Pat Cleburne Could See It Coming

by Al Benson Jr.

Lately I have been going through my library and checking out books I have not read in 15-20 years and reading some of them to see if I might find more insights in some of them now than I did then.

One I recently did this with was Lee’s Last Campaign by Clifford Dowdey in which Mr. Dowdey dealt at  great length with General Lee’s campaign in the Wilderness and surrounding areas in 1864. I am glad I went through it. This time it gave me a much better understanding of what Lee had to put up with and how well he really did in that campaign–much better than the “historians” give him credit for.

Another one I have just reread is Stonewall of the West–Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds. Pat Cleburne was an interesting personality, and I mean that in a positive sense. He was killed in the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee in November, 1864 because John Bell Hood was so anxious to attack the Yankees in Franklin that he couldn’t resist a frontal assault across open ground which, basically, destroyed his army. I’ve been to Franklin to see the site of the battle.

Hood lost a lot of his officers in that foolish attempt, and I say foolish because the very next day the Yankees pulled out of Franklin and moved up to Nashville. Hood didn’t need to destroy his army attacking Franklin–the Yankees were on the way out anyway. To all intents and purposes his army, the Army of Tennessee, was finished after that battle.

Five officers killed in that battle were laid out on the porch at the Carnton Plantation house after the battle and one of them was General Pat Cleburne. Pat Cleburne had come to Arkansas as a Protestant Irish immigrant, made his home there and when the War of Northern Aggression started he joined up to fight for the Confederacy. I can understand that, the South was his home and the Southern folks sort of adopted him, somewhat the way they have my wife and I.

Pat Cleburne was no dummy and he early realized what would happen if the South lost the War. At one point he spelled it out quite plainly. He said that, if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education in regard to our gallant debt as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” Cleburne was downright prescient in his prediction. This is exactly what has happened. Southern children have been taught Yankee/Marxist “history” and we sit back in incredulity and wonder what happened to the kids because they seem to think great granddaddy was a racist traitor for fighting for the Confederacy.

I grew up in the North and my wife and I either had our kids in Christian schools or home schooled them. They never set foot in a public school for “education” since day one. Having lived through part of the Textbook Protest in Kanawha County, West Virginia back in the 1970s we were well aware of where the public schools were coming from and we didn’t want our kids absorbing what passed for education in them.

Back in July of 2015 I read an excellent article by Pastor Chuck Baldwin entitled The Confederate Flag Needs To Be Raised, Not Lowered. He wrote it soon after what many believe to be a false flag event in Charleston that became a rallying point for the cultural Marxist campaign to erase Confederate flags and symbols from all over the South–a campaign that is not over by a long shot. It has spawned everything from ethnic cleansing campaigns to frantic new efforts at gun control and the cultural Marxists continue to try to destroy as much of our culture as they can. For awhile we resisted. There were Confederate flag rallies and new Confederate flags being put up all over the South. Now, in the main, we seem to have gone back to sleep again as the cultural Marxists gird their loins for a new assault this year.

They have the state flag of Mississippi in their sights early this year and so there needs to be a strong effort put forth to resist that attempt. Just remember, with the cultural Marxists, cultural Marxism is still Marxism and that’s another thing most of our kids have not learned the truth about in school. We here in the South at this point don’t know our history. If we did we would never stand still for our kids saying a pledge of allegiance that has the line “one nation indivisible” in it. This was a “pledge” written by a defrocked socialist minister in Massachusetts in 1892–exactly one generation after the Southern states lawfully seceded in 1860-61. It was an open slap in the face at those in the South that had fought for the Confederacy. And their children were to be taught that their fathers had been traitors and that they were, heretofore, to be ashamed of them. Folks, this is ethnic cleansing and it still goes on in the South today, if anything with more intensity than it did fifty years ago. Pat Cleburn’s prediction has been fulfilled, more’s the pity!

So what to do? Getting your kids out of public school would be a major step in the right direction for those that can manage it.  Home schooling does not have to be all that expensive nowadays. There are lots of home school programs out there. All you have to do is start looking.

You need to start teaching your kids accurate history. This is an area most home school people just kind of pass over and they take whatever passes for history in whatever curriculum they get. Mistake!!! Look around for your history material. I did an article on this a couple years ago, I think on my other blog spot where I listed some of the history material I had found.  If anyone is interested in this information I will try to hunt it up and post some of it here.

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