Lately, a lot of emotion has been spent over Confederate monuments in the Tar Heel state.

Silent Sam, the statue on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was gleefully pulled from its pedestal by a mob, August 20th. Former alumni, as well as citizens across the state, were outraged at the lawless act and the justifications given for it.

Two days later, August 23rd, the North Carolina Historical Commission rejected Governor Roy Cooper’s request to relocate three Confederate monuments on state Capitol grounds. The Commission opted instead to provide contextualization signage and raise funds for constructing and erecting African-American monuments. Continue reading →

Some of you may get angry at me for what I am about to say. Some of you may feel insulted. I don’t care; if I did, I wouldn’t say it. If you have either reaction and decide, because of your reaction, not to finish reading this article, understand that you will only be proving what I say to be true.

Those of you who participate in, or support, the “removal” of Confederate Monuments because you believe them to be monuments to “white supremacists” are ignorant, uneducated, indoctrinated fools. Now, you can prove me right, and remain ignorant, uneducated, indoctrinated fools, or you can finish reading this article and possibly break free of those chains. By all means, feel free to check my facts, you might learn something. Continue reading →

August 20, 2018 ~ Language is the tool we use to communicate ideas to others, but to some there are words and phrases that garner a negative emotional reaction when spoken by others. Racial slurs and excessive use of profanity are among the category of language that illicit a negative emotional response from those hearing them. Yet there are two words, when spoken by themselves are innocent enough, but when combined illicit a predominantly negative response from those hearing them; those words being civil and war. Put those words together, as in Civil War, and the minds of most Americans immediately think of racism and slavery, when the truth is that the actual conflict was not about those things at all. Continue reading →

June 11, 2017 ~ Monuments honoring heroes of the Confederate States of America, American heroes in fact, are being removed from the public square, due to a successful presentation of oversimplified arguments and lies by the same progressive Leftist Democratic apparatus that seeks to fundamentally transform America. These assaults on the Southern heritage by politically correct propagandists and arrogant activist ideologues are assaults on our American culture and heritage, or “AmeriKKKa” as the Left calls America; and, it is nothing short of a cultural cleansing campaign, a purging of the truth and history and a national disgrace. (Source)

In 2015, the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP called for the destruction of the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument, that honors Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and General Stonewall Jackson. They wanted the nearly 2000 square feet and 12 feet deep carving “sandblasted away”. Continue reading →

CLAUDE FREDERIC BASTIAT was a French economist, legislator, and writer who championed private property, free markets, and limited government. Perhaps the main underlying theme of Bastiat’s writings was that the free market was inherently a source of “economic harmony” among individuals, as long as government was restricted to the function of protecting the lives, liberties, and property of citizens from theft or aggression. To Bastiat, governmental coercion was only legitimate if it served “to guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all.”

Bastiat emphasized the plan-coordination function of the free market, a major theme of the Austrian School, because his thinking was influenced by some of Adam Smith’s writings and by the great French free-market economists Jean-Baptiste Say, Francois Quesnay, Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte, Richard Cantillon (who was born in Ireland and emigrated to France), and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. These French economists were among the precursors to the modern Austrian School, having first developed such concepts as the market as a dynamic, rivalrous process, the free-market evolution of money, subjective value theory, the laws of diminishing marginal utility and marginal returns, the marginal productivity theory of resource pricing, and the futility of price controls in particular and of the government’s economic interventionism in general. Continue reading →

I am the Confederate Battle Flag. My design is based upon the Saint Andrew’s Cross of Scotland. Some prefer to call me the “Rebel Flag”. Either name I will wear with honor. There is certainly no shame in being called Confederate, as the people who bore that same honorable title are remembered for their bravery on the field of battle, a Southern culture built upon hard work, and faith in God. As for the name “Rebel”, it was the Revolutionary War soldier and outstanding pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, in his series “The American Crisis“, said: “Let them call me Rebel and welcome — I feel no concern from it“. Because you see, it was George Washington and his Colonial Army who were the original Rebels. My boys in gray were the second to wear the name. Continue reading →

Thomas Sowell has published numerous books, as well as numerous articles and essays, covering a wide range of topics.

Sowell has taught Economics at Howard University, Cornell University, Brandeis University, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman. He retired in January of 2017.

February 26, 2012 ~ April 12, 2011 marked the 150th anniversary of the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. This launched our Civil War, which would kill more than 600,000 on the two sides. More than half the deaths resulted from disease. The death rate was higher in the Confederate States due to more primitive medical care. The war devastated the economy of the South for decades. Political and emotional wounds from the conflict continue to fester.

As this grim anniversary approaches, some commemorations have been launched that portray the Civil War as solely about states’ rights. Last year, secession balls were held in some Southern states to celebrate the splitting of the union. The Civil War was about slavery, the greatest moral blot on our nation’s history. Continue reading →

The martial banner first used by Brig. General Christopher Gadsden (1724-1805) and the 1st South Carolina Regiment during the First War for Independence, 1775-1783.

Gadsden was a successful and influential Charleston, South Carolina businessman and Statesman. He was an early advocate of Independence and engaged in the creation of the South Carolina Constitution. Elected Governor in 1782 he refused to serve on ground of ill health but remained actively involved in State affairs opposing States consolidation. Continue reading →

The African Slave Trade ~ Profits and Prosperity

The Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and other anti-slavery journals in this city are discharging themselves of such a mass of special and minute information about the movements of slavers, and the activity of the slave trade in New York, New London, New Bedford and Boston, that it seems highly probable they are stockholders or secret agents in the business.

