Back in November of 2007, Musharraf declared martial law; to bolster his case, he cited none other than Abraham Lincoln as precedent.
Here’s what he said at the time:

I would at this time venture to read out an excerpt of President Abraham Lincoln, specially to all my listeners in United States. As an idealist, Abraham Lincoln had one consuming passion during that time of supreme crisis, and this was to preserve the Union, because the Union was in danger. Towards that end, he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties. His justification was necessity, and explaining his sweeping violation of Constitutional limits he wrote in a letter in 1864, and I quote:

“[M]y oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government―that nation―of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it.”

We are also learning democracy. We are going through a difficult stage. It is the nation which is important. And for me and every Pakistani, Pakistan comes first, and anyone else’s considerations come after that.

When the chips are down, dictators always seem to stick together.

A few issues back we published an article called “The Dictator’s Favorite President” about how some of the worst tyrants of the 20th century, like Hitler and Stalin, modeled themselves on Old Abe.

We don’t know what exactly Musharraf’s resignation will mean for Pakistan or American foreign policy, or the hunt for bin Laden or anything else, but here at SP, we can’t help but wonder how much better off America, and the world, might be had Old Abe spared those millions of men, women and children who fell to the sword of Abraham.

N.B.: You can see the actual video of Musharraf’s speech here.

MARK ROYDEN WINCHELL (1948–2008)

Dr. Mark Royden Winchell, distinguished and prolific scholar and author and a Fellow of the Abbeville Institute, passed from this world on May 8 after a valiant and spirited two-year battle with cancer. Professor of Literature and European Civilisation at Clemson University, Dr. Winchell was a lively exemplar of the Southern literary tradition, although a native of Ohio. He won the PhD at Vanderbilt University during the last days of Agrarian influence there. An accomplished literary critic, Dr. Winchell was much more—essayist, biographer, and one of the few scholars not afraid to defend the Southern tradition publicly and emphatically—a true man of letters and good citizen.

His published work includes a half dozen literary biographies, including works on Cleanth Brooks and Donald Davidson (completing a project begun by M.E. Bradford), and many dozens of articles and essays on every aspect of 19th and 20th century American literature.

Few professors of literature have been more prolific and versatile. Dr. Winchell was coauthor with Senator Herman Talmadge of Talmadge’s memoirs. His most recent books include: Reinventing the South: Versions of a Literary Region; God, Man, and Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from ‘The Birth of a Nation” to “The Passion of the Christ”; “Confessions of a Copperhead” (unpublished); and Ideas in Conflict: Writing about the Great Issues of Civilization, a reader for English composition courses co-edited with his wife Donna H. Winchell, a distinguished scholar of African-American literature.

Dr. Mark Winchell was just in the prime of his distinguished and highly productive career when struck by illness, but he continued his work and maintained a lively, positive spirit throughout his illness. He leaves a wife, two young sons, and a host of friends and admirers.

The family has requested, in lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Christ the Savior Antiochian Orthodox Church; 603 N. Fant Street; Anderson, SC 29621 or to Clemson United Methodist Church Building Fund; 300 Frontage Road; Clemson, SC 29631.

Why does the mere display of the Confederate Flag provoke howls of protest and anger from the usual places? Professor Paul Gottfried has the answer.This paper was originally presented in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Confederate Flag Day (March 3, 2007), an annual celebration North Carolina has observed since 1988. It is one of three days during the year that the Confederate first national flag is flown atop the historic North Carolina State Capitol. The other two days are Robert E. Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day.

Recent past speakers have included Professor Clyde Wilson, the late Dr. Samuel Francis, and Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief (and editor of this magazine) Christopher Sullivan. Professor Gottfried’s message was so timely, we offer it as our cover piece for this issue.

Those Southern secessionists whose national flag we are now celebrating have become identified not only with a lost cause but with a now publicly condemned one. Confederate flags have been removed from government and educational buildings throughout the South, while Confederate dignitaries whose names and statues once adorned monuments and boulevards are no longer deemed fit for public mention. The ostensible reason for this obliteration or dishonoring of Southern history, save for those civil rights victories that came in the second half of the twentieth century, has been the announced rejection of a racist society, a development we are persistently urged to welcome.

Up until the last generation or so, the South, we have been told, was a viciously insensitive region, and the Southern cause in 1861 was nothing so much as the attempt to perpetuate the degradation of blacks through a system based on racial slavery. We should therefore rejoice at the reconstructing of Southern society and culture in a way that excludes, and indeed extirpates from our minds except as an incentive to further white atonement, the pre-civil rights past, also known as the burden of Southern history. This last, frequently encountered phrase is from the title of a famous study of the South by C. Vann Woodward, who in his time was a liberal-minded Southern historian.

Arguments can be raised to refute or modify the received account of Southern history now taught in our public schools and spread by our leftist and neoconservative journalists. One can point to the fact that a crushing federal tariff falling disproportionately on Southern states contributed to the sectional hostilities that led to the Southern bid for independence. One can also bring up the willingness of Southern leaders to free blacks and even to put them in grey uniforms, as the price of the freedom that Southerners were seeking from Northern control. And even if one deplores slavery, this commendable attitude, which was also shared by some Confederate leaders, does not justify the federal invasion of the South, with all of its attendant killing and depredation. This took place, moreover, in violation of a right to secede, with which several states, including Virginia, had entered the Union.

A comparison is drawn nowadays between two supposedly equivalent evils, the Old South and Nazi Germany. This comparison has entered the oratory of the NAACP and Black Caucus; it has also appeared with increasing frequency in social histories that have come from the American historical profession since the Second World War. A bizarre variation on this comparison, and one frequently heard from the American political Left, is between the Holocaust and Southern slavery. First brought up by the historian Stanley Elkins when I was still an undergraduate, this seemingly unstoppable obscenity is resurrected whenever black politicians demand reparations.

Not surprisingly, those who claim that the Holocaust was unique and that comparing it to any other mass murders, particularly those committed by the Communists, is an impermissible outrage have never to my knowledge protested the likening of American slavery or segregation to the ghastliness of Auschwitz. The benign acceptance of this comparison by would-be Holocaust-custodians has more to do with leftist political alliances than it does with any genuine reaction to Nazi atrocities.

At the very least, reason would require us to acknowledge that Southern slave owners were vitally concerned about preserving their human chattel, even if they sometimes failed to show them Christian charity and concern. Unlike the Nazis, these slave-owners were not out to exterminate a race of people; nor did Southern theologians and political leaders deny the humanity of those who served them, a point that historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have demonstrated at some length.

