North Carolina's Horrid Fragment of Feudal Despotism

From: bernhard1848@gmail.com
Constitutional scholar and lawyer R. Carter Pittman (1898-1972) wrote that "Philosophy and sociology have always been the tamper tools that have sprung institutions of liberty out of alignment. Historical research and common sense born of experience, have always been the tools to spring them back into place. Doctors of pseudo-socio-science have always been the apes of tyranny."

He viewed the "all men are created equal" phrases in State constitutions as being "forced upon the people . . . by carpetbag doctors of pseudo-socio-science, while Federal bayonets held the outraged white people at bay. As soon as those doctors were run out, nearly all the States returned to George Mason's phrase: "That all men are born equally free and independent."

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"


North Carolina's Horrid Fragment of Feudal Despotism

"Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists.  It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself." Alexander Hamilton, 26 June 1787

"American high school and college textbooks are loaded with equalitarian propaganda, all pointing to the Declaration of Independence equality clause as the "American dream" or the "American creed."  No one questions the right of all men to equal justice under law, but propagandists have carried the doctrine beyond equality of rights to equality of things . . .

The Declaration of Independence never became living law in America, and no provision of the Federal Constitution or Bill of Rights can be traced to it and . . . its influence on State constitutions and bills rights has been insignificant.

It was written to serve the temporary purposes of a sanguinary conflict.  It was and perhaps will always be history's most effective piece of propaganda, but it neither grants nor protects human rights.  The Declaration of Independence does not say that all men are equal.  It says they were "created" equal.  There equality ends.

The [United States] Constitution proclaims in its preamble that it was established "to . . . insure domestic tranquility . . . and secure the blessings of liberty."  Nowhere does it hint a purpose to insure or impose equality of men or things.

For decades after 1776 North Carolina's Bill of Rights proclaimed "that all men are born equally free and independent."  There must surely be some explanation as to why people who had lived under the maxims of George Mason since 1776 should suddenly change in 1868.

The Constitution of 1868 was framed in a convention called under the reconstruction acts of [the Northern] Congress, by Major General [Edward] Canby.  It assembled at Raleigh, January 14, 1868.  Federal soldiers stood guard over deliberations. The same equality clause was inserted in the bills or rights of many Southern States while the natural leaders of the white people were held at bay by Federal bayonets. See for examples, the Alabama Bill of Rights, the Louisiana Bill of Rights of 1868, South Carolina's of 1868 and Florida's of 1868.

As is well-known by those the least familiar with American history, shortly after the Federal troops were withdrawn [in 1877], the white people of the South quickly expelled the carpetbaggers and subdued the scalawags and recaptured the State governments. Every one of those States, with one exception, promptly called a constitutional convention according to its own wishes in place of those imposed upon it by military might.

All struck the doctrine of human equality from their constitutions, except North Carolina. Why North Carolina should have retained that doctrine in her Bill of Rights is a mystery.  There it stands on parchments as a horrid fragment of feudal despotism imposed on a proud and helpless people by superior force."

(Equality Versus Liberty, the Eternal Conflict, R. Carter Pittman, August, 1960; www.rcarterpittman.org)

New York's Notorious Slave Ships

From: bernhard1848@gmail.com

In the post-Revolution era, African slavery was waning as cotton production was a laborious task and not worth cultivating on a large scale until Eli Whitney of Massachusetts revolutionized the industry in 1793. Thereafter, New England mills could not live without raw slave-produced cotton, Manhattan lenders ensured plantation owners that money was available for plantation expansion, and New England slavers continued to import the labor supply.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"


New York's Notorious Slave Ships

"In the decade 1850-1860 Great Britain maintained consulates in six Southern ports: Norfolk, -- changed to Richmond in 1856 – Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans and Galveston.

[Consul G.P.R.] James [in Norfolk and Richmond] . . . considered that Virginians were very kind to their slaves and that slavery was an injury to masters rather than Negroes. One of the proprietors of the Richmond "slave warehouse" was, wrote his son Charles later, an "unmistakable Yankee," said to be very humane to his charges, "but the business was regarded as infamous.  I heard a respectable man denounced for accepting his hospitality."

At Niagara Falls, James saw a runaway Negro belonging to one of his Norfolk neighbors; he had found it difficult to make a living and was cold and he begged the consul to ask his owner to take him back.

