The South Was Right

by James Ronald Kennedy

  We have established that the original form of the American government, a government formed by the free and voluntary association of equal states, was changed by the dominant Northern element into a centralistic federal government, formed by armed aggression, criminal fraud, and political coercion. This, and the continuing train of abuses suffered by the Southern people at the hands of the federal government, is enough to brand the federal government as an illegitimate governmental force. The present federal government does not rule by the consent of the Southern people. The present federal government dictates its governing policy toward the Southern people; it does not govern with the free and unfettered consent of the Southern people. Its claim to the right to govern is based upon the right of conquest—a right that Southern Nationalists reject!

  REFLECTING ON THE PAST AND VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

  The historical facts that have been reviewed stand as a continuing indictment of the Northern Congress. And the facts represent much more. The facts stand as a continuing indictment of the Northern-controlled Supreme Court, an arrogant tribunal that refused attempts to grant a review of the legitimacy of the Reconstruction acts and amendments. While on the one hand the court has refused to review these frauds, it has on the other hand been very willing to apply them as the legal excuse for its aggressive and punitive decisions, court orders, and edicts.

  The current Northern-controlled federal government was established by fraud, corruption, political coercion, and blatant military aggression. Its continuing existence depends upon maintaining the myth that these crimes against the Southern people never occurred and that the present system is legitimate. The creation of the Northern-controlled government was marked by the death of thousands of Southerners and by the deliberate extinction of a culture and a way of life. Even more importantly, it is marked by the demise of the spirit and letter of our Original Constitution and of the original and legitimate government of our country—the constitutional republic called the United States of America!

  Many observers of the American political system freely admit that there is a major difference between the federal system as originally established and the system which operates today. Yet few have ever stopped to analyze why this change has occurred and what it means to the people of the South. A radical change occurred in the philosophical foundation of the American government. The idea that governmental authority resides with the people, making up the sovereign community, was displaced with the new reality of an all-powerful central government having dominant authority over the people of the states. The Constitution was changed from an instrument limiting the power of the federal government to an instrument allowing the federal government to review every action of its now inferior appendages, the states. The destruction of the Original Constitutional Republic brought about the end of constitutional protection of the rights and liberties of the Southern people in particular and of all Americans in general.

  The Southern people today know very well the dangerous tendencies of a government to abuse its powers and to oppress its subjects. In addition to the Original Constitutional Republic, something else passed away—a legitimate federal government, a government that ruled by the consent of the governed. The legal right of the federal government to govern the Southern people lost the justification for its very existence.

  The people of the South do indeed have a right to be free. It is an innate right, a birthright that existed before the establishment of government itself. The people of the Southern states comprise a sovereign community in each state. This and this alone is the repository of legitimate authority. A thousand Appomattoxes or a thousand Gulags can never negate the right of a sovereign people to be free!

  The Northern-controlled federal government has never renounced its numerous crimes against the Southern people. It would be foolish indeed for us Southerners to cling to the delusion that we are a free people. To do so would require us to continue to ignore our history, to make a mockery of justice, and to deny the natural right of individual liberty. It would mark this age as a generation of foolish cowards. Our children would grow up to hate us, knowing that for a small effort, infused with courage, we could have saved our Southern nation and made them free!

  Yes, the Southern people by right and of necessity ought to be free. The belligerent and aggressive attitude of the federal government, both past and present, demonstrates this truth. Refusal to yield to the will of the sovereign community, coercion, military aggression, innumerable acts of crime, fraud and corruption—all of these and more stand as testimony that the present federal government is an illegal and illegitimate governmental force. Therefore, the federal government has negated its right to govern the Southern people and has by its own action released them from the obligation to maintain allegiance to such an oppressive despotism. This allegiance must now be withdrawn to the respective states. Southerners must look forward to the establishment of a new constitutional government in the United States, or failing that, to the establishment of the second Constitutional Republic within the borders of their common homeland, the South!

  William W. Church, Company C, Fifty-Third Alabama Volunteer Infantry. Church’s unit served as mounted infantry during part of his service. (Image courtesy of Betty C. Kennedy, Simsboro, Louisiana)

  CHAPTER 7

  John Milton: The Father of Secession

  The South possesses an inheritance which it has imperfectly understood and little used. It is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness.1

  Richard M. Weaver

  INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

  Richard Weaver noted that the post-war/Reconstruction South made two critical mistakes. First, it failed to study its position until it could defend its philosophical logic or reason for being. It needed a Burke or a Hegel, but all it produced were lawyers and journalists. When the average Southerner was forced to defend his region he would become frustrated and explode in anger.

