April 13, 2013 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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Welcome to the Political Cesspool, known worldwide as the South's foremost populous radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Saturday evening, April 13th, and April is, of course, Confederate History Month.
You know, we've been doing our Confederate History Month series since 2005.
Our show first took to the airwaves in October of 2004.
Confederate History Month is April of each year.
And so the first time we had an opportunity to do it would have been in April of 2005.
And we have been doing it every year since then.
And each and every year, since 2005, we have always done our Confederate History Month in April during the third and final hour.
I had to do a little problem solving this week.
You're asking, you're saying, well, why are you doing it in the second hour of tonight's show?
Well, I had a problem.
That's why I had to solve it.
Having lunch with Keith, and I wanted Keith to do the Confederate History Month hour this week because Keith has been out on the speaking circuit.
He's a hot commodity right now with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and he's been touring, doing presentations at different SCV groups.
And so I wanted Keith to give a condensed radio version of his presentation for tonight's Confederate History Month hour.
But I had Winston Smith booked to do an interview with an author during the second hour.
So I said, Keith, Winston's doing the second hour.
Can you come back during the third hour and do the Confederate History Month presentation?
Well, you know, Keith's been a co-host for a while.
He's got a fan base and a following of his own now.
Got a little bit of the James Edwards Prima Dama streak in him.
So he said, you know, he couldn't leave and come back.
His hours had to be consecutive.
So I was thinking, well, how am I going to solve this?
And then the light went off.
I said, there's no law that says we have to do the Confederate History Month hour during the third hour.
Why don't we just switch it up one time?
We'll do it during the second hour.
Winston will be bumped to the third and his guest will be on during the third hour.
And That's the story behind the scenes, political problem solving at its best, Confederate History Month hour right now.
We're in it.
Keith Dogg's in it, who he brought to work tonight.
You know, look, for a guy that can't, you know, leave it.
You know, I said, Keith, you can just go to the green room down the hall on the radio station.
We'll have one of the harem girls feed you grapes for an hour, and, you know, why not?
But, you know, what enough for him?
He is Keith Alexander the Great.
I mean, he gets what he wants.
So anyway, that being said, we don't have a lot of time left during this first segment after that live rendition of Sweet Home Alabama.
But we're going to get started here, and Keith will have the remainder of the hour to give you a condition.
You know, Keith, I hear your speeches are about an hour and a half extemporaneous, off the cuff, no notes.
It's the craze of the Mid-South area SCV camps, and you're going to break it down tonight in the time that we have available this hour, Confederate History Month, 2013.
Keith Alexander, take it away.
Now, I've heard it all, James.
I'm the primadonna and you're not, right?
Okay.
Well, let me just get right into this thing then.
The Civil War, or what do you call it, first of all.
I would call it not the war of northern aggression because there were a lot of northerners who dissented from Lincoln's policies.
The Civil War was actually the invention of one man, Abraham Lincoln.
He was the one who prosecuted it.
He's the one who insisted upon it.
So I think probably the most accurate way to describe it is Mr. Lincoln's War.
That's exactly what it was.
Now, the problem with history is twofold.
First of all, the victors get to tell the story.
And the people that were the victors in 1865 are still the victors in America today.
And let me tell you who the victors aren't, and that's Southern whites.
Southern whites were the losers in 1865, and we've continued to be at the bottom of the pile ever since.
Now, the problem, I said, was twofold.
First of all, the victors write the story.
The second thing is the left is now firmly ensconced by virtue of the triumph of cultural Marxism, also known as liberalism in everyday parlance.
And as a result, they use history as a teaching tool.
And the only way that they can spend the Civil War to make liberalism look good and for white Southerners to look bad is to focus on slavery as the one and only be-all and end-all cause of the Civil War.
Now, that's really kind of ridiculous.
What you ought to do is try to put yourself in the position of an antebellum American, either North or South, and start trying to figure out how they would react to certain circumstances and see if indeed slavery was what they were fighting about.
Let me suggest something.
First of all, no antebellum Americans, at least not enough to be significant, were willing to sacrifice their sons, their brothers, their uncles, their fathers, their husbands, in a crusade to free black people from slavery in the deep south.