But all of this has been by way of introduction to the gist of my remarks. What interests me as a sympathetic outsider looking at your culturally rich region goes back to an agonized utterance made by someone at the end of William Faulkner’s magnificent literary achievement, The Sound and the Fury. The character, Quentin, who has journeyed from Mississippi to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study at Harvard, and who will eventually take his life, tries to convince himself that “No, I don’t hate the South.” This question is no longer a source of tortured embarrassment but part of a multicultural catechism that requires an immediate affirmative answer. That is to say, every sound-thinking (bien pensant) respondent is supposed to hate the real South, as opposed to warm-weather resorts that cater to retirees and in contrast to places commemorating Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King. The South, as the location of the Lost Cause and of Confederate war monuments, is one that we are taught to put out of our minds. It is something that a sensitive society should endeavor to get beyond.

Looking at this anti-Southernness, in whose filter displaying a Confederate battle flag, particularly in the South, has been turned into a hate crime, one may wish to consider the oddness of such an attitude. Why should those associated with a defeated cause, and one whose combatants were long admired as heroic even by the victorious side, become moral pariahs for their descendants? Is there anything startlingly new about our knowledge of Southern history since the early 1950s, when my public school teachers in Connecticut spoke with respect about Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which would account for the present condemnation of the same figures?

A few years ago, following my viewing of Gods and Generals, a movie that deals with the personality and military career of Thomas Jackson, I was struck by the widespread attacks on the movie director, Ron Maxwell. Apparently this celebrity had failed to use his art to expose Southern racism. In fact there was nothing in the movie that suggests any sympathy for human bondage. In one memorable scene, for example, Jackson’s black manservant raises a question in the presence of his master, about whether it is proper to hold a fellow Christian as a slave. The devout Presbyterian Jackson, who ponders this question, has no answer for his manservant, with whom he has just been praying.

How any of this constitutes a defense of slavery is for me incomprehensible, but it does confirm my impression that there is something peculiarly twisted about the current repugnance for the Old South—and indeed for any South except for the one reconstructed by federal bureaucrats in the last fifty years.

On visits to Montgomery, Alabama, I have noticed two local histories, which, like parallel lines, never intercept, but nonetheless confront each other on public plaques. One is associated with the birthplace of the Confederacy; and the other with the political activities of Martin Luther King and the distinctly leftist Southern Poverty Law Center. The headquarters of this watchdog of Political Correctness stands obliquely down the street below the state capitol.

It may have been a pipedream that the two historical narratives, divided by culture as well as race, could be either bridged or allowed to function simultaneously. What has happened is entirely different. One of the two competing narratives, the one about the South as a bigoted backwater until the triumph of revolutionary forces aided by the federal government changed it, has not only triumphed but has been used to drive out its rival narrative. It might have been a happier outcome if Southern whites and Southern blacks could have agreed on a single narrative that would not demean either race. The second-best outcome would have been if both had retained their accounts of the Southern past, as separate non-intersecting ones that nonetheless remained equally appropriate for different groups. The worst outcome, however, is the one that we now have. It is one in which the descendants of the defeated are taught to vilify or treat dismissively their ancestors, so that they can demonstrate their broadmindedness and remorse about past racism. As a result of this inflicted attitude one is no longer allowed to speak about the South as an historical region without focusing on its real or alleged sins.
But this has not always been the official situation. Certainly this was not the case, even in the North, from the years after Reconstruction up until the second half of the twentieth century, when even veterans of the Union army praised their former foes. It was also not always the case even afterwards, as Shelby Foote’s treatment of the losing side in his work on the Civil War, a classic that has gone through multiple printings, would indicate. The venting of hate and contempt for the South, as found in such predictably unfriendly authors as Eric Foner and James McPherson, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It underscores the fact that the Old South has been defeated twice—and the second time at the level of historical memory even more disastrously than in a shooting war that it lost in the 1860s.

The American white South has fallen victim to the politics of guilt, a dreary subject albeit one on which I have written widely. The Yankee victors of the 1860s, who overwhelmed the Southerners by virtue of their numbers and superior industrial power, did considerable wartime damage. They also subsequently occupied the land of those whom they had vanquished militarily, but then did something that was equally important. They went home, and permitted their devastated opponents to rebuild without an occupying army. This indulgent description may not please everybody who is gathered in this room; but what I mean to say is that the first occupation was morally and psychologically less destructive than the ever deepening humiliation that is going on now.

The first victors were mostly Yankee Protestants, who in some ways were similar to those they had invaded and occupied. Once the passions of fratricidal war had cooled, these Yankees were able to view their former enemies as kindred spirits. Although they were establishing a bourgeois commercial regime, one that differed from the prevalent Southern way of life, the winning side had also recruited farmers and those whose culture did not diverge significantly from that of those who had fought on the Southern side.

In a certain sense Socrates’ observation about Greeks once applied to Americans as well. While they could fight brutally with each other, they were still brothers, and so (diallage) “reconciliation” was eventually possible for the former enemies. And both North and South came up with a narrative about their past differences which bestowed honor to the heroes on both sides. This was possible with the Yankee Unionists, who wished to draw Southerners back into their community, even after a terrible war had been fought to keep the Southerners in a Union that they had tried to leave.

But the second civil war seeks the utter humiliation of those who are seen as opponents of a society that is still being imposed. The Southern traditionalists from this perspective are particularly obnoxious inasmuch as they are a full two steps behind the project in question. Those who insist on these changes are no longer Victorian capitalists or Methodist and Congregationalist villagers from the North. They are post-bourgeois social engineers and despisers of Western civilization, a stage of development that these revolutionaries identify with discrimination and exclusion.

In Southern traditionalists they see those who are still celebrating a pre-bourgeois, agrarian, and communally structured world. It appealed to hierarchy, place, and family; and its members displayed no special interest in reaching out to alien cultures. Such ideals and attitudes and the landed, manorial society out of which they came point back to a nineteenth century conservative configuration. For our post-bourgeois intelligentsia, this point of reference and model of behavior cannot be allowed to persist. It clashes with feminism and the current civil rights movement, and would hinder the acceptance of a multicultural ambience.

The fact that people like you are still around and still honoring the national flag of nineteenth century landed warriors from the American South might have the effect, or so it is thought, of making others equally insensitive. Even worse, those who engage in these celebratory rites do not express the now fashionable guilt about members of their race and tribe. Those being remembered had owned slaves, and they would have denied women, whom in any case they treated as inherently different from men, equal access to jobs. Needless to say, non-Westerners are not required to dwell on similar improprieties among their ancestors or contemporaries, and so they may celebrate their collective pasts without disclaimers or reservations. The hair-shirt to be worn only fits Western bodies, and in particular impenitent Southern ones.

