American Greatness: The New Secession Crisis

Jeremy Carl has this historical analogy backwards.

It is Joe Biden and the Democrats who are the true heirs of Abraham Lincoln and what was known at the time as “Black Republicanism.” Then as now, the South was the conservative section of the Union which had placed its faith in the Constitution and it was the urban East that was full of power crazed Radical Republicans and abolitionists fired by the religious zealotry of the Second Great Awakening who were hell bent on overturning the existing social order to usher in the millennium.

Secession was a reactionary movement. It was triggered by the election of the “Black Republican” Abraham Lincoln and the collapse of faith among conservatives in the Constitution. The final straw was the fanatic John Brown’s raid on the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and his celebration as a martyr in the North. It led to a tsunami of revulsion that swept across the Deep South which swept away the Union. It was based on the realization that these people were willing to support genocide to get their way.

It was Southerners who fought for the things that conservatives care about: their understanding of the nature of the constitutional compact which they called Free Government, loyalty to their own people, their states, their families, homes and communities. Southerners fought for their own liberty. The Confederate understanding of the conflict was that slavery was the “incident” or “occasion” of the war. It was just the issue which at that time triggered a deeper clash over rival worldviews and values. The Union understanding of the “irrepressible conflict” was that it was all brought about by “traitors” who were part of a vast “Slave Power conspiracy.” They were fighting for “democracy” or what Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, for the people” in the Gettysburg Address or overthrowing the governments of the Southern states, imposing a military dictatorship and requiring 10% of the voting population of each state to swear allegiance to His Majesty Abraham Lincoln and abolish slavery.

American Greatness:

“It was appropriate that news of the Democrats’ plans to pack the Supreme Court broke in April, just a couple days after the 160th anniversary of the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the shots that began the Civil War.

Unlike President James Buchanan, who dithered in responding to obvious Confederate aggression, the newly inaugurated Abraham Lincoln acted decisively upon taking office. He informed South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens that he would be resupplying the fort, forcing South Carolina’s hand. Lincoln’s actions did not start the war—they made it clear that war was already underway. From that point on, Americans, even those who had previously wished to ignore what was staring them in the face, were awakened to the reality of their situation. 

The dispute between Lincoln and Pickens that led to the attack on Fort Sumter was not simply a political struggle over who should control the regime but a larger political struggle over which regime it would be. Ultimately, it was a question of whether we would be a nation for free citizens or one that held men and women in bondage. 

Today’s Republicans, like Lincoln, find themselves in a regime-level conflict with the Democrats. The Democrats are firing again and again on our Constitutional order, our history, and our traditions—our metaphorical Fort Sumter, if you will—but unlike our forebear Lincoln, our elected leadership seems either to be aiding the insurgent Left or, at best, feebly invoking constitutional provisions and principles, as if our opponents have shown that their behavior can be in any way constrained by these things. We need to channel the spirit of Lincoln rather than Buchanan to win this struggle. 

This does not mean we should forgo our work within the current system, but we must acknowledge that whether we wish it to or not, the regime as constituted may not long endure in its current form, and we must prepare ourselves accordingly. …”

It was Republicans who had a problem with the Supreme Court.

Sen. William Seward who later became Lincoln’s Secretary of State famously framed their position on the issue by appealing to a “higher law than the Constitution.” It was Republicans including Lincoln who challenged the Dred Scott decision which he rejected in his Inaugural Address. It was Lincoln who defied Chief Justice Roger Taney in Ex Parte Merryman and who would later pack the federal courts.

Virtually all of these grievances were cited by Southerners to justify seceding from the Union and creating the Confederacy:

• The hysterical attacks on White Americans by modern day Democrats are what antebellum Americans would have associated with abolitionists and recognized as the disease of “Black Republicanism.” The Southern fear of “Black Republicanism” wasn’t merely associated with abolitionism. It was also associated with all of the “-isms of the North” like “strong minded womanism” or Bloomerism or what we call feminism, atheism, free love, anarchism and socialism. It was a subject that Southerners returned to again, again, again, again and again. The Southern image of the East was an alien land boiling over with “-isms” and social revolutions.