You know, black people just weren't that popular.
In fact, the abolitionists were considered the lunatic left fringe of American political life back in the antebellum period.
And more than half of the abolitionists were against slavery because they were also anti-black.
A perfect example of that type of person would be David Wilmot, a representative from Pennsylvania, who was a member of the Free Soil Party.
He was the author of the famous Wilmot Proviso, which was debated in Congress after the Mexican War and attempted to provide in law that none of the territory gained in the Mexican War, which basically doubled the size of the United States, would allow slavery.
And he didn't do this because he had this deep abiding love for black people.
In fact, he despised black people.
He thought that black people were keeping down the employment prospects of white peons.
Andrew Johnson, the vice president under Lincoln, thought exactly the same way.
We'll get back to this after these words from our sponsor.
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Welcome back.
To get on the Political Cesspool, call us on James's Dime, toll-free, at 1-866-986-6397.
And here's the host of the Political Cesspool, James Edwards.
All right, everybody, we are in our Confederate History Month hour for this evening's broadcast.
And as I mentioned before, Keith Alexander, a hot commodity on the SCV lecture circuit right now.
I might have to reassess my opinion of the organization if Keith remains in demand there.
But what started off is just a single appearance at a local camp meeting has metastasized.
That's the word.
Tongue-tied and all.
Well, anyway, Keith has been delivering the same presentation at each of his stops, and he is providing a condensed version of it tonight as Confederate History Month continues on the Political Cesspool Radio Program.
Keith, back to you.
Okay, we're talking about what the establishment in America today says was the cause of the Civil War, which, you know, in a word is slavery.
Slavery, slavery, slavery.
Nothing else amounting to a hill of beans.
And of course, what is happening here is that the left has a parable and they want to tell it time and again.
And because it's cultural Marxist in its origins, it has to be racial.
The only way that Lincoln and the North turn out to be the good guys is if you focus solely on slavery as being the cause of the Civil War.
Now, of course, there are many causes to the Civil War, and slavery was really probably not in the top five.
But if you read any modern history book now, like Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, Team of Rivals, which Steven Spielberg's magnum opus, Lincoln was based on, or, you know, any Hollywood movie like the Lincoln movie by Spielberg or, you know, even more fantastic, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer, where all the vampires are southern whites.
This shows you, or the movie Django by Quentin Tarantino.
Basically, everybody was obsessed about slavery in antebellum America if you listen to the establishment both academically and in the entertainment industry today.
But, you know, only 8% at the most of antebellum Southerners owned slaves.
So why would the other 92% be so fixated on slavery?
Well, the short answer to that is they weren't.
Slavery wasn't that big of a deal.
In fact, many people in the North likewise were not excited about the slavery issue.
A lot of the abolitionists were anti-slavery because they were also anti-black and they blamed white Southerners for bringing blacks to America.
Of course, they didn't know much history because the history was that every colony, all of the 13 colonies had allowed slavery.
It was legal at one point or another in their history.
In fact, on the eve of the American Revolution, every colony had legalized slavery, legalized black slavery in America.
Now, it went out fairly soon in England.
It was going out in New England because New England was not equipped in terms of its landscape to have large farming operations, large agricultural operations, like plantations, because they didn't have a lot of fertile soil.
They had rocky soil.
Now, what happened in New England was that they were much more suited to the development of manufacturing because unlike the South, which had broad, slow-moving rivers, typically, in New England, they had a lot of narrower, swiftly running rivers.
Why is that important?
That's important because water power driving water wheels was the way that manufacturing concerns were powered in the late 18th and early 19th century in America.
Under the Acts of Navigation, when England was in charge of the 13 colonies, they had established that manufacturing development in their colonies was to be forbidden.
They wanted the colonies to produce raw materials, ship them to the mother country so the mother country could get the advantage of the higher paying manufacturing jobs.
Even back then, manufacturing jobs paid better than service industry jobs or farm jobs.
Then they would produce the manufactured goods, send the value-added products back to the colonies and make a profit.
That's what the acts of navigation were all about, and that was one of the causes of the American Revolution.
