Mr. Lincoln Wanted a War

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Years ago, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, I heard Professor Donald Livingston from Georgia give a speech in which he stated “Lincoln wanted a war.” Some who heard the speech may have been a bit shocked, but Dr. Livingston was right on the money. Lincoln did, indeed, want a war and he gave the country one in such a way as to make the South appear to be the aggressor. A master stroke on his part, but then he was devious, whereas most of the Southern politicians that had to try to deal with him were not.

Gene Kizer Jr. in his authoritative book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States noted, on page 87, “Lincoln needed to start a war as fast as he could before Southerners completed trade and military alliances with England and other European countries, which they had been pursuing with great enthusiasm for months. With every second that went by the South got stronger and the North got weaker…He also worried about free states joining the South. The Confederate Constitution allowed it. Slavery was not required. Slavery was up to an individual state, and Southerners anticipated that many free states with economic ties to the South, especially along the Mississippi and in the West, would join the Confederacy.”

Kizer continued: “The South wanted to be Independent just as the colonists had wanted to be independent in 1776. The South wanted freedom and self-government. It was tired of 10 years of Northern hatred and terrorism…Lincoln knew that sending his warships and soldiers to Charleston during the most critical hour in American history would start the war. That’s why it was well publicized nationally, so everyone could get ready. He hoped the Confederates would fire first. Everything he did was designed to get the result.”

On page 223 he asked the rhetorical question “Could the Southerners be induced to attack Sumter, to assume the aggressive and thus put themselves in the wrong in the eyes of the North and of the world?” It would appear, from footnote 178 on page 223 that there were, indeed, some on the North, along with Lincoln, who hoped for just such an occurrence.

So the evidence begins to mount that it was really Lincoln and some of this political cronies that wanted a war, and not the South, even though they were conned into firing the first shot.

Just today, 6/29, I read a penetrating article by Professor Thomas DiLorenzo which dealt with the book A Disease in the Public Mind–A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, written by historian Thomas Fleming. Professor DiLorenzo noted in his article: “So, why was there a war, according to Thomas Fleming? First, there was an extreme  ‘malevolent envy’ of Southerners by the New England ‘Yankees’ who believed  they were God’s chosen people entitled to rule over not only  America but the world. Today, such people would be called ‘neocons.’ Second, there were twenty-five or so wealthy and very influential New England abolitionists who had  abandoned Christianity, condemned Jesus Christ, and adopted the mentally  deranged murderer of innocents, John Brown, a self-described communist, as their ‘savior,’  funding his terroristic bloodbaths.” Brown killed all manner of people in Kansas as a protest against slaveowners. Most of those he killed owned no slaves, but Brown planned on leaving a message, so they died anyway.

DiLorenzo then notes the similarities between Brown and those who supported him and today’s leftist revolutionaries and their mode of operation. The similarities between the two are striking. The leftists in Brown’s day wanted to destabilize the South. Today’s lefties want to destabilize the Trump administration and drive Trump from office The agenda is pretty much the same in both cases.

Whether we could end up with another “civil war” over this is something that remains to be seen, but I am afraid it is not out of the question.

Lincoln and the Republican Party Were Frauds

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Awhile back I reviewed Gene Kizer  Jr.s  informative book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States. Mr. Kizer brought out some excellent points about the Republican Party in the early part of his book, things we maybe need to reflect on today in light of where the present Republican Party seems intent on taking us–down the same path the Democrats are.

We have all been dutifully informed, via our public school “history” books that the North went to war to free the slaves. I have often asked the question–if that is true, then why did the North not first free those slaves in the four slave states that, for one reason or another, had to remain in the Union? The silence in reply to my question has been deafening! This is one issue no one wants to touch, so they just ignore it and hope no one really important, with a big audience, ever bothers to bring it up.

