The American South in Three Parts.
It is my home, my birthplace, and the soil in which I will one day be buried.
Part 1. Lee and Slavery.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room first.
Modern historians will tell you any reverence of Robert E. Lee results from some post-bellum Southern legend based upon a lost cause narrative, racism, and slavery.
This is wrong.
Modern historians & the pseudo-academics who orbit campuses, media, & politics demonize Lee, the historic South & even their modern descendants. They minimize Northern white supremacy & demand any critic of their false arguments is deluded by this postbellum lost cause mythology. All of their assumptions are wrong, lacking in historicity, and fail to deliver anything other than angered propaganda that drives modern political narratives.
After the early 1850’s, Lee himself did not own any slaves though the Custis-Lee estate did retain some. Lee freed all the slaves had inherited from his mother while his wife retained ownership of the slaves she had inherited.
Lee was a stickler for records, so we have much to look at when examining Lee and Slavery.
Lee did hire out slaves who lived on the estate, every existing contract indicates that the hiring out was for a specific skilled task and for a specific time, all of which was done so that the debt on the estate could be paid and the slaves subsequently freed and reunited with their families at the earliest possible convenience.
All of this is proven by examining the ‘inventory’ of the Custis Estate as dated in 1857 and comparing it with Lee’s Emancipation Decree of Dec. 1862 which lists all of the slaves’ families and their locations.
However, this is inconvenient for modern propagandists who prefer whipping up racial hatred for the dead and driving people via their emotions to convenient political ends.
Further, we often hear that Lee was a traitor who fought for slavery, not to protect Virginia. Lee’s decision to resign from the US Army to take a commission in the Virginia Militia was not based upon anything other than his wish to defend his home, Virginia, from invasion.
Being given the opportunity to lead the Union Army by Lincoln in 1861, Lee declined saying “I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?”
Travelling back from his Union army assignment in Texas, Lee said “If Virginia stands by the old Union,' he told a friend as he prepared to leave Texas, 'so will I. But if she secedes then I will still follow my native state with my sword, and if need be with my life.'
Modern propagandists don’t understand the Jeffersonian concept Lee prescribed too. States were at that time sovereign entities under compact with one another through the Constitution to which a general government was delegated few, specific powers –perhaps most easily understood by the modernist lacking historical understanding by comparing these states to those states that today comprise the European Union.
See, had the remaining States of the European Union invaded the UK after ‘Brexit’ and Officers of the British Army who were prior to that time assigned to posts with the EU Defense Forces found themselves resigning those posts and returning to the UK, and subsequently were found leading troops in defense of Great Britain – would this have been treason? Not at all. This would be a preposterous notion. They would be Brits defending Britain just as Lee was a Virginian defending Virginia.
And so too was the idea that those Officers who served in the Union Army before their State Legislatures moved to secession, who then resigned their Union Commissions, and joined their own States Defense Forces in defense of their State.
So, the concept of ‘traitorous’ as so often applied here is simply nothing more than a modern misunderstanding of Compact Theory and what it meant legally and culturally to those who lived through and were faced with difficult decisions leading up to the American Civil War.
And on top of it all, Lee had his citizenship restored by President Ford and the US Congress on August 5, 1975. Therefore, he isn’t a traitor. He is a citizen who led an army of what was at the time a sovereign nation that subsequently lost a war to the American Union.
At the time, President Ford stated “General Lee’s character has been an example for succeeding generations making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride.” Incidentally, those who voted to restore citizenship for General Lee was then Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware.
Lee isn’t looked to as an example of someone to be admired because of some silly lost cause narrative. He is an actual example much in line with those names such as Washington or Jefferson. His actions and words tell us so. We know it now, and the people of his time knew it then.
You see, only a month after the Appomattox surrender, Union General Ulysses S. Grant wrote... “All the people of the South except a few politicians will accept whatever Lee does as right and be guided by his example.”