It is against this background that one might try to understand the loathing that the political, journalistic, and educational establishment reserves for the unreconstructed white inhabitants of the South. You seem to bother that establishment to a degree that Louis Farrakhan and those unmistakable anti-white racists who are often found in our elite universities could never hope to equal. You exemplify what the late Sam Francis called the “chief victimizers” in our victimologically revamped society, an experimental society that fits well with our increasingly rootless country. But your enemies are also the enemies of the West, or of the West that existed in centuries past.

You may take pride in those whom you honor as your linear ancestors but equally in the anger of those who would begrudge you the right to honor them. What your critics find inexcusable is that you are celebrating your people’s past, which was a profoundly conservative one based on family and community, and those who created and defended it. For your conspicuous indiscretions, I salute you; and I trust that generations to come will take note of your willingness to defy the spirit of what is both a cowardly and tyrannical age.

Paul Gottfried, a long-time advisor and contributor to Southern Partisan, is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

Until now.

The Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bruce Cole, sat down with Andrew Ferguson and interviewed him about his latest book, Land of Lincoln. What a farce. The book is a mystic journey through the footsteps of Lincoln and his “ancestors” in America―as if even the Mormons claimed to have answered the question of Lincoln’s genealogy.

Take your children on a journey through the Illinois Department of Tourism’s Lincoln Heritage Trail and learn all about “honoring the places he’d been, the places he’d touched,” said Ferguson. Find the Lincoln Cabin, where Lincoln was born. Walk the five or six blocks from his home in Springfield to his law office. “You can trace the path.” And from his law office, “you can look out the window … onto the old State Capitol, which is exactly the view he would’ve had―it can be a haunting place.”

You get the drift. But we just wonder why Ferguson didn’t include the Lincoln Marriage Temple, which is an official state park in Kentucky. The log cabin in which he married Mary Todd now has a church built around it, complete with steeple and stained-glass windows. A holy place, indeed.

Ferguson reminisces: “[I]f I had my faith in Lincoln shaken … I’d take down a volume from his collected works. And I’d just start reading. The power of his words, their clarity, the emphatic moral content of what he wrote was cleansing. It was like a bath.”

He admits that, in fact, it was him, a senior editor from The Weekly Standard, who attended the Partisan contributor Lincoln conference in 2003. “I was expecting a bunch of crackers and hillbillies,” he said. Pardon us, but would you please pass the caviar and Grey Poupon? They sure do mollify the palate when the nearness of mere plebians becomes distressing.

“But they were actually, you know, just regular ole American guys. They could’ve been airlifted off any suburban golf course in America and transplanted to this hotel in downtown Richmond. They were wearing Izod shirts, the khakis, the brown loafers, you know, the native dress of my people,” said Ferguson. How long, not long, Mr. Ferguson, our God is marching on for thy people. Did they also have the hair, the arms and the legs, you know, the hands and the feet, too. What a surprise. Maybe they’re also marvelous croquet players?

But in all seriousness, we happen to know that even though this writer may be a golfer, none of the speakers were, with the exception of Tom DiLorenzo. Most of them would be proud for Ferguson to mistake them for crackers and hillbillies. But does anybody actually use those terms anymore? That is, outside racially exclusive Cape Cod country clubs?

Ferguson admits that our contributors “knew a hell of a lot more about Lincoln than I did.” But what settles the question is that he refers to them twice as “haters”. Case closed. He considers himself, of course, a Lincoln expert, because he grew up with pictures of Lincoln on the walls of his parents’ house.

So, on went Ferguson to a conference of the now known-to-be fraudulent Historical Society, which praised Lincoln profusely. He says “they were terrible” (italics in the original). They were ambiguous and filled with typical bloated and meaningless academic jargon.

To remedy the situation, Ferguson has not acknowledged Lincoln criticism. Instead, he’s written another flattering book about Lincoln, adding to the heaps for the burnings after the revolution. We must restore the icon, he says―the proposition of the Union, dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal. “Without [the Lincoln] icon, without the personification of this principle … we risk losing the principle.”

Thank heavens for the NEH for doing this interview. Anybody have a barf bag?

You can read the full interview here [http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2007-11/Interview.html] (the Lincoln stuff is in part 2).

A culture war is rapidly heating up. Ordinary citizens have become increasingly concerned about the cost of illegal immigration, the rise of the welfare state, and multiculturalism enforced by liberal elites.

Things have gotten so hot that the Economist magazine (one of the world’s best-known journals of leftist opinion) published a recent article explaining “the culture war” in this place as a crude reaction to a laudable effort by liberals to “redraw national identity” and to “make amends for past wrongs to indigenous peoples.”

Rejecting the policies of the left and reconnecting with their ancestors, ordinary citizens are now displaying their traditional flag whenever they can: at political gatherings, public places, private homes and wherever people gather. Meanwhile, leftist policy makers are, of course, deeply concerned about such displays of militant nostalgia and have proposed that the old flag be redesigned to something more acceptable in the modern world. Sound familiar? Where do you think this is happening? Georgia? Mississippi? Alabama? South Carolina?

Well, yes. There too. But the set of facts outlined above describe what’s happening today in Australia.The good people Down Under are fed up with militant modernism and the Labor Party’s relentless drive to destroy all tradition. And the Australian flag has become a symbol of renewed pride for ordinary citizens and a link to their ancestors, whose lives and sacrifices they refuse to trivialize or to discredit in the false name of progress.

American Southerners understand. Consider for example recent events in Georgia. Herculean efforts were made by secular progressives to eradicate the 1956 Georgia flag which included the Confederate battle flag design. As you may recall, a committee of soulless boosters attempted to replace the flag with a horrendously bland banner—the Barnes flag— which was replaced with another design after Governor Roy Barnes was defeated.

Mississippi found a better way. The same leftist legions agitated for years to replace the state flag and to strip away its Confederate symbolism. But Mississippi politicians were clever enough to allow the issue to be decided by public referendum.

In South Carolina, the state flag has so far escaped attack because its traditional design is merely a lone palmetto tree with a crescent moon, and the heathens are not well enough informed to understand its Confederate roots. So, instead they attacked the easier target: the Confederate battle flag which flew atop the capitol dome.

In 1996, there was a public referendum on the GOP primary ballot in South Carolina asking voters whether the battle flag should continue flying atop the statehouse.

The flag won with a whopping 76%, attracting the largest primary voter turnout in state history. Still, four years later, the South Carolina legislature voted to move the flag from the dome to a Confederate soldiers’ monument on statehouse grounds, where it still flies and where the attack on its existence continues unabated.

In 2000, when the South Carolina Senate was debating removing the Confederate flag, Sen. Harvey Peeler warned his colleagues that if that one flag came down from the dome a thousand would go up across the state.

They didn’t care. After all, they claimed flags on private property were of no concern to them, as long as that particular one wasn’t in “a place of sovereignty.”

