Secession Would Not be an Answer to, But a Part of Our Problem

When Was the Last Healthy Nation You Saw in a Civil War?

Aleppo, Syrian Civil War

Dylan Roof and the shooting at Emmanuel Church in Charleston has once again opened a racial and political wound in this country which refuses to heal. It almost seems like we refuse to let it mend; somewhere some how it will always be exploited and brought up again. Democrats in 2008 used it to get an unqualified community organizer elected as leader of what used to be a world superpower. Republicans have been using it discreetly to try and maintain some kind of relevance with the electorate. Public speakers and authors have been using it to sell tickets and books. Religious leaders have been using it to attach a religious element to the racial strife in America so they could maintain relevance in a vastly irreligious country. People continually take advantage of the situation and stoke the fires, but the last time we had anyone who seemed serious about overcoming and removing this hurdle seems to be in the Civil Rights Era or during the Harlem Renaissance.

But now that is all a distant memory; once upon a time in American politics we battled 18th and 19th century Racialism for what it was, but now both sides are beginning to comfortably and brazenly use it as each side becomes more daring in their radicalism. This is the future of American politics: drawn along the lines of race and identity for the sake of securing votes the political elite have successfully driven a wedge between the people of this country. Now the Civil War has re-entered American public conscience with a vengeance. Battle lines are being drawn between two sides that, to be quite frank, are pitiless and unlovable. Neither represent America, only portions of it. Neither represent the people, but are instead lead de facto by political elites who have sown all of this for their own benefit. They alone will reap the rewards of this harvest, we are but the slaves who will gather it by our sweaty toil; we shall starve for our trouble.

Battle of Pea Ridge, Ark., by Kurz and Allison.

The fact we feel so threatened by this that we must start banning Confederate memorabilia left and right illustrates this perfectly. At this stage there is no militant force of Neo-Confederates worth mentioning that could strike out at the Union or do harm to it. There are radicals who use it who could easily be dealt with case-by-case; other than being visibly or verbally offensive the organized groups are hardly a threat. But they could easily become one.

There's honestly not much I can add to all this that hasn't been said. I can offer my unique experience, however. You see, people make the standard suppositions about me when I speak on the Confederacy: that I'm ignorant and just know nothing about the Cause. Well...

Life Under the Southern Cross

 

... that's a load of horse shit, because I was raised Neo-Confederate and liked it at the time. So from this point forward, assume I know what I'm talking about and listen. I'll try and provide links and sources for historical assertions.

Up until I'd estimate my senior year of High School, I classified myself as a Good Ol' Rebel. I hoarded Confederate memorabilia and most of my first vacation destinations were anything that had to do with the Confederacy. Just imagine me, but with the CSA. I was incredibly proud of my Southern heritage. I was raised loving it and I knew about my Confederate ancestors, of whom there were several. One was a Confederate officer at the Battle of Pleasant Hill. Five who carry my last name are buried in the Vicksburg Confederate Cemetery. Another survived both Antietam and Fredericksburg. This isn't really special for someone with a Southern family; almost everyone has family who were involved in some way.

But I wasn't raised to be a racist, either. I think this is where the genuine disconnect comes in: Northerners and others see the Confederacy for what it was, a seditious institution founded for the protection of slavery upon ideas of white supremacy. But for many Southerners this is not how it's taught to them at all. I'm not going to pretend there aren't those who are taught that is what it is, but I can speak as a native that really these people are out in the sticks and generally aren't accepted in mainstream society. Those you do meet have only become more brazen in recent years as politics have become increasingly racialized. When I was growing up you didn't see those types, and they were banned from most things that had to do with the Confederacy.

What did the Confederacy represent to us then? True America, quite simply. To the average Southerner the Confederacy is the embodiment of not just everything we hold dear but everything good about America. Christianity, civil liberty, self determination, and the willingness to fight for it. More specifically to the South it represented tradition, chivalry, honesty, and upstanding virtue. I know that's hard to believe, but you must understand our folk historiography is basically formed by Gods and Generals and Gone With the Wind. Imagine if the average German's view of the Third Reich was Triumph of Will and only that film. Most of what we're exposed to regarding the Old South are romanticized paintings of Confederates in glorious combat against the Yankee Menace in the War of Northern Aggression (yes, they really call it that), or beautiful and white-washed depictions of plantation parties and rural country living. Along with spirited renditions of Dixie and other Confederate ballads, it isn't exactly difficult to let yourself get swept up in it all if you don't know better.

