The “Civil Rights” Races

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Claude Bowers in his notable book The Tragic Era that I have mentioned in some of these articles made note of the Union League Clubs.

John Chodes, author of Segregation–Federal Policy or Racism? (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, South Carolina, noted the Union League on page 26 of that book. He said: “The Union League began as a political club in New York in 1863 to revive the sagging patriotic spirit of the Northern states during the War for Southern Independence. It’s philosophies were similar to the Radical Republicans so it fused with and became part of Republican vote-building machine for blacks in the post-war South…The Union League’s expenses were covered by the sale of confiscated white Southerners’ property, thus inciting the volunteers to harass the people in time of peace by unlawful seizure to provide the means of paying themselves. This further alienated whites from blacks.” In other words, the Union Leagues were “legal” Yankee/Marxist thieves.

Of the Union Leagues Bowers wrote: “…the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenital task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the Negro vote. Sagacious politicians…obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of (Thaddeus) Stevens and (Charles) Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the Negroes against Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs.” Again, nothing more than the classic class struggle technique employed by the communists–pit one group against another so you can manipulate both!

Bowers continued: “Left to themselves, the negroes would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who understood them best. This was the danger. Imperative then, that they should be taught to hate–and teachers of hate were plentiful. Many of them were found among the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau…devoting themselves assiduously to party organization on government time.”

Again, it is important to stress this, the Civil Rights Movement began as a political tool, to be used in furthering Northern expansionist aggression. It was, from the beginning, a movement that had to use the Marxist class struggle method of employing racial hatred to further its own ends. It was 19th century reverse racism in the truest sense of that term. And you all thought  reverse racism didn’t rear its ugly had until the mid-20th century, right? That’s what they taught most of us, but their timetable was off by about 90 years–on purpose!  When, today, we hear all this leftist propaganda about “Civil Rights” and “multiculturalism” let us be discerning enough to go back and take a look at the roots of the movement–roots sunk deep in apostate, radical abolitionism–and ask ourselves if this is the sort of tree we really wish to have growing upon our national landscape.

At the end of the War there were all manner of ex-slaves roaming all over the South. Many had no marketable skills, and therefore could not support themselves. Many of them were footloose and irresponsible. Due to false promises made to them by Union officials, they envisioned their new life as free men as one of ease and luxury, with all the goodies handed to them on a silver  platter, much as many of them seemed to think their situation in our day was going to change when Comrade Obama assumed the throne in Washington. I remember reading of one case where a black lady just stopped paying her rent when Obama took office because she now thought that, with Obama as president “things were going to be different.” Many ex-slaves had no real sense of responsibility, just as many today who wait for the federal gravy train to show up and take care of them. They don’t work and they don’t want to work. They expect those of us who worked all our lives to support them.

In that day, most had no real understanding of freedom or liberty, nor of the truth that real liberty carries with it the responsibility to preserve that liberty. They thought that liberty was being free from work and just waiting around for the federal government to support them all their lives. What lots of these folks really desired, although they didn’t realize it, was not liberty, it was license, with no moral restrictions. Most of them, once off the old plantations, had no visible means of support and so they became a vast welfare problem. Sound familiar? Some realized that they did have to make their own way and so, along with many poor white folks, became sharecroppers in a “new South” that, according to the Kennedy Brothers, was Punished with poverty for daring to want to be free of the Yankee Empire.

At this point, most of the Southern states adopted what became known as the Black Codes, which governed the work and employment of blacks. According to Clarence Carson’s Basic History of the United States–Volume 3: “The black codes aroused considerable opposition in the North. It should be noted that at the time they were adopted they were not contrary to the laws of the Constitution of the United States;  Some of their provisions did not differ much from rules Union army officers had adopted for blacks, nor were vagrancy laws any harsher than those in some states in the North…Even so, the black codes were the occasion of acrimonious comment from the North.” Just a bit of hypocrisy here, folks, but pay it no mind–the “history” books sure don’t!

The Yankee/Marxist government in 1865 established the Freedman’s Bureau, supposedly to protect the rights of blacks in the South and to provide food and medical care for them. According to Kent Steffgen’s The Bondage of the Free, “Congress established the Freedman’s Bureau on March 3, 1865, under Lincoln. Funds were appropriated to set up agencies in counties throughout the South and the Bureau was given the power to divide up abandoned lands and assign them in portions to the Negroes…Local agents of the Bureau were the Northern whites who had been brought into the South during the fighting or who were given subsequent  assignments out of Washington. Those who later joined the corrupt political regimes became known as ‘carpetbaggers’ because many of them arrived in the South penniless, or with mustering out pay from the army, with nothing but bare essentials which were sometimes literally carried in a piece of carpet tied at both ends.” The Marxist concept of state ownership of all property must have already been in their minds if they felt they could just move on in and have their flunkies start dividing up abandoned land with no attempt to find former owners. Ponder that thought for awhile. It just may give you something to reflect on as to where the Union government really was in 1865 and afterward.

Mostly, the carpetbaggers were what Southerners referred to as “white trash”–poor whites, quite a few of whom were criminals of one sort or another. Many had been abject failures in the North so they came South to see what they could steal.

As with the Union League Clubs, the Freedman’s Bureau was ultimately managed by carpetbaggers whose main thought was building for themselves a political force to make sure they held onto lucrative power.  True concern for the welfare of the blacks was, in most cases, a minor secondary consideration, if even that high on the list.

In February, 1866, Congress passed a bill that added to the already existing powers of the Freedman’s Bureau. Andrew Johnson vetoed it. He felt it gave unconstitutional power to the military. A radical Congress overrode his veto. It was hardly to be the last time for that. They also passed a Civil Rights bill in April of that year, which Johnson also vetoed  on the grounds of its unconstitutionality. Needless to say, Congress overrode this one, too. And so we were, officially, off to the Civil Rights Races–which even up to our own day, have had no ending!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“Reconstruction” Was (and is) Marxism

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Back quite a few years ago, establishment historian James  M/ McPherson wrote a book I have often referred to, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. When I first read it, it was a revelation to me. In it McPherson bragged about how Abraham Lincoln championed the cause of the Forty-Eighters in Europe. He gave us one of Karl Marx’s quotes in regard to the sainted Mr. Lincoln. In 1865 Marx  praised the great rail-splitter as “the single-minded son of the working class” who led his “country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” 

Marx’s statement, like most of what he said, was utter hogwash. Neither he nor “Father Abraham” gave a flip for  the “enchained race” but Lincoln used them as an excuse when it was convenient for the furthering of his (and Marx’s) agenda–the reconstruction of a social (and political) world.

Most  people never get to see such quotes, and many who do are unaware of the real significance of them. Our “historians” routinely leave quotes like this out of our “history” books because to include them might raise questions they’d rather not deal with, nor make their readers aware of. After all, does the reading public really need to know that Lincoln and Marx supported one another’s causes? Better for them, and their masters, if we don’t know. Did we know such things it might change our perspective as to what the War of Northern Aggression was really all about (Marxist revolution in America).

You don’t suppose this comment by Marx had anything to do with the attempted cultural “reconstruction” that took place in the Southern states after the shooting phase of the War was over do you? Our current crop of court “historians” would be quick to pooh-pooh that idea, but it’s interesting, and informative, that both Karl Marx and the Yankee government both settled on the term “reconstruction” to describe what should happen after the shooting stopped.

In the book Russian Radicals Look to America by David Hecht, the Russian radical, Bakunin, is quoted. Interestingly, Bakunin recognized the War of Northern Aggression as a revolution, but he really didn’t feel it went far enough. He said, and this is revelatory, “for popular self-government” really to become “a reality…another revolution…far more profound…” would be necessary. Bakunin strongly favored the program the Radical Republicans had laid out for the South (reconstruction). And he recognized it as “another revolution,” a cultural revolution. His thinking, and that of Marx,  both lurched along the same tortured leftist cow path.