So you see, in the South, they just had philosophical arguments as to why they wanted to secede from the British Empire.
But in New England, they also had a very practical economic reason to want a divorce from the mother country because they were suited to developing manufacturing and they wanted to develop manufacturing.
And as soon as they became free, they promptly started to do that, to develop a manufacturing base.
Now, the South remained an agrarian economy.
And this bore the seeds for the division that eventually occurred.
If you're like me, you remember attending American history class and hearing about the era of good feelings and wondering what that was about.
The era of good feelings was the period from, let's say about 1800, until 1824.
And it is particularly identified with the presidency of James Monroe.
In 1824, there was a presidential election, which resulted in what historians call the corrupt bargain.
Andrew Jackson, a frontiersman, was running against John Quincy Adams, the son of the second president of the United States, John Adams, and Henry Clay, who was kind of the first turncoat southerner in American political life.
He was kind of the prototype for Lindsey Graham.
And he was a member of the Whig Party.
Well, Clay came in third, Adams second, and Andrew Jackson had the most electoral votes, but none of them had the plurality that they needed in order to claim the presidency.
Then Clay, along with John Quincy Adams, conspired and Clay had all of his electors vote for Adams.
So Adams got to be the president in 1824, despite the fact that Andrew Jackson had more votes.
Well, this enraged Andrew Jackson, who was the type of man that wouldn't allow a slight to go unnoticed.
And he basically campaigned for the next four years against John Quincy Adams and against the corrupt bargain.
And he was elected president in 1828.
So that's kind of the background.
That fissure that existed as a result of the 1824 election between the North and the South, in essence, is still with us today.
You know, it was William Faulkner who said the past isn't dead.
It isn't even past.
The same division, the same division in temperament, intellect, values that led to the Civil War is still being manifested in American public life today.
It's called Red State, Blue State America.
The Blue States, which are the upper Atlantic seaboard in New England, the upper Midwest and the left coast, are basically the spiritual heirs of the abolitionists of New England.
Red State America, which is the interior west, some parts of the Midwest and the South, is basically the modern manifestation of the old Confederacy in outlook.
We are not the same nation.
Our ancestors in the South recognize that.
We're right on the verge of being commissaried by the federal government again into having to accept gay marriage as the law of the land because Blue State America wants it.
So we'll get back to this right after these words from our sponsor.
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And so we have moved our Confederate History Month hour of this week to the second hour of tonight's broadcast.
And again, we're right in the middle of it.
Keith Alexander giving you a condensed, radio-friendly version of the presentation he is currently making on his stops in the SCV circuit.
So Keith, continue on.
Okay, let's get back to slavery as a cause of the Civil War.
I want to give you this talking point so you can challenge people, be they academic speakers or the man on the street that tells you that it was all about slavery, because quite frankly, that's all that he's likely to hear if he just gets all of his information from the mainstream media.
The final word on this is the existence of what was proposed to be the first 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
It's called the Corwin Amendment.
It was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification early on in the Lincoln administration.
Lincoln was wholly in support of this.
In fact, he sent a handwritten letter to the governor of every state recommending its swift ratification so it could be part of the United States Constitution.
It would have been the 13th Amendment.
What the Corwin Amendment did, first of all, it was proposed by an Ohio congressman named Thomas Corwin, was to amend the Constitution to empower that Congress would have no power to abolish or interfere with the institution of slavery in any place, any state or territory in which it was then lawful.
So, if the South had seceded from the Union because they wanted to protect their right to enslave other people, that would have settled it.
The Corwin Amendment would have given them everything they wanted if the liberal version of the cause of the Civil War was correct and it was all about slavery.
But the South went ahead despite the fact that the Corwin Amendment was on the table and seceded anyway.
Why did they do this?
Secession was a two-part process.
First of all, the first seven states, South Carolina and the Gulf states, seceded.
Then Lincoln said he wanted every state to throw in 75,000 volunteer troops to create an army to put down the insurrection and rather than raise troops to go to war against their neighbors, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina joined so that you had 11 Confederate states in all leave the Union.
Now, the Corwin Amendment was ratified by several states, Ohio being one of them and Maryland being another, and it undoubtedly would have become the 13th Amendment had the South not persisted in seceding.
