1800-1820, Second Great Awakening. Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875, was the leader of the Second Great Awakening. Finney and Lyman Beecher were fanatics who with the Second Great Awakening launched anti-Catholic campaigns.
1801-1835, John Marshall, former Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.
1807, British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act. It effectively ended the slave trade in England.
1808, U.S. Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves was passed to end not slavery but the importation of slaves henceforth.
AMERICAN INDIAN
(Check with Will Grigg on American Indian battles, like Wounded Knee and others.)
Rushdoony on the American Indian
Rushdoony’s son on how the federal government has infected the American Indians and all other Americans with reservation fever. The term “Indian” is a European term thanks to Columbus who believed that he had landed in India. The Indians themselves never saw themselves as Indians but in fact small tribes of families.
1812, War of 1812
Second War of Independence?
Issues: Abolitionism v. Anti-Slavery. Important differences. Abolitionism, of whom mass murderer, John Brown, was one of its leading members, was used by the Yankee New Englanders as fuel to mass murder Americans in the southern states during the Civil War.
“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.”)
Thomas Fleming states in an interview that “The best people of the North showered praise on a fanatic who believed that “without the emission of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.” In Kansas a few years earlier, Brown had murdered six unarmed southerners before the horrified eyes of their wives and children and ordered his sons to hack up their bodies with swords.
After Brown’s execution, America’s best-known writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, declared him the equal of Jesus Christ. Another Massachusetts man told Emerson that compared to John Brown, Christ was a “dead failure.” He had ignored three decades of northern prayers begging him to end slavery. John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, declared the South had to be conquered, “though it cost a million lives.”
John Brown, 1800-1859, an abolitionist and monster, murdered a half dozen southern soldiers in front of their children and wives. He had the financial backing of northern abolitionists. He lived by the ideology that “without the emission of blood, there is no forgiveness for sin.”
FLEMING: Here we get into the peculiarities of the New England mind. They had a natural tendency to look down on the rest of the country. They saw themselves as the real founders and were infuriated that the leadership had passed to Jefferson and other southern presidents. Jefferson’s 1807 embargo, which was an economic disaster for New England, was the trigger that made them see the South as enemies. Then they focused on the South’s moral flaw — the continuance — and the growth — of slavery, and the two arguments fused into Abolitionism, a creed proclaimed in their souls by God.
In Britain, one of the ways the situation was diffused was to compensate the slaveholders. Reasonable voices—Abraham Lincoln for example—proposed that here, but the Abolitionists in Congress never backed his bill. The abolitionists’ goal was not persuasion of southerners. It was to shame them into submission, confess their guilt and free the slaves. It was essentially a fanatical religious crusade.
Tom DiLorenzo is good to read on this war. Here he writes “Yankee Confederates: New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States,” Thomas DiLorenzo, 1998. It’s a chapter found in David Gordon’s Secession, State, and Liberty, 1998.
http://www.ditext.com/dilorenzo/yankee.html
1816-1819, First Seminole War.
1819, McCulloch v. Maryland.
1821, New York’s reformed Constitution of 1821 retained the property requirement for voting, thereby preventing most blacks from voting in New York. Abolitionist Movement gains steam in the U.S. with the state of New York being the first to officially abolish slavery completely. Here is a timeline.
1824, Old Glory is a nickname for the American flag or American National flag. I really don’t see the big deal with this flag. Sounds like something some relatives made for a sailor who used it on his boat. Big whoop.
1825, John McDonogh.
This leads me to the story of John McDonogh. He was one of the great forgotten men in American history. He was not well known outside of Louisiana, and he was generally hated there. He died in 1850, the richest man in the state. Today in Louisiana, there are many public schools named after him. There is a reason for this.
John McDonogh was a penny-pinching Scot. Like most Calvinist Scots, he was a strict Sabbatarian. Nobody worked on his plantation on Sundays, but they worked like madmen on the other six days.
Why? From everything we know about the slave economy, slaves were slackers. They stole, they cheated, they faked illnesses. They were goldbricks. They were officially regarded as natural slaves.
What John McDonogh proved, as perhaps no one in American history has proved more clearly, is that men respond to incentives. In 1825, he conceived of a plan that would enable his slaves to buy their way to freedom. He hoped that they would go to Liberia, but only one did.
As a strict Sabbatarian, he would give them Saturday afternoons off for their own work if they promised not to work on Sundays. Other planters also gave their slaves Saturday afternoon off. But McDonogh made this offer: if they would work for him on Saturday afternoon, and two extra hours each day, he would pay them extra. He paid them 50 cents a day in winter and 62.5 cents in summer.
He established a set release price for males of $600 and $450 for females. This was somewhat less than the average market price for healthy field hands. Once they had paid off one-sixth of this agreed-upon price, they would get one free day of their own. They could then use their earnings on this free day to speed up repayment. When they “owned” Saturday, the time they spend working for him on Saturday enabled them to buy Friday. When they had bought Friday, they started buying Thursday. When they bought Monday, they were granted their freedom. It took fifteen years for a slave to buy his way out of slavery.
1828, New York state abolishes slavery. Why did it take 7 years and why did NY abolish slavery in 1828, which corresponded with the Tariff of Abominations?
1828, The Tariff of Abominations.
1830, Colonizing blacks. Lincoln supported deportation back to Africa. Tom Di Lorenzo observes Abraham Lincoln’s question of “What Shall We Do With the Negroes After They Are Free?”
So asked Abraham Lincoln of General Benjamin Butler in early 1865 (page 19 of the linked article). Lincoln answered his own question: Deport them all out of America, he said. After complimenting Butler on his ability to move large numbers of people by water during the war, Lincoln asked him if he could work up a plan to deport every last black person in America by sea. This was all well known to prior generations of historians before the Great PC Whitewashing of Civil War History commenced, as discussed in this 1919 article in theJournal of Negro History. (Thanks to Tom Mullen).
Could this mean that Lincoln was not quite the racial saint that the Republican Party (among others) has portrayed him as being for the past 150 years?
Remember Marcus Garvey, head of the black organization here in the 1920s? Well, he also advocated deportation back to Africa.
1830s, Pietism
Pietism, as it swept American Protestantism in the 1830s, took two very different forms in North and South, with very different political implications. The Southerners, at least until the 1890s, became “salvationist pietists,” that is, they believed that the emotional experience of individual regeneration, of being born again, was enough to ensure salvation. Religion was a separate compartment of life, a vertical individual-God relation carrying no imperative to transform man-made culture and interhuman relations.