Gene Kizer’s commentary on the early Republican Party is quite revelatory.  He says: “But ending slavery was not the goal of the Republican Party in 1856 and 1860. Taking over the government so they could rule the country for their own benefit and aggrandizement was their goal…Wendell Phillips proudly claimed that the Republican Party is the first sectional party in American history and is the party of the North pledged against the South. For the entire decade of the 1850s, Republicans used the most virulent hatred against the South to rally their votes. Republicans celebrated John Brown’s terrorism and murder of Southerners and Republicans endorsed Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document.” Helper’s book advocated slaves murdering their masters. This was the line the Republicans were pushing in the 1850s.

Can you begin now to understand why the South wanted out of this Union? The party now in power was advocating their destruction. I can’t think of a better reason for wanting out. Kizer observed: “Republicans were not a great political movement trying to solve the difficult slavery issue with good will. Most people in the North (95 to 98% according to historians Lee Benson and Gavin Wright)  were not abolitionists. They did not care about freeing the slaves who would then come North and be job competition. No Republicans could be elected in the North on the platform of directly ending slavery but they could agitate on slavery in the West with good results…Neither slaves nor free blacks were welcome in Lincoln’s West.”

The concern over the expansion of slavery in the West was yet another Republican faux issue. Kizer noted that the territory of New Mexico had been open to slavery for ten years and in that decade there was a grand total of twenty nine slaves there in 1860.

Historian Charles Ramsdell had noted that slavery had about reached its peak by 1860 and “…must shortly have begun to decline, for the economic forces which had carried it into the region west of the Mississippi had about reached their maximum effectiveness. It could not go forward in any direction and was losing ground along its northern border…It is a great irony that Northern anti-slavery  was mostly economic or racist.” Look at what Ramsdell is telling you here. By 1860 slavery was beginning to be on the way out. So why would the North then fight a war to get rid of it? All they had to do was to wait and eventually it would have died a natural death.

And Kizer also noted that “The reason Lincoln needed to preserve the Union  was because, without it, the North faced economic annihilation, the magnitude of which easily made war preferable…By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861 there was gloom, despair and panic in the North with thousands of business failures, hundreds of thousands of people out of work, serious trouble with the stock market, threatened runs on banks, and Northern ship captains heading South because of the South’s low tariff. There was no talk whatsoever of ending slavery.”

Almost seems like this situation we have today with this Chinese virus with the Deep State trying to keep the country shut down and the economy in tatters–and all so they can make sure Trump doesn’t get a second term. They need to get rid of him because he is not “one of the boys.” And the Republicans here are every bit as guilty as the Democrats because the Deep State controls both parties. Trump isn’t one of the boys–Lincoln was!

The Republicans would not protect the South in 1860, but rather planned to make war on it. The Republicans today refuse to protect us from the Democrats. They tell us they will, but more and more, their actions belie  their words. When the Republicans start acting like the Democrats then you better watch out–but also learn from history. The original Republican Party was not conservative–they were socialists. It seems in our day they are headed back toward their origins and we need to keep an eye on that because it will affect us all, and our children.

Trite Comments About Sigel

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I am in the process of rereading The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara. It is a historical fiction book about the last two years of the War of Northern Aggression after Gettysburg. Shaara is an entertaining writer and he has obviously had to do quite a bit of research on his subject to make it believable to discerning readers.

Having said that does not mean, by any means, that I agree with all of his commentary or suppositions.

When I first read the book, I made a few notes in the flyleaf about some things that caught my attention. On page 2 he makes brief comments about some of the men who fought for the North. He says: “Some are barely Americans at all, expatriates and immigrants from Europe, led by officers who do not speak English.” Anyone who knows the history knows who he is talking about here, the socialist and communist Forty-eighters from all over Europe who came here to try to push their agenda on this country because they had not been able to make it work in Europe. But Shaara does not tell  us any of that. He ignores it as though it didn’t exist. Indeed, his readers are not supposed to realize it did exist and he ain’t about to let them know. He would not have had to go into great detail. In about three sentences he could have at least given us a brief overview of them. If he’s done any homework at all he has to be aware of who these guys were, yet he says nothing.