Communist writer James Allen (an alias) noted of “reconstruction” that: “With the defeat of the South on the battlefield and the emancipation of the slaves the revolution had completed only its first cycle…A new phase, involving the complete transformation of southern  society, now opened.” This is what “reconstruction” really was–the Yankee/Marxist transformation of Southern society. RECONSTRUCTION WAS and is MARXISM! Let that comforting little thought begin to settle in your minds. The Marxists wanted Southern folks “reconstructed.” James Allen’s comments were made in his book Reconstruction The Battle for Democracy which was published by International Publishers, a Communist publishing house in New York.

Though “reconstruction” did major damage to Southern culture, it didn’t go over all that well in parts of the South. People resisted its cultural implications without fully realizing its origins. It was one of the most shameful periods in American history and the Republican Party, the supposed “party of small government) should hang its head in shame that it ever perpetrated such and outrage on the people of the South–but it won’t–because when push comes to shove, Donald Trump notwithstanding, the Republican leadership was, and is, Marxist at heart. To grasp the full truth of that statement you need to study the history of the Republican Party and its foundations, which Donnie Kennedy and I discuss at some length in our book Lincoln’s Marxists. Another book worth reading is one by Arthur Thompson called To the Victors Go the Myths and Monuments. It was published by American Opinion Foundation Publishing in Appleton, Wisconsin. It’s a bit expensive, but most definitely worth the read. You will learn much about our history that most of our “historians” really would rather you didn’t know about.

Back in 1929, Claude Bowers wrote The Tragic Era. I’ve mentioned it in several recent articles. It dealt, state by state, with exactly what the reconstructionist carpetbaggers did to the South during the “reconstruction” years. Interestingly, Mr. Bowers was a Northerner who just tried to tell the truth about “reconstruction.” For years his book was out of print. Awhile back someone told me it had been reprinted back in 1991 or thereabouts. Check out Amazon.com to see if you can still find it.

Then, in 1988, Marxist “historian” Eric Foner, came along with his book Reconstruction America’s Unfinished Revolution. Naturally, Foner didn’t think all that much of Claud Bowers book. Yet even Foner was forced to admit that “reconstruction” was “an unfinished revolution.”  What he neglected to say was that it was unfinished because it is still going on! It has now spread way beyond the South and encompasses the entire country, though certain aspects of it are still at work in both the South and the far West.

Astute observers can begin to connect the dots and see how “reconstruction” operated and still operates. One thing “reconstruction” did to the South was to bring in a government (public) school system there and when the Yankee troops stationed in the South went home, the Yankee school teachers with their Northern version of our history remained. The Yankee teachers are gone now, but the Northern version of our history remains and is now being taught by Southern teachers, who think the public school system is the greatest thing since sliced bread. So we have been infiltrated without our knowing it. And one of the main tenets of Marx’s Communist Manifesto was “Free education for all children in public schools.”

Reconstruction was Marxism in this country. It still is!

The Beast’s Son-In-Law in Mississippi

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

If any of you saw the movie Gods and Generals you may have noticed in it, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, a Yankee colonel named Adelbert Ames from the state of Maine. In the movie he is a rather sharp-featured individual. Pictures of him later in life show that the sharpness of his features have been rather dulled and he looks much like a person that has led a softer existence.  Living the good Yankee life in the South during Marxist “reconstruction” seems to have had that effect on many that came south after the War of Northern Aggression to seize new opportunities–and anything else they could get their hands on. They planned, in classic totalitarian style, to either “rule or ruin” or both.

Ames was born in Knox County, Maine in 1835. His father was a sea captain and he served as a merchant seaman on his father’s ship. It would have been better for the state of Mississippi had he stayed there. He entered West Point in 1856 and was still there when Mr. Lincoln decided “for the good of the country” (and for his tariffs) to invade Virginia. He was wounded at First Manassas, where he served as an artillery officer, but, though wounded, he refused to leave his guns, so no one can question his personal bravery. What I question are his actions after the war. In 1864 the division Ames was in was part of the X Corps of the Army of the James, where Ames served under that always-noble and sterling character Major General Benjamin Franklin (Beast) Butler. Ames would later marry the Beast’s daughter (Beauty and the Beast?) thus becoming the Beast’s son-in-law–an unenviable position for anyone. However Ames probably deserved it.

Quite possibly he had some connections in Washington (the Beast may have been one of them), because in 1868 Congress appointed him to be the provisional governor of Mississippi. Not long afterward, his command extended to the Fourth Military District, which took in Mississippi and Arkansas.

According to Wikipedia: “During his administration he took several steps to advance the rights of freed slaves, appointing the first black office holders in state history.” After slathering that goop all over its readers, the Wikipedia article then went on to decry “White supremacist violence” in Mississippi, “one of the last states to comply with reconstruction.”

If you only took Wikipedia’s word for it, Adelbert Ames’ carpetbag administration in Mississippi would have come off smelling like a bed of roses. However, as with most things in real life, such was hardly the case.

At one point,  the Great Arsonist of the Shenandoah, General Philip Sheridan, sent a detachment of troops to Vicksburg, Mississippi in answer to a plea from the carpetbag city government there saying it needed protection in the coming election. According to Kent Steffgen’s book Bondage of the Free: “In Vicksburg, black militia marched back and forth through the streets drilling night after night with guns loaded and bayonets fixed in an arrogant show of intimidation. Who was in the saddle now? The Negroes! Anyone with eyes to see could see they were the men of the future since they controlled both state and local governments. Soon, white women would realize this and be there for the taking.” Who actually controlled the state and local governments might be a highly debated point in some circles, but it surely wasn’t the blacks that held political offices. They were there to uphold the reign of terror promoted by the Union Leagues and the carpetbag governments.

However, to combat all this foolishness, a white militia (horror of horrors) made up of disgruntled taxpayer groups was formed. Steffgen said of this: “Faced with this challenge, three regiments of black militia rallied outside the city limits and proceeded to march on Vicksburg  from three different directions, only to be repulsed and driven back by the armed taxpayers. The Negroes dispersed, withdrew to their homes, and the election proceeded without interruption.” That really ticked off Governor Ames, who ran to his legislature to get the authority to equip and even bigger group of militia, probably black also, but the legislature replied by asking Grant for help.  Maybe Grant was tiring of all the “reconstruction” games being played in the South, who knows? All he did was to tell the whites to vacate the premises, and about that time Sheridan’s troops arrived. This was the setting for the 1876 elections in Mississippi.  The “White supremacist violence” in Mississippi was, in reality, nothing more than whites defending themselves against “Black supremacist violence.”

We’ve been informed, via the usual politically sources, that Adelbert Ames appointed the first black office-holders in Mississippi state history. Claude Bowers, writing in The Tragic Era, has amplified that statement and observed: “To grasp the significance of the Vicksburg drama we must have the background of the wreckage wrought by the alien rule of Governor Adelbert Ames.Whatever may have been the intent of this deadly dull army officer, he lacked the courage or capacity to cope with the criminals around him. His own election had drawn the color line;  the blacks were more powerful than ever, and more exacting with the carpetbaggers. They controlled the legislature,…A mulatto was Speaker of the House, a darker man was Lieutenant Governor, the Negro Bruce had been sent to the Senate, a corrupt quadroon was in charge of the public schools, a black, more fool than knave, was Commissioner of Immigration. The Lieutenant Governor was a merry soul who  played high jinks with Ames when he sought his native North for the hot season, dismissing Ames’ officials and appointing others, amusing himself with the personnel of the judiciary, pardoning his friends out of the penitentiary–six being pardoned before their trials.  He could be persuaded to accept a monetary consideration for these favors.” Sounds like “reconstruction” government at peak efficiency!