In contrast, the Northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by “Yankees,” adopted a far different form of pietism, “evangelical pietism.” The evangelical pietists believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will. More particularly, they also believed that it was necessary to a person’s own salvation – and not just a good idea – to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society:
“To spread holiness,” to create that Christian commonwealth by bringing all men to Christ, was the divinely ordered duty of the “saved.” Their mandate was “to transform the world into the image of Christ.”
1830, In tandem with Pietism came the Welfare State and in 1860 Progressivism.
1830s, Temperance Movement. Lyman Beecher, 1775-1863, was one of the movement’s co-founders as well as a supporter of the Second Great Awakening.
Postmillennialism was a dominant theological belief among American Protestants who promoted reform movements in the 19th and 20th century such as abolitionism and the Social Gospel.[2] Postmillennialism has become one of the key tenets of a movement known as Christian Reconstructionism. It has been criticized by 20th-century religious conservatives as an attempt to Immanentize the eschaton.
Lysander Spooner provides excellent insight on the unconstitutionality of slavery.
1832, South Carolina made noises about secession in 1832, but President Jackson put an end to all that speculation. Jackson was ready to invade South Carolina. Dr. Gary North points out that:
Madison sucked them in. He and the others did not discuss getting back out.
It was clear that Jackson was ready to invade South Carolina in 1832.
They backed off.
The War of 1861 was a revolution. It was justified as such: an appeal back to the Declaration of Independence.
The South in 1861 wanted to gain control over the import taxes that were being collected by the Union. Lincoln referred to this in his first inaugural. He said he would collect them.
“The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
The South wanted the money. Lincoln said no.
And the war came.
1833, UK Paid to Abolish Slavery via Slavery Abolition Act.
1835, Dade Massacre.
1835, Tocqueville‘s Democracy in America. Great 1962 article by Robert Schuettinger. From the artricle:
“Tocqueville saw that the real threat to a democratic society in our age would not be what the Tories dreaded, anarchy, nor would it be the absolute dictatorship feared by the Old Liberals; rather, it would be the mild tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit, a gray uniformity enforced by a central government in the name of “humanity” and “social justice.”
1835-1842, Second Seminole War.
1835, U.S. immigration into Mexico.
Immigrants from the United States poured into the area, and by 1835, over three-fourths of Mexican citizens in what is now east Texas were of American origin and largely Protestant as well. The Mexican government had attempted to stop the flood of immigrants in 1830 by halting immigration and setting up administrative districts to impose new customs duties. The halt in immigration was largely ineffective, however, since Mexicans of American extraction were numerous enough to control many of the local institutions and did little to prevent further immigration. The end result was a small minority of Catholic and Spanish-speaking citizens in the region by the time Texas declared its independence in 1835.
The example of Texas is so useful because it clearly shows us that when dealing with issues of immigration, the point in time in which it becomes clear that immigration is a problem, it may already be too late. As the “American-Mexicans” of the 1830s showed us, it can prove exceedingly difficult to enforce any meaningful immigration policy when the machinery of government is controlled by those who stand to gain from even more unlimited immigration.
The Mexican government should have really known better than to swing the doors open to Protestant and English-speaking Americans when they couldn’t even begin to populate the area with anyone hailing from any parts of NewSpain. It didn’t take long before Mexico’s open borders policy had produced a situation where almost 23,000 of the 30,000 people in Texas were more interested in being a part of the Protestant-Anglo society of the United States than in being a part of Mexico’s Catholic and Hispanic culture. It took little more than the demographic shift to make Texas an independent country, and then a part of the United States.
1846, US Invasion of Mexico. “. . . from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. . . .” Ryan McMaken points out that . . .
“Much of the [Marine] behavior was motivated by the crazed anti-Catholicism endemic among most American troops, and of course, by long-standing bigotry toward Mexicans in general. The disdain for civilian Mexicans was so great, in fact, that such behavior was a major motivating factor for the members of the famous San Patricio Battalion of Irish and German Catholics which went over the Mexican side at least partially in response to the American treatment of Mexican civilians. From a history of the San Patricios . . . .”
1846-1848, Mexican-American War. San Patricios, 1846-1848, Irish immigrant recruits who deserted the US Army in order to defend Mexican fellow Catholics from Yankee aggression.
1848, Shelby Foote said that the bayonet had been defunct tactically since 1848.
1848, Revolutions in Europe. Failed revolutionaries flee to the United States.
Between 1845 and 1854 over one million German citizens left their homes and emigrated, many of them as a result of the failed revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. The ‘Forty-Eighters‘ who came to the United States both for political and economic reasons went through different stages of adaptation to the new country. The immigrants contributed to the political, social and cultural life of their new homeland by transforming staid communities on the East coast, by founding new settlements in the Midwest and West, and by swelling the number of politically conscious artisans and workers in the big cities. Their voting power and personal sacrifices were of great importance in the abolition of slavery in the U.S. They participated in the debate about the women’s vote and in stressing the concepts of free and general education.
Excerpt from a podcast between John Denson, an Alabama lawyer, and Lew Rockwell, head of the Mises Institute. Terrific review of the role played in the US by the Forty-Eighters and their impact on Lincoln and the Civil War.
Let me move on to a second book that I think is important. And this is something brand new to me. This is a book called Red Republicans and Lincoln Marxists. And the subtitle is Marxism in the Civil War. It’s by Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson Jr. It’s been out several years. But is it about the effect of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and what they did to America.
You know, when I look at the European history, and you see the Congress of Vienna Mitterrand put together, 1814, 1815, to bring the Napoleonic Wars to an end, historians and I have praised that settlement because it, in effect, brought general peace to Europe for 100 years until World War I. Now there were some revolts in there. The Classical Liberals didn’t particularly like it. They wanted less government. But the Socialists and Communists arising out of the French Revolution did not like it at all. And so in 1830, there was a tremendous revolt in France that overthrew Charles X, but that was about it.
1848 in Europe, everybody but England and Russia suffered the revolt. 17 countries put on efforts to overthrow the Congress of Vienna settlement and they were all suppressed. None of them were successful. And so I’ve sort of dismissed that in my mind as a significant event in history.