When Lee’s 3rd Corp rejoined his Virginia Army a week before his first battle with Grant, the soldiers caught sight of Lee during a welcoming review. Numerous journals from soldiers that were present have since been found and catalogued.
E. Porter Alexander, an Artillerist, wrote of the welcoming review “A wave of sentiment swept over the field. Each man seemed to feel the bond which held us all to Lee. The effect was that of a military sacrament, in which we pledged anew our lives.”
Lee often shared in his soldiers hardships, and always took responsibility for his armies’ failures. He often slept in a tent instead of a nearby residence as was common for flag officers of the time.
His battle report to President Davis after his defeat at Gettysburg praised his soldiers but offered his own resignation. He was a man with whom the buck stopped.
The lost cause narrative that attacks Lee holds that Southerners were universally racist and that it was Northern Republicans who, through some divine kindness, sought from the outset to eradicate slavery and see those freed slaves live happy lives after emancipation.
This is also false. The 1860 Republican Party platform which banned slaves in the federal territories, didn’t do so because they disliked slavery. They did so because they disliked black people and wished to keep as much land free of black people as possible. This wasn’t some inspirational good passed down from on high. It was racism, just in another form. See, the idea originated with Congressman David Wilmot in 1846 when he introduced a bill to ban slavery from any territory gained during the Mexican War.
He explained “I make no war upon the South nor upon slavery in the South. I have no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
In 1854, future President Lincoln said “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [western] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.”
Just 1 month before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincolns home state of Illinois voted 2-1 against Black suffrage even though Black people only made up 0.4% of the population. Black folks were no threat to “free labor”.
Lincoln is often stated to be some noble President who freed the slaves, again, out of some greater divine good that resided within him. This is false. The son of Lincolns Ambassador to Great Britain, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. stated “Most wartime Northerners believed that the proclamation would spark a slave uprising to suddenly end the war by forcing Confederate soldiers to return home to defend their families.”
9 days before the Proclamation Lincoln admitted such, stating that it very well might spark a slave rebellion within Southern States. While meeting with a group of Chicago abolitionists Lincoln stated he was aware of potential consequences of massacre and insurrection in the south but considered emancipation to be a practical war measure.
In late June of 1862, Northerners expected the Southern war machine to collapse since Northern General McClellan was a mere 6 miles outside of Richmond. Two months later Lee’s army was at the doorstep of Washington facing down a demoralized Union army freshly routed at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run.
Only 3 weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation, military reversals and failures had so decimated the Union and Lincolns morale that he stated he was “almost ready to hang himself.”
While condemning Southern racism and slavery, Northern racism aimed at essentially quarantining black people in the South is almost never addressed by these modern propagandists.
The 22 States that joined the Union after Texas in 1845 were states where black people composed less than 1% of the total population, hardly a challenge to Northern ideals of free white labor in a fair country.
Following the Civil War, the GOP pushed hard for suffrage among Southern States, not because they cared for black folks. Rather, this would shift the political tide & provide GOP vassal states among the South until new states could be formed out of the GOP Western Territories.
That’s why Grant, the first Republican Reconstructionist President, won only a minority of the White popular vote in 1868. Prior to the war States outside of the Confederacy had only 2% of the American Black population, yet 94% of them could not vote.
But none of this fits the modern woke political narrative that Lee + traitor + slave holder = bad!
US History is dynamic. It is complex. It is not some all or nothing, this or that history. The more we dumb down large historical ideas, events, & people to singular words, isms, and safe-space traumas as defined by modernist political language, the farther we get from truth.
Transitioning from Lee to Slavery, let me be very clear: Slavery is a moral and political evil wherever it exists.
That being said, slavery was not an institution peculiar to America as many would have you believe.
It was, in fact, one of the few global institutions known to every civilization on earth regardless of race, creed, or religion. Every race has been a slave. Every race has held slaves. Slavery in America was neither the best nor worst form of slavery history has known.
It was certainly far less brutal than Caribbean and South American slavery, and without question certainly safer, shorter in duration, and infinitely less deadly than the Arab slave trade.