Needless to say, you won’t get any of this information from our current crop of court “historians.” This is the stuff they take great pains to bury! You don’t need to know all this. Did you, in your study of “reconstruction” history learn of such actions you might be tempted to doubt the efficacy of “reconstruction” in the South and such doubts would not fit the agenda, then or today.

Bowers has duly noted that: “The people were breaking under the confiscatory taxes necessary to maintain their rulers in the style to which they had become accustomed, and Ames’s appeals for retrenchment fell on ears of stone. He was arrogant, insolent, tyrannical toward the courts, naming incompetents to the bench, and presuming to dictate their decisions.” Typical Yankee/Marxist behavior!

Such was the situation in both Vicksburg and the whole state of Mississippi. Among the black militia there was open talk of slaughtering the whites in Vicksburg on election day. Something else the “historians” have forgotten to mention to us.

Normal people would probably refer to this as voter intimidation, just as the Black Panthers visited polling places in Philadelphia not so long ago, and with nightsticks gently “persuaded” lots of folks (whites) not to vote. And you all thought that “reconstruction” ended long ago–little do you realize that “reconstruction” is still alive and well in our own lifetime. Of course, in today’s politically correct (Marxist) cultural climate,  whites trying to protect themselves and their families will always be interpreted as “white supremacist violence against blacks.” It’s all a matter of semantics and this is how the game is played. Not much different than 1876 is it?

And what was worse, the whites even had the unmitigated gall to run a slate of candidates in the 1876 election themselves. Horror of horrors! When that happened the black Lieutenant Governor got in a panic and requested troops from Grant. Can’t have those white crackers governing themselves now can we. If they did, then we might lose that goose that laid them golden eggs! While all this was happening in Ames’s Southern satrapy, Ames was busy “vacationing” in the North. When he found out about it he rushed headlong back south and repeated the request for troops to Grant. Whatever his reasons, Grant refused the request, and guess what, the slate of candidates the white taxpayers had supported won the election!

Ames then issued a proclamation labeling the taxpayers as “riotous and disorderly persons.” Ames’s proclamation, issued against people defending their property and families is what has been picked up by all the leftist-oriented “historians” of our day.

Notice how this corresponds to what goes on today. Honest patriotic people who have legally protested escalating taxes and the general leftist direction of government have been labeled  as “right-wing extremists” and “low-level terrorists”–especially during the recent reign of Comrade Obama, and it even goes on today via those leftists that have embedded themselves in the Trump administration. If you think they are not still there look no further than the Justice Department.

Actually, all things considered, the white response to the black radical militia’s invasion of Vicksburg and ensuing events was quite mild. There were none of the lynchings, whippings, and such that you are so very often told about (many of which never happened). But you can see how such events have been exaggerated  over the years so that Marxist-oriented “civil rights agitators” could latch onto them and even further embellish them almost a century later to further promote the concept of Marxist class struggle–race hatred in the South.

This was the rotten fruit of Marxist “reconstruction” here in the South, and the technique has since been even further polished and perfected so it is now in full use all across the country. As I said earlier “reconstruction” is still alive and well!

In reference to the Confederate States, Marx talked about the “reconstruction of a social world” and his minions and their spiritual descendants have been working for well over a century now to make sure that takes place here. Observing our current cultural climate, do you have any doubt that it’s working?

 

 

 

Powell Clayton and More Marxist “Reconstruction”

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Anyone who has read even a fair amount of the history of the War of Northern Aggression–the United States’ first step on the road to a world empire–as well as some of the history of the Kansas/Missouri border troubles before and during that war, will have at least a nodding acquaintance with the Fifth Kansas Cavalry. This was a rather dubious Yankee outfit made up of Kansas Red Legs and various other “looters and pillagers.”  It’s commander was one James H. Lane, the chief looter and pillager of Missouri. Lane and his federally legitimized pillagers had a decidedly Marxist view of any and all Southern private property. They “liberated” what they could carry off and destroyed the rest.

I could write pages and pages about “Mad Dog Jim Lane” and his erstwhile Red Leg companions and their sordid attempts to “preserve the Union” and line their  own pockets as well, but that will have to wait for another time. This present reference to the “glorious” Fifth Kansas Cavalry has been made so that I might introduce to my readers the person of  Powell Clayton, who, interestingly enough, was first a lieutenant colonel, and later a full colonel in the infamous Kansas Fifth. After fighting a battle in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in October of 1863, which his forces won, Clayton was made a brigadier general in August of 1864.

Clayton either seems to have liked Arkansas or else he recognized the potential financial opportunities there. He bought a farm (some say a plantation) in Jefferson County and he stayed.

As Marxist “reconstruction” came into full bloom in the devastated South, Clayton was elected the first Republican governor of Arkansas. According to an internet article on Wikipedia “His tenure was marked with soaring state debt (despite a state surplus when he took office), corruption and violence…Many members of his administration and colleagues in his party were brought up on corruption charges while he was governor. Clayton himself was impeached at one point, but was never formally convicted of a crime. He was involved with the tampering of a US senate election between Thomas Boles and John Edwards.” How very typical for a “reconstruction” government in the South. And it sounds much like both Republican and Democratic administrations in our own day. Business as usual, and the public be damned–they are only sheep to be shorn! Supposedly he worked to improve the infrastructure of the state with railroads, levees, and unified school system (a government school system), however  “…the means he used to raise money for these projects was often controversial and probably led to the state debt.” One might be led to wonder if the term “controversial” employed here was a charitable term for “dishonest.”

As was often done, Wikipedia and other politically correct sources continue to whitewash monstrous “reconstruction” policies and their perpetrators, usually blaming “white racism” for all the problems instead of the corrupt politicians. They persist in painting the “reconstruction” crooks as noble beings that stepped in to stem the “racist” tide and in so doing restored peace, justice and domestic tranquility. Anyone believing this hogwash deserves to be duped. In many cases the “reconstruction” policies were what caused much of the problem to begin with. And let’s don’t kid ourselves or others–“reconstruction” in the South was really deconstruction.

Claude Bowers, in his book The Tragic Era has given us a little more realistic picture than have some more current sources. In describing Powell Clayton, Bowers began at the war’s end.  He noted: “The fighting had taken him into Arkansas and when the firing ceased  he settled on a plantation and remained. From that point of vantage he cunningly studied the situation,  and at the psychological moment he grasped his opportunity.  Gathering the Negroes and carpetbaggers behind him, he seized on power. Coldly calculating, unsympathetic to suffering, autocratic, impatient of opposition or restraint,  he ruled for three years as an absolute monarch.” One might wonder if he ever paid for the plantation he remained on. But I digress! Bowers continued: “He knew his game. Clayton’s policy was extermination…His was the mastermind that organized the Republican Party in Arkansas, that directed the framing of the constitution, making a despot of the Governor; and he took the governorship. He waved his wand, and a system emerged that destroyed civil liberty, and reduced overwhelming majorities to impotency. This Clayton system reserved the loaves and fishes for the carpetbaggers alone.” And Bowers further noted, as if to confirm for the doubters “Nowhere such concentration of power as in the hands of Clayton.” It’s easy to see what this Yankee/Marxist egomaniac was all about–personal power and self-aggrandizement.

Bowers noted that, when honest people protested what was being done to them and their families, Clayton “evoked the sword.” His “militia” was totally an instrument of his party and his followers and hangers-on wanted a militia that would “strike early and strike hard” and steal as much as they could in the process. Negroes were not only enlisted but armed–all with Washington’s approval, thus ensuring that class struggle would be used to drive a wedge between the races so that no real attempt at reconciliation between them would emerge. You have to realize that this planned hatred between the races was all by design.