And then you get to the Franco-Prussian War, 1870, 1871, and then you get the Nationalist – Germany being made more into a national government rather than a confederacy. But I never really read anything or thought about the fact that a huge number of the rebels in 1848, primarily in Germany, were run out of the country. Some of them sought asylum in England, some in Switzerland. But a huge number came to America because they saw that, in the War Between the States, this was exactly what they were trying to do in Germany, and that is to create a national government. They wanted a strong central government. They wanted a graduated income tax. They wanted government control over the money. And they saw an opportunity in American. So there’s a listing of so many of them, but several of them became generals in the Union Army; colonels in positions of military leadership.
And a guy named Charles Dana, D-A-N-A, was a good friend of Karl Marx, and so he convinced Horace Greeley to let Marx write a regular column in the New York Tribune. And Carl Schurz, I’ve read about from time to time. In fact, he was the only one I thought had anything to do with the 1848 revolution and came here. He had a very high military position and was eventually elected Senator of Missouri and became secretary of Interior under Hayes. And he was about as red as you could get. (laughing) And so these ideas that were not successful in Europe in 1848 became successful under Lincoln in the War Between the States. And they were all attracted here and thought Lincoln was doing exactly the right thing, to eliminate a confederacy and have a strong central government; do away with the ability of the states to do anything.
ROCKWELL: Didn’t Marx write Lincoln – wasn’t Marx an admirer of Lincoln personally, too?
DENSON: Yes, absolutely. He was very much in praise of what Lincoln was doing. And these ideas, it was like a contagious virus that came over here from Europe. And these ideas continued to bubble into the populous movement and into the progressive movement. And it all begins with this virus hitting us over the 1848 revolutions in Europe that were unsuccessful, but very successful here.
And this is a book that needs to be studied because not many people know how strongly the Union Army was led by the rebels from Germany – (laughing) – and it was not just Germany but primarily Germany – and how many of those ideas were put into place by people like Schurz, becoming a Senator and secretary of Interior, and Marx being able to write in a New York paper the benefits of Communism and centralized government. It’s a very revealing book to me, that I had never thought about – (laughing) – why the European history of 1848 was important to American history.
1848, Social Justice. While the concept of social justice can be traced through Ancient and Renaissance philosophy, such as Socrates, Thomas Aquinas,Spinoza and Thomas Paine,[4] the term “social justice” only became used explicitly from the 1840s. A Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli is typically credited with coining the term,[5] and it spread during the revolutions of 1848with the work of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati. In the late industrial revolution, progressive American legal scholars began to use the term more, particularly Louis Brandeisand Roscoe Pound. From the early 20th century it was also embedded in international law and institutions, starting with the Treaty of Versailles 1919. The preamble to establish the International Labour Organization recalled that “universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.”[6] In the later 20th century, social justice was made central to the philosophy of the social contract, primarily by John Rawlsin A Theory of Justice (1971). In 1993, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treat social justice as a purpose of the human rights education.[7] Here is a decent article on social justice.
1850, Fugitive Slave Act.
. . . the Fugitive Slave Act incensed many Northerners. It was one thing for Southern states to perpetrate slavery in their territory; it was another to have the federal government send marshals into non-slave states, arrest runaways, and return them to bondage.
1850, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. Here is Wikipedia’s history.
1851, from the Pietist article by Rothbard above:
“Swett was keen enough to recognize that the pietist educational formula meant that the state takes over jurisdiction of the child from his parents, since “children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country.”
1854, Henry David Thoreau and Walden
This is a great essay by the economist, Dr. Gary North, on how Thoreau was anti-capitalist and not self-reliant as he was trying to live up to his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. (April 18, 2014)
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1855, “…when the poor people who are the victims of this crime [slavery], disliking the stripping and peeling process, run away into states where this practice is not permitted – a law has been passed requiring us who sit here to seize these poor people, tell them they have not been plundered enough and must go back to be stripped and peeled again, and as long as they live.”
1857, Dread Scott Decision. DiLorenzo explains that:
The 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision solidified the state’s protection of slavery. In his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln clearly stated that in his opinion slavery was already constitutional, but that he would support a constitutional amendment (the Corwin Amendment) that would make the protection of slavery “express and irrevocable” (his exact words). If any flag ever “represented” an American slave empire, it is the U.S. flag.
At the same time, the newly-formed Confederate government adopted a new flag based on the Saint Andrew’s Cross. Saint Andrew is said to have been crucified on the cross, shaped like an “X.” Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, which is why the Scottish flag has been a rendition of the Saint Andrew’s cross since the ninth century, as are numerous other national flags, as well as the state flags of Florida and Alabama, and even of cities in other countries.
The Confederates chose the Saint Andrew’s Cross, apparently, because of the overwhelming numbers of Scots-Irish immigrants in the Southern states. As James Webb wrote in his book, Born Fighting: A History of the Scots-Irish in America, “his people,” the Scots-Irish, dominated the ranks of the Confederate Army, where the average soldier was a yeoman farmer who did not own slaves and fought “because he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded.” The tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart” of the Scots-Irish, writes Webb, which is why they fought. In every major battle of the war, Webb points out, Confederate non-slave owners fought against Union Army slave owners from border states where slavery was still protected during the Lincoln regime as long as those states remained in the union and continued paying federal taxes.
1859, It was Thomas Huxley, beginning in late 1859, who became known as Darwin’s bulldog. He did the heavy lifting intellectually, and then the ideas spread very fast. Darwin, I’m sure you’ll agree, was an evolutionist. He was not a believer in radical discontinuities as shapers of nature. His whole system was opposed to radical discontinuity as an explanatory device. –from Gary North
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, 1861-1865
How to Teach/Study the Civil War:
Turns out that the cause for secession at the start of the Civil War actually was slavery.
“The forgotten fact that you should begin with concerning the Civil War is this: the future of North from 1860 to 1865 was dependent on the Illinois Central Railroad. Lincoln was a lawyer with that railroad. Stephen A. Douglas was a lawyer with that railroad. In senior management was George McClellan, who oversaw both of them. So, in the election of 1860, the President was going to be won by an Illinois Central lawyer. In the election of 1864, the election was going to be won by an employee of the Illinois Central Railroad. Anybody who thinks this was random is the kind of person who believes that it was random in 2004, when a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones was going to be elected President. This is an organization that selects 15 people a year. Out of all the people in the United States, the only candidates who made it to the top were Skull and Bones members in 2004, neither of whom was allowed, or is allowed, by the secret oath of the organization to discuss the organization. Similarly, historians of the Civil War rarely bother to talk about the centrality of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Lincoln went to war to save the union, and to make certain that the union would stay in control of tariff revenues, especially tariffs collected at the port of Charleston. That is why the war began there. That is why General Beauregard began firing on Fort Sumter, which was under the control of his former West Point instructor, Maj. Anderson. The South wanted the revenues that were coming in through the port of Charleston and the Port of New Orleans. They wanted the money, and Lincoln was not going to let them have it.