Much of what I am about to reference comes from Dr. Fogel and Dr. Engerman, two men who have done more research on the American Slave Economy than anyone else in the world. Their book 'Time on the Cross' provides the base for much of what follows.
Dr. Fogel won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993, and Dr. Engerman won the Bancroft Prize in 1964. Both are considered the foremost experts in their field & have Academic reputations that are without question; something few can say about most modern Academics.
What we are going to talk about is freedom that is not so free, slavery that is not so much like what we have been told, the complex relationships that existed between Southern whites and Southern Blacks, as well as the relationship between Northern Whites and Northern Blacks.
Let us begin...
Around 1800, there were about 1 million slaves in the American South. If they had suffered the same mortality of the slaves sent to the British West Indies, the population of slaves in the US would have been 186,000 at that time.
The slave diet as catalogued by numerous sources exceeded the chief nutritional recommendations by the US government in 1964. Yes, the catalogued slave diet exceeded the nutritional recommendations as laid out by the US government nearly 100 years later.
Antebellum slave sleeping quarters had more square footage of sleeping space per person than was available for the average wage earner in NYC at the same time.
During the same time slaves had a longer average lifespan than factory workers in both the US and Europe.
We have inherited a picture of maniacal white men bashing poor black Africans with whips at every chance & driving them dead into the dirt, somehow having both the ability to massacre their slaves daily and yet still have them run the entirety of the plantation operation.
How the dead run a plantation is beyond me. The reality, however, is much different as pointed out by Fogel and Engerman.
In terms of equal input of labor & resources for output per acre, Southern agriculture was 35% more efficient than Northern agriculture. Southern free farms were 9% more efficient than Northern farms.
The States of the “New South’ with their advanced tools and methods of farming were 53X more efficient than Northern agriculture.
This amazing efficiency was driven by international competition. In order for Southern States to compete, they had to have enormous output. And that output was through healthy slaves. A beaten man couldn't provide economic output. Certainly not world leading economic output.
This meant Southern Planters had to educate slaves in a variety of advanced skills and techniques including animal husbandry, land surveying, metal and machine work, carpentry, architecture, engineering, bookkeeping, and business management operations.
This required a large labor force that identified their own success with the success of the plantation operation. For this to be the case Planters had to provide pecuniary rewards in the form of money, status, and enhanced liberty and respect.
Every Monarchical system throughout history, and the Southern Plantation system though not often referenced as so today WAS a Monarchical system, had one thing in common: that it HAD to give back to the workers (serfs, slaves, etc.) if it wished to survive.
Enter the Incentive System:
The incentive system utilized throughout the South meant that Planters often gave plots of land for slaves to grow their own vegetables and produce on, which they could sell for their own benefit. Planters also gave year-end bonuses in money.
One planted is recorded as regularly giving a year-end bonus to each of his slaves of $15-20, when the national per capita White income was $100.
Southern Planters spent on average $50 per year to house, feed, and provide medical care for each slave.
There are many instances given to us by Fogel and Engerman of the reality of slavery in the South that isn’t Django Unchained.
One Alabama field hand earned during this time $309/year and had loans owed to him of $2,400.
Another incentive was elevation, just as people receive promotions today, the same system existed on the Southern Plantation. People went from field hand to driver, artisan to overseer and even acted as plantation managers and earned their freedom.
About 31% of slaves in urban areas in 1860 were on hire, meaning these individuals lived on their own, worked a job of their choosing to which their skills matched, and then a portion of their earnings went back to the slave owner.
In Richmond, it was 50%. The only difference in the case between the slave artisan and free artisan was the portion required to be paid back to the owner.
These artisans established their own businesses, rented accommodations, advertised, and marketed their products and skills, travelled to negotiate with their customers, and managed their own finances.
Tobacco manufacturers in Virginia paid their slave labor no less than $60/year and some earned more than $300/year. Some skilled artisan slaves earned $500/year, about 5x the per capita income of whites.