The Northern newspapers had been spoon-fed all manner of stories about “outrages” in Arkansas, and so the stage was set when Clayton decided to proclaim martial law. Bowers observed: “Soon the proclamation of martial law; soon two thousand undisciplined Negroes (the militia) were preying on the people of ten counties, stealing, arresting, imprisoning, executing, looting houses, and occasionally violating women. Clayton was soon sending the officers lists of men to be arrested, with the comment that many of them would be executed.” Even the editor of the Daily Republican who had protested at first, until the governor decided to cancel his state printing contracts, ended up stating: “We’ll make Arkansas Republican or a waste howling wilderness.” Of course such history has all been changed now. Bowers is definitely out of vogue among our current crop of Marxist “historians.”

Marxist “historian” Eric Foner looked at this same situation in his book Reconstruction–America’s Unfinished Revolution and stated, on page 440 that: “Clayton placed ten counties under martial law at the end of 1868 and dispatched a state militia composed of blacks and scalawags (usually in segregated units) and commanded by former Gen. Robert F. Catterson. Scores of suspected Klansmen were arrested, three were executed after trials by military courts, and numerous others fled the state. By early 1869 order had been restored and the Klan destroyed.” Notice Foner’s “order had been restored.” Realizing any Marxist “historians” penchant for stretching the truth to fit the Marxist agenda, I think I will take Bowers’ word for what really happened rather than Foner’s.

Clayton’s political militia, whose sole aim was to “perpetuate the party of ascendency” (the Republican Party) in Arkansas, cost the good people of that state $330,676.43–and for what? To finance their own cultural destruction! Do you begin now to wonder why the “solid South” voted Democrat for around a hundred years?

Thanks to the carpetbaggers’ use of blacks as their cannon fodder, not only in Arkansas, but in most areas of the South, race relations in the South remained mostly sour going into the middle of the 20th century–just long enough so that the cultural Marxists and their political cousins could then use the emerging “civil rights” movement as yet another vehicle to promote class struggle that has continued unto this day. Unfortunately, this has not ended–and “reconstruction” in this country has continued–they just don’t call it that anymore.

Marxist “Reconstruction” in Louisiana

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

How about a little “change” in your state government, brought to you by a young man who talked quite well, well enough that he truly sounded convincing–without really ever telling you much of anything?

Right off the bat I know who comes to mind that fits that description–Comrade Obama. He did lots of talking, though often in a condescending manner, because, if the truth be known, he really looked down on all of us that were not raving socialists. But this isn’t about him (thank Heaven). Rather it’s about one of his illustrious predecessors who was imbued with the same Marxist mindset and operated  somewhat in the same way–with the state house controlling everything in Louisiana. This sterling individual, Henry Clay Warmoth, was a radical Republican, of the same stripe as those Donnie Kennedy and I wrote about in Lincoln’s Marxists.

Henry Clay Warmoth (interesting that he was named after the man Thomas DiLorenzo  characterized as a national socialist) was born in 1842 in McLeansboro, Illinois–in what was to become the “land of Lincoln.” During the War of Northern Aggression he served in the Union army in Missouri. He was wounded at the Battle of Vicksburg, but was dishonorably discharged for promoting exaggerations in regard to Union losses in that battle. Such behavior did not bother Mr. Lincoln, though, who reinstated Warmoth’s military status. He was commissioned a judge in the Department of the Gulf Provost Court in 1864 by no less a military luminary than General Nathaniel (Commissary) Banks of Red River Campaign fame, (or infamy, depending on how you view his loss in that campaign to a Confederate force with decidedly inferior numbers).

But. for Warmoth, the army wasn’t where the long green was. So, in 1865, Warmoth decided to run for Congress.

Looking for a constituency that would help to support his aspirations, Warmoth arrived in New Orleans and latched onto the newly freed blacks, seeking to convince them that he would be their “main man” in government if only they’d elect him. He must have been good at spinning windys  because he won. However, after Lincoln’s assassination, the Yankee Marxists that controlled the Congress declined to seat any Southern representatives, even those that didn’t have Southern accents. Why they refused him a seat when he was one of them is hard to figure. They surely must have known his origins. Anyway, he returned to New Orleans.

However, in 1868, Winfield Scott Hancock was removed as the Military Commander of the Fifth Military District, which took in both Louisiana and Texas, and Hancock’s handpicked successor also resigned. This opened the way for a special election in 1868 and Warmoth ran for Governor as a Republican, an election he won narrowly over a Democrat. Then the financial fun and games began in earnest. Warmoth wasn’t in the game to do the good folks of Louisiana any favors. He was profoundly interested in the big bucks!

Under Warmoth’s gentle guidance the state’s bonded debt ascended from $6 million to $25 million, and was reputed, at one point, to have been around $100 million. After all, what’s a few million here or there among friends, as long as it all ends up in the right pockets.

Even in our day, Warmoth’s reputation has continued to live after him.  On http://www.sos.louisiana.gov on the Secretary of State’s page, there is a reference to Mr. Warmoth. It states, in part: “Henry Clay Warmoth epitomizes the corruption of Louisiana politics during Reconstruction and at other times as well. Elected Governor at age 26 as the Republican candidate,  Warmoth speculated in state bonds and treasury notes, profited from part ownership in the newspaper which held the contract for state printing, and created the State Returning Board to supervise election returns. The Board had the power to throw out votes from any precinct thought to have tainted results. Radical Republicans  used the Board to maintain power by enabling them to steal elections from the Conservative Democrats.” In other words, how the Board acted depended on whose ox was supposed to be gored.

Claud Bowers, in his expose of “reconstruction” The Tragic Era noted: “…and a few weeks later, at the age of twenty six, he (Warmoth) was elected Governor.  His enemies were soon to comment on his capacity to save one hundred thousand dollars a year on a salary of eight thousand dollars and to accumulate a million in four years.” Some of our modern politicians have probably taken a page or two from Warmoth’s political playbook. But why should anyone find this extraordinary? Isn’t this what the Carpetbaggers came south for in the first place?

Bowers went on to describe the legislature in session in Mechanics Hall in New Orleans under the reign of Warmoth. He observed: “It is a monkey house…with guffaws, disgusting interpolations, amendments offered that are too obscene to print…Bad in the beginning, the travesty grows worse.  The vulgarity of the speeches increases; members stagger from the basement bar to their seats. The Speaker in righteous mood sternly forbids the introduction of liquor on the floor.” Bowers noted that corruption was inevitable and that some members who were openly charged with bribery were not even offended. The truth didn’t bother them much one way or the other.

Bowers informed his readers that: “Measures involving millions, many criminal, and having to do with railroads, canals, and levees are passed without examination and members vote vast sums into their pockets openly, defiantly. One outraged legislator, when confronted with his outright thievery,  had the gall to respond with ‘What we give to the community is without money and without price. It is so valuable that the price may not be fixed–there is no standard’.” In other words, these political charlatans were out there doing so much good for the state of Louisiana that they should have been allowed to steal all they wanted as just compensation for their valiant efforts in behalf of the people of Louisiana! Do you now begin to wonder why Southerners hated, and still hate, “reconstruction” in spite of all the pious lies told to them by our current crop of Marxist “historians?”

Warmoth pretty much had the state in his back pocket at that point. Through his control of the managed media, the prostitute press,  (yes folks, it was the same then as now) part of which he owned a share in,  he “brought pressure to bear in favor of four measures intended to give him dictatorial power and prolong his reign. The Registration Bill made every parish registration official his minion, and gave them power to accept or reject votes without interference from the courts…The Election Bill superceded sheriffs on election day with Warmoth’s appointees,  forbade the courts to interfere and authorized him to deny certificates of election  to successful candidates as he saw fit…The Constabulary Bill authorized Warmoth to name a chief constable in each parish, who could name a deputy, and these were absolute.  And the Militia Bill empowered him to organize and equip as many men as he wished and place one hundred thousand dollars at his disposal for the purpose.”