Sen. Peeler was right, of course, as the Confederate flag is more visible and displayed more frequently than ever by ordinary South Carolinians. My sense is that the same is true of the ’56 Flag in Georgia, and generally true throughout the South.

An interesting byproduct of the Confederate flag debate here in South Carolina is the prominence of the state emblem: the Palmetto Flag. Little more than a decade ago, it was rare to ever see the state flag outside an official setting. Now, however, the Palmetto emblem is everywhere: on cars, boats, clothing; and it seems that just about every third business has it in its logo.

One cannot help but conclude that this newfound affection for the symbol of South Carolina is a direct result of the attack on the state’s Southern heritage.

Flags and symbols have power, and ordinary folk everywhere are turning to traditional symbols as a way of resisting the Left’s relentless drive to eradicate or redefine history. There is a cultural war and it is being fought in spots all across America and around the world. It is a war waged by socalled progressives against those who honor the past and respect tradition.

Southerners, like our distant cousins Down Under, instinctively cling to their flags as symbols of their country and their heritage; as heraldic devices, resplendent with the symbols of a precious cultural inheritance.

Just as instinctive, however, is the spirit that motivates those who see the South’s unique culture as something to be feared and fought against, who see the Confederate flag and her vexillological offspring as obstacles to a society uniform in thought and action.

These enemies of our heritage do not want the Confederate flag—or any of these state flags, for that matter—in any place of prominence or honor. Nor do they want them on bumpers, doorframes, t-shirts or anywhere else.

Their goal is simple: they want them gone. But the more they try to rub out Southern identity, the more tenaciously people display the symbol of their revered ancestors, the symbol of which those very ancestors were so justifiably proud.

Confederate Sergeant Barry Benson described it thusly:

“Oh how it thrilled the heart of a soldier, when he had long been away from the army, to catch sight again of his red battle flag, upheld on its staff of pine, its tatters snapping in the wind.

“‘A red rag,’ there will be those who will say. ‘A red rag tied to a stick, and that is all!’

“And yet that red rag, crossed with blue, white stars sprinkling the cross within, tied to a slim, barked sapling with leather
thongs cut from a soldier’s shoe.

“This red rag my soul loved with a lover’s love.”

New Englanders haven’t apologized for the dominant role their ancestors played in the slave trade or for the legalization of slavery in states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Connecticut freed its slaves only 13 years before the outbreak of the War. Yet the Yankees have apparently set up a statute of limitations that shifts with each passing year, always excluding them from prosecution, never expiring for us.

Acting as both priest and penitent, they have absolved themselves of the sin of slavery, while demanding that Southerners come to confession every day.

Black agitators like the Rev. Jesse and the Rev. Al take advantage of this double standard to solicit contributions from their Northern patrons. They know that whenever they attack Southerners or the Confederate past, left-wing Yankees write fat checks. These so-called civil rights leaders are like the ghouls who creep around battlefields after sunset, stealing coins and watches from the corpses of dead heroes.

Yet such hustlers are not our chief enemies. Those who do us the greatest harm are the genteel fraggers who, when we attempt to defend our people, living and dead, fall behind us and shoot us in the back—folks like the Virginia and North Carolina legislators.

Jack Moses’ final mission was as hopeless as it was valiant. The rag-tag group of volunteers did manage to hold off “Potter’s Raiders” for over an hour before being overwhelmed by a well-equipped force that had them outnumbered seventeen to one.

The date of this skirmish at Dingle’s Mill was April 9, 1865—the same day that General Robert E. Lee surrendered. Jack’s eldest brother, Joshua Lazarus Moses, was killed in the War’s last big engagement.

Josh died at Fort Blakeley, Alabama, commanding the artillery in defense of Mobile. His unit was outnumbered 12 to one. Josh died a few hours after Lee surrendered. One brother was wounded and another captured.

Of course, the History Channel’s April 22, two-hour documentary, “Sherman’s March,” tells a very different story. According the documentary’s producers, my ancestors were fighting, not to protect their families, homes and cities, but to acquire slaves and land. Also, we learned that, deep down, General Sherman was a decent and wise man who spoke with a gentle Southern accent.

Sherman: Decent and Wise?

Uncle Billy,” as he was sometimes called by his men, waged war against helpless civilians and burned homes. But, according to the History Channel, it was all in a good cause. Yes, he had a few minor flaws—such as his disregard for the fate of the freed slaves—but all in all, he should be respected for doing what he had to do to win on the side of good against evil. “War is cruelty,” he said, “…The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” What the History Channel fails to report is that such a rationale could be used to justify any massacre of civilians, including the S.S. at Malmedy and Oradour-sur-Glane, the Japanese in Nanking and Manila, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Hitler’s march through Poland and Russia (though no comparison to any of these events is here intended).

While one becomes accustomed to seeing the War Between the States constantly misrepresented in the media, one is nevertheless astonished by the sheer audacity of the History Channel in presenting such a blatantly biased and demonstrably untrue version of the War.

For example, the documentary repeatedly suggests that the War was fought over slavery. That assumption is a smear against the average Confederate draftee, who—hungry, exhausted, sick, shoeless, and short on everything but courage—fought against overwhelming odds. Only one isolated anecdote is offered to support the documentary’s view that slavery was the cause of war. As recorded by Major Henry Hitchcock, when Uncle Billy asked an old slave, “Why do these poor white people that don’t own slaves fight us?”, the man responded, “because the rich white people have promised them land and slaves if they whip the Yankees.”

The slave’s alleged statement stands uncontradicted as the only reason why young men whose homes and cities were being burned kept fighting until the bitter end.

Brutality Downplayed

I initially had hope that the History Channel documentary might manifest some shred of objectivity, since it noted early on that Sherman had been “a failed businessman … considered crazy” by some, and that Union commander Ulysses S. Grant was “a drunk.” The documentary does note that Sherman “plundered a year’s harvest,” and shows some scenes of theft and terrorizing of civilians, stealing and shooting of livestock; the use of Confederate prisoners to clear land mines (“torpedoes”); and the execution of an innocent POW. All these would be considered, then and today, to be war crimes.

Sherman is also shown ordering that freed slaves following his army be turned back. In one scene, many ex-slaves drowned after one of Sherman’s men (ironically named Jefferson C. Davis) pulled up the pontoon bridge over Ebenezer Creek; the Yankee’s offense not being that the poor slaves were unaccepted by their erstwhile liberators, but that they were now abandoned to the approaching Confederates. But the documentary hardly touches the surface in conveying the extent of suffering visited on Southern civilians left in Sherman’s wake or the cruelty of the invading army towards civilians, black and white alike.

