In Defense of the South

‘After the South had been conquered by war and humiliated and impoverished by peace, there appeared still to remain something which made the South different—something intangible, incomprehensible, in the realm of the spirit. That too must be invaded and destroyed; so there commenced a second war of conquest, the conquest of the Southern mind, calculated to remake every Southern opinion, to impose the Northern way of life and thought upon the South, write “error” across the pages of Southern history which were out of keeping with the Northern legend, and set the rising and unborn generations upon stools of everlasting repentance.’—Frank Lawrence Owsley, ‘The Irrepressible Conflict’, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, LSU Press, Baton Rouge, La., 2006 [1930], p. 63.

We consider ourselves fortunate to know about Mr Matthew Ehret’s writings. His research into the machinations of the global Elite is enlightening, and his promotion of a peaceful, cooperative, multipolar world order is something we heartily concur with. However, he is forever describing the American South as a place of abominations and President Lincoln and his cohort at the North as the embodiment of virtue. As one whose family has lived in the South since the middle of the 1600s, we hope he will accept a friendly rejoinder as it regards his view of the two sections, and that he will likewise contemplate how his reconsideration of them might advance his vision of a multipolar world.

Regarding China, he says in his essay ‘Manifest Destiny Done Right’,

‘What we have seen in places like Tibet and Xinjiang are cultural heritage centers, exploding literacy rates, the celebration and teaching of traditional languages, songs, stories and dances given full government patronage.

‘While evidence of this cultural growth has grown across all minority ethnic zones, we have also seen a dramatic growth in longevity, population density, quality of life, poverty reduction, infant mortality reduction, and access to advanced industrial skills, clean water, internet and abundant electricity.

‘ . . . NED-controlled propaganda outlets in either region would have you remain blind to these demonstrable facts of Chinese life.’

About the South, though, he avers,

‘The southern perversion of Manifest Destiny promoted by Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Albert Pike envisioned increased black slavery and Native Americans crushed under the heel of the “superior” white race, and cordoned off into cage-like plantations or reservations never to have a say in their own destiny.’ 

If he would read from the forbidden histories of Southerners that the cancel culture of the North has proscribed for decades, he would see that what is said about the South and her slaves in approved, mainstream sources is very much akin to what they say about China and Xinjiang that he opposes so strenuously; while the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, wrote in his book A Defence of Virginia, and through Her, of the South1 (1867) words strikingly similar to his own about Xinjiang. Said Rev Dabney:

‘The malignant industry of our enemies in propagating these monstrous slanders, compels us, therefore, to pause at the outset of the discussion, to rebut them, and disabuse the minds of readers. And it is here asserted, once for all, that the popular apprehension of the slave's condition and treatment, spread throughout Europe and the North, is utterly false: that 214it is the result of nothing less than persistent, wilful, and almost incredible lying on the part of interested accusers; and that this is recognized by every intelligent European and Northern man who has resided among us long enough truly to know the institution of slavery. The character disclosed by the Yankees in the war lately closed, has effectually taught the rest of the world to recognize the probability of our charge.’

In other words, then as now, there was ‘fake news’ about the South and slavery. He went on:

‘And now, it is emphatically asserted that Southern masters, as a class, did not seek or desire to repress either the mental or religious culture of their servants' souls; but the contrary. It is our solemn and truthful testimony, that the nearly universal temper of masters was to promote and not to hinder it; and the intellectual and religious culture of our slaves met no other general obstacle, save that which operates among the labouring poor of all countries, their own indifference to it, and the necessities of nearly constant manual labour. If there was any exception, it was caused by the mischievous meddling of abolitionists themselves, obtruding on the servants that false doctrine so sternly condemned by St. Paul. Southern masters desired the intelligence and morality of their servants. As a class, masters and their families performed a large amount of gratuitous labour for that end; and universally met all judicious efforts for it from others with cordial approval. An intelligent Christian servant was universally recognized as being, in a pecuniary view, a better servant. Is it asserted that there is still much degrading ignorance among Southern negroes? True: but it exists not because of our system, but in spite of it. There is more besotted ignorance in the peasantry of all other countries. It is the dispassionate conviction 216of intelligent Southerners, that our male slaves presented a better average of virtue and intelligence than the rank and file of the Federal armies by which we were overrun: and even the negro troops of our conquerors, although mostly recruited from the more idle and vicious slaves, were better than the white! The Africans of these States, three generations ago, were the most debased among pagan savages. A nation is not educated in a day. How long have the British people been in reaching their present civilization under God's providential tutelage? The South has advanced the Africans, as a whole, more rapidly than any other low savage race has ever been educated. Hence we boldly claim, that our system, instead of necessitating the ignorance and vice of its subjects, deserves the credit of a most beneficent culture.’

