters from Yemen, including a senior figure who facilitated travel to Afghanistan for Arab extremists, and a Tunisian extremist would be transferred to Slovakia and Georgia.

The transfers leave 143 detainees at Guantanamo, which Obama has vowed to close. Republican lawmakers, who have been pressing the administration to stop releasing detainees amid reports that some former prisoners had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, were furious.


"If just one U.S. soldier loses their life over these transfers, we will have failed in our duty to the American people,” said outgoing House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon.
"What the Obama administration is doing is dangerous and, frankly, reckless. They have chosen many times to put politics above national security. It’s time they stop playing with fire and start doing what’s right. Until we can assure the terrorists stay off the battlefield, they must stay behind bars," the California Republican said.

More @ Washington Examiner