David Aiken, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div., B.A.

I'm talking today about two American histories, and two American literatures – which teach different American ideals and values, resulting in different societies and different visions of what it means to be an American. Today we have a Northern history and a Southern history; we have a Northern literature and a Southern literature. As we meet, there is no consensus, nor has there been for almost two centuries. The Northern perspective is dominant, even though it is an aberration and even though it has become increasingly intolerant. If you don't like the Northern/Southern dichotomy, then use a Lincolnian vision of America versus a Jeffersonian vision of America.

Now there are numerous ways to illustrate this conflict, but I want to focus on some lost documents and wisdom primarily from the pen of William Gilmore Simms. Needless to say, Simms is a spokesman for Southern history and for Southern literature, as we would expect from the Father of Southern Literature. Simms and the South were Jeffersonian. Simms consistently defended a Jeffersonian vision of America. Nowhere do we see Simms's views of America and the South more clearly than in his literature on Mr. Lincoln's War.

During the Invasion of the South, Simms wrote extensively about the two major military campaigns in South Carolina: the Burning of Columbia and the Bombardment of Charleston.

With four of his children and a grandchild, Simms took refuge in the capital city as Sherman marched through the heart of the state, burning and looting his way to Columbia. He was in Columbia when Sherman arrived on February 17, 1865, and he was still in Columbia when Sherman left four days later. One of Simms's responses to Sherman's destruction of Columbia was to write a 90-page historical narrative which he published in a tri-weekly he helped create out of the ashes of the destroyed city. In the Columbia Phoenix he recorded what he and others had witnessed and experienced. This compelling account is now being read and studied in A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia. Some people – including Simms's first biographer – claim that it is Simms's best writing. Certainly it is a masterpiece on multiple levels, as I have argued elsewhere.

Prior to Sherman's destruction of Columbia, Simms had spent a considerable amount of time in Charleston during the 587-day Yankee siege of the port city, a siege he criticized with passion in poetry. Simms's response to the longest siege of the war included a series of poems, unpublished. In the following moments, I want to highlight a few of these war poems. Among other things, they portray Simms's vision of Core Southern Values which are consistent with a Jeffersonian vision of America.

As a war poet, Simms was exceptional, surpassing Herman Melville in Battle-Pieces and Walt Whitman in Drum-Taps, both of whom defended – even glorified – Lincoln's Invasion of the South.

Herman Melville wrote a short poem called "The Swamp Angel" to praise the 24,000 lb. cannon placed in the marshes almost five miles outside Charleston. To Melville's speaker, Charleston is a proud city, a wicked city, guilty of secession and slavery. Melville ignores the fundamental involvement and complicity of Northern States in slavery. Facing this massive weapon of war, Melville’s Archangel Michael flees not only St. Michael's Church but also the whole city as Charleston women and children receive their just punishment from “a coal-black Angel with a thick Afric lip.” Melville's North was establishing a consolidated, centralized, commercial Union, and not even God's Archangel Michael could stop the power of the Northern superior white race. Melville, I remind you, was a middle-aged non-combatant who received his war news primarily from New York and Boston papers.

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Back To Eden

By Franklin Sanders

Southern Economic Renewal

What Can You Do?

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But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

But is shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:

Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

- Matthew 20:25-28

About 1954 Murray of Ohio moved to Lawrence County, Tennessee and opened a factory. The first generation of country people who went to work there held onto their farms and worked 18 hour days. After a shift at the factory, they’d go home and raise all the crops and animals they ever had. Owning their own land, they were able to build up an estate for their children.

DOWN INTO EGYPT

The second generation worked at the factory and let the land go. If they stayed, they limited their farming to raising cattle or trees. Most of the land wound up in the hands of paper companies.

The third generation depended completely on their factory jobs. In the meantime Murray, as the largest employer in the county, set wage rates, and they set them low, so wage rates have remained low over the past 50 years. After all, they didn’t move down here because they were philanthropists; they moved down here because labour was cheap.

