Cavalier Liberation

John Brown as he is seen in the South

Dixie

Here’s an amusing excerpt from Colin Woodward’s American Nations that takes us back to ideological war between the Union and the Confederacy over the future of the United States. The North and South were rival civilizations that were fighting over principles:

“The planters celebrated slavery because it ensured the stability and perpetuation of a republican aristocracy. “The planters are a genuine aristocracy, who cultivate themselves in a leisure founded on slavery,” London Times correspondent William Russell reported from South Carolina on the eve of war. “The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes and for a landed aristocracy is undisguised and apparently genuine.” One planter told Russell: “If we could only get one of the Royal race of England to rule over us, we should be content.” Many others expressed regret for the revolution, noting they “would go back tomorrow if they could.”

The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders, “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics implanted in the north … [and her] newly born colonies all the ferocity, bloodthirstiness, and rabid intolerance of the Inquisition,” Russell reported. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption … the source of everything which South Carolina hates.” Another planter told him that if the Mayflower had sunk, “we should have never been driven to these extremes.” …

As the conflict with the Yankees loomed, there was renewed interest in the old Tidewater theory that racial differences were to blame. In wartime propaganda, the Deep Southern elite was explicitly included in the allegedly superior Norman/Cavalier race in an effort to increase the bonds between the regions, with the (decidedly un-Norman) Appalachian districts often embraced for good measure. For Tidewater in particular, casting the conflict as a war for Norman liberation from Anglo-Saxon tyranny neatly sidestepped the more problematic slavery issue. The Southern Literary Messenger, Tidewater’s leading journal, conceded in 1861 that “the Roundheads” may gain many victories in view of their superior strength and their better condition” but assured “they will lose the last battle and then sink down to their normal position of relative inferiority.” The journal argued the Confederate aim was to create “a sort of Patrician Republic” ruled by people “superior to all other races on this continent.”

This propaganda was embraced in the Deep South as well. In an 1862 speech, Jefferson Davis told Mississippi legislators that their enemies were “a traditionless and homeless race … gathered by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the north of Ireland and of England” to be “disturbers of peace in the world.” The war, DeBow’s Review declared, was a struggle to reverse the ill-conceived American Revolution, which had been contrary to “the natural reverence of the Cavalier for the authority of established forms over mere speculative ideas.” By throwing off monarchy, slaveholders endangered the wondrous “domestic institution” that rested “on the principle of inequality and subordination, and favored a public policy embodying the ideas of social status.” Democracy “threw political influence into the hands of inorganic masses” and caused “the subjection of the Cavalier to the intellectual thralldom of the Puritan.” Other Tidewater and Deep Southern thinkers came to agree that the struggle was really between respect for established aristocratic order and the dangerous Puritan notion that “the individual man was … of higher worth than any system of polity.” As Fitzhugh put it, it was a war “between conservatives and revolutionists; between Christians and infidels … the chase and the libidinous, between marriage and free-love.” Some even championed the dubious notion that the Confederacy was fighting a Huguenot-Anglican counterreformation against Puritan excess. Slavery was not the issue, they argued – defeating democracy was.”

The disturbers of peace in the world.

Does that sound like a particular group of people who are known the world over for their chronic inability to mind their own business? Does it sound like a group of people who would join a Freedom Ride and travel all the way to Alabama to make sure a bus terminal has been integrated in a city they have never before visited?


About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
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10 Comments

  1. The best solution I have seen is Buddy Tuckers Message, Richard Kelly Hoskins is next, Tom Metzger, Rockwell then Louis Beam, David Lane and all the rest. White Resistance Manuel is good. Buddy Tucker is right, NEWS is best I have ever seen. I stand by him. Old White Jim and Hunter are right—Back To Africa and Mudland!

  2. What genetic flaw makes it impossible for damnyankees to understand that negros were not a problem before yankee interference; and they would not be a problem now expect for yankee interferences

    Why ship negros anywhere? Mexico won’t keep its people on its side of the border so why not repay the favor with negros? However, I figure blacks in africa would benefit from our negros. They are useless to us, but they are technologically advanced compared to your typical skinny . And I’m not sure we would need to deport them. Take away all the taxpayer subsidies and they’d starve soon enough

  3. stonelifter says:
    November 26, 2011 at 3:16 pm
    What genetic flaw makes it impossible for damnyankees to understand that negros were not a problem before yankee interference; and they would not be a problem now expect for yankee interferences

    JR Replies:

    Yours is comforting propaganda – that the Negroes in the South were kind, decent folks – the “colored folk”, content with their position in life until YANKEE outside agitators stirred em all up, made them uppity and corrupted them with booze, radical notions of impossible social equality etc. The reality is that Blacks, Negroes have always been a huge threat to riot, rape, kill, revert to savagery at any place iin the world, any time in history. All types of religious, social systems were created, designed to keep the Negroe apart, in his place – often for the Blacks own good – slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, Apartheid – or see how Arab Muslims did it (castration, slavery). These systems always break down.

