Confederate flag disappearing across South, response to

Via Billy

Confederate flag disappearing across South

 Dear Mr. Cotterell:

Your article or column on the “disappearance” of the battle flag — not to mention all other symbols representing the attempt by eleven Southern States in the 1860s to escape the clutches of a tyrannical central government — misses the point.

First, of course, secession was a constitutionally guaranteed right to any State. I suggest that you read the report delivered to President Buchanan by his Attorney General Jeremiah Black. Buchanan had ordered Black to find him a constitutional means of preventing secession and of forcing those States that had already “gone out,” back in. Black’s finding were unequivocal, constitutionally valid and irrefutable. In sum, Attorney General Black said:

Another clause in the same section gives Congress the power 'to provide for calling forth the militia,' and to use them within the limits of the State. But this power is so restricted by the words which immediately follow that it can be exercised only for one of the following purposes: To execute the laws of the Union; that is, to aid the Federal officers in the performance of their regular duties. To suppress insurrections against the State; but this is confined by Article 4, Section 4, to cases in which the State herself shall apply for assistance against her own people. To repel the invasion of a State by enemies who come from abroad to assail her in her own territory. All these provisions are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve the peace, and not to plunge them into civil war. Our forefathers do not seem to have thought that war was calculated 'to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' There was undoubtedly a strong and universal conviction among the men who framed and ratified the Constitution, that military force would not only be useless, but pernicious, as a means of holding the States together.

In other words, the right of secession was recognized in the Constitution. This cannot be doubted as the New England States had met in convention to consider secession during the War of 1812 and no army was sent north from Washington to threaten invasion or war.

Black also pointed out something else to President Buchanan:

If one of the States should declare her independence, your action cannot depend on the rightfulness of the cause upon which such declaration is based.

Of course, this means that the legitimacy of the secession of the first Southern States did not depend upon the reason or reasons these States chose to leave the Union! Was it a matter of “preserving slavery?” In some instances, yes, but often more because these States saw the ongoing efforts by the States of the North and West to enforce their will upon their Southern brethren whether it had to do with slavery or — the primary reason for secession — the theft of Southern wealth through confiscatory taxes.

Actually, sir, the reason for the secession of the States of the South in 1861 is hardly irrelevant these days and that is exactly why we have the current and ongoing effort at cultural genocide against the South, something that took place during the so-called “civil war” itself. That flag you believe to be “racist” and a symbol of “rebellion” was not the former but certainly was the latter and it is because of its latter meaning that it is not only relevant but ESSENTIAL to Americans in this the first part of the 21st Century. For we have what Lincoln defined as a NATIONAL government that is completely out of control. Indeed, if we were not so apathetic or ignorant, all Americans, black and white, who love those liberties given by God and [supposedly] protected by the Constitution would embrace the flag of the people of the South who saw what we have today in their future and rejected it with their blood and treasure.

Of course, those who have no problem whatsoever with our current tyranny will reject the symbols of a people who fought against eternal slavery for all Americans and not just the chattel slavery that was ended everywhere in the Western Hemisphere by 1888 without war EXCEPT in the United States! The planters of the South — less than 2% of the total population — could not have maintained black slavery even had they wished to do so. That is a myth and a lie used to deceive people about what this assault on the South is all about.

The only people to whom the battle flag has become “embarrassing” are those who rejoice in the current tyranny or those who are too blind to see it.

Valerie Protopapas
Huntington Station, New York