Here is a more accurate summary of events, taken from Brian Cisco’s new book new book War Crimes Against Southern Civilians:

Women and children, black and white, were robbed, brutalized, and left homeless in Sherman’s infamous raid through Georgia. Torture and rape were not uncommon. In South Carolina, homes, farms, churches, and whole towns disappeared in flames. Civilians received no mercy at the hands of the Union invaders. Earrings were ripped from bleeding ears, graves were robbed, and towns were pillaged. Wherever Federal troops encountered Southern Blacks, whether free or slave, they were robbed, brutalized, belittled, kidnapped, threatened, tortured, and sometimes raped or killed by their blue-clad “liberators.”

Occupation of Sumter

My family’s home in Sumter, South Carolina was taken over by Sherman’s troops. My great-great grandmother Octavia Moses had five sons fighting for the Confederacy. Here, in part, is the account she cave of that terrible time:

On Sunday, April 9, 1865, Potter’s Raiders occupied Sumter…. They entered many houses and took what they wanted…. They looted the stores and burned the jail and Court house. After my husband was nearly killed by negro soldiers who demanded liquor … we asked for protection and took some officers in our house in order to insure it. We were afraid to undress our children at night, as we did not know when the torch might be applied; we had them dressed in several suits of clothing and had provisions and weapons hidden away.

The Moses family survived the Yankee occupation of Sumter, but some of their most valuable possessions did not:

On Tuesday, April 11, Potter’s raiders departed, but not before burning many buildings and 196 bales of our cotton…. As soon as the Northerners left, all the people of the town went around to each other to find out who was suffering most and how to relieve their needs.

Other families fared much worse, as Octavia notes:

We found poor old Mr. Bee (a refugee from Charleston) had been murdered by drunken soldiers. Mr. Harmon DeLeon, of Charleston, and my husband saw to his burial. My husband also went out to the battle field where, assisted by Augustus Solomons, they together cared for the dead.

Joe Wilder and others tell of the Yankees’ plundering in search of alcohol, and he says, “The black troops murdered old Mr. Bee while they were here on account of some wine, and if it had not been for a guard coming in, white troops would have killed Jackson Moses, thinking he had liquor concealed.”

According to Anne King Gregorie’s History of Sumter County, Robert Bee “was found hanging from the rafters of his attic, tortured and murdered by drunken soldiers, who were said to have raped his daughter” named Julia. In Julia’s “Account” of the incident, she tells how on “Sunday afternoon, the troops came in the village destroying everything on the way”:

The homes were ransacked—every vestige of food was taken—in the home was my father, sister, and four little children…. [T]he home was filled with Yankee hordes—My father was forced to leave the room—and not until several days afterwards did we know where he had been taken—our faithful servant who was looked upon as one of our household—dear faithful Hannah found looking in the upper rooms, exclaimed as she entered the room—”My God, here is my dear Master” murdered by the Yankees. Everything had been ransacked.

Cleansing the Atrocities

But no such horrors appear in the History Channel’s documentary. Sherman’s vandalism, arson and theft of food vitally needed by women and children are casually referred to as “foraging operations.” Sherman fondly calls his teenage soldiers “my little devils.”

Nor is there any mention of the worst atrocities: the well-documented rapes and murders of blacks and whites described in numerous contemporaneous accounts of the March. The closest is the concession that that South Carolina took the brunt of the destruction, since it was the object of vengeance by the Union soldiers, who considered it “the cradle of the rebellion,” the place “where the treason began, and … where it will end.”

Viewers of the documentary wait in vain for any discussion of the mass murder in the west of Native Americans—atrocities that historians euphemistically call “the Indian Wars,” carried out later under Sherman and other Union generals. One hears nothing of Sherman’s genocidal views of the Indians, such as his writing in 1866: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to the extermination, men, women, and children.”

Nor is there a single word about the virulent hatred of Jews demonstrated by Sherman and other Union officers, well known at the time, culminating in America’s worst official act of anti-Semitism in the nation’s history. On December 17, 1862, Union general Ulysses S. Grant issued his infamous General Order 11, expelling all Jews “as a class” from his conquered territories within 24 hours.

A few months earlier, on August 11, Sherman had warned in a letter to the Adjutant General of the Union Army that “the country will swarm with dishonest Jews” if continued trade in cotton is encouraged. Sherman, in a letter written in 1858, had described Jews as “without pity, soul, heart, or bowels of compassion.” None of these insights into Sherman’s character can be found in the documentary.

Confederate Gallantry

Try as they did to sugar-coat Sherman’s methods and motives, the valor of the outnumbered Confederates does come through at times. One of the most poignant moments is the Battle of Griswoldville, ten miles east of Macon, Georgia. A local militia had been formed, from what little manpower remained in the area (largely old men and boys) to try to slow the Union advance. It was the only significant attack on Sherman during his March to the Sea.

In this skirmish, the Union troops, occupying the high ground and firing repeating rifles and cannon, suffered 62 to 92 casualties, as compared to 473-600 militia casualties, according to varying accounts. The documentary quotes a Union soldier writing home about finding a 14-year old boy, with a broken arm and leg. Next to him, “cold in death, lay his father, two brothers, and an uncle.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that almost three dozen members of my mother’s extended family, the Moseses of South Carolina and Georgia, fought for the Confederacy, something that has given me some direct insight into how and why the war was waged by the South.

From their letters, memoirs, and diaries, I know with first hand authority that they and their comrades in arms were not fighting for slavery. They were trying to defend themselves and their comrades, their families, homes, and country from an invading army that was trying to kill them, burn their homes and cities, and destroy everything they possessed.
Thousands of descendants of Confederate veterans could recount similar stories, but such incidents are largely dismissed in “Sherman’s March” as myths or exaggerations.

The Confederates’ Honorable Behavior

The Confederates were operating under honorable rules of engagement that now seem almost quaint.
My ancestor, Major Raphael Moses, is a good example. As General James Longstreet’s chief commissary officer, Moses participated in many of the major battles in the east, and was responsible for supplying and feeding up to 54,000 troops, porters, and other non-combatants.

General Robert E. Lee had strictly forbidden him from entering private homes in search of supplies in raids into Union territory (such as the incursions into Pennsylvania), even when food and other provisions were in painfully short supply.
Moses always paid for what he took from farms and businesses, albeit with Confederate currency. And he always acted as a gentleman. Once, when a distraught woman approached Moses and pleaded for the return of her pet heifer that had been caught up in a cattle seizure, he graciously agreed.

For his part, Moses noted that while the women initially spurned his efforts to pay for the goods, and “refused his Confederate ‘trash’ with great scorn,” they eventually were careful to demand the precise amount owed them, “being very particular about the odd cents.”

Lincoln’s Reaction to the Atrocities

In President Abraham Lincoln’s brief appearance in the documentary, he is always portrayed as wise, decent, kindly and compassionate. Lincoln’s factual reaction to Sherman’s atrocities is not revealed.