One Planter turned over the entire management of his operation to slaves. He supplied them with all the necessary tools and equipment they required, and he received a certain percentage of the income.
The slaves in management were responsible for planning the planting, harvesting, marketing, and final sale of all that came from the Plantation. They also paid the bills and divided the profits in a just manner.
Further, the majority of Plantation managers were NOT white. Only 30% of Plantations with 100 or more slaves had white management. On smaller plantations, those with less than 100 slaves, the percentage of whites in management was even less.
For example, Ben Montgomery, a slave, managed the entirety of Jefferson Davis’s brothers Plantation. He was accomplished in many fields & invented an ingenious propeller for steamships but did not receive a federal patent as the US government wouldn’t award patents to slaves.
It is estimated that 25% of slaves were educated by planters in various forms of expertise, those types required to keep complex agricultural operations & the localities that depended upon them running.
Northern employers had no incentive to educate free black folks whose mere existence was generally resented.
As Fogle and Engerman point out, we can argue today about Liberty and Slavery from a modern perspective, but it must be noted that the distinction during that time was muddy at best.
"America saw lots of quasi-slavery in the South and even more quasi-freedom in the North."
That is, Slavery in the South was not so much like the slavery we have been led to believe it was and freedom in the North was not so free as wage earners were typically poorer, lived in more cramped conditions, and whose overall lifespan and livelihood was as bad or worse.
There were some 260,000 free blacks in the South during this timeframe owning property worth $25million USD. On average, this meant the average holding of a free black person in the South was $96, equal to that of the white per capita income.
Today, the per capita income in the US is about $38,000. However, the median savings of American households today is only $5,300. Free slaves were comparatively far wealthier than the average wage earner is today in the US.
This is a very odd thought.
Also, in some cases 40% of free blacks were slave owners themselves. Many black slave owners grew wealthy and held significant positions in southern society. John Caruthers, a black man, owned over 100 slaves and employed 3 white men to manage his Plantations.
42% of free blacks in Charleston, South Carolina owned slaves and 64% of those were WOMEN. Black feminism at work!
Maria Weston of Charleston owned slaves whose total worth was $40,000. In today’s money, that’s a jaw dropping $1.4million dollars in slaves alone!
William Ellison was born a slave in 1790 South Carolina. South Carolina operated under what was known as the “task system’. That meant at the beginning of each day, you were given your task and when done you were free to go about your day.
Ellison was a true hustler, who over time managed a cotton gin production facility in his free time. He became a successful planter in his own right owning 63 slaves & eventually purchased an ex-governors mansion. He was also a significant financial supporter of the Confederacy.
His grandson, John Wilson Buckner, was wounded July 12, 1863 fighting against the attack on Ft. Wagner by the well-known 54th Black Massachusetts Regiment, however we all know that scene didn’t show up in the film. Go figure. It is too complex of an idea.
Just as pecuniary incentives to achieve and force were equal parts to the slave system, so friendships and force were a part of the southern system, as well. Fogel and Engerman describe the complex, deep personal attachments between blacks and whites in the South.
From the 1830’s to the lead up of the Civil War, there were 106 anti-slavery societies in the South, and only 24 anti-slavery societies in the North.
Blacks in New England accounted for less than 1% of the population and in the West accounted for just over 1% of the population.
Those in the North generally did menial jobs which reinforced the idea in Northern whites that black people had very little capacity for work or education.
This idea didn’t exist in the Plantation South as it was well established and known that without the industriousness of Africans as already demonstrated, the south would not have been agriculturally as efficient or productive.
James Weldon, and African American writer, wrote in 1912 “Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race." “Yet, generally speaking, they have no particular liking for individuals of the race.”
Later he begins speaking on specific relations between blacks and whites in the South “...for certain individuals they have a strong affection, and are helpful to them in many ways. With these individual members of the race they live on terms of the greatest intimacy; ..."
