Special to the Mirror by Charles Landis
In the center of a small town in North Carolina is a monument to the Granville Grays, a company of Confederate soldiers from Granville County who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. My grandfather (1833-1892) was the captain and they engaged in many battles throughout the War.
He was a very prosperous merchant and, like most in the South, did not own a plantation or slaves. Being of Mennonite heritage, like Quakers, he did not believe in slavery or war. Like General Robert E. Lee, he did not want secession and would only fight for the Confederacy if invaded. He died before I was born but my grandmother, born in 1852, lived until 1947. While a child of 10-12 years of age, I can recall her belief the War was considered an invasion. The needless destruction of property of innocent civilians, including her home, by the Union Army, she could never forget or forgive. Aunts, who were born in the 1880s, lived until the 1980’s, were lifelong Democrats, and could never forgive or forget the Union invasion or what the Republicans did during Reconstruction.
The monument honoring these Confederate soldiers honors their bravery and sacrifice against invaders, not in defense of slavery. And so, I believe, is the reason for other Confederate monuments such as in Parksley and Eastville. Would anyone expect a monument to General Sherman in Georgia?
The accomplishments of Abel Upshur as Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of State, I argue, make him the most important person in Eastern Shore history. He was also Virginia’s architect of nullification and secession. Should his portrait hanging in the hallway of Ker Place be burned and, as well, his writings on meaning of the Constitution, which were required reading for a generation of law students at University of Virginia and William and Mary?
Henry Wise is considered by historians as the most important political figure in Virginia in quarter century leading up to the Civil War and he precipitated Virginia’s secession. Should his exhibit at Kerr Place be taken down?
The Revolutionary War hero, John Cropper, spent forty years and much of his wealth in the cause of independence. He left George Washington on the battlefield to return to the Eastern Shore to defend against the British pillaging property and setting slaves free. Should his exhibit at Ker Place also be destroyed because of his defense of slavery?
Charles A. Landis
Onancock
Paul Plante says
No to all your questions posed above.
Why should our collective history as a nation be erased to appease a small handful of people who don’t like that history, and want to replace it with something else, instead?
Why should our collective history be hidden from us?
Who benefits when history, especially the bad parts, of which American history is chock full, is hidden away in a dark closet somewhere?
Anyone who has bothered to get over themselves and their out-of-control emotions and passions to actually study the Civil War, or War of the Rebellion as it is called here to the north of you, or War of Northern Aggression, which from a historical perspective, it actually was, as it is known here in the south, knows that the seeds for that war were planted long before, at least back to the Revolution, when the 13 colonies broke with England and became, each of them, a free and independent state or nation.
Said another way, at the time of the break-away from England in 1776, the Commonwealth of Virginia was an independent nation on the face of the earth just as France or England or Russia were independent nations.
The Articles of Confederation came much later, and in no way stripped Virginia, or any of the other states of their sovereignty.
According to information found in the VA Genealogical Society Quarterly – volume XXIII – number 1 (01-Feb-1985), Ancestry.com March 11, 2002, the Oath of Allegiance in Virginia in 1777, when Virginia was a free and independent state read as follows:
May 1777. Whereas allegiance and protection are reciprocal, and those who will not bear the former are not entitled to the benefits of the latter.
Therefore Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that all free born male inhabitants of this state, above the age of sixteen years, except imported servants during the time of their service, shall, on or before the tenth day of October next, take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation before some one of the of the justices of the peace of the county, city, or borough where they shall respectively inhabit; and the said justices shall give a certificate thereof to every such person, and the said oath or affirmation shall be as followeth, viz,
‘I do swear or affirm that I renounce and refuse all allegiance to George the third, King of Great Britain, his heirs and successors, and that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the commonwealth of Virginia, as a free and independent state, and that I will not, at any time, do, or cause to be done, any matter or thing that will be prejudicial or injurious to the freedom and independence thereof, as declared by congress; and also, that I will discover and make known to some one justice of the peace for the said state, all treasons or traiterous conspiracies which I now or hereafter shall know to be formed against this or any of the United States of America.’
And be it further enacted, That the justice of the peace before whom such or oath or affirmation shall be subscribed shall keep fair registers of the names of the persons so sworn… and shall on or before the first day of January . . . transmit in writing . . . to the clerk of court of the county a true list of the names.