The South’s spokesman who told the truth on this matter after the war was the man who had been Stonewall Jackson’s chaplain and his aid to camp: Calvinist theologian and Presbyterian pastor, Robert L. Dabney. Dabney wrote a defense of slavery during the war, and he allowed it to be published as a book in 1867: A Defense of Virginia (And Through Her, the South. He placed slavery and its defense front and center. After the war, all other defenses of the South shifted the issue to the constitutional right of secession, ignoring slavery as the primary reason.
Read more at http://teapartyeconomist.com/2015/03/05/how-to-teach-the-civil-war/#mGIRIaCO6KyZissl.99
CIVIL WAR LITERARY FIGURES:
Gary North explains that:
The three literary figures who fought in the Civil War were Ambrose Bierce (North), Lew Wallace (North), and Sydney Lanier (South).
Bierce is remembered for The Devil’s Dictionary and the most famous short story of the war, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Bierce did write a personal memoir of the war. It is not famous.
Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur.
Lanier was a poet. He is remembered mainly because there is a large man-made lake in Georgia named after him. It supplies Atlanta with its water.
. . .
On the origins of the American Civil War or the War for Independence of the Southern States.
This is why the US Civil War is important and relevant today. “Almost everything, in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War.” –Murray Rothbard. Here is more from Charles Burris.
On the origins of the Civil War, Thomas DiLorenzo explains “A war was not necessary to end slavery – the rest of the world did it peacefully; only 6 percent of adult Southern men owned slaves, which means that the average Confederate soldier was not fighting to preserve a system that actually harmed him and his family economically; and that the real cause of the war was what Fleming calls a “malevolent envy” of the South by New England “Yankees” who waged a war of economic conquest. In his own words, from the inside front cover of A Disease in the Public Mind:
[Northern] hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. Abolitionists were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leaders of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.”
. . .
Fleming discusses in great detail how John Brown came to replace Jesus Christ in the minds of Northern abolitionists, who adopted his mantra that blood must shed in order to eradicate sin. That is, if they were to be saved and sent to Heaven, there must be bloodshed, and the more the better. That is why peaceful emancipation was not achieved in America, writes Fleming: It was not stubborn and evil Southern plantation owners who were the problem, it was the bloodthirsty abolitionists.
John Brown “descended from Puritans” and was “the personification of a Puritan,” says Fleming. And he truly became a “god” to the New England “Yankees.” “Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed awe and near-worship of John Brown,” writes Fleming. He lavished praise on John Brown’s “religion of violence.” Emerson called Brown “that new saint” who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau said that “Brown was Jesus.” He was “the bravest and humanest man in the country,” said Thoreau with horribly clunky English. He described Brown in that way after learning of Brown’s execution of non-slave owning, innocents in front of their wives and children. These men were clearly crazy, and their writings must have contributed a great deal to the “disease in the public mind.”
In his final chapter Thomas Fleming writes about Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was an officer in Lincoln’s army who was wounded in battle. After the war, “For seventy years, he repeatedly condemned the abolitionists and others who claimed they had a message from some higher power that everyone had to obey. Above all, he voiced his contempt for people whose claim to certitude often persuaded other men to kill each other.” If this sounds familiar, it is because it has been the guiding principle of American foreign policy ever since 1865. “The Yankee Problem in American History” by Clyde Wilson.
Manumission was the act of a slave owner releasing his slave.
Political support for the North in the Civil War came from Germans exiting the 1848 revolution in Germany.
The Outlaw Josey Wales, released in 1976, is based on Forrest Carter’s Rebel Outlaw: The Josey Wales, 1973.
Shenandoah is not on Netflix as of June 12, 2013, but it is available to rent at YouTube for $2.99.
1861-1865, Civil War revisionism. “Napoleonic charges . . . characterized the war.” “Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in “manners” by a region that “excelled at the arts of peace.” Well, not really. What the North “excelled” in was the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping: “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).”
1861, CSA, Confederate States of America, was formed in 1861, the year in which the War of Secession began.
1861, General Robert E. Lee’s battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also known as the Rebel flag.
1861, The Confederate Flag, also known as the “Stars and Bars.”
St. Andrew’s flag is the national flag of Scotland, 1542. Notice the resemblance of the St. Andrew’s flag and the St. Patrick’s flag to the second national and battle flag of the Confederate, called “Stainless Banner,” 1863. This is referred to as the white-diagonal cross of St. Andrew of Scotland.
St. Patrick’s red diagonal cross of Ireland, 1625.
1863, Stainless Banner was the 2nd flag of the Confederate States of America.
The Southern Cross is not an emblem on any American flag, but it is a constellation of the Milky Way whose configuration is in the shape of a kite or a cross. The emblem does appear on national flags of countries in the southern hemisphere, like Australia [and here] and New Zealand.
Crux /ˈkrʌks/ is a constellation located in the southern sky in a bright portion of the Milky Way. It is among the most easily distinguished constellations, as all of its four main stars have an apparent visual magnitudeabove +2.8, even though it is the smallest of all 88 modern constellations. Its name is Latin for cross, and it is dominated by a cross-shaped or kite-like asterism that is sometimes known as the Southern Cross.
“Lincoln’s win in the War To Prevent Southern Independence put that argument to bed, established the Republican party, and led us to the corporate Washington we have today, an unconstitutional club of business and government bureaucrats and lobbyists responsible to no one but themselves, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day.”
Gary North: “Slaves would have been freed by federal vote in the 1880’s or 1890’s. The South would have seceeded. Then the war would have crushed the South in a matter of a year. The South had no industry. It could not defend itself.
The South could have done it in 1828. Then it would have contracted economically in the final decades of the century. Agriculture was finished as a major source of income. The South took a century to recover after 1865. It was a basket case economically.