"...they intrust to them their children, their family treasures and their family secrets; in trouble they often go to them for comfort and counsel; in sickness they often rely upon their care.”
And he continues “This affectionate relation between the Southern whites and those blacks who come into close touch with them has not been overdrawn even in fiction.”
This complex arrangement and push-pull relationship is not one spoken about today, nor is it even considered. WE have become an uneducated population, blind to fact and unable to see that past in anything other than black and white and arranged to fit modern sentiment.
We are actively attacking and tearing down a history - American history - that we neither understand the complexities of nor have a basic working knowledge of.
We are rabid to find hate among the dead and project our own political ideologies & shortcomings on to those who are unable to speak for themselves. In all of this we are failing to come together and instead rage against a past that cannot be changed nor should it be erased.
It is ours. All of ours. The good, the bad, and the complex parts that tend to make up the whole of what American history is. Painting in black and white is getting us nowhere. We must learn from the past so that we may be better tomorrow. Erasing it creates ignorance.
Part 2: The American South
Woke history, modern politics, and the progressive base look down their nose at both the modern and historic South. Both we and our ancestors are often regarded as lazy, uneducated, rednecks, racists and more recently Nazis. It is said we have dark history and are a people whose ancestors were as uneducated as we are evil today. The contempt for both our history and our modern belief systems are as inaccurate as they are laughable.
Let us not forget that the historic South was, despite its flaws, one of the better examples of what a people can achieve throughout history.
The 1860 census shows that the South greatly outranked the North in per capita income. The 12 highest annual per capita income states were all in the South. All of them.
The highest was Mississippi with an annual per capita income of $2,128/yr. South Carolina with $2,017. The highest Northern State was Connecticut with $771/yr. per capita income, a little more than 1/3 that of Mississippi.
New York’s per capita income was $597/yr. Less than 1/3 that of Mississippi. The poorest Southern State was Arkansas with $881/yr. which was higher than any Northern State.
Even if Slaves were counted in the average of income earners it would only move 3 Northern States into the top 12. These would be Connecticut, New Jersey, and Oregon.
The first commercially successful railway in America was built in Charleston South Carolina in 1830. It was called the Best Friend of Charleston. It ran 136 miles and was the largest railroad line in the world at that time.
As of 1861, the South had the 2nd highest number of railroad miles in the world.
In wealth, that of the South equaled that of Europe though much of it was still frontier, and it was more equally distributed, as well. The South in 1861 had the 4th largest economy in the world.
However, wealth is little unless it is spent wisely. So, what did Southerners do with their wealth? They educated their children. Consider this: The South had more educated men and women in proportion to the population of the North, or any part of the world.
Jeffersonian America’s literacy rate was the highest in the world and they sent more youth to college than anywhere else in the world.
According to the 1860 census there was 1 college student for every 247 white inhabitants in the South. In the North, it was 1 for every 703. Nearly three times as many Southerners attended college as did in the North.
Salem College, founded in 1772 is the oldest women’s college in the South. It is the oldest female educational establishment that is still a women's college. In 1836, Wesleyan College in Macon Georgia was the 1st College in the world chartered to give women advanced degrees.
The South’s 260 colleges represented half the total of colleges within the United States. The South Carolina College library had more books than the Harvard library did by 1840, but more impressively a lending library just next door had more books than the college library.
Southern Culture favored education with an emphasis on the classics. For those that did leave the South for education they thrived & led the elite universities of Europe and the North. South Carolinians were known for sending their children to Eton, Oxford, and the Middle Temple.
Of the 350 American admitted to the Inns of Court in London nearly 2/3 were from the South. Northern Schools such as Yale and Harvard had large Southern contingents and John C. Calhoun was elected President of his class at Yale.
Nearly half the students at Princeton in 1850 came from the South. European governments saw the Jeffersonian South as a model to emulate. Switzerland changed its constitution in 1848 from a loose confederation to a federal system of states thereby emulating Jeffersonian America.
