My Civil War

[Valin]

NY Times

TERRY L. JONES

May 2, 2014

 

As a teenager growing up in the piney woods of Winn Parish, La., I frequently looked out our front window to see an old man in well-worn overalls gingerly climb over the fence and walk up the hill toward the house.

 

Uncle Alce, short for Alson, lived next door, and he would come over to drink coffee and catch up on local news when my father was home from his pipeline construction job. Uncle Alces father, Elisha, was my great-great-grandfather and is one of six generations of Joneses buried in the local cemetery. Elisha and his extended family were poor dirt farmers in 1861, and they chose to sit out the Civil War after Winn Parish voted against secession. Not until the Yankees captured New Orleans and a conscription law was passed in 1862 did Elisha join several hundred other parish men in enlisting in the 28th Louisiana Volunteers. Military records show that he deserted the following summer while the regiment was serving in southern Louisiana. When asked about it, Uncle Alce quickly answered, Pa wasnt a deserter. He came home to get in the corn crop and then went back.

 

(Snip)

 

Before visiting Ms. Farnsworth, I, a son of the Deep South, had never much considered how Northerners felt about the Civil War. But the trip to Michigan demonstrated to me that it was as an important part of their family heritage as it was of mine. In his 1861 inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln reminded the nation that all Americans were bound together by the mystic cords of memory. Those words still ring true today, particularly in regard to the Civil War. That conflict and the Reconstruction period that followed settled the critical issues of secession, slavery and citizenship, but they also left deep wounds that are still red and angry and painful to the touch. One reason the Civil War resonates so strongly with us today is because it is a recent event in our collective memory. The last Union veteran died in 1956 and the last Confederate in 1959. Incredibly, the last Union widow died in 2003 and the last Confederate widow in 2004!

 

The war may have ended nearly 150 years ago, but many Americans today are only one generation removed from Appomattox, and family history is judged in terms of generations, not years.

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Ludwig von Mises Institute

The Jeffersonian Secessionist Tradition

Mises Daily: Wednesday, July 09, 2014 by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Thomas Jefferson, the author of America’s July 4, 1776 Declaration of Secession from the British empire, was a lifelong advocate of both thevoluntary union of the free, independent, and sovereign states, and of the right of secession. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form,” he said in his first inaugural address in 1801, “let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it.”

 

All of these Northern state editorials were published in the first three months of 1861 and are published in Howard Cecil Perkins, editor, Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, Mass.: 1964). They illustrate how the truths penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence — that the states were considered to be free, independent, and sovereign in the same sense that England and France were; that the union was voluntary; that using invasion, bloodshed, and mass murder to force a state into the union would be an abomination and a universal moral outrage; and that a free society is required to revere freedom of association — were still alive and well until April of 1865 when the Lincoln regime invented and adopted the novel new theory that: 1) the states were never sovereign; 2) the union was not voluntary; and 3) the federal government had the “right” to prove that propositions 1 and 2 are right by means murdering hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens by waging total war on the entire civilian population of the Southern states, bombing and burning its cities and towns into a smoldering ruin, and calling it all “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

http://mises.org/daily/6805/The-Jeffersonian-Secessionist-Tradition

[Draggingtree]

When the South Was America 1607-1861

By Donald Livingston on Dec 27, 2016

Dr. Donald Livingston on “When the South Was America, 1607-1861” at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School on “The Southern Tradition and the Renewal of America,” June 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW4M46JXXzE

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/when-the-south-was-america-1607-1861/