  The second mistake was that due to its first failure (i.e., the lack of a philosophical or even revolutionary justification for its existence) the South refused to go on the offensive. The sum total of its efforts was to defend and compromise.

  The South was transformed from the fighting South into the hesitant and pacified South. It took the decision of Appomattox too literally. This cast a dark cloud over any efforts or dreams of taking the offensive and regaining its lost estate.

  In the next section we will demonstrate the depth and richness of our Southern political philosophy. Our belief in limited government, reserved and delegated rights, and the right to recall delegated powers was not something thought up down South to protect slavery. It has deep historical roots—roots that nourished a beautiful tree of liberty in the South—until the arrival of the drunken Yankee woodsman.

  John Milton: The Father of Secession

  The political philosophy that would lead to Southern secession was first advocated by John Milton. Although he is best known for his literary works such as Paradise Lost, his political works were destined to have an impact on political thought equal to or even greater than his literary achievements.

  Early in the seventeenth century, England was beginning to groan under the forces of change. The English Church had renounced the authority of Rome and purists were attempting to rid the English Church of the last vestige of Romanism. The king, James I, had alienated the Puritans by his threats at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604.2 Turning from religion to politics, he lectured Parliament on the divine right of kings. The Commons replied in their 1604 apology, “The voice of the people, in the things of their knowledge, is said to be as the voice of God.”3 It was an era of tumultuous change.

  In 1638, John Milton visited Galileo in Florence. Galileo’s work on planetary motion placed him in the forefront of the scientific revolution and on a collision course with the Roman Church. Even though he was forced to recant his theory that the earth orbited the sun, he ended his recantation with these words, �
�eppur si muove” (and yet it moves). Milton’s visit with this man who was willing to challenge accepted authority and present new and bold ideas served as the prelude to his political writings.

  John Milton’s political philosophy is revolutionary because he presents radically different ideas (under appropriate conditions extreme measures may be necessary) and openly challenges accepted authority. His advocacy of civil liberty establishes him as the first major English libertarian, a classical liberal a hundred years before his time. Milton’s work prepared the way for the writings of subsequent men who are more popularly quoted by modern historians.

  John Milton’s political writings established the foundation upon which Southern political thought was built. The political concepts advocated by him have been reaffirmed by subsequent generations in England and by the American South up to the 1870s.

  THE ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT

  Anthropologists inform us that the early form of order in human society was based upon kinship. As the need to control more land and people increased, the kinship system was extended into an enlarged and formal system of government.4

  Milton was one of the first English political philosophers to address the question of the origin of government. In The Real and Easy Way he asserted that the law of nature is man’s first principle in his relation to government.5 In Book XII of Paradise Lost the archangel Michael explained to Adam that man would at first be ruled by kinship groups. The change from kinship groups would result from the evil then within man.6 At first, kings would be appointed or elected by the people. The idea that all men were born free was a bold assertion to make in the age of absolute monarchy. Milton based his belief in the natural freedom of man upon the biblical account of man’s creation in the image of God as a free moral agent.7

  The English philosopher John Locke was born in 1632. Locke became the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution. This revolt removed the Catholic, James II, and placed William and Mary on the English throne. Locke reaffirmed Milton’s attack on the divine right of kings by publishing his First Treatise on Government followed by the Second Treatise on Government.8 In the Second Treatise he again borrowed from Milton by depicting man originally in a state of nature bound by nature’s laws.9

  In 1760 a young Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, entered William and Mary College. This young Southerner was to draw from Milton’s political ideas to formulate a Southern political philosophy. In the first line of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson boldly proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” Compare those words to the first lines of Milton’s Tenure, “… proving that it is lawful and hath been held so through all ages …” Here we see Milton’s shadow touching the very document announcing the birth of the American Republic! Jefferson goes on to assert that “all men are created equal.” Recall Milton’s words, “No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.”10 Thomas Jefferson echoed Milton’s own words. We can see how the ideas championed by Milton influenced Southerners from the earliest days of the republic.