Slavery was doomed in the 19th century. Its time had come. But the South’s leaders thought they could get way with secession. They could have in 1861, but only by adopting guerrilla warfare. Had Nathan Bedford Forrest been put in charge of the army, the South would have won.”
Here is a little more on Bedford.
1861, The Sacking of Osceola, Missouri, September 23. The movie, starring Tobey Maguire, Ride with the Devil, 1999, depicts the guerrilla warfare on the border states at the outset of the Civil War. It’s directed by Ang Lee. I liked the movie for it showed how expansive the war was across counties and states. You get a good sense of size and scope of the war from the movie.
1861, Lincoln suspends Habeaus Corpus.
Salmon P. Chase was Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary.
Jay Cooke financed the North’s war.
1862, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, eulogizes Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862. “The Eastern elitists, from Emerson, the Alcotts, Hawthorne, Melville, Horace Greeley, etc. were orthodox Christians they were all a part of the progressive agenda that led to the Lincoln idolatry,” observes Newleaf.
1862, Revenue Act. “In July 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue and enacted a temporary income tax to pay war expenses (see Revenue Act of 1862).”
1862, Battle of Shiloh. Here’s one history and another. This music by Bobby Horton should not be missed.
1862, Pharaoh’s Army, starring Chris Cooper, Kris Kristofferson, and Patricia Clarkson. “In the spring of 1862, in the Cumberland Mountains ‘down near the Tennessee line,’ war sympathies were strongly divided against neighbors.” Wikipedia.
1862, The Homestead Acts. Lincoln hoped to bleed the South of fighting men by offering 160 acres per man for free; sans the filing fee.
1862, The Morrill Act. “Officially titled “An Act Donating Public Lands to the Several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts,” the Morrill Act provided each state with 30,000 acres of Federal land for each member in their Congressional delegation.” This is how public high schools and universities got their start. They needed land for the buildings. Then they continued to build. I recall my days at UC Irvine how it was a fairly remote place in South Orange County. Then one by one building, large structures began being built before every inch of space was taken despite the complaints from the environmentalists about brown-spotted moths or anteaters.
1862, Ulysses. S. Grant expells Jews from his military district.
1863, Emancipation Proclamation, January 1.
1863, Lawrence, Kansas, August 21.
1863, November 19, Gettysburg Address and what Lincoln’s speech achieved. And here is Gary North’s interpretation of Lincoln’s address. How Lincoln forged a civil religion of American nationalism.
In 1967, sociologist Robert Bellah launched the modern career of “civil religion” as a concept, a way to examine how, on the one hand, the state adopts religious language, ritual, holidays, and symbolism to bind a nation together and how, on the other hand, it elevates its own values and ideas to the status of holy doctrine. Regarding the first type, University of Toronto political theorist Ronald Beiner recently defined civil religion as “the appropriation of religion by politics for its purposes.” Lincoln had been doing this to the Bible since at least 1838. He ended his Lyceum Address by applying Matthew 16:18 to American liberty: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” More famously, in 1858 he quoted Matthew 12:25 to characterize the precarious state of the Union: “A house divided against itself shall not stand.”
Such an appropriation of Christianity for politics dominates the Gettysburg Address, from its opening “four score” to its closing “shall not perish.” In the 1970s, literary scholar M.E. Bradford, in his essay, “The Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution,” identified the Gettysburg Address’s “biblical language” as the speech’s “most important formal property.” That is undoubtedly so. Lincoln drew from the King James Version’s archaic words and cadences, as he opened with the biblical-sounding “four score,” an echo of the Psalmist’s “three score and ten” years allotted to man on this earth. He continued with “brought forth,” the words in the Gospel of Luke that describe Mary’s delivery of Jesus—the first instance of what turns out to be a repeated image of conception, birth, life, death, and new birth, culminating in the promise of eternal life in the words “shall not perish”—a startling echo of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:16 (“whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life”).
1864, August, Burning of the Shenandoah Valley by Ulysses S. Grant & U.S. General, Philip Sheridan. Shenandoah Valley.
In September, Sheridan defeated Jubal Early’s smaller force at Third Winchester, and again at Fisher’s Hill. Then he began “The Burning” – destroying barns, mills, railroads, factories – destroying resources for which the Confederacy had a dire need. He made over 400 square miles of the Valley uninhabitable. “The Burning” foreshadowed William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea”: another campaign to deny resources to the Confederacy as well as bring the war home to its civilians.
from Bovard’s “Burning of the Shenandoah Valley” . . .
The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s post-war recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. Connecticut College professor Jim Downs’ recent book, Sick From Freedom, exposes how the chaotic situation during and after the war contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of freed slaves.
Bovard adds insight on the results of brutal war policies on future wars the U.S. launched and are a must-read for any student of American history, of war, or the U.S. Civil War in particular.
After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict as a crusade for freedom and the grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy towards the Indians (Sheridan famously declared “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later historians sometimes ignored U.S. military tactics in World War Two and Vietnam that resulted in heavy civilian casualties.
Bovard concludes
The failure to recognize how wars routinely spawn pervasive brutality and collateral deaths lowers Americans’ resistance to new conflicts that promise to make the world safe for democracy, or rid the world of evil, or achieve other lofty sounding goals. For instance, the Obama administration sold its bombing of Libya as a self-evident triumph of good over a vile despot; instead, chaos reigns in Tripoli. As the administration ramps up bombing in Syria and Iraq, both its rhetoric and its tactics echo prior U.S. debacles.
Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as the spotlight is kept off atrocities, most citizens will continue to underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.
1864, December 21, General Tecumsah Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
The campaign began with Sherman’s troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces followed a “scorched earth” policy, destroying military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property and disrupting the Confederacy’s economy and its transportation networks. The operation broke the back of the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender. Sherman’s bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be one of the major achievements of the war.
Thomas DiLorenzo reviews a book on Sherman’s March to the Sea by historian Karen Stokes, South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path: Stories of Courage Amid Civil War Destruction, that deals with Sherman’s motivation in waging total war on the civilian population of South Carolina.
These passages are telling
In a January 31, 1864 letter to Major R.M. Sawyer, Sherman explained the reason why he hated the South in general, and South Carolina in particular, so much. The war, he said “was the result of a false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government.” In the same letter Sherman referred to states’ rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press as “trash” that had “deluded the Southern people into war.”