This is the Confederacy to the Average Southerner; This and Only This. Believe Otherwise and you're a dirty Yankee commie who hates America and just doesn't get it.

You're probably thinking that with time and scholarship such ideas would melt away. Well, it's not that simple. One thing I do disagree with is how the South was treated after the war, but ironically enough that was their own fault. When John Wilkes Booth shot and killed Abraham Lincoln he killed the most powerful friend the Post-War South had. Lincoln above all just wanted a solution to the crisis and he frankly didn't give a damn what it was; he loved America and wanted to preserve it and if that meant keeping slaves, freeing slaves, deporting them wholesale, or keeping them and integrating them he was going to do it. He cared about what worked, not necessarily what people wanted. At the same time the moral compass of the nation was being awakened with the advent of industrial agriculture. Slavery was quite simply no longer necessary because industry could beat anything a field of slaves could do, and there was more money in it. It was a perfect storm for abolition, just like the South's climate was naturally against abolition.

Back to Lincoln, Lincoln believed in a policy of reconciliation and recuperation for the South. He wanted them to be an industrialized, strong, happy, healthy, free part of the United States. But he was a minority in this, so when Booth cacked him it was only going to go downhill from there. As this bitter Southern man ran out of the theater shouting the Latin Virginian motto, Sic Semper Tyrannis, he sealed the doom of the South at the hands of embittered and angry northerners who wanted to seize the resources of the South away from them and use them for their own commercial gain.

This and the above painting is done by Don Troiani, a guy who specializes in Civil War art. This is totally unrelated to anything I'm talking about, I just wanted to show the Confederates aren't the only people with seriously epic artwork. You can enjoy it, be patriotic, and be guilt-free. Seriously, check him out.

To be quite honest I see where the North was coming from, but that doesn't mean revenge was a good guiding motivator for domestic policy. The South and the North had a nice dichotomy going before the war; the South grew the cotton, shipped it north to factories, and then the North made good use of it. If that could have been recreated maybe today the South wouldn't be one of the poorest places in the country. This may come as a shock to the Southerner who's so convinced in the agrarian purity of the South, but we're in the bottom on everything good and the top of everything bad. Highest crime rates, greatest amount of STDs, highest infant mortality rate, highest number of broken homes, lowest number of people with a high school diploma, greatest number of people on welfare, lowest GDP, lowest infrastructure score, greatest drug usage, highest rates of domestic abuse, you name it. I'm not saying anywhere else in America is paradise but when you look at the numbers we really are not doing that great. A big part of this has to do with how Reconstruction was done (which again indirectly was John Wilkes Booth's fault because he shot the one guy who could stop it). Every Southern boy knows that the Carpetbaggers came south and exploited us at our lowest, which is somewhat true. Most industries and manufacturing in this state is owned by non-native corporations. The only thing that isn't is agriculture and service industries, the former being because most Southerners owned the land to do it with in the first place and the latter because we have to make money somehow.

I'd also like to point out at this point there was this "Romance of Reunion" thing going on. See, actually, most of the big name guys involved in the Civil War were happy it was over and hated it while it happened. Most of the military who weren't "grunts" had all served together before in other wars, some as far back as 1812. They were not enthusiastic at the prospect of shooting one another. So after the war was over most people honestly wanted to get on with their lives and make sure this catastrophe weakened us as little as possible. Foreign powers were starting to take interest in the Americas again with its primary superpower divided and killing itself (see: France in Mexico), but the war ended decisively before any one side got too involved. Just as an aside, the Confederacy regarded every state as a sovereign nation. You needed a passport just to cross state lines. Each one could make treaties and trade deals of its own accord, and even declare war. Now how exactly is that supposed to work out for a strong, unified country? At the time, we would've become a playground for foreign empires within a year.