In his Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, the general tells of visiting Lincoln with General Grant (whose family still owned slaves at the time) near war’s end aboard the president’s ship docked in City Point, Virginia.

The History Channel’s documentary quotes part of Sherman’s assessment of Lincoln: “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.” But the program does not mention Lincoln’s little known reaction to Sherman’s report of his war tactics against civilians:

We walked down the wharf, went on board, and found Mr. Lincoln alone in the after-cabin. He remembered me perfectly and at once engaged in a most interesting conversation. He was full of curiosity about the many incidents of our great march, which had reached him officially and through the newspapers, and seems to enjoy very much the more ludocrous [sic] parts—about the “bummers” and their devices to collect food and forage when the outside world supposed us to be starving.

This report is confirmed by “Admiral Porter’s Account of the Interview with Mr. Lincoln,” written in 1866 at the U.S. Naval Academy, mailed to Gen. Sherman, and included in his book:

The day of General Sherman’s arrival at City Point (I think the 27th of March, 1865), I accompanied him and General Grant on board the president’s flag ship, the Queen, where the president received us in the upper saloon….

The conversation soon turned on the events of Sherman’s campaign through the South, with every movement of which the president seemed familiar.

He laughed over some of the stories Sherman told of his “bummers” and told others in return. The interview between the two generals and the president lasted about an hour and a half, and, as it was a remarkable one, I jotted down what I remembered of the conversation.

At the end of the documentary, Sherman is shown in retirement being visited by those of his former troops who are in need, “the bummers,” receiving monetary gifts from their kindly commander: “the poor old soldiers who show up regularly at his door…. They are his family. He will always be their ‘Uncle Billy’.”

Correcting the “Myths” about Sherman

“Sherman’s March,” the History Channel documentary, was written and directed by Rick King for JWM Productions in Washington, D.C. It was well reviewed by the mainstream media and will doubtlessly win awards because it follows the politically correct version of history. Here is what Jim Auchmutey wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the various “myths” corrected by the program:

Sherman raises a tumbler of whiskey with his lieutenants and offers a toast as they watch Atlanta burn. The light from the flames plays off his red hair and strawberry complexion, making him look like a 19th-century Satan.

Despite the imagery, the man behind the show says he believes Sherman was no devil, even if he did pioneer the concept of “total war.”

“Sherman’s March is one of the great myths of American history,” says Rick King, a native of the Washington suburbs who wrote and directed the program. “The myth is that he was a brute, that he raped and pillaged his way across Georgia and the Carolinas, that he hated the South and was merciless and cruel.”

King points out that Sherman had lived in the South before the war and loved it. Furthermore, he argues, the burning of Atlanta and the March to the Sea have been exaggerated in popular memory and were undertaken for a humanitarian reason: to shorten the war by destroying the South’s will to fight.

The actor who plays Sherman, Bill Oberst, Jr., is a 42-year old South Carolinian from Pawley’s Island who grew up hearing stories about the War. His great-grandfather came from Scotland and became known as “Shorty” after losing a leg while serving in the Confederate Army. “I’m just dripping with this stuff, like most Southern guys of my generation,” Oberst told Auchmutey. “From a military perspective, I can understand what Sherman did. Those are the stories that have been handed down. So, yeah, I hated him.”

Oberst has played not only Jesus, Mark Twain, and John F. Kennedy, but even starred in his own one-man show depicting, of all people, the late humor writer Lewis Grizzard, who truly loved the South. “I thought if someone was going to play Sherman, it ought to be one of us,” Auchmutey says of Oberst. “He chomps his cigar and confers with Ulysses S. Grant. He pauses in the piney woods to talk with a group of emancipated slaves. He rides among his troops, who affectionately call him ‘Uncle Billy’.”

Unfortunately, the reporter did not ask Oberst if he thinks his great granddad “Shorty” is spinning in his grave after his descendant’s performance.

Producer-director Rick King was kind enough to allow me to interview him at length, and he seems like a nice guy. He knows how to make a documentary film, and he genuinely believes what he produced to be a truthful account. But—with apologies to Mr. King—I cannot help but be appalled by what comes across to me as an anti-Southern bias concerning our nation’s most transforming events.

I asked him why the program did not show or mention a single rape or murder of civilians, despite numerous eyewitness accounts. He said that he could not find any historians, or documentation in the dozens of books he consulted, to confirm the atrocity stories that have been handed down for generations.

He said that while there was indeed lots of plunder and destruction, he believed that the number of murders was “very minimal,” and that only a total of “two or three rapes” occurred. (Not believing what I heard, I asked him to repeat that.) Outside of South Carolina, King says, he could find very little wanton destruction of homes other than those with owners who were involved in the war effort.

I asked him if he truly believed Southern conscriptees were fighting to get land and slaves, as the ex-slave stated. “That was his opinion,” he replied, but he did not say why no other “opinions” were offered.

But King did make one point that makes sense out of Sherman’s tactics. By waging war against civilians instead of attacking the Confederate Army, he argues, Sherman saved many lives on both sides, and his destruction of much of the South’s economy shortened the war.

King says he blames the wealthy slave and plantation owners for the war, not the common soldier. “It was a rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.” This is, of course, the Marxist version of the War.

A Revisionist History

History is indeed often written by the victors. In the case of the War Between the States, what is taking place is more accurately described as a cleansing of the harsh facts about the Union victory, substituting a softer, more acceptable version. And now the revisionist account has become the mainstream version.

Today, respectable histories tell us the War was all about slavery; Sherman’s brutality is largely mythological; Lincoln was saintly, kind and compassionate and our greatest president ever. To take issue with any of this dogma invites quick and sharp allegations of racism and bigotry.

The producers of the program claim to have consulted 30 to 40 books. If so, it hardly seems possible that they could have failed to find solid evidence and numerous credible accounts of atrocities against civilians by Sherman’s army.

One historian they did not consult and whose books and articles they did not read is history professor and John C. Calhoun scholar Clyde Wilson. In his review of the documentary for LewRockwell.com, Dr. Wilson had this to say:

A whole team of third-string, half-baked carpetbagger “historians” of the type that now staff all Southern universities are presented to make the best possible case for the glory…. But … it is a bad cause that has to be defended by lies. And it can only be defended by lies, then and now.

In the end, there is no question that “Sherman’s March” attempts to make a hero of a war criminal and rewrites history under the guise of shattering myths. But like the teenagers and old men at Griswoldville 150 years ago, there will always be a few loyal Southerners honest and brave enough to keep fighting against hopeless odds. Unfortunately, you won’t be hearing from those brave souls on the History Channel’s version of Sherman’s March.

Lewis Regenstein writes from Atlanta and can be reached at Regenstein@mindspring.com. All photos courtesy of the History Channel.