Sherman’s subordinates expressed similar opinions. In 1865 Major George W. Nichols published a book about his exploits during Sherman’s “march” in which he describing South Carolinians as “the scum, the lower dregs of civilization” who are “not Americans; they are merely South Carolinians.” General Carl Schurz is quoted by Stokes as remarking that “South Carolina – the state which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator” of the war was “deserving of special punishment.”
All of this is so telling because it reveals that neither Sherman, nor his subordinate officers, nor the average “soldier” in his army, were motivated by anything having to do with slavery. South Carolina suffered more than any other state at the hands of Sherman’s raping, looting, plundering, murdering, and house-burning army because that is where the secession movement started. It was NOT because there were more slaves there than in other states, or because of anything else related to slavery. It was because South Carolinians, even more than other Southerners, did not believe in uncompromising obedience to the central state.
This is why Sherman and his army revelled so much in their brutalization of defenseless South Carolinian women and children and the looting and destruction of their property. And they bragged about it for the rest of their lives. Much of the boasting is cataloged in South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path. Stokes quotes a General Charles Van Wyck as writing that “nearly every house on our line of march has been destroyed.” An “embedded” New York reporter named David P. Conyngham is quoted as described one South Carolina town after observing “the smoking ruins of the town, to tall, black chimneys looking down upon it like funeral mutes” with “old women and children, hopeless, helpless, almost frenzied, wandering amidst the desolation.” The book contains dozens of other eye-witness accounts by Union Army soldiers and Southern civilians of the burning down of entire cities and towns, rape, robbery, and wanton destruction of all varieties of private property, all of it occurring after the Confederate Army had vacated. All to prove once and for all, to South Carolinians and all other Americans, North and South, that federalism and self-government was a “delusion,” to quote General Sherman himself.
Few songs capture the soul of the South that The Band and Lynnard Skynner do. Too many others inject honkie tonk rhythms into their songs. Not these. These are ballads and tributes to the folks and heroes of the South. The sad thing is that the country music industry captured all the venues and all we hear now are these bubble gum, lip-smacking tales of “I was in New York week . . . .” There is no soul to what used to be one of the greatest genres in the world.
The song, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1969), was written by Robbie Robertson, Canadian singer, and songwriter, and famous lead guitar of the band, The Band. The video is above is from their 1978 concert, The Last Waltz. The opening stanza to the song goes
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train
‘Till Stoneman‘s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well
The destruction of the Danville train is a reference to the R&D Railroad, the Richmond & Danville Railroad. Richmond, Virginia was the Confederate capital.
Robertson stated that he had the music to the song in his head but at first had no idea what it was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he did research on the subject, relying heavily on the Dunning School theories of the period. Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas, stated that he assisted in the research for the lyrics.[2] In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, “Robbie and I worked on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”
Dixie is the historical nickname for the states making up the Confederate States of America. The first lines of the lyrics refer to one of George Stoneman‘s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia at the end of the Civil War in 1865.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. And, of course, “Simple Man.” The Outlaws‘ “There Goes Another Love Song,” 1975 is excellent guitar riffs of the ’70s. Paul McCartney released his “Silly Love Song” in 1976. The Beatles are blatant copycats. The other band that might compare with The Band could be Creedence Clearwater Revival, a bay area band. I like a lot of their songs, but there is a kind of fusion between psychedelic lyrics and themes with country and southern rhythms if that makes any sense.
1864/1865, 13th Amendment. Gary North tells it like it is:
“Wait a minute! Are you saying that the various levels of civil government should shut down prisons and re-institute slavery?” Yes, I am. That’s what the U.S. Constitution authorizes.
I am saying that slavery in the private sector is better for the victims and the criminals than slavery in the public sector, which is what prisons are. Slavery in the public sector is inherently unproductive.
The actual text of the 13th amendment is rarely discussed in public, and never in public school textbooks. Why not? Because the text of the 13th Amendment flies in the face of the idea of the messianic State, the State that promises to make bad men good and good men better. The therapeutic state is the modern concept of the State. C. S. Lewis called this the humanitarian theory of punishment. He regarded it as a moral monstrosity, which is exactly what it is. The idea that someone should be sold into slavery, where he can earn his way out — the biblical system — is an affront to the defenders of the messianic State. “Criminals must pay their debts to society — at taxpayers’ expense!”
So, we have a gigantic prison industry, where taxpayers are charged on average about $29,000 a year to house criminals. (In New York City, where everything costs more, it’s about $168,000 a year.) Here, young people learn new trades from skilled professionals. When released, they go back into the job market as trained criminals.
1865, April 9. Surrender at Appomattox. General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Robert E. Lee’s birthday is January 19, 1807. He died October 12, 1870. Clyde Wilson observes that “January 19, is a memorable date, the birthday of one of the greatest of all Americans. Robert E. Lee was born in Tidewater Virginia in 1807. Two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and his father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence. He was later to wed the granddaughter of Martha Washington.” Wilson mentions at the end that it was Ulysses S. Grant who presided over the greatest political corruption this country had seen up to that point. “His actions after the war illustrate his nobility. He refused invitations to lend his name to business ventures that would have made him a rich man. Instead, he became head of a struggling college and devoted himself to setting an example for his people of quiet rebuilding. His opponent in the last period of the war was President of the United States for eight years and presided over the greatest political corruption in American history.”
1865, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. His dates are February 12, 1809-April 15, 1865.
1865-1876, RECONSTRUCTION
“No period of Southern history has been covered by more distortions in recent times than has 1865-1876. Not too long ago, nearly everybody, including Northerners, regarded this period as a shameful un-American exercise in military rule and limitless corruption. Now, it is established academic “truth” that the only thing wrong with Reconstruction was that it was not ruthless enough. The South should have been subjected to a complete Marxist, egalitarian revolution.” Clyde Wilson. Matthew, 19:30 is used to justify revolution.
1866, A critique of Lincoln and his neocons:
. . . Robert E. Lee told the great libertarian Lord Acton in 1866 that “the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”
Here is the Acton Institute’s website.
Tom Woods on Libertarian history to 11th graders.
POST CIVIL WAR: THE PLAINS INDIAN WARS
from Thomas DiLorenzo . . . .
General Sherman wrote in his memoirs (p. 775) that as soon as the war ended, “My thoughts and feelings at once reverted to the construction of the great Pacific Railway . . . . I put myself in communication with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person, and I assured them that I would afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.” “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress [of the railroads],” Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in 1867 (See Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 264).
