history speaks the truth... 9/2/2017 0 Comments   On the University of North Carolina campus -- the Unsung Founders Memorial (close-up of the base) by E.L. Christianson Jr. Charlottesville has people talking and thinking.  But, even with this newest stimuli to the national racism nervous system, we can't make ourselves look at the truth.  We are moving into more serious discussion about southern civil war memorials, but we still want to find every excuse for southern secession other than slavery. Paul Craig Roberts, who because of his usual rational approach, is frequently quoted in this blog, penned an opinion piece, "How We Know The So-Called “Civil War” Was Not Over Slavery".  He states "The secession document [of South Carolina] reads as a defense of the powers of states and not as a defense of slavery." What he ignores is the fact that the 'state power' being defended was the power to maintain slavery... they said so in clear and plain language. Roberts and others like to say that secession was about tariffs and taxes.   In 1831-1832, thirty years before the civil war, high tariffs led to the 'nullification crisis' wherein South Carolina declared a federal tax null and void within the state.  South Carolina was ultimately not allowed to nullify the tax.  No other state joined the protest. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860. The Tariff of 1857 was a major tax reduction and was supported by southern agricultural interests.  No southern state used tariffs as a justification for secession.   Each state in the Confederacy published an “Article of Secession” which explained the state's decision to secede.  Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina published the “Declarations of Causes," explaining  the decision in greater detail.   Read these documents for yourself.  What conclusions can be drawn? "The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery... A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia" "A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.  In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. ​ Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world." Mississippi and Georgia were direct in their statements.  The first words of the documents went straight to the point..."with reference to the subject of African slavery" [Georgia]... "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery" [Mississippi].   South Carolina offers background information that ultimately states accurately that the federal system of government is required to return slaves to their owners. ​"The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.  "​The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." "This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River. "The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States. Texas offered history as the explanation for secession. "Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. ​"But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them? Texas goes on to explain that the answer to that question, 'what has changed in terms of the non-slave holding states' is their reason for secession. Just as the 'founding fathers' asserted in the Declaration of Independence that conditions with the British were such that the people must change their government; and that forced by necessity, the colonies must remove political ties with the British government and become independent states.  The confederate states make the very same statement in their 'declarations' and identify slavery specifically as the condition of cause.  Why is this so difficult to comprehend?  It was about slavery, and that's the truth !!! “Reynolds’s political map of the United States, designed to exhibit the comparative area of the free and slave states and the territory open to slavery or freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.” William C. Reynolds, 1856. Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. If we citizens of the United States could recognize this simple truth and accept the fact of it, we could perhaps move toward some form of improvement or 'healing' or restorative activity.   The civil war was about slavery.  Those states that seceded stated their reasons for secession in clear unambiguous terms. If we cannot look at the documents and draw accurate conclusions, how is it possible to look at civil war memorials that honor southern soldiers and draw accurate conclusions.  The documents are straight-forward.  Statues are created for multitudes of reasons.  Without a statement of purpose from the artist, who can say?  Any conclusion wold be speculative at best.  Was the person whose statue stands here leading an army to overthrow the United States government?  How do we regard that type of action?  What common words do we know that describe the act of leading an army against the United States government.  Must  we fight another civil war to give meaning to our understanding our own history? ​Three people are dead and at least 33 injured after a series of violent clashes erupted at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. In the most extreme incident, 20-year-old white nationalist James Alex Fields plowed his car into a group of counterprotestors, killing one person, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, and injuring 19. Fields has been charged with second-degree murder, and the Department of Justice announced a civil rights investigation into the incident. Two state troopers were also killed when their helicopter, which had been assisting with the police response to the rally, crashed outside the city later in the day. The violent clashes in Charlottesville injured at least another 14 people beyond the car attack, and led Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe to declare a state of emergency  A debate erupted over the weekend on a popular UNC Facebook page, Overheard at UNC, about the functionality of a monument on campus — the Unsung Founders Memorial, which was built to honor the men and women of color who helped build the University. There are several monuments on campus.  Fact is, 'Silent Sam' has never been silent. His very presence embodies the stubborn refusal of Confederate hard-liners to admit the deliberate evil of their miscalculated slavery defense. Silent Sam shouts to every passerby, “I will not confess my complicity in the sinfulness of slavery. I do not admit guilt. I will never ask forgiveness.” And the truth is that very likely, we will never get over 'it' here in this country.  Race is number one for us. ​A Window Into the Horrors of Our History from Common Dreams by Greg Huffman I am a child of the South. I was born in North Carolina, grew up in Catawba County, and have never lived outside the state as an adult. My sister and I joke that we never had a real vacation. Our parents were amateur historians and genealogists and were particularly interested in the Civil War and our family during it. While other kids were at Disney, we were traveling in the family station wagon to pretty much every Civil War battlefield from Pennsylvania to New Orleans, along with the accompanying historic sites, museums, court houses and cemeteries. By age 10, I could rip off a mean tombstone rubbing with charcoal and wax paper. Are the monuments alone history? No. But they can shed light on the dark history surrounding their erection. ​ This historical journey culminated in my teens when my mother and a family friend, Joe Hatley, collected and edited the Civil War letters of a common relative. What followed was a published book entitled the Letters of William F. Wagner. Wagner was your average Catawba County farmer conscripted into military