    Fair minded folks should acknowledge the huge impact the Black slave uprisings in Santo Domingo (modern day Haiti) had on White Southern opinion – White French refugee that were lucky enough to escape Black rule in Haiti spread the word to Whites in the South what emancipation would mostly likely be like. American Renaissance has a good article on Haiti – which should be required reading for any even remotely racially conscious Whites.

    http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2010/01/the_revolution_1.php

  4. What genetic flaw makes it impossible for damnyankees to understand that negros were not a problem before yankee interference; and they would not be a problem now expect for yankee interferences

    It is natural to avoid taking responsibility for creating the problem. That is why Yankee WNs spend so much time blaming the Jews. The Jewish role is exaggerated out of all proportion to reality.

    Most of the Jews were not even in America when negroes were made into American citizens. They were living in Poland and Germany when Yankees were marching through Charleston and Richmond at the head of negro armies.

    160,000 of these “African-Americans” fought for the Union. In the aftermath of the War Between the States, Southerners lived under the rule of carpetbaggers, negroes, and scalawags.

    We had the same system back then that we do today. Everything was integrated. Blacks were citizens. Blacks were voters. The anti-miscegenation laws had been repealed. We were living in a society that was run for the benefit of blacks.

    Blacks were citizens with voting rights in New England before the War Between the States. They were attending integrated schools in New England in the 1870s. Some of the places where Jews settled like New York and New Jersey never had an anti-miscegenation law.

    There are parts of America in the Deep North where you can literally say “it has always been this way.” Blacks were always citizens there. They always had voting rights there. They were always able to marry White women. They were always treated like White people. There was never anything resembling segregation.

    You can see it happening again with “gay marriage.” Where is there “gay marriage” in the United States? In the Northeast. Where does Barack Hussein Obama actually have the support of the White majority? In the Northeast.

  5. “Where is there “gay marriage” in the United States? In the Northeast.”

    You’ve obviously never been to San Francisco!

  6. I have some problems with the deep South planter-Aristocrat school because they place too much emphasis on their own aristocracy and neglect the middle class. Nowadays when we have a very democratic government amidst an ultra-egalitarian, anti-elitist zeitgeist it’s easy to fall in love with the antithesis of aristocracy, royalism, heraldry etc. but I believe it’s very naive not to consider the problems that highly aristocratic forms of government can fall prey to.

    Consider the Byzantine empire which survived for a long time with a loyal core of small landowning farmer soldier-citizens who gave the empire an army, a tax base, and a strong agricultural sector. Many historians believe that one of the most important causes of the Byzantine fall was the strangulation of this middle class by the large landowning aristocratic elite who wanted to (and succeeded in doing it) turn the middle class soldier-farmer-citizens into non-landowning tenant farmers. Once Byzantium lost its middle class of soldier-farmer-citizens they ended up with a reduced tax base, lower agricultural output, and lack of citizen-soldiers– forcing them to rely more on foreign mercenaries of questionable loyalty to the Empire.

    And the Byzantine Empire is just one of many examples of a corrupt aristocracy.

    I don’t see the deep South planter elites as the incarnation of satan, but it would be a grave mistake to trust them with too much power, and this is what a lot of deep South political thinkers do.

    Instead, I favor the Jeffersonian Virginia school that places more emphasis on a strong middle class of yeoman farmers. Hopefully I won’t offend you with this, but I see the old Virginian aristocracy as much more worthy of the name aristocracy than their deep South cousins, as the Virginians were much more forward looking– recognizing the potential for corruption in their own aristocratic class and seeing the need for a strong middle class as a check against their own class’ potential corruption. That’s not to say that we can’t learn a lot from the South Carolina/Georgia aristocrats, but recognize that they thought far too highly of themselves and often weren’t aware of their own limitations and potential for corruption.

  7. Hunter: There was Jews in America before 1880. New York City has a long history of JEWS from Netherlands, Amsterdam, Denmark and England. In fact the Bush Family is traced to Solomon Bush of Revoltionary War who was Jewish. Charleston, S.C. had more Jews than New York City! Check Jewish History and Genealogy. They were here and they did have a hand in affairs. Remember the Maronos, Secret Jews? Some played like the locals not to draw attention……The Serpent Race comes from Cain. James Mccanney a NASA Scientist has alot of info on Black Nobility. They have been around for 5,000 years—-and now their power is absolute. In Henry Fords International Jew he talks about Jews who came with Columbus. Now the Controllers are trying to say that Columbus was a JEW! Fritz Springmeir is his works talks about Jews in New York who had organizations for JEWS!

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