Lincoln’s old personal friend Grenville Dodge, who he had appointed as a military general, initially recommended that slaves be made of the Indians so that they could be forced to dig the railroad beds from Iowa to California (See Dee Brown, Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow, p. 64). The government decided instead to try to murder as many Indians as possible, women and children included, and then to imprison the survivors in concentration camps euphemistically called “reservations.”
When he became president, Grant made his old pal Sherman the commanding general of the U.S. Army and another “Civil War” luminary, General Phillip Sheridan, assumed command on the ground in the West. “Thus the great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort,” writes Fellman (P. 260), “formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by the 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as ‘the final solution of the Indian problem’” (emphasis added). Other former Union Army officers joined in the slaughter. This included John Pope, O.O. Howard, Nelson Miles, Alfred Terry, E.O.C. Ord, C.C. Augur, Edward Canby, George Armstrong Custer, Benjamin Garrison, and Winfield Scott Hancock.
“Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after: resisters to the legitimate forces of an ordered society,” writes John Marzalek, author of Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (p. 380). “During the Civil War,” Marzalek continues, “Sherman and Sheridan had practiced a total war of destruction of property . . . . Now the army, in its Indian warfare, often wiped out entire villages . . . . Sherman insisted that the only answer to the Indian problem was all-out war – of the kind he had utilized against the Confederacy.”
1867, US War on Plains Indians.
Drawing on Michael Fellman’s book, Citizen Sherman, the general is quoted as saying the following about the Plains Indians shortly after the war: “It is one of those irreconcilable conflicts that will end only in one way, one or the other must be exterminated . . . . We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women and children” (p. 26). According to Fellman, Sherman “had given [General Phillip] Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary . . . . Sherman would cover the political and media front” and “maintained personal deniability.” “The more Indians we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed next year,” wrote Sherman. “They all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”
Valerie quotes Professor Harry Stout of Yale Divinity School as recently writing that Sherman’s “religion” was “America, and America’s God was a jealous God of law and order.” All those who “resisted” were “reprobates who deserved death.”
But Sherman’s “religion” was not “America,” which at the time was comprised of some 30 million people. His God was the federal government or, more specifically, the Lincoln administration and Lincoln himself. This is what motivated Sherman, not the ending of slavery or anything else. After all, the citizens of the Southern states were Americans and included the descendants of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Patrick Henry, among other notable historical figures (Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, was descended from Martha Washington’s family).
1868, Memorial Day, every year since 1868. Formerly called “Decoration Day.”
1868, France’s role in the slave trade.
1870s, Horatio Alger, Jr., Rags to Riches stories.
1876, Custer’s Last Stand or Battle of Little Big Horn. Gary North explains Wyatt Earp’s role: “Custer’s last stand. Why was it relevant? Because, for the first and last time, the Plains Indians got together in one location for one battle. It wasn’t just Custer’s last stand; it was the Plains’ Indians last stand. It took place in 1876. Wyatt Earp was part of what made it the Plains’ Indians last stand. In the early 1870’s, he was a buffalo hunter. Between 1872 and 1874, the buffalo herds were exterminated.”
1890, Wounded Knee Massacre as one battle in the War on the Plain Indians.
In 1867, William Sherman wrote a letter to General Grant insisting that “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress” of the railroad. About a year earlier, Sherman had urged Grant to “act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out that Sherman set out to make the Sioux “feel the superior power of the Government,” even if “the final solution to the Indian problem” required that they be physically annihilated.
The Plains Indians were canny, elusive, and motivated. However, their dependence on the buffalo provided the aggressors with an exploitable vulnerability. Hunting the Indians was difficult and risky; slaughtering buffalo was neither.
The railroads, acting as a military force multiplier, began ferrying tourists to the West for the specific purpose of “sport-hunting” buffalo.
Unlike the Indians, who never threatened to hunt the buffalo to extinction, or Bill Cody, who was restrained in his efforts to harvest them to feed construction crews for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the Eastern tourists had no property interest in the continued existence of the species, and didn’t have to pay any price for the profligate destruction they wrought.
“Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake,” recalls King. “Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands,” leaving their ravaged bodies to bloat and fester.
Cattle became the successor to buffalo in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
1887, Interstate Commerce Commission. Passed in order to protect the railroads from competition. See Milton Friedman on this and his book, Free to Choose, 1979.
1890, Wounded Knee Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Wikipedia does a pretty good job here. This is more detailed. Here is more of Will Grigg’s take on Wounded Knee at freedomeinourtime.blogspot. Prepare to be enlightened.
From Will Grigg’s page linked above:
“Dead and wounded women and children and little babies were scattered all along … where they had been trying to run away,” recalled Ogalala medicine man Black Elk, who arrived shortly after the slaughter. “The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the [Hotchkiss] wagon guns hit them.”
Those who resisted survived. Black Elk recounted how two small boys had taken up sniping positions and killed as many soldiers as they could: “These were very brave little boys.” Other Sioux had “fought soldiers with only their hands until they got their guns.” An Army Captain named Wallace was surrounded by a scrum of Sioux mothers and beaten to death with clubs.
. . . Here, Griggs answers the belabored question of whether it was a battle in the war or a massacre of slaughter.
But this was not a “battle,” as it was referred to for a century after the event. It was a massacre of helpless, innocent people by Leviathan’s killing apparatus. When Black Elk arrived on the scene, what he saw was not a battlefield, but rather “one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away.”
When survivors sought medical help, they discovered that the first priority was to tend to the wounds of the handful of Army personnel who had been injured in the course of carrying out the slaughter. Many of them perished from exposure and untended wounds. For several days the ground at Wounded Knee was littered with the bodies of the dead. On January 3, 1891, the mortal remains of the victims were gathered and interred in a mass grave.
The military expedition that carried out the massacre cost an estimated $2 million in 1890 dollars. This did provide a welcome “economic stimulus package” for local communities. But it’s worth remembering that it would have cost just a fraction of that amount to provide the starving Sioux with the rations they had been promised under the original 1868 treaty.
But Washington apparently believed the additional expense was worthwhile in order to extract the last full measure of submission from the once-fearsome Sioux. Providing the Seventh Cavalry with an opportunity to avenge its defeat, and thereby vindicate the power of the “Star of empire,” was a lagniappe.