[Consul] Henry G. Kuper of Baltimore gave assurance that the slave trade was being extensively carried on by many American citizens, especially in New York . . . with the connivance of Spanish authorities in Cuba where most of the cargoes were conveyed . . . Consul Edward W. Mark wrote from Baltimore that at any moment twenty vessels might be found under construction at that port, admirably adapted for the slave trade. Some were built expressly for the trade by "respectable houses," which would not enter the trade themselves but merely executed the orders they received.

Mark believed, however, that in Baltimore little countenance was given to the trade. It was carried on rather "from New York and the eastern parts of the Union . . . and generally by New England and foreign firms."

[In 1858 Consul] Molyneaux of Savannah told the story of a Charleston mercantile house . . . which proposed to send the ship Richard Cobden . . . on a [suspicious] voyage to Africa to bring "free emigrants" to a United States port. The collector of the port appealed to United States Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb who pronounced the proposal illegal.

About the same time the Lydia Gibbs, a vessel of one-hundred and fourteen tons of Northern build, sailed from Charleston under one Watson, a Scotchman naturalized in the United States. He took it to Havana where it was sold to unknown persons for $12,000.  Watson was to receive $6,000 more if he escaped detection, and in addition a certain percentage of the slaves he should succeed in landing in Cuba.

[In July 1858 Charleston Consul Robert Bunch] wrote that the brig Frances Ellen had cleared from Charleston for Africa, supposedly to engage in the slave trade; that the firm of Ponjand and Lalas, two Spaniards, which sent it out, was believed to be regularly engaged in this traffic [and] intended to land five or six cargoes in Texas . . .

In December, 1859, the South Carolina legislature received from the New York assembly a set of resolutions passed by the latter body, condemning the slave trade and urging the Southern States not to connive at or encourage the odious traffic.  South Carolina returned the resolutions to the senders without comment and Bunch, though agreeing with the New York sentiments, dryly noted that the action was not "happily received," "as it is notorious that, during the present year, at least ten slavers have been fitted out in New York for one in the entire South."

(The South in the 1850's as Seen by British Consuls, Laura A. White, The Journal of Southern History, February 1935, excerpts, pp. 29, 31, 36-41)

Captain George Thomas Parker of Gates County

George Thomas Parker served with the Fifth North Carolina Regiment for the duration of the war, originally enlisting with Company G at Camp Winslow in Halifax County on 20 June 1861 and appointed First Sergeant.  The Fifth Regiment mustered into Confederate service on 15 July 1861 and left for Virginia the same day. It arrived at Manassas Junction on 16 July and was assigned to the Fourth Brigade of Brigadier-General James Longstreet and marched to Mitchell's Ford on Bull Run Creek where it saw its baptism under fire at First Manassas.  Promoted to regimental Sergeant-Major, he returned to Company G as a second lieutenant, then transferred to Company H on 15 January 1862; first lieutenant to rank from 12 October 1862; and captain to rank from 15 June 1863.

From northern Virginia the regiment was sent to the Williamsburg area to resist enemy invasion in March and April 1862.  Parker was wounded during Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's offensive at Seven Pines in May 1862 but returned to duty to participate at King's School House, Cold Harbor, Gaines Mill, Frayser's Farm, Seven Days, South Mountain, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Mine Run and Spotsylvania, where Parker was wounded in the right thigh in May or June 1864.  He was reported as "absent wounded" through December 1864, returned to Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and paroled at Appomattox on 9 April 1865.  

Brothers David Wood and James Robert also served the Confederacy, as well as Joseph John Parker who died of typhoid fever in October 1861.  This "camp fever" was ubiquitous and usually the result of exposure to the elements and poor camp sanitation.  Parker was paroled at Appomattox in April 1865.

Capt. Parker returned home after Appomattox "so ragged and dirty they put him in the smokehouse to take a bath. He threw away all the clothes he had on and left his pistol out there," according to daughter Julia in a 1954 interview.  Parker married Eunice Katherine Riddick on 2 December 1865 and their union produced six children, including Julia.

A dedicated member of the United Confederate Veterans after the war, Parker served as commander of the Tom Smith Camp of the UCV in Suffolk, Virginia where he had made his home.  After several years of illness and then paralysis, he passed away at age 74 on 18 January 1911; wife Eunice followed him in death on 10 February 1931.