The Swiss went a step further by denying to the central government original taxing power. Even today, the Swiss central government may only tax at a certain time at a set rate & then it lapses completely whereby they have NO taxing power until passed again.
Canada too, followed the Jeffersonian Souths view of States Rights & the ideas Southerners held of nullification & interposition. Canadian provinces can nullify any federal law in the area of human rights. They can simply opt out, something not available to modern Americans.
There is a saying that ‘the South, having lost the war in America, won it in Canada’ where the ideas of nullification and secession can be discussed most every day without people going crazy.
As well, Southerners led America both culturally & politically from its founding up through the civil war. As of 1862, the South produced 9 Presidents, the North 6. More importantly, 5 Southern Presidents served 2 terms. No Northern President at that time ever served 2 terms.
In the first 64 years, 51 of those were under Southern Presidents. That number would have been higher had President Polk not abided by a self-imposed rule of only serving 1 term, or had Zachary Taylor not died in office Millard Fillmore would have not been President.
Had William Crawford not suffered a stroke in 1824 during the election timeframe, he would have likely won against John Quincy Adams. Had these 3 small shifts happened, 56 of the first 64 years would have been under Southern Presidents.
Look at attorney generals during that same time:
The South – 14
The North – 5
Supreme Court Justices:
The South – 17
The North – 11
Speakers of the House:
The South – 21
The North - 12
All the territory acquired by the United States beyond the 13 original colonies were acquired by Southern Administrations. Southerners were crucial in securing independence from Britain and forming the Constitution. In so many ways, it was the South that created America.
Some of the greatest literary minds our nation has every produced come from the South: Reynolds Price, James Dickey, William Price Fox, Flannery O'Connor, Davis Grubb, Margaret Mitchell, Walker Percy, Ellen Glasgow, William Styron, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Penn Warren, and more
Even great authors & academics who weren’t from the South found success writing about it. Sterling Allen Brown, Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, & Kate Chopin all found great success in writing about the South by treating their readers to both myths & facts associated with it.
Today, the American South - however derided in the press and academia - is still a land worthy of praise. The South has recovered quickest from “COVID” as governors lifted restrictions faster and earlier than anywhere else in the nation. Florida led the way.
The American South is on track to reach 2019 levels of employment by the end of 2022, early 2023 making it the first area to reach pre-pandemic employment numbers. Again, attributed to governments not usurping the freedoms of their people.
The South is also expected to experience the fastest consumer recovery spending, the Northeast the slowest and one that is expected to lag all other geographic regions across the nation. The economic output of the Southeast is about $2.3 trillion.
Population in the South has increased steadily with the trend of Americans migrating south because of the region's attractive weather, lifestyle, politics, and economic opportunity—among other reasons.
Another strength is brainpower as reflected in the many high-quality institutions of higher education. The Atlanta area alone has 45 universities and colleges—not counting postsecondary technical schools.
Some of the most important workforce development takes place at vocational school & higher ed institutions. The University of Va, University of NC-Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, University of Florida and The College of William & Mary are all top 10 public universities.
To say the South is underinvested in education while five of the top 10 public universities are Southern ignores reality.
Southern Right-to-work states see increased economic growth, higher long-term wage growth and increased manufacturing employment than forced-union states. Of the nation's 50 largest ports in terms of total international trade, 15 are in the South.
Louisiana and Texas lead the nation in exports. Interestingly enough, there is very healthy north-south trade between Canada and the Southeast as shipments between these areas amount to many tens of millions of dollars each day.
One reason for this connection is proximity. For instance, a truck delivery from Montreal to, say, Nashville takes about two days. The same shipment going west to Vancouver might take as long as five days.
To emphasize the importance of Canada as a trading partner, the country is the largest export market for 36 U.S. states and a majority of which area Southern states. Acknowledging this global trend, international business finds the American South very attractive.