On page 88 he mentions Franz Sigel, one of Lincoln’s socialist generals. Of Sigel he only says: “He was a graduate of the German Military Academy, an experienced fighter who had emigrated himself because he happened to pick the wrong side in a brief revolution.” He doesn’t tell you much does he? You are not supposed to realize who Sigel and the other Forty-eighters really were. There was much more to Sigel and his socialist comrades than you get from these perfunctory comments. Sigel just didn’t “pick the wrong side in a brief revolution.” Shaara’s “brief revolution” rocked the entire European continent in 1848-49 and that’s why so many of its participants ended up here, in the North. Austria, Hungary, Italy and Germany, along with others were all involved in Shaara’s “brief revolution” which literally swept through much of Europe.

Shaara does the exact same thing many authors do when writing about the War, he downplays the socialist involvement of many in the North, including many high officers in Lincoln’s armies because that sort of information does not fit the agenda of a righteous North fighting to end evil slavery in the evil South. And if you are going to get anything about the War and the personalities involved in it published in this day and age by any big company you already realize that you have to approach this topic from the position that the North was righteous and virtuous and the South evil and venal. Thinking people realize that isn’t the case, but if you want your stuff out there for a mass audience then you better learn to write it that way, and damn the facts!

If you want to find out the truth about Franz Sigel, who, by the way, was no military whiz kid, you need to read Donnie Kennedy’s and my book Lincoln’s Marxists and I am not trying to make money off of it when I say that. There are no more royalties to be made off our book. However, if you want to begin to see what a large part of the War of Northern Aggression was really all about then you need to read this book.

Franz Sigel was part of an orchestrated push to install socialist and/or communist governments in most of the European countries in 1848-49–and that’s what the Forty-eighters had as their agenda when they came to America. With Lincoln in the White House they were able to accomplish quite a bit of that, both in his administration and those that followed it. We still live with the results of that in our day and it’s time we started to realize that.

Too Little Too Late!

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Just noticed this morning an article about how the National Guard is being mobilized to protect statues in Washington D. C. and in Wisconsin. In Washington some leftist protesters tried, unsuccessfully, to topple a stature of Andrew Jackson and in Wisconsin I guess they managed to pull down a statue of some abolitionist. At least that’s they way I heard it.

For weeks now they have been pulling down statues of any historical personage who happened to have white skin, not just Confederates but others as well.  Even some who opposed slavery have had their monuments trashed.

I haven’t heard anything more about those statues of Marx and Lenin in Oregon and Washington. How much you want to bet they are still up? Even a statue of Ulysses S. Grant was torn down, although Grant had been a slave owner and had refused to free his slaves until forced to do so by the 13th Amendment. His contention for waiting so long to turn loose of his slaves was “good help is hard to find.”

I also heard that President Trump issued an executive order protecting monuments, at least monuments of veterans, and I am all for that, but I am beginning to wonder why it took so long to get around to doing this.

Now that statues for Yankees and abolitionists are being torn down, suddenly we see a need to stop this madness. What about when Confederate statues and monuments were being torn down and toppled? And if we are going to protect statues of veterans, how many of those men who ended up being Confederates had been in the Union army before Lincoln became the federal dictator, or maybe it was Stanton who was the federal dictator and Lincoln only the willing accomplice.

How many Confederate statues ended up being destroyed and no one said much of anything? Now that the abolitionist statues are being town down suddenly we need to halt all this because suddenly, we are destroying the wrong history! And you can hardly expect the mindless Marxists who are destroying all the statues to differentiate between them. All they know is “If he’s white, pull him down.”  They wouldn’t know an abolitionist from a bull frog!

I wonder if the few remaining Confederate statues and monuments that are still up someplace will be protected by this new ban that seems to me to almost be too little too late.

“Different Dreams”

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

The movie Gettysburg had lots of fiction in it. It was good historical fiction, though I think it leaned a bit too hard on the slavery issue as the cause of the War of Northern Aggression.

But there were also some interesting observations in it. One of them was made by the Englishman, Colonel Arthur Freemantle, who visited the South during the War. In the movie, Freemantle is talking to General Longstreet and commenting on the similarities between North and South, mostly same genealogical background, they worshipped the same God (though at this point that one might be subject to some interpretation) but then Freemantle noted that North and South had “different dreams.” For all their similarities, there were certain things they did not view, had never viewed, quite the same way.