In 1825, John Caldwell Calhoun and his wife, Floride Bonneau, moved into a modest plantation home in the upper South Carolina piedmont near present day Clemson. Having risen to prominence as a local lawyer in nearby Abbeville, Calhoun had by this time served in the South Carolina General Assembly (1808-1810), the United States Congress (1811-1817), and as Secretary of War in the administration of James Monroe.

Located in Pickens County, South Carolina, and originally called Clergy Hall, Fort Hill was constructed as a four-room cottage in 1803 by Dr. James McElhenney, the second pastor of the historic Old Stone Church. Built in the upcountry vernacular style with three Greek Revival columned piazzas, the home would grow to ten rooms (and 14 fireplaces) to accommodate their ten children.

While lacking the lofty scale of a Monticello, Fort Hill had a simple grandeur elegantly framed by magnificent views of the Blue Ridge Mountain range to the north and the Seneca River to the south. Although only about 450 acres of the estate’s approximately 1,100 were cultivated during Calhoun’s life, it was a vibrant and active home for such a large family and about seventy slaves.

Although its modern setting is surrounded by the sprawling campus of Clemson University, which is the house’s custodian by the terms of the will, a visitor in Calhoun’s day would have come up along a cedar-lined drive to the main house, along with an exterior office and kitchen with a vegetable garden on one side and on the other “Cornelia’s Garden,” a playground for one of Calhoun’s daughters, born lame.

While Fort Hill provided Calhoun with a retreat from the hullabaloo of official Washington, he was never removed from the issues of the day. Here Calhoun would pen some of the works that would establish him as the preeminent political philosopher of the American Republic. His famous Fort Hill Address: On the Relation which the States and General Government Bear to Each Other, which set forth the doctrine of nullification, was written on his desk in the office. As further reminders of the larger world, two trees on the grounds were presents from his Congressional colleagues: a cypress from Henry Clay and a hemlock from Daniel Webster.

History abounds inside Fort Hill as well. Unlike many other historic homes, most of the furnishings never left and others were donated by family members in the 20th century. A chair located in the parlor was presented to Calhoun’s son-in-law (and subsequent owner of the house) while he was an emissary to Belgium. There is a mahogany sideboard made from wood once used in the USS Constitution, as well as a Windsor chair once belonging to George Washington.

After Calhoun’s death in 1850, the property passed to his widow and daughter Anna Maria Calhoun. Anna Maria had married Thomas Green Clemson of Philadelphia. Educated in Paris, Clemson served as Charge d’Affaires to Belgium until 1852 and as United States Superintendent of Agriculture until the firing on Fort Sumter.

When the War started, Clemson, who was fifty-four at the time, joined the Confederate Army and served in Arkansas and Texas, administering mining operations and developing more efficient explosives. At the end of the War he was paroled at Shreveport, Louisiana.

His son, Captain John Calhoun Clemson, CSA, fared worse, spending two hellish years as a Yankee prisoner at Johnson’s Island, in Lake Erie, Ohio.

The elder Clemson died in 1888—outliving his wife and children—and bequeathed more than 814 acres of the Fort Hill estate to the state of South Carolina for an agricultural college with a stipulation that the dwelling house “shall never be torn down or altered; but shall be kept in repair with all articles of furniture and vesture … and shall always be open for the inspection of visitors.” Clemson University has operated Fort Hill as a museum ever since.

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, Fort Hill fell on hard times and at one point was designated to the Department of the Interior, National Historic Landmarks Program, as a “Threatened and Endangered” landmark in need of restoration based on continued deterioration.

Since Clemson was required by the will to maintain the property, they finally began a major renovation project in 1997 and concluded in time for the bicentennial in 2003. Clemson University’s restoration, funded partly by a $1.2 million grant from the South Carolina legislature, included structural stabilization, the installation of climate control, upgrade of fire suppression and electrical systems, as well as restoration of Calhoun’s office.

The second phase of restoration focused on the inside of the home. It included painting and plaster repair and the reproduction of missing architectural features such as doors. It also included the painstaking reproduction of wall coverings. Fort Hill was named a national treasure by the Save America’s Treasures program, and now its artifacts are currently undergoing a comprehensive conservation program funded by this federal grant and matching funds.

Photos by Michael Givens

This is because he was a statesman—that is, he was a thinker of permanent interest as well as an actor on the political stage. Calhoun himself often drew attention to the difference between a statesman and a politician. A statesman takes a long view of the future welfare of his people and says what he believes to be true, even if the citizens prefer not to hear it. A politician says what he thinks will make him popular and not offend the voters and the media. His span of attention is short-term: the next poll and the next suitcase full of cash.

Like the generation of the Founding Fathers, Calhoun was capable of a long-term and unselfish view. In some respects he had an advantage over the Founders because he had forty years (1811-1850) to observe how their Constitution had worked. What he came to understand about how the history of the United States would play out shows Calhoun to have been a prophet—a man whose words of a century and a half ago resonate in this morning’s newscast.

John C. Calhoun on American Government and Politics

* One thing alarms me—the eager pursuit of gain which overspreads the land, and which absorbs every faculty of the mind and every feeling of the heart. _______________________________________ * Every dollar that we can prevent from coming into the treasury, or every dollar thrown back into the hands of the people, will tend to strengthen the cause of liberty, and unnerve the arm of power. _______________________________________ * It was impossible to force the minds of the public officers to the importance of attendance on the public money, because we had too much of it. _______________________________________ * The Presidential election is no longer a struggle for great principles, but only a great struggle as to who shall have the spoils of office. _______________________________________ * The first step, towards any effectual reform, is to put down and disgrace party machinery & management. No devise ever was adopted better calculated to gull the community … & keep the people in ignorance. _______________________________________ * When did the South ever lay its hand upon the North?

Calhoun must be studied and understood in the realm of ideas more than in the realm of politics. Only a few years ago, a historian wrote a biography in which he stated that he could not understand Calhoun’s ideas and so had paid no attention to them. The biography won a prize. I know of another celebrated historian, who has been on C-SPAN numerous times, who in one of his books portrayed Calhoun as grinding and gnashing his teeth over having been outsmarted by Martin Van Buren. As one who knows more about Calhoun than anyone living, I can assure you that such a thing can never have happened. Even if it had, that historian would have no way of knowing it.

Like most of what passes for comment on John C. Calhoun these days, these things tell us nothing about Calhoun but an awful lot about the shortcomings of current historians. If the textbook you once studied had a picture of Calhoun, it was probably one from the last months of his life aged 67 or 68, in which he looks like a fanatic who just stuck his finger in an electric socket. Few have seen any of the dozens of portraits in which Calhoun appears as the handsome, charming, magnetic fellow that he actually was.