Capt. Parker's obituary described a faithful Christian and member of his congregation, a superior role model for his children and future generations:

"A consistent and faithful member of Main Street Methodist Church, he was always found at his post of duty in the choir and the other activities of his church, taking great interest in all things which pertained to the moral and spiritual uplift of the community.  He was a brave soldier, a good husband and father, a true citizen, and a devout Christian gentleman.  Freed from his rundown house of clay, he lives in a glorious body in the "house of many mansions." He served his day and generation well and has gone to reap the reward – the crown of rejoicing and the presence of his God forever."

Sources:  Confederate Images, C.E. Avery, Confederate Veteran, Volume 6, 2000, pg. 9; North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865, A Roster, Volume IV, Weymouth T. Jordan

"The Economic Causes of the War"

The excellent explanation of the economic causes of the War Between the States by Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr. is added in its entirety.  It was published in September 2001. Please pass this website along to family, friends and acquaintances to help them better understand American history, the reasons for the 1861-1865 conflict, and the unsurpassed valor of North Carolinians who fought for their independence.  Read an excerpt below:

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"Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North.  The love of money is the root of this, as of many evils.  The quarrel between the North and the South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."  Charles Dickens

In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the presidency and took the steps needed to end slavery.  He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding States that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.

People in the South, like my great-great-grandfather Louis Thomas Hicks, had a different view of the war. Louis Hicks fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in the Army of Northern Virginia, commanding the 20th North Carolina Regiment (in Iverson's Brigade of Rodes Division in Ewell's Second Corps). He led his regiment into action on the first day of the battle and was forced to surrender after losing eighty percent of his men (238 out of 300) in two-and-a-half hours of fighting. In his personal account of the battle, he wrote, "[As a prisoner] I lied awake, thinking of my comrades and the great cause for which we were willing to shed our last drop of blood."

His daughter, Mary Lyde Williams, echoed similar sentiments in her Presentation Address given at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg on July 3, 1929.  She began her address with the words, "They wrote a constitution in which each State should be free." Four children, including her granddaughter, my mother, who was then 10 years old, removed the veil that covered the statue.

Today's Standard View of the War

Today American children are taught in the nation's schools, both in the North and South, that it was wrong for people to support the Confederacy and to fight and die for it.

Well-intentioned, "right thinking" people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Indeed, such thinking has now reached the point where groups from both sides of the political spectrum, notably the NAACP and Southern Poverty Law Center on the left and the Cato Institute on the right, want to have the Confederate Battle Flag eradicated from public spaces. These people argue that the Confederate flag is offensive to African-Americans because it commemorates slavery.

The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign States. Instead,
America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say.  For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued – Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996).

Read more at: http://www.ncwbts150.com/EconomicCausesoftheWAr.php

MRS. HENRIETTA E. LEE'S LETTER TO GENERAL HUNTER ON THE BURNING OF HER HOUSE:

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 8, pages 215-216.]

The following burning protest against a cruel wrong deserves to be put on record, as a part of the history of General David Hunter's inglorious campaign in the Valley of Virginia, and we cheerfully comply with the request of a distinguished friend to publish it. The burning of this house and those of Col. A. R. Boteler and Andrew Hunter, esq., in the lower valley, and of Governor Letcher's and the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington give him a place in the annals of infamy only equaled by the contempt felt for his military achievements:

Jefferson County, July 20, 1864.

General Hunter:

Yesterday your underling, Captain Martindale, of the First New York Cavalry, executed your infamous order and burned my house.

You have had the satisfaction ere this of receiving from him the information that your orders were fulfilled to the letter; the dwelling and every out-building, seven in number, with their contents, being burned.

I, therefore, a helpless woman whom you have cruelly wronged, address you, a Major-General of the United States army, and demand why this was done?
What was my offence? My husband was absent, an exile. He had never been a politician or in any way engaged in the struggle now going on, his age preventing. This fact your chief of staff, David Strother could have told you.

The house was built by my father, a Revolutionary soldier, who served the whole seven years for your independence. There was I born; there the sacred dead repose. It was my house and my home, and there has your niece (Miss Griffith), who has tarried among us all this horrid war up to the present time, met with all kindness and hospitality at my hands.

Was it for this that you turned me, my young daughter, and little son out upon the world without a shelter? Or was it because my husband is the grandson of the Revolutionary patriot and "rebel," Richard Henry Lee, and the near kinsman of the noblest of Christian warriors, the greatest of generals, Robert E. Lee?