One of those things was their view of government. The South had always viewed the Constitution as a compact between states and not as a document that bound all the states together as one indivisible “union.” As the decades passed, that became the normal view in the North, just like radical theology became one of the norms in the North. The South never accepted this view of the Constitution, nor did it accept the radical theology that may have helped to promote it.

Anyone who has read my material knows I have had problems with the Constitution, but then, the great Christian statesman, Patrick Henry, also had problems with the Constitution, so I guess I am in pretty good company. I have always respected Mr. Henry, both for his Christian faith and for his political acumen. Not many in his day could see the problems he saw. He warned people–to no avail.

Be all that as it may, the Constitution is what we ended up with and the views of it still prevail, even today. In the pre-war South, most Southern folks viewed their home state as their country. This was also noted in Gettysburg when General Kemper stated “Virginia is my country.” When Robert E. Lee resigned from the U.S. Army he did so because he feared Lincoln would invade Virginia and he wanted to defend his home state from that.

I don’t care what the politically correct minions of the Far Left say today. Robert E. Lee and those Southerners who fought to defend their states from Yankee invasion were not traitors. Their understanding of the Constitution required that they defend their home states. They were never cogs in the wheel of an “indivisible Union” that you could never get out of no matter what. Given the fact that some states had secession articles in their ratification documents for the Constitution, this view of the “indivisible” union is heretical. If that was what it really meant, then no state would have signed on to it.

The people that push this anti-secession fertilizer are either totally ignorant of the history or they hope you are. You owe it to yourselves and your children to learn the real history–and it ain’t what you were taught in your high school or college “history” book!

So the North and the South did indeed have “different dreams.” The Southern “dream” was something they felt was in line with the original intent of the Constitution. The Northern “dream” was something they felt was more in line with the Lincolnian vision of empire–“aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”

And let’s be honest with ourselves here. This country is not an “indivisible” nation. Can anyone look at us today and not see the divisions? We are rife with division. Most notably, the political Left  is at war with the rest of us and those minions of the Deep State are at war with all of us and using the political Left to destabilize the country as a whole. They are tearing down our flags, monuments, and destroying our history and most of us sit numbly by and watch them do it. And many in Washington love to have it so.

I even read an article just this morning where leftist demonstrators are now smashing stained glass windows and tearing down statues of our Lord, Jesus Christ that they say look “too European.” And where are the Christians? They’re mostly watching it all happen.

We may well get to the point where the Lord will get sick of all this foolishness and end up turning the Leftist’s “dream” for America into a real nightmare!

It’s All Nothing But Black Racism

by Al Benson Jr.

In checking over some of the monuments the Black Lives Matter groups and significant other similar groups have been pulling down recently you discover that almost any statue or monument of any white person is fair game for these black Marxists.

They don’t pretend to know their history, but, hey, how much history do you need to know to tear down a monument, any monument, to some old white guy?

I saw an article a few days ago about where rioters in Philadelphia defaced a statue of Matthias Baldwin. Who was he? Well, it turns out he was an early abolitionist who campaigned against slavery three decades before it ended. To these anti-slavery rioters, Baldwin should have been one of the good guys. But he had a serious  problem–he was white–and so, good guy or not, his statue had to come down. Any statue or monument to any white guy needs to come down.

Protesters also defaced the Shaw memorial. I’m not just sure where that is, but what it commemorates is an all black battalion that opposed slavery during the War of Northern Aggression. I wonder if they were opposed to slavery in the four slave states that remained in the Union during that war.

It seems that about the only statues of old white guys that are safe anymore are statues of Marx and Lenin, of which a couple are in existence in the Pacific Northwest. Either the protesters just have not discovered them or, due to their stance among leftist protesters they continue to remain on sacred ground. Untouchable! Which should tell you something about where the protesters are coming from.