How and why does the South keep the Confederacy alive, then, if all this is true? Aside from the romanticism involved in all of it: money. Remember what I said about how poor the South is? Well, what we do have are a large collection of famous Civil War monuments, battlefields, and so on. Plantations and cities with old quarters full of reenactors. Who put the Old South on full display for your enjoyment as a tourist. Whether you be a foreigner, a Neo-Confederate on pilgrimage, or just a curious tourist, you're welcome for $20 each. Tourism is literally what keeps the South operating in the green, and even then for some of them it's not enough to keep them out of debt. We've also got civil war reenactments that are huge events, like football game huge. People bring lawn chairs and families to watch these things. They come for miles, even for battles where the Confederacy loses! It's a money making scheme; that's all it is.

But there's a final element to this whole thing: political disenfranchisement. The average Dixian feels disconnected from every other part of the country. As we've seen before, the entire South can vote one way in a national election and it doesn't matter; it's a drop in the bucket. But that's how our electoral college is set up. On top of that, we're a joke to most of the planet and even in the rest of the country. We don't know our own history, we seemingly live in invincible ignorance, we literally drag our nation down, and yet while being only a fourth of the nation we dare to make the assertion that we represent the United States of America. Or worse yet that we're better than the US and can somehow survive on our own without it. We're like that crotchety old relative who lives in your house, talks smack all the time to everyone else (but never gets in a fight of any kind or does anything substantial and when he does it fails gloriously), when he's in his 40s and has done nothing with his life and is utterly dependent on others.

But really, that's a big part of it. It really came back into vogue though the the Centennial of the Civil War in the 50s; before that, the Confederacy was a quirky piece of history. In fact the Confederate Flag you see today is the result of that Centennial; it was flown at parades and sold to people who wanted to commemorate a heritage which suddenly meant so much to them. The closest thing to what people use now was actually the navy jack (coloration is off) or the battle flag of Northern Virginia (though it's a square and had writing on it, unlike the ones you see today). So the flag everyone is arguing over is not even the right one.

I daresay many fly the flag simply as a symbol of rebellion: they feel themselves unjustly punished by the North because they were in the right, which they only believe because of folk historiography. Nothing embodies this thinking better than the song, "I'm a Good Ol' Rebel." Take a listen, and be amazed.

Now do you get it? Most Neo-Confederates know nothing of substance about the Civil War and don't want to learn because they enjoy the historical grounding the Confederacy gives their current distaste for things; they like the aesthetic, it fits them comfortably, and the idealistic and romanticized portrait of a bunch of rag-tag rebels fighting a modernized liberal empire for all that's good, traditional, and conservative in America with valor and courage. You can see the dissonance all over this video; he literally says he hates the Declaration of Independence and Old Glory, yet puts a picture of the Confederate Flag in captioned "Heritage/Not Hate." Note the inclusion of Black Confederates; they validate his believe that the original CSA was not about white supremacy, and to most Black Confederates it isn't either. They're an anomaly, truly. Historically blacks fought for the Confederacy because they were slaves and therefore had no choice or hoped fighting would advance their social standing. Others like black slave owners simply wanted to continue the business they had carved out for themselves. But it does not change that the CSA's continued existence would secure the perpetration of white supremacy and slavery in North America; not a chance. How many Neo-Confederates are racists? Honestly it's hard to say; I guess what would matter was if the power and influential ones were.

To make things worse, Republicans and Conservatives have almost been forced into appealing to these people because everyone else is voting Democrat. This almost seals the doom of the continuation and mainstream acceptance of Neo-Confederates.

The great irony is that it is indirectly our own fault: cantankerous and violent minorities with questionable loyalties very rarely get treated nicely. Especially when they've been treated marginally well compared to what could be done to them. Less generous nations might've smashed us into the ground multiple times now for our cries of secession and so-on and torn down every vestige of the Confederacy, but they didn't.

In summary? Neo-Confederacy is caused by a mixture of political disenfranchisement, folk historiography, romanticism, white-washing, a booming tourism industry, political manipulation, and racism.

So why am I now anti-Confederacy? Around the early days of the NSIR a critic of my page attacked my early posts defending the Confederacy, and told me some things I didn't know. Mostly concerning that link I showed you all. The fact is that slavery was the immediate cause of secession and most Southerners knew that; the election of an Anti-Slavery President was the source of secession. That was the event which triggered the whole proceeding events. The economic backbone of the South was threatened. Slavery was an immoral institution and many in America wanted it abolished, but the South would do no such thing as they'd built their entire society around it.