  John C. Calhoun was also influenced by Milton’s ideas. Calhoun maintained that due to the evil within man, God had ordained man to live under some form of government.11 This idea runs parallel to lines eighty-three through ninety-three, Book XII of Paradise Lost. Calhoun expanded Milton’s natural law12 into the concept of the sovereign communities.13 The people of the states represented to Calhoun the natural repository of all natural laws from which government gained legitimacy.

  The men who followed Milton took the ideas he had already advocated and adapted them to a new age. While the men and times changed, Milton’s principles regarding the origin of government remained useful and influential with each succeeding generation.

  THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION

  Milton’s purpose in writing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was to prove that it is and always has been lawful to overthrow and even put to death a wicked king. He replaced the traditional concept of divine right of kings with his own adaptation of natural law. He used Roman history to support the concept that a bad king should be removed, quoting the Roman emperor Trajan, “Take this drawn sword to use for me if I reign well; if not, to use against me.”14 Milton envisioned the act of revolt as an act of popular self-defense; and if an individual’s act of self-defense is lawful, so then is the mutual self-defense of an entire people who rise up in revolt.15

  Milton established for the English-speaking people the right to revolt against tyranny. Years later Locke asserted that when rulers do not abide by the law of reason and attempt to oppress the natural rights of the people then a state of war exists. At this point the people resume their natural rights, that is they withdraw their delegated rights and make an appeal to the God of battle.16

  When Thomas Jefferson wanted to justify the secession of the American colonies from the established English government, he looked to the philosophy of Locke and Milton. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson described a large number of abuses of power by the king against the American people. These abuses were not given as the reason for the secession but stood as evidence that the king had violated the natural rights of Americans. “These truths” were not creatures of Jefferson’s mind but were political ideas already established by Locke and earlier by Milton.

  In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson proclaims the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that encroaches upon certain inalienable God-given rights. In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton shows that man is created a free moral agent in the image of God. Here again we can see another parallel in Jefferson’s ideas and Milton’s works. Jefferson champions the right to set up new government just as Milton justified the changing of government in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, The Second Defense, and others.

  THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED

  The most striking example of Milton’s influence on Southern political thought can be seen by tracing the political theory of the “consent of the governed.” Milton stated that kings were exalted to their high place with the consent of the people.17 Therefore, the legitimacy of any government is based upon the consent of the people. John Locke followed this same theme by asserting that government is freely created by the people to protect their rights and that it derives its power from the consent of the people.18 Compare this to the very familiar words of Jefferson:

  … governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  But what of the right of the people to withdraw their consent from an existing government (i.e., to secede)? In Tenure, Milton explains that one of the conditions for a people to consent to be ruled is to bind the king with oaths to do “impartial justice by law.” If the king failed to abide by his oath, “the people would be disengaged.”19 Milton believed that the power exercised by kings “was and is” the people’s and that those powers are in the form of a conditional grant. If such powers are used unjustly, the people retain the right to “resume” them. This right to resume delegated powers is a clear and early declaration of the people’s right to secede from an oppressive government.20

  In its resolution ratifying the United States Constitution, Jefferson’s native state of Virginia placed this condition upon her consent to the new government:

  The powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them, whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.21

  The same argument was penned by Jefferson in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Milton’s own words could have been substituted:

  The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust, the right remaining in [the people] to reassume it to themselves, if by kings or magistrates it be abused.22

  John C. Calhoun defended the South’s right to withdraw her consent from an oppressive government based upon the works of Jefferson
. He attacked the intrusion upon State’s Rights on constitutional grounds, declaring:

  The Constitution has admitted the jurisdiction of the United States within the limits of the several states only so far as the delegated powers authorize; beyond that they are intruders, and may rightfully be expelled.23

  Calhoun believed that:

  All powers granted by the Constitution are derived from the people of the United States; and may be resumed by them when perverted to their injury or oppression; and that every power not granted, remains with them, and at their will; and that no right of any description can be canceled, abridged, restrained, or modified by Congress, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the President, or any department or office of the United States.24

  Calhoun could have just as easily quoted Milton:

  Thus far hath been considered briefly the power of kings and magistrates, how it was and is originally the people’s, and by them conferred in trust only to be employed to the common peace and benefit; with liberty therefore and right remaining in them to reassume it to themselves, if by kings or magistrates it be abused, or to dispose of it by any alteration as they shall judge most conducing to the public good.25

  Calhoun also believed that: