Republic of Virginia

An Obituary printed in the London Times… Absolutely Dead Brilliant

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.

No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.  He will be remembered as having cultivated such
valuable lessons as:
 

– Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
– Why the early bird gets the worm; 
– Life isn’t always fair; 
– And maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing
regulations were set in place.   Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. 

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault. 

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. 

Common Sense was preceded in death,

-by his parents, Truth and Trust,
-by his wife, Discretion,
-by his daughter, Responsibility,
-and by his son, Reason. 

He is survived by his 5 stepchildren;

– I Know My Rights 
– I Want It Now 
– Someone Else Is To Blame 
– I’m A Victim
– Pay me for Doing Nothing 

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.   If you still remember him, pass this on.   If not, join the majority and do nothing

By H. V. Traywick, Jr

Thomas Carlyle said that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men (1). Among the many worthy men who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was the savior of Western Civilization. Sir Winston Churchill said Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals of war (2). But now the Lee Monument in Richmond has been taken down. Our groveling scalawag Governor says Lee no longer represents the values of Virginia. Judging by the filthy graffiti that has desecrated the Lee Monument ever since the rioting of last summer, I would say no truer words have ever been spoken. We are in a Marxist revolution. Critical Race Theory merely replaces traditional class warfare with race warfare, with White people, and particularly Southern White people, the “oppressors,” and the conveniently long-dead Confederacy the scapegoat for all the racial ills in the country.

Thomas Carlyle said that it takes men of worth to recognize worth in men (1). Among the many worthy men who recognized the worth of General Robert E. Lee was the savior of Western Civilization. Sir Winston Churchill said Lee was one of the noblest Americans who ever lived and one of the greatest captains in the annals of war (2). But now the Lee Monument in Richmond has been taken down. Our groveling scalawag Governor says Lee no longer represents the values of Virginia. Judging by the filthy graffiti that has desecrated the Lee Monument ever since the rioting of last summer, I would say no truer words have ever been spoken. We are in a Marxist revolution. Critical Race Theory merely replaces traditional class warfare with race warfare, with White people, and particularly Southern White people, the “oppressors,” and the conveniently long-dead Confederacy the scapegoat for all the racial ills in the country.

Ever since the Spring of 1864, we Southerners have been on the defensive. No war was ever won on the defensive, but we have spent barrels of ink explaining the righteousness of the cause our forefathers fought and died for, mistakenly confounding the many causes of secession with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself. That, is what the war was “about,” and what we were fighting for was the defense of our land from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance – just as in 1776, when the thirteen slave-holding (3) Colonies seceded from the British Empire. But, rather than taking the offensive and hammering our detractors with this simple Truth, we instead get ourselves into involved defensive explanations that cause their eyes to glaze over, and they calmly look at us and say “Slavery” or “racism” or “White supremacy.”

I take a different approach. I indict the hypocrisy of our detractors and their Myth of American History. The agitation over our Confederate monuments rests upon this fossilized myth, which proclaims that “The Civil War was all about slavery, the righteous North waged it to free the slaves, and the evil South fought to keep them. End of story. Any questions?”

Well, yes – and I don’t buy their myth. To think that the South went to war to keep their slaves, one must think that the North went to war to free them. The simple fact is, that it did not. Aside from the obvious fact of Lincoln’s bold disclaimer in his First Inaugural (4) at the outset of the war, if the North were waging a war on slavery, why didn’t she free her own slaves? The simple fact that slavery was constitutional in the United States throughout the entire war (5) is one of the most glaring omissions of historical fact buried under the colossal lie known as The Myth of American History. Do the grammar school histories indoctrinating our children or the Marxist professors of our highest universities of learning say anything about the self-righteous North’s arrant hypocrisy? When the various Northern States abolished slavery for its inutility in their industrializing society, they did not free their slaves. They sold them South before the respective abolition laws went into effect (6). So if the righteous North went to war to free Southern slaves, why didn’t the righteous Northerners first clean up their own back yards and free the rest of their own slaves? And why did Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – issued halfway through the war when the South was winning it – say that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government (7)? And why did he admit West Virginia, a so-called “slave State,” into the Union six months later? And why did he – a documented White Supremacist (8) – choose to inaugurate the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to, in effect, drive

Southern slavery back into the Union? In his Second Inaugural, he claimed that the South was fighting to expand slavery into the Territories (9), but with the South out of the Union, the Confederacy had already given up all claims to any and all United States Territories, making Lincoln’s specious claim just another smelly “red herring” to cover the tracks of his murderous usurpation of power in waging war against the secession of the Southern States. Since Lincoln did not recognize the Southern States as being out of the Union (10), by his own definition he was committing treason under Article III, section 3 of the Constitution by waging war against them.

Secession is merely freedom of association writ large. There were many causes of secession, not least of which that Southerners no longer wished to be associated with those people who slandered and despised them so. But that begs the question of why those people waged the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to prevent their departure. To hear their vitriol, one would think they would have been happy to be rid of these Southern Apostates polluting what the New England Pilgrim Fathers called their “City upon a hill.” But they weren’t, for running like a river beneath their bigoted pieties was their avariciousness. With the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and set up as a free trade confederacy on the North’s doorstep, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse (11)! So Lincoln rebuffed every Southern overture for peace and launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot (12). South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation at Charleston just as Massachusetts had responded to George III’s provocation at Lexington and Concord, giving Lincoln the war he wanted (13), but putting himself in the shoes of George III.

Virginia, “The Mother of States and of Statesmen,” stood solidly for the Union she had done so much to create, but when Lincoln called for her troops to subjugate the “Cotton Kingdom,” Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war” (14), seceded from the Union, and joined the Confederacy. Four other States – including occupied Missouri – followed her out. But after four years of arduous service, as General Lee said at Appomattox, the South was compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources (15), and Lincoln drove the Southern States back into the Union at the point of the bayonet. Although John Wilkes Booth made a martyr out of America’s Caesar, Reconstruction cemented his conquest. With an Army of Occupation and the pretense of law, and with the Union Leagues stirring up racial hatred, a corrupt Northern political party transformed the voluntary Union of sovereign States into a coerced Yankee Empire pinned together by bayonets.

With her men killed and her land laid waste, the South, at the behest of General Lee, “accepted the situation.” In good faith she sent her representatives to the US Congress in December of 1865, but the Radicals were in control, and they were not allowed to take their seats. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania stated the Radical opinion: “The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conqueror. They must come in as new States or remain as conquered provinces. Congress … is the only power that can act in the matter… Congress must create States and declare when they are entitled to be represented… As there are no symptoms that the people of these provinces will be prepared to participate in constitutional government for some years, I know of no arrangement so proper for them as territorial governments. There they can learn the principles of freedom and eat the fruit of foul rebellion…” (16)

In that session, the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, was sent to the States and was ratified – three years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth Amendment was then proposed. This would gave illiterate Blacks the right to vote and serve on juries. It barred all ex-Confederates from Federal and State offices, and it required the Southern States to share in the payment of the Union war debt and repudiate their own. Tennessee ratified, but the ten ex-Confederate States that rejected it lost their identities in March of 1867 with the passage by Congress of the First Reconstruction Act (17).

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the ten Southern States into five military districts, with Virginia being designated as “Military District Number One.” It stipulated that each Southern State frame a new constitution that met with Yankee approval. This was to be done by a convention consisting of male delegates “of whatever race, color, or previous condition” – with the exception of all Confederate soldiers and most other Southern White people, all of whom were disfranchised. Then, when the legislature elected under this new constitution had ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, that State would be declared “entitled to representation in Congress” – or, in other words, “readmitted into the Union.”