Meanwhile the rest of the middle class has nearly disappeared, aided no doubt by dropping wages and the invasion of Wal-Mart and other chains. The multitude of restaurants, bakeries, small shops, groceries, hardware stores, shoe shops, dry goods stores, dairies, craftsmen and most other small businesses have vanished. What middle class remains is a small crust of lawyers, doctors, dentists, and, of course, the inevitable bankers. In a country once covered with independent freeholders — self-sufficient farmers and small business owners — most people have become property-less employees. The predictable sequel unfolded in 2004 as Murray teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. In one morning they laid off over 100 supervisory personnel. Then they shut down two of three production lines. What employees are left expect the rest of their production to be shipped to Mexico or China — where the labour is still cheaper.

On November 8, 2004, Murray declared bankruptcy.

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Wade Hampton's

Jeffersonian Principles

By Dr. David Aiken

I want to begin with an assertion -- South Carolina in the nineteenth century was Jeffersonian. In fact, the whole South and most of the rest of the country were Jeffersonian. Nineteenth-century Americans understood and accepted Thomas Jefferson. They elevated him to Founding Father status. His notions of governance, the American experiment in consensual government, were unique and well suited to the North American continent and so were broadly accepted. Based on Classical and Biblical and Celtic ideals, Jeffersonian Republicanism was the special gift of Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers. Jeffersonian Republicanism became the essential element of what it meant to be an American. New interests and new people moving to the continent would expand and add color to the American identity, but the core, the essence of American identity would be forever associated with the life, example and writings of Thomas Jefferson.

When I say that Carolina's pre-eminent citizen Wade Hampton was a Jeffersonian, I am surely stating the obvious. But sometimes stating the obvious is necessary - especially at the 2010 Wade Hampton Memorial Service at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral for one of the most honoured people of this state.

The basic facts of Wade Hampton's life are well known. Born in Charleston in 1818, he died in Columbia in 1902. His life falls neatly into three periods: first, as a youth on large cotton plantations in South Carolina and in Mississippi; second, as a Confederate general serving under Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia; third, as a civilian serving his beloved South Carolina as its governor before representing her in Washington as her senator.

"During his nearly two decades in Washington, Hampton had been [a] Southerner with a national outlook, proud of America and wanting his own state to share in the country's prosperity and greatness. He knew that Confederates had fought for principles ... handed down from the founders of the Republic. He asked of former foes only that they give him and the people of South Carolina the measure of respect he accorded to them, by acknowledging that each side had struggled for his own vision of America."

Hampton told Confederate veterans in Savannah:

“If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake, and the revolution to which it led was a crime, ... If Washington was a patriot, Lee cannot have been a rebel; if the enunciation of the grand truths in the Declaration of Independence made Jefferson immortal, the observance of them could not have made Davis a traitor."

Clearly Hampton sees a connection between the British invasion of the eighteenth century and the Yankee invasion of the nineteenth century. Both times, Southerners fought for liberty and for homes.

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The Immorality of Education

In the 21st Century

by Dr. Michael Hill

 

"All that education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good." - John Gould Fletcher

At one time in the not too distant past, the objective of higher education was the nurture of something M.E. Bradford called '"humane learning." At the core of humane learning lives the idea that one will ultimately learn not only about the world in general, but about one's own place in it. In other words, the properly educated student will develop a balanced character as a result of being taught the particulars about his own place and kin and not simply rootless abstractions such as the universal rights of man, global democracy, and equality.  Humane education, then, should bring out something that already exists in man: a reverence for his own kind. As John Gould Fletcher wrote in his essay, "Education, Past and Present" from the Southern Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, “All that education can do in any case is to teach us to make good use of what we are; if we are nothing to begin with, no amount of education can do us any good."

TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN EDUCATION THEN...

Before the Northeast forcibly imposed its own nationalistic educational system on the entire country after The War to Prevent Southern Independence, the South's schools and colleges were on the whole more humane and tolerant, in the true sense of the word, than their Northern counterparts. Northern institutions, characterized by a meddlesome Unitarian-Universalist strain, produced iconoclasts who reveled in destroying traditional social norms in the name of "progress." Based on the classical model Southern schools, by contrast, produced men of good character who ensured the continuation of a stable, conservative society.