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There really is where the Civil War some years later started, with that oath and what it meant to those who were then called Virginians, and it was a matter of a belief system hotly debated so many years later in 1787, when it was clear to everyone then in America that the Articles of Confederation were absolutely worthless once there was no longer a common external enemy like England to fight.
Consider an Address to the People of the United States by Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia in January of 1787:
There are two errors or prejudices on the subject of government in America, which lead to the most dangerous consequences.
It is often said, that “the sovereign and all other power is seated in the people.”
This idea is unhappily expressed.
It should be—”all the power is derived from the people.”
They possess it only on the days of their elections.
After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can they exercise or resume it, unless it is abused.
It is of importance to circulate this idea, as it leads to order and good government.
The people of America have mistaken the meaning of the word sovereignty: hence each state pretends to be sovereign.
In Europe, it is applied only to those states which possess the power of making war and peace—of forming treaties, and the like.
As this power belongs only to congress, they are the only sovereign power in the united states.
We commit a similar mistake in our ideas of the word independent.
No individual state, as such, has any claim to independence.
She is independent only in a union with her sister states in congress.
end quote
There in 1787 is the northern sentiment being expressed by Benjamin Rush that was to be contested during the Civil War, and slavery was but a part of that equation, as has been said many times, many Southerners did not own slaves, yet fought for the right of their state to be what it was at the time of separation from England – free and independent.
Was Benjamin Rush expressing merely an opinion in 1787 when he stated “No individual state has any claim to independence?”
Or was he expressing some kind of factual law on the subject?
Personally, having read historical documents from the archives of the “government” of the state of New York from that period of time that Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia likely had no access to, I believe that historically he is dead wrong, which puts me over on the side of a legal argument with Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson, whose military prowess and the exploits of his foot cavalry which was able to whip the Union troops up and down the Shenandoah Valley have been studied by military men since then, and have saved American lives in combat on layer times. but that is another story for another day.
At about the same time in 1787 that Benjamin Rush was expressing his opinions on the subject of the relationships of the states with each other, in FEDERALIST No. 13 for the Independent Journal by Alexander Hamilton, he informed us as follows as to the relations of the “states” at that time as he understood them, which is not the same as Rush understood them:
To the People of the State of New York:
The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates.
The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies—one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States.
The supposition that each confederacy into which the States would be likely to be divided would require a government not less comprehensive than the one proposed, will be strengthened by another supposition, more probable than that which presents us with three confederacies as the alternative to a general Union.
If we attend carefully to geographical and commercial considerations, in conjunction with the habits and prejudices of the different States, we shall be led to conclude that in case of disunion they will most naturally league themselves under two governments.
The four Eastern States, from all the causes that form the links of national sympathy and connection, may with certainty be expected to unite.
New York, situated as she is, would never be unwise enough to oppose a feeble and unsupported flank to the weight of that confederacy.
There are other obvious reasons that would facilitate her accession to it.
New Jersey is too small a State to think of being a frontier, in opposition to this still more powerful combination; nor do there appear to be any obstacles to her admission into it.
Even Pennsylvania would have strong inducements to join the Northern league.
An active foreign commerce, on the basis of her own navigation, is her true policy, and coincides with the opinions and dispositions of her citizens.
The more Southern States, from various circumstances, may not think themselves much interested in the encouragement of navigation.
They may prefer a system which would give unlimited scope to all nations to be the carriers as well as the purchasers of their commodities.
Pennsylvania may not choose to confound her interests in a connection so adverse to her policy.
As she must at all events be a frontier, she may deem it most consistent with her safety to have her exposed side turned towards the weaker power of the Southern, rather than towards the stronger power of the Northern, Confederacy.
This would give her the fairest chance to avoid being the Flanders of America.
Whatever may be the determination of Pennsylvania, if the Northern Confederacy includes New Jersey, there is no likelihood of more than one confederacy to the south of that State.
end quotes
There in 1787, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, who should know more about what was going on then in America better than anyone today who was not alive back then, is where the seeds for what became the CSA, or Confederate States of America, were first sown.
And notice there is no mention of slavery made there.
That history, which used to be required knowledge of schoolchildren up here where I am goes on and on, in first person accounts, and it was a history we were supposed to know, so we wouldn’t be so stupid as to repeat it.