It might be asked that if these States were considered out of the Union under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and under martial law, how could they ratify an amendment to the Constitution of a Union they were not in; and if they had never been recognized as being out of the Union, how could they be compelled to ratify it? The answer, of course, is Federal bayonets. Reconstruction was nothing short of a revolution on the same order as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

Results? For the North? “The Gilded Age.” For the South? Grinding poverty in a land laid waste until the Second World War, and the curse of being ruled by little men. For the Blacks? A recent study of military and Freedman’s Bureau records has revealed that between 1862 and 1870 perhaps as many as a million ex-slaves, or twenty-five percent of the population, died of starvation, disease, and neglect under their Northern “liberators” (18)! Freed from their master’s care, “Father Abraham, The Great Emancipator,” had told them to “root hog, or die.” Black enfranchisement in the South, and the disfranchisement of Southern Whites, were merely cynical Northern political tools to cement the North’s conquest, and once she had achieved it with her so-called “Reconstruction,” the North abandoned her Black puppets – or “useful idiots” as the Communist Vladimir Lenin would have called them – to the upheaval she had wrought in Southern society and turned her attention to the Plains Indians, who were in the way of her trans-continental railroads. But that’s another story – let the Indians tell you that one.

The gradual peace and reconciliation after Reconstruction came in part from the South’s “acceptance of the situation,” and in part from the North’s recognition of the South’s difficulty in suddenly assimilating millions of Africans into a European population that had been steeped in Western civilization for thousands of years. As such, since the North had gotten what she wanted out of the war and Reconstruction – which was control of the Federal Government and its finances – she was content to let the South deal with her own domestic problems in peace. However, when hopeful Southern Blacks started moving North to the Promised Land in the Great Migration, they found themselves relegated by a cold Northern racism into segregated ghettoes, and discovered that the Northern rhetoric about social equality was a political sham.

The invention of television gave Northern politicians and demagogues a way out of this embarrassing situation by giving them the means to divert Black attention from de facto Northern segregation onto the codified segregation in the South, but their demagoguery provoked racial agitation that broke into urban race riots up North. Desperate, guilt-ridden Northern White Liberals were driven to devise further crusades upon which to divert the attention of their credulous and unwanted Black population onto Southern scapegoats. First came the self-righteous “Freedom Riders” protesting Southern segregation – locked arm-in-arm with Black protest marchers – and posting their Progressive virtues before the TV cameras for all to see. But while they were delivering tutorials on proper race relations to the benighted Southerners, the Blacks up North were burning their cities down – and they have been doing so ever since, forever compelling Desperate White Liberals to devise new crusades upon which to post their virtues.

Their latest crusade is against Confederate Monuments. But when all of the Confederate monuments have been vandalized and torn down, who will their next targets be? Be assured that these self-righteous, Latter-Day Puritans will not rest, for crusading, witch-burning and virtue-posting is in their DNA. It came over in the Mayflower. Meanwhile, Monument Avenue in Richmond is a desecrated and vandalized shambles; Thomas Jefferson is under assault at UVA; W & L has repudiated General Lee; and VMI has repudiated “Stonewall” Jackson, while her Cadets who fought and died at the Battle of New Market and are buried on Post under Sir Moses Ezekiel’s “Virginia Mourning Her Dead” have become an embarrassment – and a rebuke.

As the mania of Identity Politics and Radical Equity for every conceivable definition of race, gender, and species reaches the point of absurdity in the Victimhood Olympics, we have been carried away into Babylon, with women being sent into combat while men push baby buggies around town; with girls becoming Boy Scouts and men “choosing” to be women; with children “deciding” their gender and being given access to the bathroom of their choice in school; with anarchy ruling the classrooms and teachers being assaulted by their students; with history being taught as Marxist indoctrination and Critical Race Theory; with conservative speakers at colleges being hounded off campus by Antifa and Black Lives Matter mobs; with “affirmative action” and race-norming instead of merit and SAT scores determining college admissions; with laws being made to conform to barbaric behavior instead of barbaric behavior being made to conform to the law; with convicts being released to create racial parity in prisons; with the National debt approaching an unimaginable thirty trillion dollars; with the US Government printing money and running riot with it like teenagers with a bottle of whiskey and their daddy’s car keys, while the homeless wander the streets and beg on every corner as the Third World pours in across the open borders; and on, and on, and on… As one commentator said recently, we have become so open-minded that our brains have fallen out.