When oppressed Southerners protested to the legislature, rather angrily at times, Bowers noted that: “…behind the legislature was Warmoth, behind him his militia and constables; and behind them federal bayonets–and the laws went into operation.”

This all was a glowing example of the “hope and change” wrought by “reconstruction” not only in Louisiana but all over the South. It was a glowing testimony of the “transparency” of all the “reconstruction” governments. The compassionate concern for the people they were robbing blind was about on the same level as is the concern for us today that emanates from Washington in our current phase of “reconstruction.”

Is it any wonder that many of us think that “reconstruction” never really ended, but just continued on under more euphemistic titles–like multi-culturalism or diversity, or civil rights–all culturally Marxist ploys for what is really cultural genocide for the South. 

“Reconstruction” is still alive and well today, not only in the South, but all across the country both in government schools at all levels, and elsewhere.

The Man Who Owned the Rifles

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Here we arrive at George Luther Stearns, another of John Brown’s Secret Six supporters. Mr. Stearns was an industrialist and a merchant. As such, he was pretty well fixed financially. However, it had not always been so. Stearns’ early life had not been easy and he had been in a position where he had to work to support his family, starting at age 15.

Stearns was involved very early on with the Emigrant Aid Society, helping to get anti-slavery settlers into Kansas. Wikipedia noted that “Stearns was one of the Secret Six who aided Brown in Kansas, and financially supported him until Brown’s execution after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. Stearns physically owned the pikes and 200 Sharps rifles brought to Harpers Ferry by Brown and his followers. Following Brown’s arrest, Stearns briefly fled to Canada but returned to Medford (Mass.) after Brown’s death…”

According to J. C. Furnas in The Road to Harpers Ferry, Stearns’ first wife passed away and he married a second time to “a well-connected niece of Lydia Maria Child, the lady Abolitionist, who disliked her aunt personally but shared her ideas.” His new wife was not always happy with Mr. Stearns. She wished that he would dress more expensively and do more entertaining. She felt that his station in life called for him to present a more elite appearance than he usually did. One thing you have to say for Stearns is that he was not overly enamored of the pomp and vanity of Massachusetts society. He was kind of like the old cattleman in Texas who dressed in faded jeans and run-down cowboy boots and who looked just like some of the rag-tag cowboys in his area. They couldn’t afford to dress up, while he didn’t have to. He knew what he had and wasn’t trying to impress anybody. In his own way Stearns seems to have been like that old cattleman.

One of his best friends was Charles Sumner, “the pontifical slavery hater” as he was described by Furnas. Otto Scott, in The Secret Six: the Fool as Martyr has observed, of Senator Sumner, that he “…had a wide acquaintance among European revolutionaries.” You have to be led to the conclusion that it is more than just coincidence that these abolitionists knew so many people in the Leftist, radical crowd from Europe. So we can probably assume that Senator Sumner was more than familiar with some of the socialist luminaries Donnie Kennedy and I wrote about in Lincoln’s Marxists. 

One of Stearns’ sons wrote a biography of his father in which he said that his father and John Brown met “like iron and magnet.” If such was truly the case, then Brown was the magnet, for he attracted more metal from Stearns, in the form of firearms, than from just about anyone else. Furnas noted that Stearns “…paid out of his own pocket for the $1300 of revolvers for Kansas that eventually found their way to Maryland with Old Brown…” In those days, revolvers sold for around $12-15 apiece, so $1300 would have bought quite a slew of them. Stearns said, at one point, “I consider it the proudest day of my life  that I gave good old John Brown every pike and rifle he carried to Harpers Ferry.” And that’s not including the revolvers!

Stearns may well not have been the elitist snob that other members of the Secret Six were, but he surely had his priorities skewed when he ended up supporting John Brown and his terrorist actions.

Furnas summed up George Luther Stearns this way: “Actually, the man hardly belongs among the Six. He did not have enough ego for their overweening society. He probably knew less of Old Brown’s exact plans than Smith, Sanborn  or Higginson.”

Stearns may well not have known as many of the exact details as did some of the others. However, he knew enough to be willing to pay for the rifles John Brown needed to carry out his terrorist agenda. And when the plan turned sour and Brown blew it, he knew enough to run to Canada, so he was hardly a complete innocent.

In looking at the Secret Six as a whole, you are forced to note a group of men with both social position and resources, who somehow, thought that their position and resources gave them the right to dictate how other people should live their lives. It is no different in our day. We are beset, fore and aft with Marxist “educators” and politicians and their friends in government, big business, and the media who feel they, somehow, have the right and authority to tell the rest of us how we should live and what we should think. And if others are not especially willing to live by their standards, well, there are always a few “John Brown” types lurking about, waiting to be used to “persuade” them–if the price is right! I’m sure, in our day, that, should you put your minds to it, the names of some of these “persuasive” groups would come to mind.

The College Grad And The Terrorist

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn  was probably the youngest member of the infamous Secret Six that supported and/or financed abolitionist/terrorist John Brown. Born in 1831, he entered Harvard College in 1852, graduating in 1855, a mere four years before the debacle at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

He graduated seventh in his class, so he was no academic slouch and obviously did not spend his college time partying. While in college he became friendly with Ralph Waldo Emerson of Transcendentalist fame.  As a result of that friendship, Emerson “engaged” Sanborn to start a small private school in Concord, Massachusetts, which Emerson’s children attended. According to http://mail.colonial.net others who had their children in Sanborn’s private school were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Horace Mann, and John Brown. An interesting mix! If you are like me you might be led to wonder why Horace Mann, the Unitarian promoter of public education, had his children in a private school at that point in time when he was so strongly tryin for force public education on everyone else via compulsory attendance. You might be led, had you a suspicious mind, why that compulsion for public education didn’t apply to his own kids. But I digress.

Franklin Sanborn was an author, journalist, “reformer” and a social scientist–one of that breed that has done such yeoman duty in the public schools–at the price of your kids’ historical knowledge.

He memorialized the Transcendentalist Movement, writing biographies of many of its leading lights.  Not everyone was completely happy with his efforts, though they did applaud his agenda. The website http://www.alcott.net said of his work that: “Sanborn’s editions and histories, despite being marred by editorial inaccuracies and shabby scholarship, served well to keep Transcendentalist ideas alive and to translate the movement’s idealism into meaningful social action.” “Social action”–now there’s a loaded term, even today. Not totally a glowing recommendation!

Sanborn founded the American Social Science Association in 1865, as it was said, “to treat wisely the great social problems of the day.” Seems to me that social scientists are still doing the same thing today–and we are still beset with many of the same social problems, which they apparently haven’t solved. That being the case you have to question just how “effective” they have really been.

In 1856 Sanborn became the secretary of the Massachusetts Kansas Commission, also known as the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee and it’s believed that this is where he came into close contact with John Brown. At that point, he had been out of college for around a year and was seemingly quite awed with Brown. College students, even in our day, are often overawed by various revolutionary types who are introduced onto college campuses via more-than-willing college administrators and leftist professors.

At any rate, this committee Sanborn was the secretary of had been formed to get provisions, clothing, and arms to settlers in Kansas so they could supposedly “defend” themselves against incursions from pro-slavery people.

Samuel Gridley Howe testified before senate committee which investigated the Harpers Ferry raid that he “believed” that 200 Sharps rifles were committed to John Brown’s tender care, and probably some revolvers as well, all to be used in Kansas, and these had been the property of the committee. “Provisions” and clothing for the anti-slavery folks in Kansas–yeah, right! Of course it might depend on how you define “provisions.” What it amounted to was that these people in Massachusetts were sending assault weapons into Kansas to aid the likes of John Brown who were, supposedly “defending” the rights of free soil Kansans. Brown and his “army” “defended” those rights really effectively the night they hacked five pro-slavery people to death in front of their families. I wonder if there were any swords among the “provisions” this committee entrusted to Brown and his “army.”