... AND NOW

Traditionally, the South never bought into the nonsense that all persons are equally educable. Those in academia would do well to remember that Thomas Jefferson championed educating only "those persons whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue." Yet today our schools and colleges have substituted quantity for quality and consequently turn out hordes of graduates woefully deficient in the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and ciphering. In the spirit of Alexander Pope, who believed "A little learning is a dangerous thing," Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney predicted our current educational dilemma: "the common schools will have created a numerous 'public' of readers one-quarter or one-tenth cultivated: and the sure result will be the production for their use of a false, shallow, socialist literature, science, and theology infinitely worse than blank ignorance."
But perhaps we should not be too surprised at this turn of events. In a society polarized between an internationally-oriented American ruling class and a regionally-oriented populism, it serves the interest of the former to see that the latter is miseducated. If this can be done to larger and larger numbers of the populists' children, then so much the better for the elite.

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The Republican Charade:

Lincoln and His Party

by Dr. Clyde N. Wilson

 

I want to take a look at this strange institution we know as the Republican Party and the course of its peculiar history in the American regime. The peculiar history both precedes and continues after Lincoln, although Lincoln is central to the story.It is fairly easy to construct an ideological account of the Democratic Party, what it has stood for and who it has represented, even though there has been at least one revolutionary change during its long history.  I generalize broadly, because all major political parties since at least the early 19th century have most of the time sought to dilute their message to broaden their appeal and avoid ideological sharpness.  But we can say of the Democratic party that through most of its history it was Jeffersonian – it stood for, at least in lip service, a limited federal government and laissez-faire economy, and it represented farmers and small businessmen, the South, the pioneer West, and to some extent the Northern working class.  This identity for the most part even survived the War to Prevent Southern Independence.  Clearly, the party in the 20th century came to represent a very different platform – social democracy as defined by the New Deal and the Great Society – and a considerably different constituency.  In either case, onlookers have had a pretty good general impression of what the party stood for.

It is nearly impossible to construct a similar description of the Republican Party.  The party that elected Lincoln was pretty clear about some things, like the tariff, although it may have been less than honest about the reasons.  It was obfuscatory about other things. Since Lincoln took power, it has been difficult to find a clear pattern in what the party has claimed to represent.  The picture becomes even cloudier when you compare words and behaviour.  This, I believe, is because its real agenda has not been such that it could be usefully acknowledged.

Apparently millions continue to harbor the strange delusion that the Republican Party is the party of free enterprise, and, at least since the New Deal, the party of conservatism.  In fact, the party is and always has been the party of state capitalism.  That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence.  By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government.  The Republican Party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favour labour unions or threaten Big Business. Consider that for a long time it was the party of high tariffs – when high tariffs benefited Northern big capital and oppressed the South and most of the population.  Now it is the party of so-called "free trade" – because that is the policy that benefits Northern big capital, whatever it might cost the rest of us.  In succession, Republicans presented opposite policies idealistically as good for America, while carefully avoiding discussion of exactly who it was good for.

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LEST WE FORGET

By James E. Layden

A foreign empire has occupied South Carolina since 1865. We endured a war waged on the civilian population by an enemy utilising all atrocities known to man. Military rule came next, along with twelve years of economic and political reconstruction (occupation), leaving South Carolina devastated. This trend continued to a lesser degree while South Carolina was held in abject poverty until World War II. By this time three generations had passed and government school brainwashing had taken a toll on our desire to be free.

Our second period of reconstruction began in the early 1950's and continues to the present time. We were ridiculed and hated during the civil rights era and we became the excuse for the Supreme Court to make laws by decree. The “Great Society” came next to implement welfare and warfare as a way of life. Political correctness (a required thinking process) was imposed on the general population by educational institutions, government programs, and the communications media. We are now subjected to ever increasing taxes, surveillance, and an unlimited number of rules and regulations for everything we do. The Yankee Empire can secretly kidnap, transport, imprison or dispose of anyone as authorised by the Patriot Act. The dictatorship will be complete when an excuse is devised to declare martial law.

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