So slavery wasn't the reason they were seceding.
If it had been, the Corwin Amendment would have satisfied them because there was, you know, you can't think of anything in starker language than this.
And it really explodes this myth of Abraham Lincoln as a great emancipator.
He told Horace Greeley, who was an editor of a, I think it was the New York Tribune or whatever it was, it was the largest, most influential newspaper in America at the time.
It was like the antebellum equivalent of the New York Times today.
And Horace Greeley was an abolitionist.
And he asked Lincoln about his position about slavery and whether he was going to press for freedom for slaves as part of his, you know, what he hoped to accomplish in the war.
And Lincoln told him very curtly that he would preserve the Union if he had to free every slave, had only to free some of the slaves, or if he didn't free a single slave.
So he was the great centralizer, not the great emancipator.
And this is the type of stuff you never hear.
Abraham Lincoln held views on race that, quite frankly, would make a modern Klansman blush.
For example, he was all for deporting them once freed out of the United States.
In fact, his second State of the Union address in 1862 had, as part of it, a request for Congress to make a special one-time appropriation of several million dollars for the express purpose of buying land either in sub-Saharan Africa or in Central America in which to relocate freed slaves once they were freed.
Also, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves behind Confederate lines, not to border state slaves and not to slaves in areas like Tennessee that had been returned to Union control.
He was hoping to foment a slave rebellion behind Confederate lines that would divert Confederate troops from the front lines and make the war easier to win.
And when the Emancipation Proclamation was read to fighting Joe Hooker's Army of the Potomac, they almost mutinied.
They said, this isn't what we're going to war for.
We were told we're going to war for the purpose of restoring the Union.
So let's get this, let's put this slavery poppycock to rest once and for all.
If the war wasn't about slavery then, what was it about?
You have to remember it was the South that seceded from the Union.
It wasn't the North that banished them.
They were the ones that took the first move.
And unlike the portrayals you've seen in movies like Gone with the Wind, the South was not filled with firebrands who thought that one Confederate or one Southerner could whip 10 Yankees.
There's always somebody that thinks like that whenever you go to war.
But on the other hand, most of the real effective political leadership of the Confederacy didn't think that way.
They realized that the South was at a serious disadvantage in terms of total population and manufacturing capacity.
And what they were hoping for was a negotiated peace.
Their last best chance was the election of 1864 in which the Democrats ran the so-called Copperhead or peace candidate George McClellan who had been Lincoln's commander of the Army of the Potomac early in the war.
McClellan was replaced by Lincoln because he wasn't bloody enough for Lincoln's purposes.
McClellan was everything that Grant and Lincoln weren't.
He was a gentleman who saw Southerners as his fellow Americans and he wanted to win the war with the least bloodshed possible with some type of strategic master stroke.
Grant was selected eventually to be the head of the Army of the Potomac because he embraced Lincoln's understanding and applied the terrifying mathematical calculus that the North just had more bodies to throw on the pile of dead bodies.
And when Grant became the commander of the Army of the Potomac in the Overland campaign from May to mid-June of 1864, he departed from custom.
Before then in the Civil War, there'd be a big battle, then there'd be probably a month or two respite, and then there'd be another big battle.
Under Grant, it was one continuous battle basically from early May until mid-June.
And Lee won every one of these battles strategically, but he was losing the war because Grant could easily replace his casualties, but Lee could not replace his.
Now, I promise to tell you what the reason was if it wasn't slavery.
Well, the reason can be seen in something called the Morrell Tariff, which was passed into law early in Lincoln's administration.
The federal government, after it was formed in Philadelphia in the 18th century, basically provided that all of the money used to run the federal government was to come from excise taxes, like tariffs on manufactured goods from abroad or on particular products like whiskey,
which led to the somewhat famous whiskey rebellion in the 1790s by Pennsylvania farmers who supplemented their income by turning kind of brand X corn, corn that wasn't really good for marketing any other way into whiskey and selling the whiskey.
Well, by far most of the money came from tariffs.