Do not hope to reason with these people, for trying to reason with them is like singing hymns to a fence post with a boom box perched on top of it blasting gutter-grunts from some Hip-Hop Rapper. I know whereof I speak, for I was once a Virginia Flagger on the sidewalk before the VMFA and faced these mobs. These are the same people who spat on us at the airport when we returned from Vietnam, so I quit before prison would become my portion, but not before I had

gotten one protester arrested and convicted for “curse and abuse.” If Reconstruction was calculated like the Communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, today’s “Woke Revolution” is fanatically mindless like the French Revolution and its bloody Reign of Terror. I am waiting for the Confederate monuments to be replaced with the guillotine.

Progressives consider the march of history to be a linear march towards a secular Utopian perfection, where the oppressive Laws of God have been repealed. It began with the New England Puritans. While Southerners were following Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, these Yankee Utopians were burning witches in John Winthrop’s “City upon a hill”; and while Southerners were five hundred miles west of the Mississippi in Texas defending the Alamo, these Yankee Utopians were a hundred miles west of the Hudson in New York, establishing their collectivist, Free-Love communes, and setting themselves up as the standard by which all true Americans should be measured. In this they have been remarkably successful, to the point where today they have the inmates running the Equality Asylum. But as the Preacher says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “Consider the works of God, for who can make that straight which He hath made crooked?”

The righteous Progressives and their “Social Justice Warriors” love to claim they are on “The Right Side of History.” But Southerners know that history is not a linear march that will end in a rosy Utopia, but a cyclic March of Folly where rosy Utopian dreams end in totalitarian nightmares. Thus Southerners are and always have been Apostates in this Brave New World, where “all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,” as Kipling wrote (19).

Southern monuments speak Truth to this Power with disdain, and stand as an indictment and a rebuke against the leveling mediocrity of these times. Lee, Jackson, and Stuart were heroes in the Classical mold of Hector, breaker of horses under the walls of windy Troy, or the fierce Achilles, or the brave Odysseus, or the dauntless Aeneas. No wonder the Heathen rage at our Confederate monuments, for these little men who swarm about in this age without a name are shamed by them. As Tennyson wrote, “Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain, to leave an equal baseness” (20).

The Reverend Dr. Robert Lewis Dabney, one-time Chief-of-Staff of “Stonewall” Jackson, wrote that Southerners know in due time they will be avenged through these same disorganizing heresies which will redound upon the North. Are we not seeing it now, with the godless anarchy that radicals have wrought, and with their blasphemous demands for Equity to “correct” the works of God? In Classical Greek mythology, Icarus in his hubris flew too close to the sun, but Nemesis brought him down. The Social Justice Warriors with their “Woke Revolution,” their “Equity,” their mob rule, and, most of all, with their hubris, forget that man is merely the Master, not the Creator of the world. So let these arrogant and successful wrongdoers flout their disdain for our Confederate monuments and all they stand for. As Dr. Dabney said, “we will meet them with it again, when it will be heard; in the day of their calamity, in the pages of impartial history, and in the Day of Judgement” (21). Meanwhile, keep your powder dry, and when they come to your door to take you away in the tumbril to the guillotine, let them be in for a surprise.

