Yankee Supremacists Trash South’s Heroes
Ilana Mercer untangles the Confederate flag imbroglio
Fox News anchor Sean Hannity promised to provide a much-needed history of the much-maligned Confederate flag. For a moment, it seemed as though he and his guest, Mark Steyn, would deliver on the promise and lift the veil of ignorance. But no: the two showmen conducted a tactical tit-for-tat. They pinned the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia on the Southern Democrats (aka Dixiecrats). “I’m too sexy for my sheet,” sneered Steyn.
It fell to the woman who used to come across as the consummate Yankee supremacist to edify. The new Ann Coulter is indeed lovely.
Also on Fox, Ms. Coulter remarked that she was “appalled by” South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s call “for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol.” As “a student of American history,” Coulter opined “the Confederate flag we’re [fussing] about never flew over an official Confederate building. It was a battle flag. It is to honor Robert E. Lee. And anyone who knows the first thing about military history knows that there is no greater army that ever took to the battle field than the Confederate Army.”
And anyone who knows the first thing about human valor knows that there was no man more valorous and courageous than Robert E. Lee, whose “two uncles signed the Declaration of Independence and [whose] father was a notable cavalry officer in the War for Independence.”
The battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—known as “Lee’s Army”—is not to be conflated with the “Stars and Bars,” which “became the official national flag of the Confederacy.” According to Sons of the South, the “first official use of the ‘Stars and Bars’ was at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis on March 4, 1861.” But because it resembled the “Stars and Stripes” flown by the Union, the “Stars and Bars” proved a liability during the Battle of Bull Run.
“The confusion caused by the similarity in the flags was of great concern to Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard. He suggested that the Confederate national flag be changed to something completely different, to avoid confusion in battle in the future. This idea was rejected by the Confederate government. Beauregard then suggested that there should be two flags. One, the national flag, and the second one a battle flag, with the battle flag being completely different from the United States flag.”
Originally, the flag whose history is being trampled today was a stars-and-bars-flag, a red square, not a rectangle. Atop it was the blue Southern Cross. In the cross were—still are—13 stars representing the 13 states in the Confederacy.
Wars are generally a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight. Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a “War for Southern Independence.” They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way. As even establishment historian Paul Johnson concedes, “The South was protesting not only against the North’s interference in its ‘peculiar institution’ but against the growth of government generally.”
Lincoln grew government, markedly, in size and in predatory boldness.
“Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil,” wrote the South’s greatest hero, Gen. Lee. He did not go to war for that repugnant institution. To this American hero, local was truly beautiful. “In 1861 he was offered command of all the armies of the United States, the height of a soldier’s ambition,” chronicles Clyde Wilson, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina. “But the path of honor commanded him to choose to defend his own people from invasion rather than do the bidding of the politicians who controlled the federal machinery in Washington.”
To his sister, Lee wrote: “With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.” Lee, you see, was first and foremost a Virginian, the state that gave America its greatest presidents and the Constitution itself.
Lord Acton, the British historian of liberty, wrote to Lee in praise. The general, surmised Lord Acton, was fighting to preserve “the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will”: states’ rights and secession.
Lee’s inspired reply to Lord Acton:
“… I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people … are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government … whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”
Another extraordinary Southerner was James Johnston Pettigrew. He gave his life for Southern independence, not for slavery. Quoting Pettigrew, Professor Wilson likens the forbearance of his own Confederate forebears to “the small Greek city-states who stood against the mighty Persian Empire in the 5th century B.C.”
Not quite Leonidas’ 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, but close.
“The U.S. government had quadruple the South’s resources.” Yet “it took 22 million Northerners four years of the bloodiest warfare in American history to conquer five million Southerners,” who “mobilized 90 percent of their men and lost nearly a fourth.”
When they hoist the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, it is these soldiers Southerners honor.
Unable to defeat the South, the U.S. government resorted to terrorism—to an unprecedented war against Southern women and children.
With their battle flag, Southerners commemorate these innocents.
ILANA Mercer is a US-based, libertarian writer. She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive, paleolibertarian weekly column, “Return to Reason.” With a unique audience of 8 million, the site has been rated by Alexa as the most frequented “conservative” site on the Internet. Ilana has also featured on RT with the “Paleolibertarian Column,” and she contributes to Economic Policy Journal (the premier libertarian site on the web), Junge Freiheit, a German weekly of excellence, as well as to the British Libertarian Alliance and Quarterly Review (the celebrated British journal founded in 1809 by Walter Scott, Robert Southey and George Canning), where she is also contributing editor. Formerly syndicated by Creators Syndicate, Ilana is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies (an award-winning, independent, non-profit, free-market economic policy think tank).
Some of the ranting well answered here. You gotta believe it to read it – just look at “The Guardian” commentary alone. Kneejerk white self-hatred. Little known: Old Abe was a reluctant abolitionist, sceptical about equal social integration of “blacks” and “whites”, and a supporter of negro emigration. The War Between the States was yet another war between good white people, with a great loss of life, followed by another loss of life under “Reconstruction”, and not in the cause of human rights so much as northern industrial profits.
David is quite correct about Lincoln: he was prepared to tolerate slavery in states which maintained loyalty to the Union, and only issued his emancipation proclamation well into the Civil War, thus casting doubt on the idea that this was a “war to free the slaves”. (The emancipation proclamation excluded pro-Union states.) In Amanda Foreman’s excellent history of the war (A World on Fire) she notes how many in the North reacted with horror at the sight of black people in New England towns – and there was even a riot when black veterans tried to join Lincoln’s funeral procession. Police had to restore order. It is also a little-known fact that many in the South, including General Robert E. Lee, essentially disliked slavery, believing that it would fade away over time. Lee was certainly not fighting for the preservation of slavery, but for the cause of Virginia, and an America which was not dictated to by the “Federal” Government. (Having said this, the South was stupid to preserve this forced-labour system, leading William Russell of The Times to describe the South as a “new Sparta”.) We also learn that Lincoln’s Secretary of State (William Seward) was almost insanely anti-British, believing that our neutrality was an insult to Washington. And the Civil War could have been the start of an alternative World War 1, with the Lincoln Government contemplating an attack upon British Canada. At one point, the British Government was preparing for the prospect of a massive military deployment to defend the Canadian frontier against a Union invasion. If this had come to pass, who knows where the United States would be today? Fighting on two fronts, and with Washington almost falling within the first few months of the war, history might have been different….
“Yankees are fond of citing Confederacy officials in support of slavery and a war for slavery. Most Southerners, however, were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a ‘War for Southern Independence.’ They rejected central coercion. Southerners believed a union that was entered voluntarily could be exited in the same way. “Yankee Supremacists Trash South’s Heroes,”