Companies are avoiding places like NY and California and relocating to places like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. Everyone from Tesla to Boeing, Toyota, BMW, Honda, Mercedes and General Electric are integrating into the economic landscape of the American South.
In 2019, Per-capita income in the United States was roughly $31,000. But in Mississippi, that equaled $35,774 in true purchasing power. Even in booming Tennessee and North Carolina, $31,000 equaled roughly $34,100 in purchasing power.
In contrast, $31,000 only got you $26,793 in New York purchasing power.
An important way to illustrate the South’s success is by examining the interstate migration trends of the region. Texas is the fastest-growing state in the country with more than 1.3 million new residents in the past decade.
Florida and Tennessee have also seen a surge in migration, with 991,542 and 238,182 new residents, respectively. These states have one thing in common—no personal income tax.
In fact, Mississippi, Louisiana and Virginia are the only states in the South that have lost residents to other states in the past 10 years. As a region, the South has added 3.6 million new residents over the same period.
Examining the Rich States Poor States index, North Carolina and Florida both make the top ten, with North Carolina ranking 2nd. NO Northern states make the top 10.
When we talk about College Sports, something sacrosanct to many across the county, 3 of the 4 powerhouse hotbeds are in the South: Texas, Florida, and Georgia. Miami, Atlanta, Birmingham, Tampa Bay, and Jacksonville are also recruiting hotbeds for schools nationwide.
The South also has a variety of cultural traditions that splash the nation with a flurry of what it means to be southern. Memphis has more music related history than any other American city.
The South has the Rock 'n' Soul Museum, the live music venues of Beale Street and the iconic Sun Studio, which discovered the talents of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison among others.
New Orleans, Louisiana, is especially known for its strong association with jazz music, universally considered to be the birthplace of the genre. The earliest form was dixieland, which has sometimes been called traditional jazz, 'New Orleans', and 'New Orleans jazz'.
And we’ve got Southern foods. Culturally unique and stemming from African and English blends, the American South is known for great food. The food reflects not just the geographic region, but the ancestors and people who made it.
Barbecue, especially pit barbecue, is probably the signature food of the South, although some other well-known examples include things like sweet tea, fried green tomatoes, ham, fried chicken, catfish, potato salad, buttermilk biscuits, and pecan pie.
We can argue about vinegar vs tomato based another time.
And to top it all off, Southerners are known for their hospitality. Seen as hokey and perhaps a bit silly to outsiders, we’ve got a knack for making outsiders feel at home – even if they’ve always thought we were beneath them.
There are six primary characteristics of Southern hospitality that can be found in every corner of our Southern land:
Politeness. Good Home Cooking. Kindness. Helpfulness. Charm. Charity.
If you’re Southern you have a history to be proud of, despite its well acknowledged flaws. You live among a widely educated, industrious, and historic people regardless of how or what modern political academics teach about it. I for one rejoice at being southern. So should you.
Part 3: Preserving Southern Identity
One year after the surrender at Appomattox, Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jacksons Aide, the Theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, addressed the students at Davidson College. Many of these students were poor, near penniless, Confederate veterans who were very likely sacrificing most anything they had left at home to continue their education.
This theme of the impoverished Southern student continues to this day.
Dabney’s speech to the students was called “The Duty of the Hour” and while long, held a simple idea: that which is of value is grown, not made. Or as I prefer, that which is valuable is natural, not forced.
Dabney advised the students to continue their education, and raise strong, healthy families despite what we Southerners know as ‘the late unpleasantness’: Reconstruction.
Dabney said, and I quote:
“Government is not the creator but the creature of human society.”
“The only community’s which have had their characters manufactured for them by governments... have had a villainously bad character.”
John C. Calhoun had made the same point in his last testament, A DISQUISITION ON GOVERNMENT. And Calhoun was only putting into intellectual form what had been the starting assumption for Southern politics from the beginning.
Society is natural, essential, and self-justifying, proceeding from man’s nature as a social being. The legitimate purpose of government is to protect and preserve society.