And they will tell you that he was a “cast iron man,” incapable of normal humanity. This “cast iron man” was a hands-on farmer and enjoyed an abundant family life. He could write his daughter a moving description of the flowers and even of the timidly visiting deer at their homeplace. He was interested in every field of human knowledge—I suspect he might have been a scientist if he had come along in a later age. When Calhoun was Secretary of State, President Tyler married a second, young wife. She was very anxious at her first state dinner. Calhoun sat beside her and whispered funny comments in her ear to set her at ease.

Some cast iron man! That term was used by a sniffy Englishwoman who met him once, briefly.

They will also tell you that Calhoun began his love letters with “Whereas,” the idea being to persuade you that his view of American affairs was narrow and legalistic. This is the opposite of the truth. Calhoun’s approach to the Constitution and to government and society is deeply philosophical and historical. It is actually the opponents of the South and of Calhoun who were narrow, pettifogging legalists. They played semantic games with the Constitution and distorted its history to justify the false idea that the federal government had supreme and unappealable power. But Calhoun was a precise thinker. He once thwarted Daniel Webster by showing him to have used the word “compact” in numerous various and contradictory ways in a speech on the Constitution.

By the way, it is well known in select circles that Abraham Lincoln was John C. Calhoun’s illegitimate son. Also that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Martians, Shakespeare did not really write his plays, Iraq had atomic bombs and was responsible for 9/11, and Elvis is alive and well and serving as a missionary in Bolivia.

Calhoun’s most important legacy is his “A Disquisition on Government,” which he worked on right up to the end of his life. A mere 100 pages, it is heavy with enough meaning to have inspired unending and international attention. Since I am thought to be something of an expert on the subject, I have been visited over the years by many people pursuing an interest in Calhoun’s thought about society and government—historians, political scientists, economists, government officials, journalists and others, not only from the United States but from Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Yugoslavia, Japan and other places.

When I want to persuade people of Calhoun’s brilliant thought and important, prophetic statesmanship, I usually leave aside the familiar “Disquisition” and Constitutional battles associated with his career. Instead, I point to Calhoun’s wisdom in areas for which he is not known. His mastery of economics was such that a historian of banking has written that Calhoun was the only public official of his time who actually understood the complicated and controversial questions of banking and money. And no one has ever made a better case for real free trade (not the fraudulent kind touted these days).

For this occasion I want to display my hero’s prophetic wisdom in two areas: the foreign affairs of the United States and the downward tendencies of the American political process.

This should persuade anyone that we have in Calhoun a statesman extremely relevant to the here and now. As to foreign affairs, Calhoun was both Secretary of War and Secretary of State and one of the major players and commentators on both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.

Calhoun was as responsible as anyone for bringing the independent Republic of Texas into the Union when the mainstream politicians of both parties tried to keep the controversial issue out of sight. But two years later he was the only member of the Senate to speak forthrightly against a declaration of war with Mexico. In part he took the same position he had earlier taken over American saber rattling over Oregon: it was foolish to bluster and bring on war with the world’s greatest power, Britain, when all Americans had to do was wait, and in the natural course of settlement by our dynamic population, the territory would fall into our lap.

When President Polk asked for a declaration of war with Mexico, many members of Congress thought it unwise, but were afraid of being called unpatriotic if they did not support war. Not so Calhoun, and you can tell here that he was a statesman and not a politician, because he knowingly sacrificed much popularity in the stand he took. This was all wrong, he told the Senate and the country. First of all, a terrible precedent had been set. While wars were supposed to be declared by Congress, the President’s dubious actions, bringing on a minor clash in disputed territory, had brought on a war which Congress was now to rubber-stamp. With this precedent, any President in the future could commit the country to war at will.

Calhoun further pointed out that hostilities are not necessarily war. A declaration of war carried vast ramifications in domestic and international law which were not justified by the border incident that had taken place. Further, war was not needed to achieve all of America’s legitimate territorial interests—what was needed were firmness, patience, and statesmanship. As the war moved on, Calhoun continued to be a critic. After the initial victories, he argued that the army should hold the territory it had won but not advance any farther into Mexico. There was no need to sacrifice the blood and treasure that would be expended in the government’s plan to invade Mexico, capture its capital, and become an occupying power. Besides, he accurately predicted, Mexican territory was the forbidden fruit that would bring on insoluble conflict between North and South.

In his stand against the war, Calhoun was not thinking about Mexico—he was thinking about the peril to Americans of embarking on a course of imperialism. There were popular politicians whipping up enthusiasm for the United States to take and keep all of Mexico. Calhoun taught a lesson that still resonates. To take the relatively empty lands of California and New Mexico that our people could settle was one thing. To undertake the occupation of a foreign people was something else. You cannot be a republic and an empire at the same time.

There is great satisfaction in devoting much of one’s life to studying a great man like Calhoun. But there is also a penalty of unerasable sadness in constant reminder of how far down we have come and are going. Statesmen were rare in Calhoun’s time. Today they have disappeared entirely.

Saint Andrew was considered the patron Saint of the Dutchy of Burgundy, the Kingdom of Scotland, and the Russian Empire, and all three used flags featuring the Cross of Saint Andrew. In Burgundy, a red cross is on a white field; in Scotland, a white cross on a blue field; and in the Russian navy, a white-bordered blue cross on a red field. By the end of the 17th century, the saltires of the British, Spanish, and Russian empires covered a large percentage of the surface of the earth.

When the use of crosses first arose there can be no doubt of the religious origin. They were first used by Constantine after his vision at the Milvian Bridge: “In this sign conquer.” This led directly to the legalization of Christianity. But as time passed, the Christian symbolism of crosses on flags seems to have faded.

The Cross of Saint Andrew is found on the flags of nations and governments around the world that are derived from the flag of the British Empire. Notable examples are the flags of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. There are also a few examples, such as the municipal flag of Valdivia in Chile, of flags derived from the Burgundian/Spanish form of the Cross of Saint Andrew. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Andrew flag, as the Russians call it, once again sails the oceans of the world on the ships of the Russian navy. Other flags featuring the saltire include the Isle of Jersey, the Basque country in Spain, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Jamaica in the Caribbean, Burundi in Africa, and the German airline Lufthansa.

Was the Confederate battle flag derived from any of these sources? There were certainly more Southerners of Scottish descent than Russian, Burgundian, or Spanish. Its designer, however, William Porcher Miles of South Carolina, simply stated that it was an “honourable ordinary” and a relatively nonsectarian alternative acceptable in the South to both Jews and Protestants.

Nevertheless, no one can deny that the Cross of Saint Andrew grew to become the symbol of the crusade for Southern independence, and to many in the South it represents a cultural heritage inextricably bound to the faith for which the Apostle Andrew gave his life.