Originally published at Reckonin.com.
Before the War for Southern Independence the main theme of American government was republican virtue and honour. The defeat of the Confederacy established a new main theme – making money. That was the most important result of the War. Compare Lee and Grant. Or the real characters of Jeff Davis and the corporate lawyer and tricky politician Lincoln.
That is why Richard Weaver called the South “the last nonmaterialist society.” Lee refused lucrative gifts to be head of a small college to help his people. Grant enjoyed four homes, socializing with the wealthy, and ignored the corruption of his friends and relatives.
Many Southerners accepted their defeat as a working of God’s will in history. That did not mean that they apologized for their heroic efforts for independence but that they believed in a universe where human desires were not the final authority.
The Agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand said that what they called the industrial regime was destroying humane society and living. Almost a century later, how can anyone doubt that they were correct? American culture, both folk and high, barely exists and only in fragments. Americans by and large have lost all sense of Place and history and have no roots, are cultureless beings. Real Christian faith barely survives. An adult American from the 1950s would not even recognize his country today, and would not like what he saw.
The South, changed and atrophied as it is, is the last bastion of the Western soul in a totally materialist society ruled from the top by corrupt elites – the reign of money.
The areas of the North and West that are today the most conservative received large settlements of Southerners. The formerly soulless highly Republican areas are now far left. They are still robbing the people but now the call it globalisation rather than tariffs and banking.
Tearing down our statues and memorials is not the result of an interpretation of history. Even if the South-haters were right about history – and they are not – it would make no difference. They act because they want to erase all real history and because they hate us. Their massive vanity seeks to eliminate us from a country they think is theirs and they bask in their power over us. Although their country is only some future thing that exists only in their imagination. Defending the South and its monuments defends the remnants of Western civilization in North America.
Historians and politicians continue to repeat the lie that the Founding Fathers nobly wanted to end slavery but did not because fear of losing the Southern States. This is ignorant, childish, and superficial almost beyond belief. The Founding Fathers, including the Southern ones, knew slavery was a problem but also knew that had absolutely no power to act on it and no idea of how to end it. Many Northern Founders held slaves and others were engaged profitably in the African slave trade. To say that the Founders agreed not to end slavery only to please the Southern States is to make the stupid assumption that the Union was founded by Northerners and Southerners were only a redheaded stepchild in the process of creating the United State, merely allowed along by the real Northern Founders.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