Again, just as with Saddam Hussein butchering babies in 1990-1 or harboring WMD in 2002-3 and with the other lies of the Elite, they are telling lies about the condition of the Africans living in the South.

The advancement of Christianity among the Southern Africans, pointed out by Rev Dabney, is much like the positive religious environment Mr Ehret describes in Xinjiang:

‘It is charged again, that slavery impiously and inhumanly sacrificed the immortal soul of the slave, to secure the master's pecuniary interest in him. This slander is already in part answered. We farther declare that neither our laws, nor the current temper and usage of masters, interfered with the slave's religious rights. On the contrary, they all protected and established them. The law protected the legal right of the slave to his Sabbath, forbidding the master to employ him on that day in secular labours, other than those of necessity and mercy. Instances in which slaves were prevented by their masters from attending the publick worship of God, were fully as rare among us, and as much reprobated, as similar abuses are in any other Christian country. On the contrary, the masters were almost universally more anxious that their servants should 219attend publick worship, than the servants were to avail themselves of the privilege. There was scarcely a Christian church in the South, which had not its black communicants sitting amicably at the table beside their masters; and the whole number of these adult communicants was reported by the statistics of the churches, as not less than a half million. We can emphatically declare, that we never saw or heard of a house of worship in the South, where sittings were not provided for the blacks at the expense of the whites: and it is believed that if there was such a case, it was in a neighbourhood containing no negro population. And in nearly every case, these sittings were more ample than the blacks could be induced to fill. Nor was there any expenditure of money on ecclesiastical objects, which was more cheerfully and liberally made, than that for the religious culture of the slaves. Further, with a few exceptions they enjoyed the fullest religious liberty in the selection of their religious communions and places of worship.’

Mr Ehret wishes us to consider population growth in Tibet and Xinjiang as a metric with which to prove Chinese benevolence towards those peoples. Rev Dabney wished for folks to do the same vis-à-vis Dixie and the slaves:

‘The reader is emphatically cautioned that he must not judge slavery in Virginia by slavery in Jamaica or Guiana. Whether the charge of the great Paley is correct, who accounts for this difference by the greater harshness of British 236character,[89] politeness may forbid us to decide. But the comparative fates of the Africans in the British colonies, and those in our States, tell the contrast between the humanity of our system, and the barbarity of theirs, in terms of indisputable clearness. If political science has ascertained any law, it is that the well or ill-being of a people powerfully affects their increase or decrease of numbers. The climate of the British Indies is salubrious for blacks. Yet, of the one million seven hundred thousand Africans imported into the British colonies, and their increase, only six hundred and sixty thousand remained to be emancipated in 1832. The three hundred and seventy-five thousand (the total) imported into the Southern States, had multiplied to four millions. Such is the contrast! How grinding and ruthless must have been that oppression which in the one case reduced this prolific race, in the most fertile and genial spots of earth, in the ratio of five to two! And how generous and beneficent that government which, in the Southern States, nursed them to a more than ten-fold increase, in a less hospitable and fruitful clime! Well may we demur to have the world take its conceptions of our slavery from the British.

‘ . . .