Heaven's blessing be upon his head forever. You and your Government have failed to conquer, subdue, or match him; and disappointment, rage, and malice find vent on the helpless and inoffensive.

Hyena-like, you have torn my heart to pieces! for all hallowed memories clustered around that homestead, and demon-like, you have done it without even the pretext of revenge, for I never saw or harmed you.

Your office is not to lead, like a brave man and soldier, your men to fight in the ranks of war, but your work has been to separate yourself from all danger, and with your incendiary band steal unaware upon helpless women and   children, to insult and destroy.

Two fair homes did you yesterday ruthlessly lay in ashes, giving not a moment's warning to the startled inmates of your wicked purpose; turning mothers and children out of doors, you are execrated by your own men for the cruel work you give them to do.

In the case of Colonel A. R. Boteler, both father and mother were far away. Any heart but that of Captain Martindale (and yours) would have been touched by that little circle, comprising a widowed daughter just risen from her bed of illness, her three fatherless babies—the oldest not five years old—and her heroic sister.

I repeat, any man would have been touched at that sight but Captain Martindale. One might as well hope to find mercy and feeling in the heart of a wolf bent on his prey of young lambs, as to search for such qualities in his bosom.

You have chosen well your agent for such deeds, and doubtless will promote him.

A colonel of the Federal army has stated that you deprived forty of your officers of their commands because they refused to carry on your malignant mischief. All honor to their names for this, at least! They are men; they have human hearts and blush for such a commander!

I ask who that does not wish infamy and disgrace attached to him forever would serve under you? Your name will stand on history's page as the Hunter of weak women, and innocent children, the Hunter to destroy defenseless villages and refined and beautiful homes—to torture afresh the agonized hearts of widows; the Hunter of Africa's poor sons and daughters, to lure them on to ruin and death of soul and body; the Hunter with the relentless heart of a wild beast, the face of a fiend and the form of a man.

Oh, Earth, behold the monster! Can I say, "God forgive you?" No prayer can be offered for you. Were it possible for human lips to raise your name heavenward, angels would thrust the foul thing back again, and demons claim their own. The curses of thousands, the scorns of the manly and upright, and the hatred of the true and honorable, will follow you and yours through all time, and brand your name infamy! infamy!

Again, I demand why you have burned my home? Answer as you must answer before the Searcher of all hearts, why have you added this cruel, wicked deed to your many crimes?

GA. TREND MAGAZINE - SEPT. 2014

From: waynedobson51@yahoo.com

There was a  section in the September 2014 issue of Georgia Trend Magazine that detailed 25 historical artifacts tracing the history of Georgia.  If I recall correctly, these items are the property of the Atlanta Historical Society. It was interesting that no reference was made to Confederate soldiers nor the great Confederate legacy of Georgia. In fact, in the portion about the War Between the States the only soldier noted was from Co. H of the 2nd U.S. Colored troops. This is blatant and contrived omission which dishonors the ancestry of many of the citizens of Georgia.  I suppose the aim of political  correctness is to please a perceived majority. Well, it did not please me nor did  it tell the truth.

John Wayne Dobson                                
Macon, GA

FIELD OF LOST SHOES

From: waynedobson51@yahoo.com    

I was at the 150th anniversary of the battle of Atlanta when a vendor selling DVD's handed me a card advertising the new film, "Field of Lost Shoes." It looked good and I had always been interested in the Battle of New Market so when I got home I looked up the official trailer on You Tube.  It did not take the narration long to declare the War was "over slavery" and soon enough one V.M.I. character declared, "we should not be fighting to keep people in chains…"
   
Must we get beat over the head by the same tired ol' slavery issue with every depiction of the War and especially those that showcase our Southern history?   Another You Tube site I checked had a representative of V.M.I. carefully making the point that the cadets at New Market never carried the Confederate battle flag. That is likely accurate but what is he ashamed of - did the cadets not assault Federal lines and fight for the South?   I guess I am disappointed in the film even before I have had a chance to see it.
   
At every turn our beloved Southern heritage is slandered, perverted and told from a Northern viewpoint, but I categorically and forever refuse to act ashamed, nor cower in the shadows with a despicable apology on my lips for ancestors who "need no pardon for anything they've done."