***

Notes

1. Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, IV: “The New Downing Street” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 12 vols., Library ed. (New York: John B. Alden, 1885) 8: 134.
2. Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1958) IV: 170-3.
3. See the 1790 US Census in Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits (New York: George W. & John A. Wood, 1860) pg. 120.
4. “First Inaugural Address” (1861) in Charles W. Eliot, LL D, Ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910). Vol. 43, American Historical Documents, 43: 334.
5. See Article XIII of the US Constitution, ratified December 18, 1865.
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) The Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen (New York: Vintage Books, 1954) I: 381-2.
7. “Emancipation Proclamation” (January 1, 1863), Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 345.
8. Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000) pgs. 183-214.
9. “Second Inaugural Address” (1865). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 451.
10. —. “First Inaugural Address” (1861). Eliot, Vol. 43, pgs. 336-7.
11. Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument (Charleston and James Island, S. C.: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 56-69.
12. Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Ft. Sumter,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August 1937) pgs. 259-88, in Kizer, pgs. 197-248. See also John Shipley Tilley, Lincoln Takes Command (Chapel Hill: U of N. C. P, 1941) pgs. 179-87, 266-7, 306-12, with documentation from original sources, including the Official Records.
13. “If the Union were to undertake to enforce by arms the allegiance of the confederate States by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of England at the time of the War of Independence,” quoted in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., Trans. Henry Reeve (New York: D. Appleton, 1904) II: 425.
14. Gov. John Letcher, letter to Sec. Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, in the Richmond Enquirer, April 18, 1861, pg. 2, col. 1. Microfilm. The Daily Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 1, 1861 – June 29, 1861. Film 23, reel 24 (Richmond: Library of Virginia collection).
15. “Lee’s Farewell to His Army” April 10, 1865. Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 449.
16. Thaddeus Stevens, “The Conquered Provinces,” Congressional Globe, 18 December 1865, 72, in Walter L. Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to 1906, 2 vols. (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906) I: 148.
17. Acts and Resolutions, 39 Cong., 2 Sess., 60, in Fleming, ed. Documentary History,I: 401-3.
18. Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012) passim. See also John Remington Graham, The American Civil War as a Crusade to Free the Slaves (South Boston, VA: Gerald C. Burnett, M. D., 2016) pg. 11.
19. Rudyard Kipling, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
20. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Merlin and Vivien,” The Works of Tennyson, Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Ed. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932) pg. 386.
21. Prof. Robert L. Dabney, D. D., A Defense of Virginia, [and Through Her, of the South,] in Recent and Pending Contests against the Sectional Party (1867; Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1977) pg. 356.

Body Servant to General Robert E. Lee

8/16/2021
The Socialist Revolution. A Scorecard.
How Much Can The Republic Endure?

• We have a bad regime in Washington run by bad people who do not have the people’s best interests at heart. Our leaders are no longer committed to our traditional, Christian principles and values.
• War on the family continues apace.
• Celebration of the gay and lesbian agenda, and transgenderism is derigueur.
• Our southern borders are un-locked and open to all comers.
• Vaccine passports are here.
• DHS declares that Americans who oppose COVID measures or claim that there was election fraud are terror threats.
• According to DHS, a grievance now qualifies as a “terror threat”.
• The FBI is asking Americans to spy on family and friends to prevent “extremism”.
• Cuban “balseros” (rafters) fleeing totalitarian political repression are turned away from our shores.
• CRT indoctrination within our schools and the military is in full swing.
• Purges of conservatives in the military has begun.
• Inflation and the danger of a worthless currency is stalking the economy.
• The fall of Afghanistan
• Social media censorship
• Private sector corporate America (Big Tech, Big Business, Big Pharma, the media) is moving steadily to the left through “corporate social responsibility”, and becoming more and more complicit in implementing the government’s agenda.
• Government and business are now docking the pay checks of those who refuse the COVID vaccine.
8/17/2021
• Abortion
• Blatant, voting irregularities within cities and states go unreported, unchecked, and unprosecuted.
• A dearth of mothers, of conscience, are remaining at home to nurture future generations.
• Advertising and Big Media lie, obfuscate, and indoctrinate.
• In bondage of the current social zeitgeist, the United States Navy, at this time, is in a shambles, unable to project American naval power in a fashion that will deter China.
8/23/2021

• A significant number of Democrats now favor government censorship

10/13/2021

Citizens who oppose COVID measures, or who believe there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election, or who express their opinions at school board meetings are branded as domestic terrorists by the president and his administration.