Outside of the statues of Marx and Lenin, any statue of any old white guy is now fair game, even if he happens to be someone who opposed slavery–either North or South, makes no difference anymore.

The leftist assault against anything Confederate was the first main assault against American history, heritage and culture. Once the lefties got by with that one they knew it was safe to go after all American symbols in general. So their crusade against all things Confederate morphed into its second stage–an attack against all things American in general.

This will continue until they have totally destroyed our history in this country, because he who controls the past also controls the future.

There are many brave souls that try to combat this, just as there were some who fought against the destruction of Confederate heritage, but there were just not enough of them and the leftist media controlled the narrative most people received.

Could we have used more help with this? Sure we could, but there were just not enough good folks that cared enough to fight back to preserve their heritage and the same will probably prove true regarding American heritage in general.

The political and theological left may prevail and if they do it will be because not enough people cared about what they would leave to their children to do anything about it.

This may sound a tad gloomy, but I hope it may also serve as a wake up call. If you care about what you leave your kids then you damn well better wake up and do something about it while there is still a slim chance that you can.

Unless we are willing to let the black Marxist racists just take over we better start to wake up and smell the coffee. It’s worthy of note that those who try to tar all white folks with that racist brush are, themselves, the most racist of all.

“Trained Marxists”

by Al Benson Jr.

I have watched in utter amazement as the political class, both Democrats and Republicans, have absolutely fawned over Black Lives Matter, as though this group was akin to the Second Coming.

From the Democrats I expect this, as most of them are works in progress when it comes to embracing Marxism in some form. Marxism so very neatly fits into their agenda–the same way it did for the fledgling Republican Party back in the late 1850s.

In recent decades, though, the Republican Party made some pretense at being conservative. It would now appear that many of them are working their way back to the way they started out in the 1850s. I can’t believe “conservative” Republicans are this stupid but it would seem that more and more of them are now willing to bend with whatever way they seem to think the political wind is blowing, left, right, whatever. If that is truly the case, then it means that many of them have no moral guidelines to follow except what they think they will gain momentarily.

To those Republican wannabees who think the public is too stupid to  follow what they are doing, I would point to an article on Zero Hedge over the weekend.

The article noted that Patrisse Cullors, reported to be one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, described BLM organizers in 2015 as Trained Marxists. This was on a video that I watched and she was very explicit. So why are these Republicans now falling all over themselves to support an organization whose organizers, at least some of them, are trained Marxists? I noticed over the weekend, also, that Mitt Romney was with one of their groups and mouthing their shibboleths. Anyone who thinks Romney is still a conservative just ain’t paying attention.

I suppose there are lots of really weak-kneed Republicans that are so afraid of being labeled as “racists” that they will cave in to whatever anyone on the political left wants to avoid that label–even if it means totally compromising whatever principles they claim to possess.

Republican voters with conviction had better be really careful about which Republicans they vote for in the upcoming elections, lest they end up voting for a batch of wusses who are afraid to stand up for what they claim to believe.

Lots of conservative, patriotic voters voted for Republicans in the last election because they felt the Republicans would protect them from the socialist Democrats. Now they are starting to find out that the Republicans won’t protect them from much of anything and have, in fact, sold out to those who wish to take away what little liberty we still have left.

You almost get the feeling that the political class, on both sides of the aisle, have little in mind except the planned destruction of the Middle Class and the removal of our God-given freedoms. And I have to wonder if this has been the game all along–and they are using Black Lives Matter, with its cadre of trained Marxists to help them accomplish it.

Communists Preserve Their Own Power–and to hell with everyone else!

by Al Benson Jr.

Recently someone on the East Coast sent me a copy of The Epoch Times newspaper for June 11th. In the opinion section of the paper there was an informative article by a Diana Zhang. As she has family in China this is a pen name, used to protect them.