service by the Confederacy as an enlisted man. He served in the infantry, fought at Gettysburg, was eventually captured, and died in a Northern prison camp in 1864. His letters detail the pain and horrors and loneliness of the war for the men who fought it and the prison where he died. It was far from the fictional, glorious version of history I keep hearing about this week from some fellow Southerners. The journeys my parents took us on taught me what history actually is. It is not a statue or monument by itself. Those are inanimate remembrances of past events or people. History consists of the actual actions and events and it is documented by letters, eyewitness accounts, photographs, governmental documents, etc. The fight about Confederate monuments has reminded me of that this week. Singling out monuments alone obscures what happened in Charlottesville. Very intelligent people have gotten sidetracked arguing about and debating the value of the monuments themselves instead of focusing on the resurgence of white supremacist groups and how white supremacists are trying to hijack the monuments as cultural and racial flashpoints as a tactic to further their agendas. Are the monuments alone history? No. But they can shed light on the dark history surrounding their erection. In North Carolina, many of the Confederate monuments were put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was the Jim Crow era in North Carolina, when powerful white men in the state rebelled against a successful coalition of whites and blacks who had wrested control of the legislature immediately after the war. The cabal of whites engaged in a campaign of violence and voter intimidation and ballot box stuffing to take back the legislature and pass laws requiring literacy exams, poll taxes, property ownership requirements, and the like as a requirement to vote. The Klan rose to prominence in many areas of the state. The UDC itself, while performing very noteworthy acts of charity and benevolence for veterans and their families, were supporters of the Ku Klux Klan. They openly lauded the Klan as the primary, valued tool of maintaining white order in the South. The UDC also spun a version of history where slavery was beneficial for blacks because servitude was their natural state, and that blacks were happy being slaves. They also claimed both biblical and historical support and justification for slavery. Monuments started going up in public places as very public statements and reminders to blacks and their white political allies of the days whites alone ruled. It helped that a large number of veterans of the war were still alive and many were influential in government and business. So, to the history. Back then, a pamphlet was usually published when a statue was going to be erected. These often contained the pre-printed speech of the keynote speaker and would be handed out at the dedication ceremony, or they would document the ceremony and speeches to be distributed later. The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill has archived a number of these pamphlets and they are available online. I read some of them this week, and a number of them are bone chilling. In a famous and well-known example, at the dedication of "Silent Sam" on the UNC campus, Julian Carr, a prominent businessman and the appointed dedication speaker, espoused the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race and credited Confederate veterans with returning the Anglo-Saxons to their rightful place of power after blacks gained some modicum of political power immediately after the war. He then recounted how, immediately after the war on the UNC campus, he had beaten a black woman with a horsewhip after he decided that she had insulted a white woman. He bragged that the beating was in full view of garrisoned federal troops who took no action to stop him. At the dedication of a monument in Oxford, North Carolina, in 1909, the keynote speaker, North Carolina's own Gov. William Kitchin, gave a particularly detailed tribute to the supremacy of the white race. He declared that whites and blacks would never be equal and that no army or constitution would ever make them so. He stated that the Ku Klux Klan was a necessity to keeping order and that whites had dominated every race they ever encountered and always would. You get the picture. These were people in control of business and government. They ran the state. They held the levers of police power, money, and the power to legislate. These were the leaders of white North Carolina. When the governor of your state stands before a crowd and declares that whites have and will always reign supreme over blacks while he is dedicating a monument to soldiers who fought a war for that cause, it is hard to deny that was part of the message behind some of these monuments. A lot these monuments were put up as a tribute, at least in part, to a defeated society that engaged in the enslavement and oppression of another race. If they have any true historical value today, it is as a dark window into the 40 and 50 years after the Civil War. They open to the past for us to see the racial views of powerful whites at the time and their continued oppression of blacks. The documented history behind the monuments, the documented speeches and eyewitness accounts prove that out. I've heard little to no discussion of that this week. Instead, I have heard bizarre revisionist, neo-Confederate versions of the war where slavery was never a cause of the war (despite the express statement of slavery as THE reason in the articles of secession adopted by South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, etc.), that history books have been altered by liberals, that what I learned in school was from liberals perverting the truth (I can assure you that Catawba County was and is one of the most conservative areas of the state, and is not a hotbed of "liberal" academic thought), that the monuments only honor our Southern forefathers, and that if you take down a monument you are erasing history. While there is no doubt one purpose of the monuments was to honor Confederate dead and veterans, there is equally no doubt that there were other motives at play and other messages being sent. When the governor of your state stands before a crowd and declares that whites have and will always reign supreme over blacks while he is dedicating a monument to soldiers who fought a war for that cause, it is hard to deny that was part of the message behind some of these monuments. As a white Southerner, particularly as a child, it was hard to accept that whites enslaved blacks and engaged in brutality and vileness. But, they did. I accepted that a young age. I also accepted that for well over 100 years after the war, white Southerners continued to oppress blacks, economically, legally, and in every other way you could imagine. If we are not willing to acknowledge and accept the history behind the monuments of the Jim Crow era and view the statues in that light, I don't see any reason to keep them up. If we view the monuments simply as a tribute to fallen forefathers or a "glorious war hero," we simply are not viewing them in the proper context and are ignoring their true meaning. I'll add that there is not one monument to our state's own civil rights leaders on any courthouse square in North Carolina. How would William Wagner feel about monuments? I doubt he would give a darn about them. He just wanted to go home. I know. I've read the letters. Greg Huffman is general counsel for Moretz Marketing and of counsel at Milazzo Schaffer Webb Law. He also serves as the chancellor of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church.