YANKEE MYTH
The North Fought the War to Save the American Constitutional Union
The forces of Northern aggression had to hide their real objectives for conducting the war. Their main concern was that the rest of the world might look with sympathy upon the Southerners as they struggled against their giant Northern adversary and that they might offer official recognition to Jefferson Davis’ Confederate government. As we have already seen, the myth of freedom for the slaves was a key war measure used by the Lincoln administration to influence world opinion. The myth that the North was attempting to save the American government was and still is another key myth. Those superficial individuals who accept the Yankee myth of history without question find it very easy to accept the allegation that Lincoln and the North were fighting to maintain the American Union. We must note that the Yankee myth alleges that they were fighting to maintain the Union. But as Southerners we must make the distinction that preserving the geographical boundary in which the central government of the United States exercises its authority and maintaining the voluntary union of Sovereign American states within a constitutional framework are quite different concepts. This is the point that Southerners have been forced to ignore for more than 125 years. Yes, the North did maintain the authority of the central government over the Southern states. Yet this very act changed that authority from one arising from consent, a bargained exchange between equals, into one of conquest! Yes, superficially the North did maintain the Union. But are we discussing real estate or principles of free government? Are we discussing geographical boundary lines, or are we discussing concepts such as the free and unfettered consent of the governed?
Many Unionists like to quote President Andrew Jackson’s words, “The Federal Union—It must be preserved.” Yet few quote from Jackson’s later explanation that the Union could not be preserved by force. Why? Because the Union he referred to was a voluntary union, and force, which precludes volition, would in and of itself destroy the very thing it was supposed to be preserving. C. C. Burr, editor of Judge Upshur’s book, The Federal Government: Its True Nature and Character, noted:
The name of our federation is not Consolidated States, but United States. A number of States held together by coercion, or the point of the bayonet, would not be a Union. Union is necessarily voluntary—the act of choice, free association. Nor can this voluntary system be changed to one of force without the destruction of “The Union”. The Austrian Empire is composed of several States, as the Hungarians, the Poles, the Italians, etc, but it cannot be called a Union—it is Despotism. Is the relation between Russia and bayonet held Poland a Union? Is it not an insult and a mockery to call the compulsory relation between England and Ireland a Union? In all these cases there is only such a union as exist between the talons of the hawk and the dove, or between the jaws of the wolf and the lamb. A Union of States necessarily implies separate sovereignties, voluntarily acting together. And to bruise these distinct sovereignties into one mass of power is, simply, to destroy the Union—to overthrow our system of government.51
In the first chapter of his book, Southern History of the War, Edward A. Pollard explains the Yankee myth of the perpetual union. The concept of perpetual union does have an American historical precedent. The Articles of Confederation, the government that preceded the original Constitutional Republic, did have a clause in its preamble stating that the Articles of Confederation was establishing a perpetual union! What happened to this perpetual union? Well, believe it or not, each state seceded from it, dissolved that union, and established a new union among only those states that subsequently ratified the Constitution. Try as hard as they might, the Unionists have never been able to discover similar language—perpetual union—in the United States Constitution. We might say that the guarantee of a perpetual union is conspicuous by its absence. The Founding Fathers made the mistake of guaranteeing one perpetual union that did not work out, and they were not going to make the same mistake again! So much for the myth of the necessity for a righteous crusade to save the Holy Union. The North fought the war to save its empire. This empire was built upon the ashes of our Southern nation, our freedom, our economic security, and our well-being as a people.
YANKEE MYTH
The South Fought the War to Preserve Slavery
When discussing the motives for fighting the War for Southern Independence (of course, the myth-makers insist upon the incorrect term “Civil War”), the Yankee myth-makers have assigned virtue to the North and vice to the South. One of their favorite myths is to assert that Southerners were fighting to keep people in slavery. This lie has been, and still is, either stated or implied over and over until today most Southerners themselves accept their assigned position of national villains without so much as one word of protest.
The absurdity of this myth can be seen by understanding that it has been estimated that from seventy to eighty percent of the Confederate soldiers and sailors were not slave owners!52 Now let’s try to put the extent of the Southern sacrifice into some type of modern perspective. During World War II, the United States lost approximately three hundred thousand military personnel. If the United States had lost personnel in World War II at the same rate (per capita) as the South did during the War for Southern Independence, the loss of American lives in World War II would not have been three hundred thousand but instead six million (yes, that is right, six million people)!
Who in his right mind could honestly claim that the Southern soldiers and sailors, the vast majority of whom were not slave owners, went to war against a numerically superior foe and endured four long years of hardships, all in order to allow a few rich men to keep their slaves? Yet, the Yankee myth of history has been so pervasive that this is the message that our children usually receive from the educational system paid for by our taxes.
Jefferson Davis wrote to his wife in February 1861 that, no matter what the result of the conflict was, the slave property of the South “will eventually be lost.”53 President Davis’ inaugural address did not mention slavery. (See Addendum III).