‘This seems the suitable place to notice the most insulting and preposterous of the abolitionists' slanders. It is that expressed by calling Virginia the "slave-breeding commonwealth." What do these insolent asses mean? Do they intend to revile Virginia, because she did not suppress the natural increase of this peaceful and happy class of her people, by wholesale infanticide? Or because she did not, like the North, subject them to social evils so cruel and murderous, as to kill off that increase by the slow torture of vice, oppression, and destitution? It was the honour of Virginia, that she was a man-breeding commonwealth; that her benignant government made existence a blessing, both to the black man and the white, and, consequently, conferred it on many of both. If it has been proved, which we claim, that servitude was the best condition for the blacks, and that it promoted their multiplication, then this is a praise and not 343a reproach to Virginia. How perverse and absurd is the charge, that Virginia was actuated by a motive beastly and avaricious, in bestowing existence on many black men, and making it a blessing to them; because, forsooth, her wise government of them made them useful to the State and to themselves! By the same reason, the Christian parents who rejoice in children as a gift of the Lord, and a blessing to him "who hath his quiver full of them," are "slave-breeders," because they make their children useful, and hope to find them supports to their old age.’

On the virtues of the slave-free North vs the vices of the slave-holding South, which Mr Ehret mentions from time to time, Rev Dabney also set the record straight:

‘The present commercial and manufacturing wealth of New England is to be traced, even more than that of Old England, to the proceeds of the slave trade, and slave labour. The capital of the former was derived mainly from the profits of the Guinea trade. The shipping which first earned wealth for its owners in carrying the bodies of the slaves, was next employed in 43transporting the cotton, tobacco, and rice which they reared, and the imports purchased therewith. And when the unjust tariff policy of the United States allured the next generation of New Englanders to invest the swollen accumulations of their slave trading fathers in factories, it was still slave grown cotton which kept their spindles busy. The structure of New England wealth is cemented with the sweat and blood of Africans.

‘In bright contrast with its guilty cupidity, stands the consistent action of Virginia, which, from its very foundation as a colony, always denounced and endeavoured to resist the trade. It is one of the strange freaks of history, that this commonwealth, which was guiltless in this thing, and which always presented a steady protest against the enormity, should become, in spite of herself, the home of the largest number of African slaves found within any of the States, and thus, should be held up by Abolitionists as the representative of the "sin of slaveholding;" while Massachusetts, which was, next to England, the pioneer and patroness of the slave trade, and chief criminal, having gained for her share the wages of iniquity instead of the persons of the victims, has arrogated to herself the post of chief accuser of Virginia. It is because the latter colony was made, in this affair, the helpless victim of the tyranny of Great Britain and the relentless avarice of New England. The sober evidence of history which will be presented, will cause the breast of the most deliberate reader to burn with indignation for the injustice suffered by Virginia, and the profound hypocrisy of her detractors.’

Rev Dabney went on to explain how Virginia, and not the North, led the effort to end the slave trade in the States. He presented a number of Virginia’s colonial measures to that end before reaching the pivotal historical moment:

‘On the 15th of May, 1776, Virginia declared her independence of Great Britain, and the Confederacy, following her example, issued its declaration on the 4th of July of the same year. The strict blockade observed by the British navy, of course arrested the foreign slave trade, as well as all other commerce. But in 1778, the State of Virginia, determined to provide in good time against the resumption of the traffick when commerce should be reopened, gave final expression to her will against it. At the General Assembly held October 5th, Patrick Henry being Governor of the Commonwealth, the following law was the first passed:

‘an act for preventing the farther importation of slaves.[35]

‘"I. For preventing the farther importation of slaves into this Commonwealth: Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That from and after the passing of this act, no slave or slaves shall hereafter be imported into this Commonwealth by sea or land, nor shall any slaves so imported be bought or sold by any person whatsoever.50

‘"II. Every person hereafter importing slaves into this Commonwealth contrary to this act, shall forfeit and pay the sum of one thousand pounds for every slave so imported, and every person selling or buying any such slaves, shall in like manner forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred pounds for every slave so bought or sold, one moiety of which forfeitures shall be to the use of the Commonwealth, and the other moiety to him or them that will sue for the same, to be recovered by action of debt or information in any court of record.

‘"III. And be it further enacted, That every slave imported into this Commonwealth, contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, shall, upon such importation, become free."

‘The remaining sections of the law only proceed to exempt from the penalty citizens of the other United States, coming to live as actual residents with their slaves in the Commonwealth, and citizens of Virginia bringing in slaves from other States of the Union by actual inheritance.