These ports, in which the slavers are fitted out belong to the most rabid anti-slavery States, and there can be no doubt that the vessels are the property of the Republicans in those several places. The profits of the trade are so great that they can well afford to contribute a hundred thousand dollars or more towards the election of an anti-slavery President [Lincoln]. From lists published a short time ago In the Post and Tribune, it appeared that eighty-six* slavers had Sailed from this port and the other ports we have mentioned, and from other cases since reported, the number cannot be now far short of one hundred sail. The net proceeds on a cargo of five hundred slaves are at the lowest estimate $100,000, which is only an average profit of $200 per head. The sum of the profits of the “blackbird fleet” at one hundred vessels would therefore amount to ten millions of dollars, and this estimate makes an allowance of five million for expenses and losses.

From facts and figures it is evident that it is a most profitable, prosperous business, and accordingly we are informed by the Post that steamships are about to give new activity to the traffic, and that they will be packed with some 3,000 negroes, whose aggregate prices would sum up about a million of dollars. One instance is mentioned by both our anti-slavery contemporaries, of 450 negroes being landed on the 30th of June from an American bark, and sold publicly in the streets of Trinidad at an average of $650 each. The gross proceeds of this cargo would be $292,500, which, for one hundred “blackbirds.” Would amount to upwards of twenty-nine millions of dollars, leaving a clear profit of from twenty to twenty-five million. It is added, in the Post, that the Governor of Trinidad received in this transaction $30,000 hush money.

Now, it may be fairly asked, how those who are not implicated or interested in the trade themselves can be so well posted in this matter of bribery, or make up the lists of slavers which have appeared in their journals? How can they be so minutely informed of the names of the vessels, their captains, the ports from which they have sailed, the number of slaves they land, the prices received for them, and the “hush money” to corrupt Governors, unless they are secret partners in the trade? If they are possessed of all this information, they must have known of the fitting out of every vessel before she sailed. Why did they not give information to the authorities before the bird had flown, unless they had an interest in concealing her flight till it was too late. Once these ships bare made their voyages and landed their cargoes, and the owners have realized fortunes, they or their agents may then inform the public that such operations were made, the legal evidence against those concerned being no longer in existence.

They can thus afford to be severe in their denunciations of the slave traffic, and call it “infernal,” having the prices of the Africans in their pockets, or snugly deposited to their credit in banks, and they can also afford to bleed copiously for the purchase of campaign documents to secure the election of Old Abe Lincoln. Like sleek Joseph Surface, in the “School for Scandal,” who zealously preached up sentiments of morality to his wild brother Charles at the very moment that he had Sir Peter Teazle’s wife concealed for a criminal purpose in his room, the anti-slavery loaders are most enthusiastic against the slave traffic at the very time that they are enjoying its profits and doing a thriving business In human flesh.

The New York Herald, August 10, 1860, Page 4
Transcribed by Bobby Edwards, September 19, 2018

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1882. Courtesy Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

If Frederick Douglass walked today’s ghettos, he would witness a new-age style of slavery, plantations without the lash and chains. He would soon be outraged that government overseers are perpetuating generations of dependency through policies designed to capture the votes of the ignorant. Of the people he would ask, “What have you done with your freedom? Where is your dignity and self-respect?”

Frederick Douglass was born about 1818 on a Maryland plantation. Following common practice, he was taken from his mother to be raised with a brood of other children until he was old enough to work. He did not know his father. At the age of eight or nine, his master sent him to work for the Auld family in the city of Baltimore. Hugh Auld was a shipbuilder. Continue reading →

We have proven in the past, the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were the sons and grandsons of Revolutionary War citizen-soldiers, heroes, statesmen and patriots. They learned the Constitution at home by the ones who won it.

The truth is they knew exactly just what Lincoln and his ilk were up to and simply seceded the voluntary union of their grandfathers. The union was to be an umbrella, not a chain. Not a chain.

But there are so many things you don’t know because you’ve not been told. Telling you the truth is our mission, what you do with the truth we give you is yours.

The truth is, the South only wanted to be left alone. She caused no trouble when she left, she hurt no one and did no damage at all; she just left. It was never her intention to fight, even though liars, deceivers, and clever tricks made her look the aggressor. Continue reading →

The Chart attached below shows the Annualized Confederate Inflation Rate. The Annual Inflation Rates are calculated from information provided by the Richmond Civil War Centennial

Committee on the purchasing power of Confederate Notes.

The table below shows the actual Confederate Treasury Note Inflation data that was used to develop this chart. At the beginning of the war on January 1, 1861 one Confederate dollar would purchase one gold dollar. By May it took Continue reading →

Larry Elder

A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as “the white man’s religion that justified slavery.” He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. “From whom?” I asked.

Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century — centuries before the European slave trade — and continued well after. Continue reading →

I begin with this remark of the celebrated Roman historian Livy, written 2,000 years ago:

There is an exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from the study of the past. There you see, set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you can select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being mischievous in its inception and disastrous in its consequences, you should avoid.
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“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.” ~ Intruder in the Dust

~ Author ~
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American author from Oxford, Mississippi. During his career, he won a Nobel Prize, two Pulitzer prizes, and two National Book Awards. His notable works include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August.

Several days ago while doing my nightly walk through at Facebook I came across the following image… but knowing what I know regarding the War of Northern Aggression (be patient here you poor under educated children) I knew that there was more to all of it, but as I expected there WAS more – much more, and so I went on an expedition. The image at right, is accurate, but heavily edited to make a point – and a very accurate one at that, but I wanted it all and Lo and behold my students, the archives are there – in full.

Of course, one must continue to wonder, why both sides always seem to want to pick and choose how they present their respective ‘side‘ of an issue, but understand – the basis of the image – is spot on, but let us review the entire column – back when the New York Times was a respectable publication. We’ll have a few comments at the close of today’s class. – J.B.
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