And because of the split between an agrarian versus a manufacturing economy that existed between the South and New England, for example, almost 85 to 90% of the income used to finance the federal government for the entire United States was raised in the South.
The South had to buy manufactured goods from overseas.
They had to do it because otherwise, The European trading partners would not buy their cotton, tobacco, and indigo.
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Scott Bradley here.
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Jump in the political cesspool with James Adley Gang.
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And here's the host of the political cesspool, James Edwards.
Folks, you know when Keith Alexander is pacing the studio like a caged lion during the commercial break that he's on a roll.
In his own mind and in actuality tonight, it has been entirely my honor to kind of sit back and take us in and out of commercial breaks because Keith is on one tonight and I knew this would be his hour to shine, sharing with you a radio condensed version of the presentation he is delivering at various stops on his SCV speaking tour.
I turn it over to Keith Alexander to wrap it up.
And in the third and final hour tonight, Winston Smith will be on deck with an interview from author CC, of author Cece Conrad, author of Jack's War.
You're not going to want to go anywhere.
Stay tuned for the third and final after Keith wraps up our Confederate History Month hour for the evening right now.
Okay, getting back to the tariff history of the United States leading up to the Civil War.
Originally, you had the American plan that was established by Alexander Hamilton, America's first Secretary of Treasury, that basically focused on tariffs as the primary financing mechanism to support the federal government.
The federal government, of course, was supposed to be small and it was supposed to not need as much money.
They would be absolutely appalled at what it has become today.
But the original tariff rate was 15%.
Then, after Jackson became the president in 1828, there was proposed a significant increase in the tariff.
It was called the Tariff of Abominations by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
And he's the one who came up with the nullification doctrine that said that if a federal law violates the interests of a particular state or its values or standards to such a degree that the state thinks it necessary, any state can just declare that that particular law is a nullity within its borders.
So that's what the way they responded to that.
Andrew Jackson responded to nullification by proclaiming that he was going to send the U.S. Army into South Carolina and hang every nullifier from the nearest tree, but that was some overblown rhetoric.
Basically, they reached a compromise where the actual tariff rate was around 25%, and that just put the lid on the pot that was still boiling.
Then, early in the Lincoln administration, after the first seven southern states had seceded, Justin Morrell of Vermont proposed another very significant increase in the tariff.
The Morrell tariff was going to raise the tariff level to 47% and eliminate any loopholes for getting out of paying it.
And Southerners said, this guy Lincoln is just as bad as we suspected he was.
He's basically running the entire federal government on our backs.
What was the federal government doing with this money during the antebellum period?
Well, whenever the Whigs, who later became the Republicans, were in power, they were big proponents of what were called internal improvements.
Internal improvements were transportation systems like the Lancaster Road, the B ⁇ O Railroad, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, things like this.
They were built exclusively, well, not exclusively, but largely with federal money raised this way.
The problem was all the money was being raised in the South, but none of these railroads or other transportation facilities like the Erie Canal, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the B ⁇ O Railroad were located in the South.
At the eve of the Civil War, there was only one major inland East-West Railroad in the Confederacy.
That was the Memphis to Charleston Railroad, and that was built entirely from private funds.
The reason the South didn't have as many railroads as the North was because the South had to raise money from private funds to have railroads, while the North got all of this federal money, all these grants from the federal government to do it.
Railroad magnates back in those days thought that they were like professional franchise sports holders today.
They thought that their particular product was such a benefit and a boon to any locality that the public generally ought to pay for their capital expenditures and land acquisition costs.
So this is why the South, this is one of the major reasons why the South persisted in their secession efforts.
Now, the South wanted a divorce, but like most people that wanted a divorce, they preferred an uncontested divorce.
So you had a phony war period for a time in which Lincoln was trying to provoke the South to some type of armed retaliation that he could use as an excuse for sending in troops and brutally suppressing the rebellion.
That happened at Fort Sumter.
Now, there were plenty of people in the Union Army that basically detested Southerners and wanted to exterminate them.
Let me read you from Union General Brigadier General James Lane of Missouri.
He said, we believe in a war of extermination.
I want to see every foot of ground burned over, everything laid waste.
Okay?