1891, March 14, Largest mass lynching in America took place in New Orleans of 11 Italians suspected of assassinating the police chief of that city. Here’s the history of Mexican-Americans being hung by Anglos at the border of Texas and Mexico.
1892, “The Pledge of Allegiance” was written by Francis Bellamy, a defrocked Baptist minister. See Tom DiLorenzo’s review. The salute that the Nazis used under Hitler was actually an import from the United States, called the Bellamy salute.
1895, State of New York passes Bakeshop Law where any baker is not allowed his workers to work more than 10 hours a day. The results of this law worked to shut down mom-and-pop bakeries that would allow their bakers to sleep in the bakery and work more hours. The Left likes to herald this law as progress because it gave workers greater freedom and more free time. Well, what if the workers didn’t want free time? What if they wanted and liked working? Hello . . . ! This was a protectionist measure designed to protect the big bakeries from the little bakeries who were operating in their homes. The Supreme Court declares that law in violation of the 14th Amendment, saying that it’s not the job of government to play this paternalistic role. This battle continued through the ’20s, the ’30s and through the New Deal. The Classic Liberals lose. In 1937, in the case of West Coast Hotels v. Parrish, the Supreme Court said enough is enough even after FDR’s infamous court-packing scheme and then we see this flood of Progressivism. Progressives made people believe that nothing had changed, that progress meant saving or reforming the free enterprise system. Not an abandonment or rejection of the system but a refining and improving of it. So today progressives believe that the system of mercantilism is a genuine free enterprise system. So Progressives will look at capitalism, say it doesn’t work and say “Look, we need Progressive ideas or reforming.”
19th Century still believed in Federalism with it division of powers and a limitation on those powers. Progressivism believed in revolutionizing a country’s institutions and change the traditional order under which a society operates and exists. Which gives rise to the interpretation that the Constitution is a living document, that there are no invariant and unchanging rules, principles, or moral ideals that should be the foundation of human association. Because there is an unchanging and invariant human nature that can be understood from experience and reason to guide us to understand what should be viewed as each individual’s rights. And learn what individual order would be most likely to secure and protect them from predators. Progressives had this idea that in a changing historical environment the rules and laws of the society have to change. This includes the Constitution. That’s why Woodrow Wilson was the worshipping darling of the Progressives. He was known as a scholar, challenging the traditional order of the United States. Federalism had to be weakened. Power needed to be concentrated. The elite had to have the authority outside of Constitutional constraint to do what was necessary for the good of society as they were defining and dictating it. That is the intellectual legacy that is captured in the thinking of Barack Obama and other presidents, including George W. Bush. But right now with Barack Obama with his idea of Executive Orders and the ability to do whatever he wants regardless of Congress and the Constitutional authorities of the 3 branches of government “because he knows it’s right and good and on the right side of history.” That’s the danger of this guy and his ideas–they undermine the rules of society and the philosophic principles that are meant to secure and explain liberty.
Wilson intervened in WWI. Prior to that, there was a bias for staying out of wars. Wilson’s mindset is the same hat guides the domestic policies. It goes something like this, “If we can use policies here at home to meddle and intervene on the lives of Americans and their enterprise, then we can do the same thing with the European folk . . . or the Middle Eastern folk.” To use the power of the Federal government to go abroad and wreak havoc. “Let slip the dogs of war.” “Make the world safe for democracy” and “This will be the war that ends all wars.” And in the middle of that war abroad, Wilson committed some of the serious violations of civil liberties in all of history. If people aren’t going along with his vision, he started putting people in jail. Teddy Roosevelt also went into Cuba to fix the “problems of Cuba.” Same with the Philippines. Even if he has to kill multitudes of people as they did in the Philippines to impose their vision. Behind their ideas and their vision is the coercive apparatus of the government. God-given vision they think they have enforced by the power of the state.
Classical Liberals did oppose McKinley’s annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Woodrow Wilson, and his WW1 and Progressive policies, gave rise to communism in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and the chaos that ensued in WWII and the 20th century across the globe. All because he wanted to make the world safe for democracy. This is the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and his social engineering paternalism.
1894-1896, Hamidian Massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. Bionic Mosquito says that “Targeting Armenians was not new in the Ottoman Empire. There were the Hamidian Massacres of 1894 – 1896, with an estimated 200,000 – 300,000 Armenians killed; there was the Adana massacre of 1909, with 20,000 – 30,000 Armenians killed. The first was committed under the Sultan; the second during the transition to a constitutional monarchy and the Young Turks. The Young Turks were to be different, more liberal – even having support of the Armenians and other minorities.”
1896, Transformation of the American Party System, Murray Rothbard.
1896, William Jennings Bryan, a non-Calvinist, in 1896 converted the Democratic Party from a free market, gold standard party to a liberal, Populist, and then Progressive party with one speech that lasted 30 minutes. That speech changed American political history more than any other speech in history. He did not take prisoners. He went for the jugular, and he severed it. I never liked his Arminian theology, and I despised his politics. But he never gave an inch. He was courageous. He did not compromise. He was the greatest speaker of his generation. Most important of all: he was not inclined to “dialogue.”
1898, The turning point in American history was not the Civil War. The turning point was 1898. The Spanish-American War was the major turning point in the history of this country. The American Establishment, as we know it today, began in 1898. . . . modern foreign policy began in 1898. Gary North writes
I believe that the textbook blackout on the Spanish-American War and its aftermath constitute the most important single success of Establishment historiography since the ratification of the United States Constitution. It was during that war that what we call today the American Establishment established itself. There were bits and pieces of it before 1898, but it was only in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War that the institutional foundations of the modern American Establishment were first constructed. Yet Establishment historians have been remarkably successful in covering up the radical nature of the transformation of American foreign policy, which took place in 1898. They tell the story of American history as if this transformation did not transfer political power, and then economic power, to the Progressive movement. It was the Progressive movement, more than anything else, that brought with it the modern welfare-warfare state.
1899, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” endorses American imperialism.
PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900 to 1920
Federal Reserve banking cartel, the Harrison Narcotics Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the ascendancy of the Eugenics movement and “scientific racism,” the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and the progressive income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment and the popular election of U. S. senators, the Eighteenth Amendment and Prohibition, and the abandonment of America’s traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, first following the Spanish-American War (Cuba and the Philippine Insurrection), in Latin America and Mexico, and more decisively in the First World War in Europe.
1899, America Empire and American Establishment begin.
1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum is published.
San Gabriel Tutor 