A partial list of Southern leaders who were not slave owners includes such notables as:
General Robert E. Lee, C.S.A.
General Joseph Johnston, C.S.A.
General A. P. Hill, C.S.A.
General Fitzhugh Lee, C.S.A.
General J. E. B. Stuart, C.S.A.
Add to this evidence the testimony of a soldier who served in the Confederate army:
I was a soldier in Virginia in the campaigns of Lee and Jackson, and I declare I never met a Southern soldier who had drawn his sword to perpetuate slavery. … What he had chiefly at heart was the preservation of the supreme and sacred right of self-government. … It was a very small minority of the men who fought in the Southern armies who were financially interested in the institution of slavery.54
In personal letters, soldiers would express their most private feelings. Occasionally we find these men testifying to the principles for which they were fighting. In a letter home, one young lad made the following comments:
The hard fighting will come off here and our boys will have a fine opportunity of showing the enemy with what determination we intend to fight for liberty, and independence. … History will record this as being the greatest struggle for liberty that was ever made. … 55
In an officer’s letter to the family of a dead soldier we find these words:
He was an excellent soldier and a brave young man. The company deeply mourns his loss but he is gone, another martyr to the cause of Southern Independence.56
George Washington Bolton of the Twelfth Louisiana Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A. sent this encouragement home to his people:
You seem to be in low spirits and fearful we will not gain our Independence. So long as there is an arm to raise in defense of Southern liberties there is still hope. We must prove ourselves worthy of establishing an independent Government.57
During the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, a soldier wrote home:
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It is a beautiful Sabbath morning indeed. I feel that I ought to be at Alabama Church this morning. The merry birds are sweetly singing their songs of spring. Oh, that I could sing in truth the songs of peace and liberty this morning to our confederate states.58
The desire for independence was evident in countless letters early in the war and continued even after years of desperate struggle. For example, in March of 1865, a soldier from Company K, Seventh Louisiana Infantry, C.S.A. wrote home:
… with proud hearts and strong arms we are more determined than ever to apply every energy until our independence is achieved.59
From Shreveport, Louisiana, in April of 1865, come these words:
I firmly believe that we will yet achieve our Independence.60
From these few examples it can be seen that these men were fighting for the same principles their forefathers fought for in the War for American Independence—the right of self-government. Another Yankee myth exposed.
YANKEE MYTH
We (Southerners) are Better Off Because We Lost the War
Perhaps no other Yankee myth brings more anger to the Southern heart than does this one—especially when we know the truth of our colonial existence and when we meet with a “fellow” Southerner who like a Pavlovian dog at the ringing of a bell salivates on cue this Yankee propaganda line, “Yes, but you know we are better off since we lost the war.” How do we uncondition an individual who has, for an entire lifetime, accepted the Yankee myth of history?
We will not discuss the loss of political rights and the loss of our Constitutional Republic at this time. That will be covered in later chapters. But we will review a very small portion of the economic consequence of our failure to maintain our independence.
An idea of the human loss as a result of a war that we did not start, we did not want, but we could not avoid is demonstrated by the fact that in the first year after the war the state of Mississippi allotted one-fifth of its revenues for the purchase of artificial arms and legs. The enduring economic impact is demonstrated by the fact that it was not until 1911 that the taxable assets of the state of Georgia surpassed their value of I860.61 The state of Louisiana lost $170,000,000 in slave property.62 Now remember, pious Yankee and Southern Scalawag, the Northern slave owner had been very careful to liquidate his investment in his slave property before allowing for emancipation. Let us not also forget that it was the rich Northern merchants who still held the profits from the sale of these very same slaves! In Louisiana at the beginning of the war there were twelve hundred operating sugar mills. By the end of the war there were only 180 mills left. As a result of the war, at least one-half of the cattle, pigs, sheep, mules, and horses had disappeared from the state of Louisiana alone.63 The percentage was even higher for other Southern states.
In 1961 LIFE magazine published a one-page overview of the economic loss experienced by the South as a result of the war. Shortly after the war ended, Yankee speculators chartered special trains to come down South where they were able to buy over fifty million acres of prime Southern virgin forest for as little as fifty cents an acre. Because the North completely controlled the United States government, they were able to raise high protective tariffs for Northern manufactured goods while Southern cotton was left unprotected. The price of cotton dropped to an all-time low. Three years after the close of the war, the Northern-controlled Congress levied a special tax on cotton. This tax cost the struggling Southern economy approximately seventy million dollars in three years. The effect of the economic exploitation of the postwar South is demonstrated by the fact that ten years after the end of the war more than sixty percent of the town of Greenville, Mississippi, was sold at the sheriffs auction for delinquent taxes! In Sumter County, Georgia, Dr. David Bagley’s 1860 net worth was eighteen thousand dollars. After enduring the devastating effects of Yankee invasion, conquest, and occupation, his 1870 net worth was only nine hundred dollars.64
The Yankee myth-makers would have us believe that even if this were true, “It all happened long ago and is no longer relevant to us today.” Yet the death, destruction, and poverty that is our legacy from the United States government placed us in a permanent secondary economic class. The South, at worst, was forced from a position of plenty to one of peonage. At best, we were transformed into second-class citizens in the United States economy.