Thomas Jefferson was a very remarkable man who started learning very early in life and never stopped.

• At 5, began studying under his cousin’s tutor.
• At 9, studied Latin, Greek and French.
• At 14, studied classical literature and additional languages.
• At 16, entered the College of William and Mary. Also could write in Greek with one hand, while writing the same in Latin with the other.
• At 19, studied Law for 5 years starting under George Wythe.
• At 23, started his own law practice.
• At 25, was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses.
• At 31, wrote the widely circulated “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” and retired from his law practice.
• At 32, was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress.
• At 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence.
• At 33, took three years to revise Virginia’s legal code and wrote a Public Education bill and a statute for Religious Freedom.
• At 36, was elected the second Governor of Virginia, succeeding Patrick Henry.
• At 40, served in Congress for two years.
• At 41, was the American minister to France and negotiated commercial treaties with European nations along with Ben Franklin and John Adams.
• At 46, served as the first Secretary of State under George Washington.
• At 53, served as Vice President and was elected President of the American Philosophical Society.
• At 55, drafted the Kentucky Resolutions and became the active head of the Republican Party.
• At 57, was elected the third president of the United States.
• At 60, obtained the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the nation’s size.
• At 61, was elected to a second term as President.
• At 65, retired to Monticello.
• At 80, helped President Monroe shape the Monroe Doctrine.
• At 81, almost single-handedly, created the University of Virginia and served as its’ first president.
• At 83, died on the 50th Anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence, along with John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson knew because he himself studied, the previous failed attempts at government. He understood actual history, the nature of God, His laws and the nature of man. That happens to be way more than what most understand today.

Jefferson really knew his stuff…

Thomas Jefferson Quotes:

• “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”
• “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
• “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its’ own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on, would save one-half the wars of the world.”
• “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them.”
• “My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.”
• “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
• “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
• “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
• “To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes, the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.”

St. Christopher’s School, Richmond, Virginia, was founded in 1911 by the Reverend Dr. Churchill Gibson Chamberlayne, A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, the University of Virginia, Bachelor of Divinity, Virginia Theological Seminary, M.A. and PhD, the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany.

St. Christopher’s was established as a Christian School with the intention of providing a liberal arts, education to elementary and secondary level boys. The aim was to train young men as followers of the way of Christ in mind, body, and spirit with the Christian faith motivating its work, informing its teaching and discipline.

Since 1919, St. Christopher’s School has been owned and operated by “Church Schools in the Diocese of Virginia Inc.” , the educational arm of the (Episcopal) Diocese of Virginia. In the intervening years since 1919, albeit incrementally, the Episcopal Church has fallen very far from grace. The denomination today is apostate and unbiblical, teaching, acceptance of abortion; gender neutral marriage; ordination of homosexual bishops and pastors; that homosexuality is not a sin; that homosexual activism and behavior is to be supported and promoted and those who speak out against it are branded as homophobic. Herein is the problem.

To celebrate “gay pride month” this year, an Instagram message was sent out by St. Christopher’s to all middle and upper school boys (see attached) to show solidarity with the “gay and lesbian cause/agenda.”  This message had the St. Christopher’s logo and the gay flag together. This fits hand and glove with the school’s projected reset through Momentum 2025, a strategy to “create a more diverse St. Christopher’s and eliminate root systems of inequity.”

Under the guise of diversity, inclusion and tolerance, St. Christopher’s has abandoned their roots and the founding principles of Dr. Chamberlayne. They are no longer a Christian school, but a “church school” that embraces and promotes the morally corrupt social and religious agenda of the Episcopal Church.

In the wake of this madness has been created a serious moral dilemma. The school trumpets the fact that they are, “educating boys for life” when, in fact, they are miseducating boys for life. They are not protecting the innocent minds entrusted to them to be shaped. Promoting homosexuality and the gay agenda to boys and young men is harmful to the social welfare of our children and amounts to child abuse. It is an insane and evil message. While everyone would like to ignore it, a growing sexual corruption coalition is aggressively pursuing children in schools, libraries and other areas. It would be instructive for St. Christopher’s to re-visit the school motto (Proverbs 9:10) as well as Matthew 18:5-6 as they proceed with “educating boys for life.”