Thus, the Constitution should be the instrument of the people’s control of the government, and not of the government’s control of the people.
This idea was at the heart of the War of American Independence, which was carried out and understood by our forefathers as the preservation of their natural “grown” society that was threatened by domination of a distant government of men that they could not hold responsible. The U.S. government is a contrivance made by men. Our forefathers agreed to it because they regarded it as a way of protecting their people. When it becomes an enemy of society it has lost all claim on legitimacy.
Fast-forward to the modern political narrative and take the California Climate Cult, for example. They would appeal to our national government to legally bind everyone to electric vehicle usage if they could, and they may still.
No one denies protecting the environment is a good idea. But no Southerner who has a good idea automatically thinks government should mandate that idea on all people.
And here lies the difference between the valuable Southern identity and the rest of America. Rarely does it occur to a Southerner to go out and ‘correct’ others through legislation.
It would likely be seen as unneighborly (Be Kind To Your Neighbors), egotistical, and anti-liberty.
Yet here we live in compact (The Constitution) with those whose lives and very identities – which they tell you about at every turn – are both warped and wrapped up in the idea that government is the master and the people the serf.
In truth, we are far behind in this fight. We are a people whose grandchildren will grow up in a South unlike our own, whose values will be unlike our own, and whose fights will be quite unlike our own.
If we are to take Dabney’s speech at Davidson College to heart, we must raise a generation to be noble, chivalrous, and righteous in their motives as Southerners and as the heirs to the Southern legacy.
For the South is as old or older than any other part of America. And those who wish to legally change the South, though they live hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away, don’t view us – or our children – as anything other than a wrong needing swift and severe change.
We are a thing needing to be destroyed. And in many ways, we already are.
We are a people without a nation. We are represented by a territory and have a valuable culture and history, yet those state governments and our representatives in Congress are controlled by grotesque political parties, banks, or other special interests.
So, what do a unique people do when they are stateless and without representation? How do we satisfy our own political, economic, social, and cultural existence?
We must determine our own fate. And this is no odd statement, though it may appear rather revolutionary. Think about it. The South is a territory and population far larger than most independent countries on earth.
We have a distinctive history and culture hundreds of years old.
We are more than banks and the beltway, the military industrial complex and the lobbyist who hawkishly devote our taxes and children’s lives to war.
We are more than shady elections, money printers, and censorious masters.
We are more than gender theory, pronouns, and adults who play dress up and make believe to satisfy sexual deviancy.
We are more than climate junkies and globalist oligarchs, pharmaceutical peddlers and vaccine cultists.
We are more than Antifa, Atheists, Socialists, and Communists. We are more than big government Republicans and even bigger government Progressives.
For all of that is what has become of America.
And we are not that. We are something more. We are Southern, which is more American than those who rule that which is now called “America”.
Much like Mr. Robert Dabney, I talk to you now after defeat. After our people have been handed over to Health Czars and their experimental treatments.
After we have been subjected to fraudulent elections, corporate bailouts, banking collapses, shortages of goods of every type and kind, and rapid inflation that has made everyday living tougher by every metric.
Much as Mr. Dabney urged, I too urge. We must, if we are to continue as a stateless nation of people, raise strong families and educate our children in the liberty that is Southern Culture.
Among our families we must work to guarantee our culture and traditions when educating our children. Our speech, our geniality, our customs, our long-established attitudes, and our history must all be instilled without hesitation.
For it is natural to pass down to one’s own children those long-taught practices of one’s own people. It is the only thing that will keep the South from ceasing to the ‘the South”.
This is no small ask. But the South has always been admired the world over for having some of the kindest and most cordial people the world has ever known.
It is this vital spirit which so naturally abounds in those whose roots run deep in Southern soil which must be preserved. For so much about what makes the South “Southern” is intrinsically admirable.
And nothing upsets those who would see us into neo-feudalism more than the admiration so many hold for what it means to be ‘Southern’.
This will carry us through.
Be Kind To Your Neighbors