Ms. Zhang had an informative article on the Chinese Communist Party, which is probably typical of most Communist Parties.  Zhang noted that: “China has a unique model: ‘Enrich the party and exploit the people…When the CCP first took over China it killed landowners and took their land, killed business owners and took their businesses. Private property became state-owned–actually, CCP owned. Everything in China is owned by the CCP.  When China’s economy was close to falling off a cliff, Western countries bailed out the CCP. With the opening of trade and the U.S. market to China, China privatized a lot of the land, but CCP officials and their relatives got the lion’s share of opportunities. The CCP used the ideals of socialism to rob people of their property, then privatized it into their own hands.”

How convenient for the Chinese Communists that the West, particularly the United States, came along to bail them out in the nick of time so they would not go under completely. This was probably no accident. The West has been bailing Communist countries out ever since 1917 when Lenin and Trotsky took over Russia–with lots of help from the United States.

Communism cannot support itself. It always needs huge financial transfusions from those western countries that are supposed to be anti-Communist but whose ruling elites are really using Communism to expand their own power worldwide.

We have, in this country today, many “Americans” who finance, support and promote what the Chinese Communists have been doing. Some of them a politicians, some media and entertainment figures. And unfortunately, some of them are in Mr. Trump’s administration because he has not been able to clean out all the Obama appointees in Washington and it is doubtful if he will ever get rid of them all. So they undermine his attempts to improve the lives of the American people. For some info on these people check out Arthur Thompson’s recent book In the Shadows of the Deep State. He has an informative chapter, starting on page 190 dealing with China, Korea and Viet Nam. The book is an expose on the Council on Foreign Relations, this country’s premier One World Government organization.

Zhang has an interesting theory about the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. She claims that the leadership of the CCP don’t view China as their home country. She says they “see the country as a place temporarily held by them where they can grab the money and prepare to leave…In 2012, the following internal date leaked out: 90 percent of central party committee members had relatives and children who had emigrated to foreign countries; 85 percent of top officials  were ready to abandon their positions and escape the country.”

She seems to feel that, if push comes to shove, the comrades in Beijing will simply grab the money and run. Her theory is that they view China as a potential land-based Titanic and they have the life boats loaded with loot just in case.

The question then remains–will those who really control what the Chinese Communists do be content to let them leave or do they have other designs for China? The Chinese Communist Party is hardly the top rung on the ladder of One World Government. And One World Government is what it is really all about. So we will just have to see.

Suffice it to say that Western support for Communist China, from our recognition of them and our negating of Taiwan has been no accident. Our leaders knew what they were doing–supporting Communism for their own ends–and many of them are still doing just that.

Boston Mayor and Contradictions

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

An article on Breitbart for June 16th by Joel R. Pollak shows the contradictory mindset of many Northern politicians.

The article stated: “Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D)  has come out in favor of removing  a statue of Abraham Lincoln that has stood in the city for more than a century–but is opposed to renaming Faneuil Hall, which is named for a slave owner and is  on the site of a slave market. As Breitbart News has reported, left-wing activists are trying to have a statue of Abraham Lincoln removed from Park Square after nearly 150 years because they find the depiction of an emancipated slave in the sculpture to be offensive.”

Actually, the statue is a replica of an original statue that was built with money donated by freed slaves. So now something bought and paid for by ex-slaves is not even good enough to please the minions of left-wing thought anymore! These people have to be the ultimate in political crybabies! Nothing satisfies them no matter what.

However, the Mayor’s office in Boston is in favor of removing the Lincoln statue and they wish to replace it with “one that recognizes equality.” Are they saying that Lincoln didn’t recognize the equality of the black man? He didn’t you know. All you have to do is to read the Lincoln Douglas Debates and that point comes through quite clearly, provided you get a copy of the unexpurgated text and not one of the newer sanitized versions. Abraham Lincoln was a racist,  pure and simple. His answer to the  problem of blacks in America was to ship ’em all back to Africa, or to someplace in South America–any place that would take them, because he didn’t want them here.

You have to wonder if Mayor Walsh has finally plumbed the depths of Lincoln’s racism. However, in the case of Faneuil Hall, named after a slave owner, Walsh favors keeping that name. He doesn’t want that changed. I’d be willing to bet that if he was the mayor in some Southern city he wouldn’t be able to get the name changed fast enough, but, in Boston, a historical building named after a slave owner is okay with him.