Every single secession declaration for the Confederate States of America mentions as a reason for their secession slavery, white supremacy, or both. Most notably South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. People talk about other factors, but these were just straws on the camel's back; the one that broke it was slavery. State's Rights were only evoked to counter federal attempts at abolition. All I'm saying is, no one got beaten to death in congress by a Southern man because of some slanted tariffs: it was because he made a speech denouncing slavery.

An argument can be made that many people - even Robert E. Lee perhaps - who fought for the Confederacy were not overtly racist. Well an argument can be made that not everyone who fought for the Third Reich was not an overt antisemite, but we still condemn them because they fought - whether they liked it or not - for a regime that would have prolonged the Holocaust, a great injustice. It's the same with the Confederacy; the existence of the Confederacy would have prolonged slavery and entrenched racialism in the south. In the service of the Caliphs who ruled Christian Iberia with an iron first there were many religiously Catholic mercenaries. Are they to be forgiven for their crimes, and the oppression of the Caliphate upon our people to be ignored because of this? No; such would be preposterous.

Speaking of Catholics, much ado is also made about how the Confederacy was somehow "Catholic." This cannot be further from the truth. In pre and post Civil War South the Catholic Church was very much under attack because they disliked slavery and racialism. Beauregard might have been a Catholic, but so is Nancy Pelosi. I think most Catholics would agree with me having brought this up that it takes more than simply professing Catholicism to be considered a good Catholic. The only substantial arguments people make revolve around the fact that Blessed Pope Pius IX wrote with Jefferson Davis and recognized him as leader of a nation; well, he was. An illegitimate one, but a nation. As I've said before by the 19th century the Church basically lost all meaningful political power and they never really had it in America like they did in Europe. Rome's primary concern at this point was the protection of their flock, hence probably why he did not antagonize them. In those days one knew the Faith, and every Catholic knew this modernist racialism and unjust slavery was something no Catholic could support. A task I will give my fellow Catholics who support the Confederacy is to find me one piece of writing from Rome in which the support for the Confederacy is espoused. Why did any Catholics fight for the Union if the Pope espoused his support for one side over the other? Why is it the case then that the majority of Catholics fought for the Union? How came it that Catholicism became far more accepted in mainstream American society than ever before following the Civil War? Oh, that's right; Catholic brigades formed by the Irish and Italians played crucial roles in many battles.

To my fellow Catholics particularly I can only question this fascination with shock. Why do you so desperately cling to this rotten edifice of a government that did not outlive its founders and moreover stood against our principles? It can be said that before the Civil War many Catholics didn't precisely oppose abolition but they opposed the Republicans at the time mostly because they housed the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Catholic and Anti-Immigrant party of the day. But at the war's onset that all changed.

Memorial to the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

We have a duty to this nation; we will not serve it if we get too bogged down in their sectarian politics.

Conclusion

Guys, why am I even having this discussion with you? Our nation is hurt with manifold wounds that open wider every day and threaten to kill us. America is not and never has been a true home for Catholics, but nowhere else in the world is either. We're much like the Jews once were in that regard; nowhere is a home for us. We are a people in exile, who's lot in life will be a boot pressed against our face if we don't act. The rest of the world doesn't care a damn about the Civil War. America is crumbling; it will crumble faster as a house divided. Ladies and gentleman, please; for the sake of our future and our survival, let's put this all behind us. America has a future: a united future, a royal future, a Catholic future. But even now those three words put many Americas in rows. We have a lot of work before us. Rome, too, was once a corrupt an inept republic. America can become something great, but it cannot be anything but a footnote in history if it falls. We must ensure that if it must fall something great must take its place, for now many malicious powers stand to replace it.

People say the Confederacy is the "Traditional" America. No it isn't; it was a merchant oligarchy that dressed itself up pretty. The difference is that the Union didn't stand on such ceremony. A rebellion or even the continual fomentation of these ideas only serve to further divide this country. For the sake of everyone we need to try and unify, even if only as Catholics. A storm is coming and it is best if we weather it united.

Hall of the Union League, Philadelphia