J. C. Furnas in The Road to Harpers Ferry took note of Sanborn’s youth. Having checked out some of Sanborn’s biographical material, he noted that: “His biography of Dr. Howe is a solicitous panegyric sticky with the writer’s delight in having known such a man well. In later life he widely exploited having been neighbor and disciple of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott in Concord, where he set up a co-educational private school…to teach the children of ‘the more aristocratic portion of the community’.” Ahh, now we know why Horace Mann’s children went to Sanborn’s school–they were part of the “aristocratic portion” of the community–no public school drivel for them! That was (and is) for the common herd.

Although Sanborn is said not to have approved of the Harpers Ferry raid, he spent much paper and ink later on defending John Brown. According to http://www.wvculture.org  “In the years after John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Sanborn was one of Brown’s most dedicated defenders, and he wrote many articles on John Brown as well as the biography The Life and Letters of John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia. The biography was first published in 1885.  Furnas said of Sanborn’s work “And his successive  writings about Old Brown are like what a devoted younger brother might have written about St. Paul or Judas Maccabeus.”

As stated earlier, Sanborn was no dumb bunny when it came to academics. By the time he was eight years old he had read the whole Bible and declared himself a Universalist. It would seem that apostasy came early for Sanborn. Furnas noted that “After maturing he shifted to the eccentric Unitarianism of Parker, Higginson, and James Freeman Clark–hot Abolitionists all.” Sounds like Sanborn slid from the frying pan into the fire!

He always looked to believe the best about John Brown and he held onto his loyalty to the old terrorist. And Furnas informed us that “His loyalty survived even the discovery forced on him by eventual new evidence, that Old Brown and some of his sons had lied in their teeth about their responsibility for the Pottawatomie Massacre.” So the wild delusions of the Leftists, then and now, blind them to the truth, and the only “truth” they can ever see is “their truth.”

Furnas said of him: “Sanborn was not the most trenchant of the Six…His record does not go beyond facile acceptance of the half-baked highmindedness of the time.” Furnas referred to him as a “well-intentioned Yankee.”

Unfortunately, he was the type of well-intentioned Yankee that, in the end, seemed to have no problem with the Marxist concept that the ends justifies the means. But that’s where most of these men were really at–they were an early type of Yankee Marxists. 

One Of Our Well-Known American Heretics

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Apostasy was most definitely on the up-swing in the middle of 19th century America. Most people don’t want to deal with the thought that it started that early. It makes them uncomfortable to think the apostates and heretics were here and quite active before they were even born. However, if we don’t learn to deal with the truth about the past we will never be able to deal with it in the future and we will just end up burying our heads in the sand (again) and pretending it’s not there.

That’s why it is so important for us to come to grips with it, and the apostates that supported terrorist John Brown are as good a place as any to start. They represent a cross section of the apostasy that rampaged across our history in the 1800s–the apostasy our “history” books gloss over by not calling it what it really was.

All of terrorist/abolitionist John Brown’s Secret Six  supporters were controversial individuals. Most all have been theologically radical as well as politically radical–people that, today, should be considered way over on the Leftist fringe of society. Although with today’s fluctuating morays they might be considered mainstream. In a normal society you would have to classify these people as far Leftists, but then today’s cultural Marxist society is far from normal. Look at what the electorate did in 2008 and again in 2012. The heretic this article is about, Theodore Parker, would today probably be considered as middle of the road.

Parker was a Unitarian, but then, many John Brown supporters leaned in that direction. Of those that supported John Brown’s terrorism in the name of freeing the slaves, of those that upheld and financed his terrorism, few would be classified as orthodox Christians.

Interestingly enough, Theodore Parker started out orthodox. He was undoubtedly a highly intelligent man, speaking four languages besides English, one of them being Latin. Wikipedia noted that “His belief in God’s mercy made his reject Calvinist theology as cruel and unreasonable.” At this point, Parker and I would part company. Either Parker didn’t understand real Calvinism or he didn’t want to. Parker didn’t like “religious dogmatism.” Another example of Parker’s apostate mindset was Horace Mann, the “father of the common schools” (public schools). Mann, like Parker, rejected the Calvinism of his day in favor of his own personal creed and view of God.

That Parker’s “god” was not the God of Holy Scripture was evident, given his Unitarian rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Observable is the fact that most participants in the Abolitionist Movement, the Feminist Movement, and other 19th century movements had rejected Jesus’ divinity and the truths of Scripture.

Author Dean Grodzins has written a book about Theodore Parker called American Heretic.  Having not read Mr. Grodzin’s book I can’t authoritatively comment on his take on Theodore Parker, but, seeing his book won a “2003 Choice Outstanding Academic Title” I will hazard a guess and say that Grodzins may well be in favor of Parker’s apostasy, or at least not overly opposed to it.

Parker seems to have been introduced to the Unitarian faith by one Convers Francis, a Unitarian minister, biographer, and historian. Francis studied at Harvard Divinity School and was ordained in 1819. Shows you how far down the road Harvard had slithered by the early 1800s.

Parker, it seems, went through a gradual descent into apostasy. I’ve been told by pastors that this is how apostasy works usually. It doesn’t just happen all at once. You don’t just wake up one fine morning and decide you don’t believe any of the theology you believed when you went to bed. In Parker’s case, he was exposed to some of the “higher criticism” of the Scriptures then growing in Germany, which led him to question. Lots of questionable ideas, and questionable people, came out of Germany in the 1840s. Parker gradually came to where he denied his orthodox views. His denial of the Biblical miracles and the authority of the Scriptures brought him some criticism, even in Massachusetts, and some pulpits, even in the Boston area, were closed to him.

By 1842 Parker had openly broken with the orthodox Christian faith and found, in his own estimation, that the Scriptures were chock-full of errors and contradictions. He now felt that people should concentrate their religious faith on “individual experience.” Again, does that sound familiar? There is lots of that mindset around even today and it leads  to all manner of “interesting” and bizarre deviations.

By 1846 Parker had finally found a congregation of like-minded souls to preach to. Among those in his congregation were William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist (and internationalist); Julia Ward Howe, author(ess) of the well-known Unitarian hymn The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the founders of the Women’s Movement in 1848. The Women’s Movement also had Spiritualist connections. What an august little group!

Some estimates have put Parker’s congregation at as many as 7,000 people. Apostasy was gaining traction in Boston.

While Parker was not a Spiritualist, he was nonetheless popular with them and he gave credence to their views. At one point he said: “I have not had time in the midst of my busy life, while solving the problems of human freedom, to investigate the phenomena of Spiritualism, nevertheless, I believe that its philosophy and phenomena are true, and that Spiritualism will be the religion of the future.” Interesting statement. It almost makes it sound like Rev. Parker is all alone out there “solving the problems of human freedom” while no one else bothers to do anything. It’s interesting that few of our “history” books reveal the fact that there were also many abolitionists in the South trying to deal with the problem of human freedom too. But, then, they were not the radical, Leftist type of abolitionist–and hence not worthy of mention.

Of slave insurrections Parker said: “I should like, of all things, to see an insurrection of the slaves…It would do good even if it failed.” Maybe he should have read about Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. It was a bloody excess and it failed. I wonder how much good it did. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t bloody enough for Parker!

J. C. Furness, author of The Road to Harper’s Ferry said of Parker’s statement “Such grim willingness to tempt young Abolitionists and thousands of Negro slaves to go and get massacred in a softening-up operation sounds more like the general staff of a Communist committee than like a professed disciple of a God of Love.” And this was the man who departed from the Calvinist faith because it wasn’t “loving” enough!