On the other hand, let’s leave the name of the building the same. In the long run that reflects that the North had as big a hand in slavery as the South did, maybe even bigger, because all the slave trading ships that brought slaves over here from Africa originated in the North, mostly Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York.

This is something the leftists never talk about–slavery in the North–but it existed, every bit as much as it did in the South. The North just got rid of most of it a little bit earlier that’s all, but our current crop of “historians”–so called, don’t want to deal with that. It doesn’t fit their agenda for trashing the South for their sin of slavery if you have to admit that the North shared in that sin, and occupied the even more heinous sin of bringing the slaves over here to begin with. Southerners may have bought them, but the Northerners “brung ’em.” And quite a few of them ended  up in the North.

It’s about time the leftists started dealing  with that fact of life. And then there is the case of blacks owning  other blacks as slaves, which was quite a common experience around the country, and there were American Indians that owned black slaves also. None of this is ever dealt with but it has been documented. In fact there is a book out there called The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist written by Annie Heloise Abel and printed by the University of Nebraska Press. The leftists ought to be able to find this one really easily and check it out–but they probably won’t. It doesn’t fit their agenda of “white racism” so it will be ignored.

Many on the left continue to be a mass of contradictions. Get rid of a statue of Lincoln who was supposed to be their “great emancipator” (he wasn’t) but keep the name of a building named for a slave owner.

Way back in 2013 I did an article on this blog about slavery in Rhode Island and it seems today that someone discovered it all over again because it has gotten over 40 views today, seven years after I posted it. Shows you the value of leaving these articles up. You never know who will end up discovering, or rediscovering them.

We Err Because We Don’t Really Know Our Own History

by Al Benson Jr.

I recently watched a short video, over five years old now, by Walter Williams, a Professor at George Mason University. Professor Williams has probably forgotten more real history than most folks will ever know.

His comments went into the Treaty of Paris in 1783, where Great Britain signed a  peace treaty that listed the thirteen states as being thirteen sovereign nations, not one huge “union.”  Most people do not realize this. They have been conditioned by what passes for “history” books today that they think this country originated as one gigantic union. It didn’t! We started out as thirteen sovereign countries.

And when those sovereign countries ratified the Constitution, in which they made the federal government their agent not their master, something some of us have contended was not the wisest of moves, there were three states, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, that had in their ratification ordinances, language that allowed them to secede from this new union if things occurred that were detrimental to the benefit of their states.

No one spoke out against the secession language in the ratification ordinances of those three states. And that was because the idea of seceding,  or leaving the new union of states was not treasonous! Try to wrap your minds around that one fact if you get nothing else out of this article.

So when the Southern states seceded in 1860-61 they were not committing treason, they were exercising a right that most regarded as sacred up to that point, including very many in the North. Professor Thomas DiLorenzo recently did an article on this that appeared on the Lew Rockwell site and he was right on the money with his observations  in that article.

He noted that the definition of treason consisted of levying war against them, or adhering to their Enemies and he noted that the important words here, the key words, were them and their which tells us, if we stop long enough to think, that the united States were plural, meaning free and independent states “not something called the United States government in Washington, D.C.

DiLorenzo noted that treason was defined this way as an attempt to make sure that the power of the federal government  “would not be used against them by means of a military invasion. Levying war on any of the free and independent states is the ‘only’ definition of treason in the U.S. Constitution.”

DiLorenzo then observed that “…when Lincoln ordered the first 75,000 man invasion of the Southern states he, and all of his political associates, committed treason as defined by the Constitution.” Lots of Republicans today don’t want to hear that, but they need to. They need to realize the Republican Party was never the conservative bastion they were taught to think it was.

If you want to learn a bit about the real foundations of the Republican Party you can check two books I have mentioned on numerous occasions–To the Victors go the Myths and Monuments by Arthur R. Thompson and Lincoln’s Marxists by Donnie Kennedy and myself. Both books contain history the Republican Establishment won’t like, but it is history, and you need to be aware of it to truly understand much of what is going on in this country in our day.