‘Thus Virginia has the honour of being the first Commonwealth on earth to declare against the African slave trade, and to make it a penal offence. Her action antedates by thirty years the much bepraised legislation of the British Parliament, and by ten years the earliest movement of Massachusetts on the subject; while it has the immense advantage, besides, of consistency; because she was never stained by any complicity in the trade, and she exercised her earliest untrammelled power to stay its evils effectually in her dominions. Thus, almost before the Clarksons and Wilberforces 51were born, had Virginia done that very work for which her slanderers now pretend so much to laud those philanthropists. All that these reformers needed to do was to bid the British Government go and imitate the example which Virginia was the first to set, among the kingdoms of the world. It is true that the first Congress of 1774, at Philadelphia, had adopted a resolution that the slave trade ought to cease; but this body had no powers, either federal or national; it was a mere committee; and its inspiration upon this subject, as upon most others, came from Virginia. In 1788, Massachusetts passed an act forbidding her citizens from importing, transporting, buying, or selling any of the inhabitants of Africa as slaves, on a penalty of fifty pounds for each person so misused, and of two hundred pounds for every vessel employed in this traffick. Vessels which had already sailed were exempted from all penalty for their present voyages.[36] It is manifest from the character of the penalties, that this law was not passed to be enforced; and the evidence soon to be adduced will show, beyond all doubt, that this is true. The act was one of those cheap tributes which Pharisaic avarice knows so well how to pay to appearances. Connecticut passed a very similar law the same year, prohibiting her citizens to engage in the slave trade, and voiding the policies of insurance on slave ships. The slave trade of New England continued in increasing activity for twenty years longer.’

Dear friends! This is only a sliver of the information about Southern history available from ONE SOURCE! There are numerous others which one could consult on these subjects.

But as it is, we hardly have room left to write of how the South is the section of normal families with masculine men, feminine women who guard the domestic hearth and raise their many children; the section of long memories and deep traditions (abounding in admiration for the ancient Greeks and Romans, the English common law, etc.) and a Christianity that still seeks to some degree the guidance of the ancient Church Fathers; the section of a unity in diversity, where the customs of the English, African, French, Spanish, Celtic, and others are allowed to coexist side-by-side within the broader umbrella of the Southern agrarian culture; the section where mankind senses the divine presence in the creation and seeks to live in a respectful manner towards it; the section where a man’s unique personality is honored, and allowed and encouraged to develop, without losing sight of the common human nature inherited from Adam.

And how the North is mostly the opposite of all this with its feminism and other gender confusions and free love experiments that war against the family; with her obsession with novelty and Progress and her Christianity so unmoored from the past that it has decayed into numerous bizarre sects – Unitarians, Shakers, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and others; her delusion that she is chosen by God to be the City on a Hill that causes her to annihilate all other cultures by forcing them into her Borg-like collective (from the Native Americans to the Philippines, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, etc.); her technocratic mindset that sees the lesser, unchosen men, and the creation in general, around her as nothing but lumps of matter with which to power her transhumanist ascent.

We hope that from the foregoing it is becoming evident to Mr Ehret and others that when it comes to allies for implementing a multipolar order, the South would be much more inclined towards that effort than the North, that it would be better for the United States to separate along regional-cultural lines as discussed in books like The Nine Nations of North America and American Nations to both facilitate that process and rid the world of the insane, eugenicist, power-mad Yankee Empire.

We do not claim that the South has been right in everything she has ever done; nor do we claim that there is no good at all to be found in Northern history and folkways – just the opposite, actually. But rarely does the South get such a friendly reciprocation from the North or her allies.

If he has been kind enough to read our essay, we hope Mr Ehret will do us that favor: to consider that perhaps what he has read about Dixie is not a disinterested account of her but, as with propaganda about China, Russia, Iran, and others who resist the globalist technocratic agenda, is meant to discredit the South in the eyes of the world.

The sources telling the true story of Dixie and the North are waiting to be read: the Abbeville Institute, Charleston Athenaeum Press, Reckonin’, the Ludwell Orthodox Fellowship, essays and books of Professor Thomas DiLorenzo, and so on.

But if Mr Ehret and others who earnestly advocate for a multipolar order go on ignoring all this and lionizing Lincoln and the North while demonizing the South, then they must not wonder at the frustration of their plans. They will have caused it themselves.

Notes:

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