Parker was yet another of those self-appointed “experts” on slavery who had seldom, if ever, been south of Washington. The perfect person to become a member of the Secret Six and to support John Brown. Parker was really a man who knew almost nothing about his subject, but was content because he thought he did.

Parker had tuberculosis and went to Italy  to try to ward it off. He was over there when John Brown committed his last terrorist act at Harpers Ferry. Though physically on his last legs, Parker had a parting word of Unitarian love for the South. He stated: “The South must reap as she sows…a pretty crop…The Fire of Vengeance may be waked up even in an African’s heart, especially when it is fanned by the wickedness of a white man; then it runs from man to man, town to town. What shall put it out? The white man’s blood.”

All I can say is that it’s a good thing Theodore Parker was such a nice, caring, compassionate and loving Unitarian. Otherwise he might have told us how he really felt. Parker never, to my knowledge, addressed the fact of blacks who owned slaves in the South. Maybe that was the white man’s fault, too.

Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of our former Marxist-in-Chief in the White House would really have loved Theodore Parker!

Was Julia’s Husband a Male Chauvinist Pig?

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Julia Ward Howe, the woman who wrote that infamous Unitarian dirge, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was born in New York City. In 1843 she married the prominent physician Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. They had six (some sources mention five) children , which they raised in the Unitarian Mecca of the northeast, Boston, Massachusetts.

Not only was Ms. Howe an author, but she was also part of the most radical wing of the Abolitionist Movement, along with her husband. Writer Michael Dan Jones wrote of Ms. Howe that: “Mrs. Howe and her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, were supporters of the most radical and violent wing of the anti-slavery movement. These ‘disunion’ abolitionists wanted to tear apart the American republic of sovereign, independent states,  and reconstruct it along their own radical, political, cultural and religious ideals. History records only too well how they succeeded with their treason.” A few years back, Mr. Jones’ article appeared on http://www.confederateamericanpride.com If it is still there it is definitely worth reading.

Regarding Ms. Howe’s literary career Jones noted: “But her literary works had dark themes, such as murder, suicide and betrayal, perhaps reflecting her own unhappy marriage with her domineering and unfaithful husband. Her church, the Unitarian Church, although it claimed to be Christian, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity.” So her husband was “domineering and unfaithful?” It’s funny that the “history” books have forgotten to mention all that. The “history” books have told us that the abolitionist crowd were folk who were deeply concerned with the betterment of humanity, fine,  upstanding, full of moral integrity and such. Now we begin to find that some among them were sinners, just like the rest of humanity, except that if they were Unitarian in their belief system they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as God’s Son. Therefore, they could not go to Him and ask forgiveness because they believed He was just another ordinary man, and, hence unable to forgive sin. Thus their sin remained.

Ms. Howe’s husband, and their Unitarian pastor, Rev. Theodor Parker (more about him later on) were both part of the Secret Six group that supported John Brown’s fanatical terrorism, particularly at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

Contrary to much of the abolitionist pabulum we have been spoon-fed over the years, the marriage of the Howe’s was, as  you can now well imagine, slightly less than idyllic . It has been noted that, at one point, Samuel had requested a legal separation, which Julia had refused. Many of their disagreements arose over Julia’s wanting to have a career separate from motherhood. While Dr. Howe has been touted as being “progressive” for his day and time, this was on really “progressive” area he had a problem with–maybe because it affected his own household rather than someone else’s. Quite often liberal elitists are that way. They have one standard for themselves and quite another for the rest of the common herd.

Dr. Howe was not overly enthused about women having any other occupation than that of wife, mother, and homemaker. No doubt the fanatical women’s libbers of the 20th century would have roundly criticized him as a male chauvinist pig!

According to http://www.uuworld.org we have been told that: “…Howe could be insensitive and argumentative and that his marriage was discordant are both well documented. As ambitious as he was for himself, he was determined that his smart and talented wife should be kept at home with their six children. Julia outlived him by thirty-four years and became a prominent suffragist and peace activist.” The ultra-liberal mentality is not to be denied!

Dr. Howe also agreed with Karl Marx on the scheme of progressive taxation. In 1865 he was in favor of and advocated a progressive tax system. He noted that, while the wealthy would resist this (really?)  he felt that America could not really become a just and caring society while the gap between rich and poor was so wide. Does this sound like anything you have heard from the current crop of Marxists in Washington in the past few years? You don’t get it from Trump but you sure did from his Marxist predecessor. The Marxists claim they want to “soak the rich” so they can help the rest of us. To put it bluntly, that’s a croc! It’s nothing more than a massive redistribution of the wealth scheme that removes everyone’s wealth and “redistributes” it to the federal government. The really rich that control the political shills in Washington don’t pay any taxes anyway. They can siphon off their huge incomes in “tax-free foundations” which they then use to make war on the middle class, under the guise of uplifting society.

And http://www.uuworld.org also informed us of how far-left Unitarianism had influenced Boston. It said that “In Howe’s day, Boston was the heartbeat of a spiritual and intellectual awakening called the New England  Renaissance. Unitarians who effectively controlled the State House, Harvard, and the city’s wealth, also led the great reform causes of the day…Theodor Parker for the abolition of slavery, Horace Mann for universal free education, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody for early childhood education.” So the Unitarians pretty much had Massachusetts in the palm of their collectivist hand–socially, theologically, and educationally. If you wonder what’s wrong with New England today,  a look back at the mid-1800s will tell you–apostasy–galloping apostasy, masquerading as “enlightenment.” Having grown up there, I know a little bit about it.

It was out of this theological and educational morass that Howe and most of the other Secret Six members emerged.

Otto Scott, in his informative book The Secret Six: The Fool as Martyr has observed of terrorist John Brown that he seemed to fit right in with this group, despite the differences in their backgrounds. Both they and Brown were revolutionaries. Brown was the sort of revolutionary that got his hands dirty–and bloody–and they were the kind that supported his activity–and kept theirs clean.

Of these radical abolitionists Scott observed: “The radical faction saw matters in a different light. It had no single leader in the Massachusetts branch of the aid committee: it was a coterie including Higginson, Parker, Howe and Stearns.  All were either famous or wealthy men who shared a common despair of the wisdom of their countrymen; each seemed to believe that slavery could only be ended by revolution.  Joh Brown appeared among these men with a reputation created by James Redpath of the N Y Tribune, attested by Richard Hinton of the Boston Traveler and the Chicago Tribune, enameled by Phillips of the New York Times in his recent book on Kansas…” So, thanks to gratuitous media coverage, Brown was duly inserted into this group of New England Unitarian revolutionaries. Do you still think the “news” media is objective in what they present? Were they back then???

Even in an undertaking such as financial support for Brown’s terrorist acts, these men were not totally honest with one another. Otto Scott observed that: “Therefore, the Boston committee of six–Howe, Higginson, Parker, Smith, Sanborn, and Stearns–started out keeping secrets from one another,  and were never to be wholly honest with the world.” John Brown assured these gullible folks that the people from Missouri were planning a big offensive in Kansas that spring, and because of their innate proclivity toward revolution, they chose to believe his fables.

Theodore Parker threw open his home and, according to Scott, “Captain Brown was lionized in a manner later made familiar to many momentarily famous revolutionists when received by wealthy radicals.” It was a case of each scratching the other’s back. In regard to Brown’s plans, Parker noted, according to Scott, that “I doubt whether things of this kind will succeed. But we shall have a great many failures before we discover the right way of getting at it. This may well be one of them.” These men viewed Brown’s revolutionary terrorism as a possible means to their ends, but if it didn’t work out, then he was just one more experiment they would have tried on their road to revolution.

