Confederate History Month 2012: William Lowndes Yancey on The Temple of Our Liberty

Tennessee

This excerpt from William Lowndes Yancey’s Memphis speech seems a fitting way to celebrate Confederate History Month 2012 on Easter Sunday:

“If the temple of our liberty, in process of time, should be taken possession of by those who have no right there; if the temple of liberty be perverted from the place where true constitutional liberty is to be had, and the true worship is to be carried on; if we find there the thieves and hucksters, there is a lesson given us in the name of Jesus Christ.”

I think everyone here will agree that thieves and hucksters have taken possession of the “temple of liberty” in Washington. That’s the understatement of the century. Nothing but thieves and hucksters have congregated in Washington in our lifetimes.

“When the temple of the Jews, that had been devoted to the worship of the ever-living God, and had been kept pure and undefiled, built without the sound of the hammer or the noise of the chisel, was taken possession of by a people forgetful of the great truths announced to them from Mount Sinai; when the hucksters, and brokers, and thieves, carried on before the altar their selfish and wicked pursuits, there was a Savior who came, and who, with a whip of scorpions, scourged them and drove them out.”

Everyone knows how that story ended too: the Jews chose Barabbas, and Jesus was crucified before the mob, and nineteen centuries passed before the invention of “Judeo-Christianity.”

“I hope to God there will be some man or set of men, whom Providence will rear in our midst, that when the temple fails into hands unworthy of its charge — that there will be some great WASHINGTON arise, who will be able to scourge them from the temple of freedom, even though he be called a traitor, a CATALINE, a rebel, in that glorious process.”

History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

These Rainbow Confederate groups that style themselves as defenders of Southern heritage are unworthy of the charge. We are a people who have become forgetful of the great truths of our own culture. It is time to set the record straight and chase out the charlatans.

Update: Here is William Lowndes Yancey offering resolutions at the Alabama Secession Convention:

“It has been said that this resolution will create discord amongst us–and is not conciliatory. It can only justly be so considered by those opposed to all resistance to the Black Republican power. I, for one, have no desire to conciliate persons occupying such position. I wish here, and elsewhere, to antagonise them.”

Yancey was determined to expose the submissionists. He was determined to antagonize them.

“They simply discriminate between those who are willing to continue the Union upon the principles of the Black Republican party, and those who are willing to resist them, and to dissolve the Union rather than see the Government administered upon those principles. With all who can vote for these resolutions, I can confer, and hope to come to a common conclusion. With those who shall vote against them, I have neither feeling or principle in common.”

Yancey had “neither feeling or principle in common” with those “who are willing to continue the Union upon the principles of the Black Republican party.” He could easily be talking about Connie Chastain or the Southern Heritage Non-Preservation Group.