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Section: 1 |
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Given that the secession was a right and that the
invasion and war was unconstitutional, Yankee myth-makers had to begin
immediate propaganda to disguise their motives and their naked
aggression. Confederate patriots were labeled "rebels" and
"traitors." The post-war abuse of Confederate States of
America President Jefferson Davis serves to illustrate the truth of the
Confederate Cause and to expose
the Yankee lies.
The commander of Andersonville POW camp, Major Henry
Wirz, was convicted in a sham trial where he was not allowed to present
key defense witnesses and the prosecution's key witness was later
identified as a deserter from the New York 7th Regiment, Felix Oeser, who
perjured himself and testified under the name, De la Baume. More on POW policies in a later section. Wirz was
convicted for the murder of two unnamed prisoners in August of 1864, at a
time when he was away from the camp on sick leave. Suffice it to say
that Major Wirz was not guilty of any war crimes. He was scheduled
for execution. On the night before his execution, a representative
of the federal government came to Wirz' cell and told Wirz that he would
be pardoned, his life would be spared, if he implicated CSA President
Jefferson Davis as being aware of and encouraging war crimes against union
prisoners. Wirz declined to lie about Davis or any other Confederate
and was hanged the next day. Wirz' minister, present
in Wirz' last hours, witnessed this brazen attempt to subborn perjury
and took Wirz' final letter to his family assuring them that he was
innocent of the charges. The minister later documented the entire
ugly affair.
CSA President Jefferson Davis was held in a
federal prison for two years without trial. He was charged with "treason"
and conspiracy in the assassination of Lincoln. The conspiracy
charge was deemed so ridiculous it was soon dropped. Davis was held
in inpregnable Fortress Monroe but to inflict cruelty, Davis was shackled in
chains and held in solitary confinement depite his poor
health.
Davis longed for his day
in court to make the case for the Confederate
Cause---to prove in a court of law that he was not
guilty of treason and that the Confederate States had the right
to secede. The best attorneys in the nation volunteered their
services pro bono. It would have been the "trial of the century" and
reporters from around the world would have been present.
The United States government realized how flimsy
their case was. There was no way they could risk a
trial.
The acquittal of Jefferson Davis would
undo the propaganda of the U.S. government and show the world that the
Confederate Cause was right.
The trial was canceled and the man Dishonest Abe called a
"traitor" was released. Denied the opportunity to clear his own name
and that of all Confederate patriots in court, Davis expressed his case in
his own two volume book
,
The Rise and Fall of the Conferate Government.
Author and syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran
had this to say about Davis's book: "It
was dry, legalistic, humorless and lacking in the stylistic felicity of a
Lincoln or a U.S. Grant...But Davis's history does have one great
merit: cogency. The hundred pages he devotes to explaining secession
can't be called light reading, but they show why the government didn't
want to let Davis have his day in court. These 15 chapters display a
profound grasp of not only the Constitution, but of the writings of the
real 'greatest generation'----of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison and Alexander Hamilton. These are works of political
philosophy that the Northern leaders, particularly Lincoln, were only
dimly aware of. If more Americans had read them, we might have been
spared the Civil War."
This writer
disagrees with Mr. Sobran on only one point. The writings of
President Lincoln demonstrate that he understood the Constitutional
principles and secession perfectly well. He merely decided that his
own purposes and political future were more important than the
Constitution.
Any fair reading
of the Founding documents coupled with a reasonable understanding
of the Founding principles of government make clear that secession
was a right retained by the states. The Southern states exercised these
rights for reasons to be discussed at length in subsequent
sections. The United States government, controlled by the sectional Republican party
of the north, for reasons primarily economic and in pursuit
of political dominance, chose to violate the spirit of the Founding principles
and to force a union at the point of a bayonet rather than to have
government whose just powers are "derived from the consent of
the governed."
In so doing, they effectively ended the Republic as
delivered to us by the Framers of the Constitution
and substituted in its stead, an empire ruled by elitists in Washington. Over
the years since, the concentration of power by the federal government
has increased exponentially. Ironically, by justifying their bloody conquest as necessary to
"preserve the union," these unscrupulous men (Lincoln's
war party) used sophistry to disguise their destruction of the Constitution and
plunder of the South, and in the process, destroyed
the Union they professed to revere.
A union by force is not a a union by consent, and as
Albert Bledsoe put it, "Conquest is substituted for
compact, and the dream of liberty is over."
The War restored the physical boundaries of the Union but not the
spirit of the Constitutional union. The South became conquered territory to
be exploited. It is the moral equivalent of the Soviets forcing Poland
and the Baltic republics to remain in
the Soviet Union or the the British forcing India or
the American colonies to remain in their empire. Tyrants can
always find an excuse for conquest.
Why was there
a war? Because Lincoln and his government chose not to
allow the southern states to leave in peace. The Southern states did
not seek conquest or overthrow of the U.S. Government but rather simply
sought to withdraw from a union they voluntarily joined---as was their
right.
Why did the
Southern states secede? These issues will be addressed
in the next sections.
The links below will lead the reader to a reasonably
comprehensive understanding of the Confederate
Cause.
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Secession in principle: Part
III
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What does the
Confederate flag represent?
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Conclusions
....under
construction
Copyright © Steve Scroggins - All rights reserved.
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