The great Southern fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey once put it this way:

“That same spirit which would turn everything into gold … has invaded the sphere of woman. Yancey contended that northern men had desexed women, had “brushed the down from her cheek, and raised the stiff beard in lieu. Materialism in the north condemned women as worthless in their vocation as mothers and thrust them into the workplace. Horribly, northern society had led women to believe “that the rights of man are also woman’s rights, and that the editorial chair – the medical – the legal and clerical professions should be filled by her, as well as by men.” Northern women had mounted the speaker’s platform and joined in “public harangues,” and some wore “Bloomers,” ready “for bestriding a fence or a saddle as utility shall demand.”

This one cracked me up because it rang so true:

“For a range of nonfictional southern spokesmen as well, civilization itself rested on appropriate gender roles and relations. While the slave South was maintaining the proper order of things, the North and sometimes the rest of the Western world, was not. In his 1856 graduation address to the Virginia Military Institute, George Rumbough explained that free society was foolish to question the natural, divinely ordained order of things. Listing the dangerous “isms” he saw to the north, Rumbough included women’s rights, Bloomerism, and Free-Loveism, along with socialism, atheism, and abolitionism. The North’s distorted ideas about slavery were not only tied up with its misguided ideas about religion, liberty, and government, but also with its foolish misconceptions of manhood and womanhood. Rumbough contrasted the South, “where woman, the most powerful, the purest, noblest element of society, is considered as an object of love,” with the North, “where woman “is viewed as an object of distrust, and far from beautifying, transcends the boundaries of modesty and decency, and sighs for an MD suffix or the transcendent reputation of a philanthropic lecturer.” One of many advantages of basing a society on slavery rather than free labor, according to Rumbough and others, was that the institution safeguarded hierarchies of gender as well as of race.

Southern fears about gender proprieties illustrate how urgent the sectional conflict could become when it appeared to enter the realm of the home and family. One Virginia farmer, writing to a local newspaper in 1854, expressed just such fears. Responding to rumors that a female preacher had been plying her trade in the area, the farmer expressed disbelief then sharp anxiety. “Some hundreds are right uneasy about their wives,” he wrote. “They are afraid that some of them women’s rights folks, from the N., are traveling among us, and that some wives are encouraging them.” Even an antislavery fanatic would be more acceptable than a feminist, though the letter-writer. “One would spoil our negroes, but the other would spoil our wives and sweethearts, and either, would be made a bad piece of property.”Perhaps intending that his readers should take the loaded word “insurrection” with a grain of salt (the word was strongly associated with slave revolts in the antebellum South) the farmer concluded: “It is feared that there will be an insurrection among the women, and that they will begin to chew tobacco and drink whiskey.” Likewise, the North Carolina congressman David Outlaw recoiled at the apparent immorality of the society he encountered in Washington, D.C. In Outlaw’s eyes, it was the behavior of northern women there that caused moral deterioration. “There is a boldness,” he wrote to his wife, “a brazenfacedness about Northern city women, as well as a looseness of morals which I hoped may never be introduced south.” In this way white southerners who worried about such matters sectionalized anxieties about moral decline, projecting those anxieties onto their image of the North.”

Nothing has changed.

The Southern critique of the East hasn’t changed in over 150 years:

“In the first place, the character of the enemy we have to contend with prevents anything like regular warfare. They are divided into hundreds of little guerrilla bands of isms, each having its peculiar partizan tactics, and we are compelled to vary our mode of attack from regular cannonade to bush-fighting, to suit the occasion.”

“Why have you Bloomer’s and Women’s Right’s men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and “vote myself a farm” men, Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel isms at the North ? Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about everything? Why is this unsettled, half demented state of the human man mind co-extensive in time and space, with free society? Why is Western Europe now starving? and why has it been fighting and starving for seventy years? Why all this, except that free society is a failure ? Slave society needs no defence till some other permanent practicable form of society has been discovered. None such has been discovered. Nobody at the North who reads my book will attempt to reply to it; for all the learned abolitionists had unconsciously discovered and proclaimed the failure of free society long before I did.” …

“They are the practical “reductio ad absurdum” of the theories of Locke and Smith. Yet they are but corollaries from those theories. The social contract involves the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, and “let alone” begets and justifies free-love and no government.”

John C. Calhoun was able to see the future … in 1849:

“Very different would be the circumstances under which emancipation would take place with us. If it should ever be effected, it will be through the agency of the Federal Government, controlled by the dominant power of the Northern States of the Confederacy, against the resistance and struggle of the Southern.

It can then only be effected by the prostration of the white race; and that would necessarily engender the bitterest feelings of hostility between them and the North. But the reverse would be the case between the blacks of the South and the people of the North. Owing their emancipation to them, they would regard them as friends, guardians, and patrons, and centre, accordingly, all their sympathy in them. The people of the North would not fail to reciprocate and to favor them, instead of the whites.

Under the influence of such feelings, and impelled by fanaticism and love of power, they would not stop at emancipation. Another step would be taken – to raise them to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public offices under the Federal Government. We see the first step toward it in the bill already alluded to – to vest the free blacks and slaves with the right to vote on the question of emancipation in this District.

But when once raised to an equality, they would become the fast political associates of the North, and acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this political union between them, holding the white race at the south in complete subjection. The blacks, and the profligate whites that might unite with them, would become the principal recipients of federal offices and patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the political and social scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them – a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people, and one from which we could not escape, should emancipation take place, (which it certainly will if not prevented), but by fleeing the homes of ourselves and our ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our former slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery and wretchedness.

With such a prospect before us, the gravest and most solemn question that ever claimed the attention of a people is presented for your consideration: what is to be done to prevent it? It is a question belonging to you to decide.”

If the South’s most outspoken fire eater Robert Barnwell Rhett were alive today, he would no doubt feel vindicated and right at home:

“The people of the reunited States – South and North – are the heaviest taxed civilized People in the world; and their Government, one of the most despotic and corrupt, staining its annals. Does not hypocrisy and contempt, usually go together? And will the echoes of Revolution throughout the land ever die away, until the South is independent; or the South is free?” (from his memoir)

“A political union can only exist, between independent political entities. Such was the Union constituted by the Constitution of the United States, “between the States.” But this Union – a Union of independent political entities – a Union of free-will and choice -, is gone; and the connexion now existing themselves what were formerly States, is no union at all; but is the operation of the different parts of a central consolidated power, held together by fear and force.” (from his memoir)

“No one can understand the nature of a Consolidated Government, without perceiving, that it is only the first step to Imperialism.” (from his memoir)

“Since the foundation of free governments, no constitution has been ever preserved by the mere faith of those who had power over it; and it has been preserved only by the resistance of those who are mainly interested in its limitations. Men – not inanimate parchments – living men, not dead abstractions – have enforced free governments.” (1860)

“The Government is not a Government whose powers “will be exercised mostly in time of war.” Defense against foreign nations is not its characteristic – but internal aggression. It is a sectional despotism. Mr. Madison being the witness, the Constitution of the United States, is an utter failure.” (1860)

“If our rights are victorious in the next Presidential election, we may consider it as a kind augury of a more auspicious future. If they are overthrown, let this election be the last contest between the North and South; and the long, weary night of our dishonor and humiliation be dispersed at last, by the glorious day-spring of a Southern confederacy.” (1859)

“To submit to the encroachments of this vulgar crew of plunderers and fanatics, is a degradation no other free people than the people of the South ever endured; but to submit to their rule will be the desperation of a weak and conquered race – conquered without a fight.” (1859)

“It has been in vain, that those in the North who respect the constitution and the rights of the South, have proclaimed, from time to time, that the South would resist, and the Union be dissolved. We have justified the contempt of our enemies; not the good opinion of our friends. The South has not resisted. The Union is not dissolved; and our aggressors, triumphing in our submission, hold place and power for our harassment, and their exaltation and aggrandizement.” (1859)

“Is not a whole life of endurance of unconstitutional oppression, enough for any wisdom in delay – too much, for safety or honor? How long shall we stand, the resistless and despised victims of Northern fanaticism and rapacity? How long shall we cry “wait!” whilst the North advances in power and insolence; and each successive year brings her nearer to the consummation of her policy of domination over us, and over this continent?” (1859)

“I have counselled but one policy to the South; yield not one inch, but meet the question here and elsewhere with firm, uncompromising, and unflinching resistance.” (1847)

“The spirit which yields one position will yield another, until at length, self-respect and self-confidence is gone, and a conscious degradation prepares the people to be the victims of corrupt and traitorous demagogues.”(1847)

“War is always an enormous crime, often on both sides – always on one.” (1846)

“The Blufton Boys have been silenced, not subdued… The fire is not extinguished; it smolders beneath, and will burst forth in another glorious flame that shall overrun the State and place her light again as of old, upon the watch tower of freedom.” (1845)

“I know that there is no danger in our people being too hot. The danger is the other way. I will keep up the fire, if like a lost hunter in a prairie, I have to kindle it alone, with my gun flint, and watch by the blaze, rifle in hand to keep off the wolves.” (1845)

“My constituents have sent for me; and I go in a few days to meet them, and tell them a story of wrongs which their Fathers would have died rather than bear.” (1844)

“The only hope of the South is in resistance.” (1844)

“If you value your rights you must resist.” (1844)

“I fear, that there is no longer any hope or liberty for the South, under a Union, by which all self-government is taken away.”

“If we are true to ourselves, a glorious destiny awaits us, and the South will be a great, free and independent people!”

“The South must dissever itself from the rotten Northern element.”

“From the beginning of time, liberty has been acquired but at the price of blood, and that blood shed in revolution.”

“You are the vassals and slaves of a consolidated empire.”

“We have to deal with erring man.”

“Universal suffrage will give those who have no property, the absolute control of the property and legislation of the country… in all its horrors… the despotism of numbers may be the most terrible that can scourge a fallen people.”

“I am a nullifier and will never consent that more power should be given to this government than strictly belongs to it.”

“Do you tell me of “Union,” when I have seen the cannon of ships and fortresses pointed at your towns, and the insolent soldiery of an angry tyrant lording it in your streets? …I can not love, I will not praise that which, under the abused names of Union and liberty, attempts to inflict upon us every things that can curse and enslave the land.”

“The star-spangled banner no longer waves in triumph and glory for me. …If a Confederacy of the Southern States could now be obtained, should we not deem it a happy termination – happy beyond expectation, of our long struggle for our rights against oppression?”

“The Union must be dissolved under its present course of administration. It requires no conspiracy to destroy – no exertion on our part to drag it to its dissolution. It goes down with the inevitable weight of its own gravitation, into that dark abyss of anarchy and ruin, where all tyrannies have fallen.”

“If to think, to speak, to feel such sentiments as these, constitute me a disunionist and a traitor, according to the English language as now understood in Carolina, then gentlemen, I am a Disunionist! – I am a Traitor!”

“Give me disunion rather than a consolidated government. Aye – disunion, rather into a thousand fragments… Because under such a government I would be a slave – a fearful slave, ruled despotically by those who do not represent me… with every base and destructive passion of man bearing upon my shieldless destiny – love of domination – avarice – long rankling jealousy – and, worst of all, the fell spirit of bigotry, which would exult over my dwelling in flames, and my children given to slaughter.”

“From the commencement of the Government of the United States, the money power of the North, controlled the North, and hovered over the Government like a vulture seeking its prey.”

“I am a secessionist – I am a disunionist. Others may submit: I will not. I will secede, if I can, from this Union. I will test, for myself and for my children, whether South Carolina is a State or an humbled and degraded province, existing only at the mercy of an unscrupulous and fanatical tyranny.”

“The long, weary night of our humiliation, oppression and danger is passing away and the glorious dawn of a Southern Confederacy breaks on our view.”

“Be prepared to meet all the usual troubles and sacrifices of revolutions. For thirty-two years, have I followed the quarry. Behold! it at last, in sight! A few more bounds, and it falls – the Union falls; and with it falls, its faithless oppressions – its insulting agitations – its vulgar tyrannies and fanaticism. The bugle blast of our victory and redemption is on the wind; and the South will be safe and free.”

We can run through the rest of these grievances.

These are all things which Abraham Lincoln did as president:

• Abraham Lincoln had the military occupy Washington, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky and created West Virginia.
• The Free States were sanctuary states that passed personal liberty laws to protect runaway slaves.
• In Lincoln’s time, the Left make a mockery of the rule of law by decapitating state governments like in Missouri, arresting state legislators, expelling and banishing congressmen like Clement Vallandigham.
• The Lincoln administration censored the press and arrested dissidents and violated their civil liberties.
• The Lincoln administration outright destroyed the Tenth Amendment and created our present day consolidated national government.
• Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens came up with the idea of race-based reparations and wealth confiscation.
• Lincoln shut down the Chicago Times and censored the press and seized control of telegraph lines.
• The Lincoln administration rigged elections. During Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans simply dissolved the Southern states and forced Southerners at gunpoint to approve constitutional changes.
• The Republicans had their own paramilitary group called the Wide Awakes.
• The Union Army burned multiple Southern cities and the University of Alabama.

