“I have been born of traitors, but thank God, they have ever been traitors in the great cause of liberty, fighting against tyranny and oppression, Such treason will ever be mine whilst true to my heritage.”

“Shall a dominant party of the North rule the South, or shall the people of the South rule themselves?” According to Rhett, after “long forbearance and patience,” stemming from a “heroic love for the Union” over “mere interest,” the South was driven to secede from the Union in order to escape the “ruthless mastery” of the North,” which was now threatening “to subject them by the sword.”

If slavery had never existed in America, continued McCrady, the North and the South would still have gone to war, for the “seeds” of the conflict were planted in the Constitution itself, growing from the opposing interpretations of Jefferson’s “Federal Party” and Hamilton’s “National Party.” As McCrady put it, “The Convention which framed the Constitution was itself divided into the two parties which, after seventy years of discussion…adjourned the debate to the battlefields of our late war.”

Believing
That they fought, for Principle against Power,
For Religion against Fanaticism,
For Man’s Right against Man’s Might,
These Men were Martyrs of their Creed;
And their Justification
Is in the holy keeping of the God of History.
But, for as much
As alike in the heat of Battle,
In the weariness of the Hospital,
And in the gloom of hostile Prisons,
They were faithful unto death,
Theirs is the Crown
Of a loving, a glorious, and an immortal Tradition,
In the Hearts, and in the Holiest Memories
Of the Daughters of their People;
Of the Sons of their State;
Of the Heirs Unborn of their Example
And all of for whom
They dared to die.

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 “The one great principle, which produced our secession from the United States – was constitutional liberty – liberty protected by law. For this, we have fought; for this, our people have died. To preserve and cherish this sacred principle, constituting as it did, the very soul of independence itself, was the clear dictate of all honest – all wise statesmanship.”

– Robert B. Rhett

 It is fashionable nowadays to regard States’ rights as yet another debunked “Neo-Confederate” myth.One Bancroft-winning historian takes the incredible liberty of inserting imaginary thoughts into prominent Fire-Eater Robert B. Rhett’s head, having him curse “St. Thomas” Jefferson, along with “inalienable rights,” “rights of revolution,” and “the principles of 1776,” claiming “the South had revolted to escape those idiocies.” Never mind the fact that Rhett proclaimed these very ideals throughout his life and personally identified as a “Jeffersonian Republican.” Elsewhere, a winner of the Alan Nevins History Prize writes off the sincerity of States’ rights with a few words. “As for the ‘dry prattle’ about the Constitution, the rights of minorities, and the like, there was never any confusion in the minds of most contemporaries that such arguments were masks for more fundamental emotional issues,” he casually asserts. “State sovereignty was an issue only because the retreat to the inviolability of states’ rights had always been a refuge for those fearful of a challenge to their property.”

Indeed, it is the modis operandi of historians nowadays to discount whatever Southerners said about political, economic, and cultural differences with the North as a false front for the ulterior motive of slavery: Southerners could not possibly have meant what they said!

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