Both black and white Southerners suffered as a result of our second-class economic status. Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, in an article entitled “The South from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage,” described this demeaning situation:
Tenancy and sharecropping reduced most white farmers to a system of virtual peonage. … Not one in a hundred makes a crop now without mortgaging for his year’s support and supplies. … burdened by debts, tenants were essentially fixed to the soil. … During the late antebellum period, perhaps 80 percent or more of the farms in the Lower South were operated by owners. During the post-bellum period this figure declined steadily until, in 1930, more than one million white families and nearly seven hundred thousand black families were tenants. In that year only 37 percent of Southern farms were fully owned by their operators, and most of those were heavily mortgaged.65
McDonald and McWhiney describe a county in the South that prior to the war was an exporter of food. As a result of the war and the subsequent social upheaval, the county became a net importer of food since the people could no longer raise enough food to feed themselves! A telling account of the war’s impact can be seen when we compare per capita corn production and number of hogs per capita in the South during 1860 and 1880. In 1860 the number of bushels of corn produced per capita rural population was 33.1; whereas in 1880 it was down to 23.4 bushels per capita rural population. The number of hogs available for use per capita in 1860 was 1.92; whereas in 1880 it had dropped to 1.14 per capita rural population.66
More and more people were working harder and harder to scratch out a living of an ever declining quality. … thus the gigantic trap slowly, steadily, inexorably closed upon them, until almost no one in the South remained free.67
The 1868 Official Record for the state of Mississippi described how the state attempted to buy its way out of the post-war poverty by allowing the Northern capitalists to purchase all the virgin forest in the state, to cut it down, and to ship it back North. A North flushed with victory and subsequent economic gain was at the same time of our poverty experiencing rapid growth. Today, Mississippi’s vast and expansive virgin forest is gone, but Mississippi still has its legacy of Yankee-induced poverty!
The 1960 United States census provides another example of how the effects of the war remain with the South. The per capita income for all of the states in the Union was given. Not a single Southern state appeared in the top fifty percent! At the time when the North was preparing to celebrate the centennial of its glorious victory in the “Civil War,” the South was still reeling from the economic impact of Yankee aggression. According to the Charlotte (NC) Observer, April 25, 1982, the lore of Sunbelt prosperity was not substantiated by the 1980 census. The report stated that the South was still by far the poorest part of the country. The United States Census Bureau found that the poverty rate for the South was twenty percent higher than for the nation as a whole. All of the states with the highest poverty levels were in the South, whereas all of the states with the lowest poverty rates were in the North.68 (One nation with justice for all? Not if you speak with a Southern accent!)
The bad news continues for the South. In addition to selling our birthright of virgin forest, the South, in more recent times, has attempted to gain economic ground by concentrating on industrial development. Southern governors make annual pilgrimages to the North to beg Northern industries to come down South and take advantage of our cheap labor supply. In addition to taking advantage of this labor supply, Northern industrialists have also been taking advantage of our environment. The Shreveport (LA) Times, April 12, 1990, page 12A, carried a news report of a recent study of the environment.
The report concludes that the South has become America’s cesspool!
An economy in ruins, a second-class economic status, the transformation of a people from self-sufficiency to dependency, the lowest personal income in America, the irreplaceable loss of our virgin forest, and the pollution of our environment. These effects and more have been the direct result of (1) Yankee conquest and (2) the inability of Southerners to control our economic destiny. We fail to see how losing our war for independence has made the Southern people “better off”; yet, duped Southerners still dutifully parrot this Yankee myth.
YANKEE MYTH
General Lee was a Reluctant Southern Nationalist
It is rather amusing for Southerners to observe the workings of the Yankee myth-makers as they dutifully ignore those parts of history that show the Yankees in their true light as aggressive, unprincipled invaders. They then invent facts about themselves and thereby create mythical heroes such as “Honest Abe.” Even though the Yankee myth-makers have a virtual monopoly in the press, in politics, and in academia, they still have not been able to create a Yankee hero equal to our Gen. Robert E. Lee!
The Yankee myth-makers realized early that even they were no match for General Lee. They could not destroy our faith in him and they knew they could not ignore him. So they have attempted to enlist General Lee to their side by way of inference, implication, and the tacit advancement of falsehoods that Lee reluctantly joined the South and then accepted defeat so graciously because he knew that the South’s defeat saved the Union. It is unfortunate, but amusing, that the Yankee myth-makers have had better luck in their efforts to illicitly enlist General Lee to their cause than they have had at creating their own hero!
The South Was Right Page 4