And all those statues and all those battlefields are a part of that history, whether anyone likes that or not.
Leave the statues up!
And if any enduring symbol of the Civil War era needs to be torn down, make it the Democrat party, because according to our history, the one that happened, not the one being invented, without the Democrat party, there would not have been slavery, and there would not have been a Confederacy for the north to invade and do battle with over the question of the right of a state to secede from a union no longer giving benefit to it, as the colonies had done when they separated ties with England in 1776, and there would not have been a civil war, because there would have been nothing to divide us.
When that is done, perhaps we can finally have some peace return to this land and I for, one will very much welcome it.
Paul Plante says
With respect to what can be called the wanton destruction of the south, which it was, speaking as a Viet Nam combat veteran who was part of the American “violence campaign” against the civilian population of Viet Nam, to punish them for being Vietnamese, it must be remembered that Lincoln had declared total war against the south to bring them into submission.
Fire and steel to break the will of the south to fight.
It is psychology – if you are a soldier fighting somewhere, and you realize your wife and family and all you own are going to be burned and destroyed, what does that do to your morale?
During the Revolution, at least in New York., if a woman’s husband went to fight for the British, she might find her house pulled down and all her belongings destroyed, and the land confiscated, and then she would have to “remove” herself to enemy lines, either Canada or New York City, at her own expense.
That is why we aren’t supposed to be stupid enough to have wars in this country, because it is the women and children who wars end up being waged against, and don’t anyone kid themselves that they aren’t.
And the irony of the situation with regard to people like Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson defending the state they were citizens of and loyal to against the federal government can be found in FEDERALIST No. 28 for the Independent Journal by Alexander Hamilton, who incidentally was an aide to George Washington during the Revolution, so he wasn’t just some rear echelon pogue in that affair, as follows:
To the People of the State of New York:
THAT there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force, cannot be denied.
Our own experience has corroborated the lessons taught by the examples of other nations; that emergencies of this sort will sometimes arise in all societies, however constituted; that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government), has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.
Should such emergencies at any time happen under the national government, there could be no remedy but force.
The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.
If it should be a slight commotion in a small part of a State, the militia of the residue would be adequate to its suppression; and the national presumption is that they would be ready to do their duty.
An insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government.
Regard to the public peace, if not to the rights of the Union, would engage the citizens to whom the contagion had not communicated itself to oppose the insurgents; and if the general government should be found in practice conducive to the prosperity and felicity of the people, it were irrational to believe that they would be disinclined to its support.
If, on the contrary, the insurrection should pervade a whole State, or a principal part of it, the employment of a different kind of force might become unavoidable.
end quote
There, of course, is the rationale Mr. Lincoln in the White House relied on when he ordered the destruction of the south.
As to Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson, FEDERALIST No. 28 continued as follows:
If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state.
The obstacles to usurpation and the facilities of resistance increase with the increased extent of the state, provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.
The natural strength of the people in a large community, in proportion to the artificial strength of the government, is greater than in a small, and of course more competent to a struggle with the attempts of the government to establish a tyranny.
But in a confederacy the people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate.
Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government.
It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.
Projects of usurpation cannot be masked under pretenses so likely to escape the penetration of select bodies of men, as of the people at large.
The legislatures will have better means of information.
They can discover the danger at a distance; and possessing all the organs of civil power, and the confidence of the people, they can at once adopt a regular plan of opposition, in which they can combine all the resources of the community.
They can readily communicate with each other in the different States, and unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty.
The great extent of the country is a further security.
We have already experienced its utility against the attacks of a foreign power.
And it would have precisely the same effect against the enterprises of ambitious rulers in the national councils.
When will the time arrive that the federal government can raise and maintain an army capable of erecting a despotism over the great body of the people of an immense empire, who are in a situation, through the medium of their State governments, to take measures for their own defense, with all the celerity, regularity, and system of independent nations?
end quote
So, were Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson, through their state government, taking measures for their own defense, with all the celerity, regularity, and system of independent nations because the federal government was raising an army capable of erecting a despotism over the great body of the people of the south?
Who of us today can truthfully answer that question, I wonder, in the light of Hamilton’s words to the people of the State of New York in FEDERALIST No. 28?
And if we can’t, then who are we to hold Bobby Lee guilty of anything but loyalty?