And their revolutionary road would lead, as it ultimately did, to a complete overturning of the society and culture of not only the South, but eventually of the entire country. Today we live with many of the results of their revolution. How have those worked out for you all?

These men, Samuel Gridley Howe among them, wanted for the rest of the country exactly what their rampant apostasy had created in New England. Their spiritual descendants are still working on that revolution today. Let’s hope the Christian Church and the rest of the country wakes up and smells the coffee before everything becomes thoroughly Unitarianized.

Gerrit Smith, the “insane” philanthropist

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Gerrit Smith was an interesting character, in some ways different than the other members of the Secret Six that financed and supported abolitionist/terrorist John Brown. Smith was an ardent abolitionist and “social reformer” like the rest, but he had also been involved in politics, running for president a couple times. He also ran for the governorship of the state of New York on an anti-slavery platform.

Mr. Smith had some “interesting” relatives, too, one of which was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the main movers and shakers of the women’s suffrage movement that manifested itself at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 and was heavily influenced by Spiritualism, according to the book Radical Spirits that I have previously mentioned. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was Gerrit Smith’s first cousin, and, in fact, she met her future husband, Henry Stanton, also an active abolitionist, at the home of the Smith family in Peterboro, New York. The town had been named for Gerrit Smith’s father. And, in 1840, the candidate for president for the Liberty Party, James G. Birney, married Elizabeth Potts Fitzhugh, who was Smith’s sister-in-law. So as you can see, Smith was connected via family to some of the big wheels of his day.

In June of 1848 Smith was nominated as the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate. Needless to say, he didn’t make the cut, but he did manage to get elected in 1852 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Free Soiler. He had some rather interesting political views.

According to Wikipedia.org Smith felt that: “…The Federal government and the states should prohibit the liquor traffic within their specific jurisdictions; and that government officers, so far as practicable, should be elected by a direct vote of the people.” So, not only was he an advocate of prohibition ahead of his time, but he was also an advocate of almost pure democracy. The radicals today that want to do away with the Electoral College have nothing on Gerrit Smith. He was there ahead of them.

Smith seems to have had a genuine concern for poor and black people, to the extent that he gave numerous farms of 50 acres each to indigent families. Wikipedia noted: “In 1846, hoping to help black families become self-sufficient and to provide them with property ownership needed to vote in New York, Smith attempted to colonize approximately 120,000 acres of land in North Elba, New York, near Lake Placid in Essex County with free blacks.” Although this was a commendable personal effort on his part, the plan fell through for several reasons. Among them was the difficulty of farming in the Adirondack region, the lack of experience in house building, and the bigotry of their white neighbors.

Whatever your agenda might be, you can’t reasonably blame the bigotry of whites in Northern New York State on the folks down in Dixie. Some ultra-liberals will no doubt try, but such a leap of imagination is comparable to today’s liberals believing that trucks and trucks of Democratic ballots were actually missing in the recent mid-term elections–just enough to give the Democrats a victory if such foolishness is to be believed! And it shouldn’t!

Part of the North Elba plan was to provide terrorist John Brown and his family a home up there. I doubt it would have worked. Brown seems to  have had a difficulty making a go of much of anything except terrorism–his one shining accomplishment.

The website http://www.nyhistory.com charitably observed of John Brown that: “On October 16th 1859, John Brown led a small group of his soldiers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia…” This was an overtly friendly description of Brown’s group. Sorry folks, they were not “soldiers”  they were terrorists, plain and simple, and to label them as “soldiers” does a grave disservice to those searching for accurate history.

The same website also notes that Gerrit Smith knew Brown a decade before the Harper’s Ferry fiasco and notes that: “When John Brown went to Kansas to fight against slavery interests, Smith raised money to support his military operations…When Brown raided the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, he had a check for $100 in his pocket sent to him by Gerrit Smith.” This website toned down Brown’s terrorist activities and made him sound like a legitimate military commander instead of the terrorist he really was. People who don’t know the full story about Brown may be taken in by such efforts. Did these people sanitize Brown on purpose? If so, they wouldn’t be the first.

J. C. Furnas, in his excellent book The Road to Harper’s Ferry has commented about Gerrit Smith. Furnas noted on page 354 that: “Smith may be the easiest of the Six to account for. I cannot fully explain how men of such bottom and intelligence as Howe’s, Parkers, and Higginson’s could enroll under a banner so Bedlamite as Old Brown’s…” But of Gerrit Smith he said: “The figure he cut is still most familiar:  the self-dramatizing millionaire addicted to causes, perhaps neo-Fascist, perhaps in guilt-assuaging subsidy of movements Reddish-to-Red; only in Smith’s time the ‘down with us’ impulse took other forms.”

And Furnas noted that “Word of Harper’s Ferry sent him into an emotional panic necessitating three months in an insane asylum.” Apparently he was confined in the state asylum in Utica.

There seems to be some difference of opinion as to whether Smith was fully aware of all that Brown planned on doing at Harper’s Ferry.

At one point the Chicago Tribune claimed that Smith had full knowledge of what Brown’s plans were. Smith responded to that accusation by suing the paper for libel, while claiming that he had no such knowledge.  He claimed he only thought John Brown wanted guns so the slaves that ran away to join up with him would be able to defend themselves against any who might attack them. According to Wikipedia (which surprised me) “Smith’s claim was countered by the Tribune, which produced an affidavit , signed by Brown’s son, swearing that Smith had full knowledge of all the particulars of the plan, including the plan to instigate a slave uprising. In writing later of these events, Smith said, “That affair excited and shocked me, and a few weeks after I was taken to a lunatic asylum. From that day to this I have had but a hazy view of dear John Brown’s great work.”

Smith was more than willing to finance Brown’s terrorism, but when asked about it, he suddenly had “but a hazy view of John Brown’s great work.” They tell me pigs fly, too, but I don’t believe that anymore than I believe Gerrit Smith!

Furnas also informed us that Smith’s second wife “…joined in his espousal of the Millerite end-of-the-world craze in the mid-1840s…As  his library showed he was almost professionally religious, preaching lay sermons in local pulpits lacking ordained ministers and founding at Peterboro a free-wheeling non-denominational congregation the unspoken credo of which was that Gerrit Smith was right on any topic that interested him.”

Otto Scott, in his book The Secret Six: The Fool as Martyr has noted Gerrit Smith’s view of Christianity in this country when he counseled twenty or thirty black families that had settled on his land. According to Scott, Smith sent them all letters: “…telling them to ‘turn your backs upon American Christianity and American politics as upon the Devil himself, for he is their author.’ He was bitter against the churches for  differing  with him on various theological points and on a political issue.”

So this was where Gerrit Smith was at–dare to disagree with him and he pronounced you the devil’s spawn. A typical Yankee/Marxist attitude! Yet this attitude made him a perfect follower and financial supporter of a terrorist like Brown. Why work slowly to remove what you perceive as evils when you can finance terrorists to do it for you so much more quickly?

How much different was Gerrit Smith than some of our advocates today of the modern “peace movement” whose only solution to the world’s problems seems to be some form of redistribution of the wealth (our wealth redistributed to them and their Marxist friends).

These are the people who, for decades now, have promoted the use of the so-called “peace symbol.” After the end of the Viet Nam War this symbol kind of went out of style for awhile, but I’ve noticed of late that it seems to be making a rather startling comeback, especially on clothing for young people.

Have you ever wondered what the “peace symbol” really was? Take a good look at it. It is nothing more than a Christian cross, turned upside down with the arms on it broken–denying the power of Jesus Christ! When you get right down to it, denying the power of Jesus Christ is really what it was all about for many in Gerrit Smith’s day as well as for now. Gerrit Smith would have loved the “peace symbol.”