The authors of The Lincoln Catechism might see some striking parallels between Joe Biden and Abraham Africanus the First:

Lesson The First

I. What is the Constitution?
A compact with hell – now obsolete.

II. By whom hath the Constitution been made obsolete?
By Abraham Africanus the First.

III. To what end?
That his days may be long in office – and that he may make himself and his people the equal of the negroes.

IV. What is a president?
A general agent for negroes.

VI. What is an army?
A provost guard, to arrest white men, and set negroes free.

X. What is meant by the word Liberty?
Incarceration in a vermin-infested Bastille.

XV. What is the meaning of the word “patriot?”
A man who loves his country less, and the negro more.

XIX. What is the meaning of the word “law?”
The will of the president.

XXII. Have the people any rights?
None but such as the president gives.

Lesson The Second

IX. What is the meaning of the declaration that, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?”
That a man’s house may be searched, and when he be stripped of his arms, whenever and wherever a provost marshal shall dare attempt it.

XVII. What is the meaning of the declaration that, “the United States shall guarantee to every state a Republican form of government?”
That Congress shall assist the President in destroying the Republican form of government in the states, and substituting a military government wherever he pleases – witness Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.

Lesson The Third

II. What are the Ten Commandments?
Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.
Thou shalt make an image of a negro, and place it on the Capitol as the type of the new American man.
Thou shalt swear that the negro shall be the equal of the white man.
Thou shalt fight thy battles on the Sabbath day, and thy generals, and thy captains, and thy privates, and thy servants, shall do all manner of murders, and thefts as on the other six days.
Thou shalt not honor or obey thy father nor thy mother if they are Copperheads; but thou shall serve, honor, and obey Abraham Lincoln.
Thou shalt commit murder – of slaveholders.
Thou mayest commit adultery – with the contrabands.
Thou shalt steal – everything that belongeth to a slaveholder.
Thou shalt bear false witness – against all slaveholders.
Thou shalt covet the slaveholders man-servant and his maid-servant, and shalt steal his ox and his ass, and everything that belongeth to him.
For on these commandments hang all the law and honor of loyal leaguers.

X. Have the loyal leaguers a prayer?
They have.

XI. Repeat it.
Father Abraham, who art in Washington, of glorious memory – since the date of thy proclamation to free negroes.
Thy kingdom come, and overthrow the republic; they will be done, and the laws perish.
Give us this day our daily supply of greenbacks.
Forgive us our plunders, but destroy the Copperheads.
Lead us into fat pastures; but deliver us from the eye of detectives; and make us the equal of the negro; for such shall be our kingdom, and the glory of thy administration.

Lesson The Sixth

II. What are States?
Colonies of the federal government.

VII. What is a Governor?
A general agent for the president.

VIII. What is a negro?
A white man with black skin.

IX. What is a white man?
A negro with white skin.

Lesson The Eighth

XXVI. What will become of all who believe in the Union as it was, and the Constitution as it is?
They shall be damned

XXVII. What shall be the reward of all such as believe the Union was a covenant with death, and the Constitution a compact with Hell?
They shall be received into a negro paradise.

Lesson The Ninth

I. Is the United States a consolidated government?
Yes, it is.

II. Who consolidated it?
Abraham Lincoln.

III. Does consolidation mean to annihilate the States?
Yes – to a great extent.

XII. Does the Republican Party intend to change the name of the United States?
It does.

XIII. What do they intend to call it?
New Africa.

XVII. What do the Republicans mean by the word people?
Abolitionists, mesmerisers, spiritual mediums, free-lovers and negroes.

Note: You could say that Joe Biden officially crowned himself Joe Africanus the Second in that speech he gave in Tulsa. He is a general agent of blacks. The full force of the federal government will now be used to drag down Whites who have no rights to the level of blacks. That’s “equity.”