In the entire Civil War, there's only one northern town, Chambersburg, Maryland, that was put to the torch by Confederate troops.
Meanwhile, in North Mississippi alone, 23 towns were burned down, including 12 county seats.
Basically, what the North did under Grant and under Sherman and under Abraham Lincoln was conduct unconditional warfare against the Confederacy.
Union generals Sheridan and Sherman are infamous in the eyes of many liberal historians for using unconditional warfare tactics against the Plains Indians in the Indian Wars that seceded or followed the Civil War, but they learned all their tactics and first practiced those tactics against Southern people in the Civil War.
And after the Civil War, Southerners were mad as hell, and their anger was directed at the Republican Party, not the Northern people generally.
And since the adversary of the Republicans was the Democrat Party, all the Southerners voted a straight Democrat ticket.
And this accomplished a certain electoral effect that I think the cryptocracy wanted.
Because of that Solid South phenomenon, we elected two very evil presidents in the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, two big liberals, big government people who never would have been elected but for the phenomenon of the solid South, which was part of the legacy of the Civil War.
Now, there are still people today that think that there should have been an extermination of Southerners and Confederates.
In fact, a black math professor at Vanderbilt proclaimed such several years ago when they're having a controversy over the proposed renaming of Confederate Hall at Vanderbilt.
And what he proposed was, he said, the greatest missed opportunity in American history was that Grant and Lincoln, or the radical Republicans, did not exterminate all the ex-Confederates by charging them with treason and hanging them.
He said, if they'd done that, we'd have a better country today.
Now, this is, James tells us we're down to two minutes now, but this is the type of thing that people don't talk about nowadays much.
Basically, Southerners, the reason Red State America is the Interior West is that most of the settling done out there was done by ex-Confederates during the Reconstruction period because they were trying to flee the oppression of Reconstruction.
Reconstruction was intended to be harsh.
Basically, it was town mutic justice being waged against the South by very angry, bitter people like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and William Seward, who thought they could think of no more delicious irony than having the South ruled over by people that had previously been enslaved.
And of course, more thoughtful and more unbiased observers looked at what was happening during the Reconstruction era and said, this is a calamity.
We can't allow this to happen.
And they ended Reconstruction rule.
And it led to the Jim Crow era.
But we need to understand that this is what really happened in the Civil War.
And that Southerners were, you know, you had Sherman's March to the Sea, where they basically killed all the livestock, burned all the crops, and tried to starve the Southerners out.
The South was always short of manpower.
Grant, under Lincoln's orders, would not allow prisoner exchanges.
That's what led to General Forrest's raid on Memphis in 1864.
He's trying to liberate Confederate prisoners in the Irving Block prison so that he could replenish his ranks.
This is what the Civil War was really about.
Lincoln was not the great emancipator.
He was a great centralizer.
And according to Spielberg's movie, Lincoln was basically a Machiavellian opportunist who would tell anybody anything to advance his secret agenda of freeing the slaves.
Now, I think Sam Dixon would agree with that.
There may be some truth to that.
If you look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, it's very obvious that Lincoln played to his audience.
He gave a very different speech in Chicago, Illinois than he did in Galena, Illinois, for example.
Because in Chicago, you still, at that time, you were getting some Slavic people there whose only experience with slavery was they'd been enslaved themselves before.
So they were anti-slavery.
In Galena, there were a lot of Southern sympathizers, so he gave an entirely different speech in which he was not very complimentary to black people.
That's it in a nutshell, James.
That's, you know, the Morrell Tariff and the Corwin Amendment are the two things I'd really like you to take away from this.
Those are the arguing points you can use to rebut and confound all these people that will tell you that it's all about slavery.
So tonight's Confederate History Month installment, outstanding Keith Alexander the Professor, Keith Alexander the Great.
Not so much, you know, focusing on the glory that was the old Confederacy.
We'll get back into that the next two weeks, the remaining weeks of April.
But tonight I thought was something different and something much needed as we continue our series of celebration of the South.
Thank you, Keith.
Stay tuned, folks.
Third and final hour, forthcoming Winston Smith will be on as we interview author C.C. Conrad.
All coming your way next on the Living News Radio Network on my new Oh, John.