Proverbs 9:10 The fear (knowledge) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Matthew 18: 5-6 Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

The Bottom line:

In no particular order, this is what I believe is coming to St. Christopher’s School in the next few years as Momentum 2025 unfolds.

• Tuition rates, which currently are between $17,525 and $29,975, will continue to escalate.
• A Christian education is not now a priority, nor will it be emphasized in the future.
• The school will continue to violate its stated principles in favor of embracing current and ever changing cultural norms.
• Critical Race Theory (CRT) will be incorporated into the curriculum.
• Indoctrination will prevail over education in many social as well as academic areas.
• Equity (guaranteed outcome), over equality (guaranteed opportunity), will be emphasized.
• Meritocracy will come to be questioned.
• Boys will become “awakened” to, and taught to speak, the preferred, ever evolving, language of inclusion.
• Parents, faculty, and students, will be made suspect and shamed for dissenting to any of the strictures and changes propagated by Momentum 2025.
• Parents and students will be taught the social benefits of giving up ambition and yielding positions earned through hard work to others who are marginalized.
• Parents and students will have an expensive private school no different from all the rest.
• Character development will become “old school.”
• A “social report card” will be established for each boy. In addition to academic requirements, an “acceptable” score on this report card will be required to graduate in good standing.
• The dress code will be changed or abolished because it is viewed as too judgmental and too white. An “anything goes” dress code will be adopted.
• There will be a concerted effort put forward to emphasize and “partner” with other world religions and any subsets thereof.
• The curriculum will be gradually changed and re-shaped in the lower, middle, and upper schools to de-emphasize and re-interpret our Judeo-Christian heritage, the history of western civilization, and American history. In order to accomplish this, elements of political correctness, affirmative action, multiculturalism, CRT, the 1619 Project, systemic racism, as well as various and sundry social action programs will be used.
• Admissions and academic standards will be lowered to allow acceptance and pass through for unqualified students.
• Financial aid will be re-framed to give more scholarship assistance to lesser qualified students.
• Foreign language requirements will be lowered or abolished.
• The gay and lesbian agenda will be incorporated in the life of the school and throughout the curriculum.

Final thoughts and a cautionary tale:

Parents, teachers, students, alumni, and friends of St. Christopher’s must shed their normalcy bias and insist upon being fully informed about “how we get there” as detailed in the glossy publication mailed out by the school about Momentum 2025. Specifics are not provided. Dig deeper for the facts. Talk to board members, friends, and administrators to understand the truth about the coming reset of the school which is Momentum 2025.

What is the goal and end game of all of this? After fully implementing Momentum 2025, St. Christopher’s can begin an aggressive marketing campaign to sell themselves to all comers. They will have become a corporate commodity with the very real possibility that they might just price themselves right out of the market morally, spiritually, and financially.

I cannot help but think about the many good and true, morally honest, wise, Christian scholars, past and present, who put the school together, made it work, and labored their entire lives to place St. Christopher’s in the forefront of exceptional schools in Richmond, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the nation. Unfortunately we are on the verge of seeing the school dismembered from within, recalibrated, re-imaged, dumbed down, and destroyed.

Is there anyone left who will stand under the pines and rally for St. Christopher, Dr. Chamberlayne, and “for all the saints who from their labors rest.”?

John L. Morgan III
St. Christopher’s School, Class of 1965

By H. V. Traywick, Jr.

History is the propaganda of the victorious. Voltaire

“The Myth of American History” claims that the righteous North went to war against the evil South to free the slaves, and that Confederate war memorials are monuments to Treason, Slavery, and Racism and must be torn down. This myth has become “the lie agreed upon” by all, to make the conveniently-dead Confederacy the scapegoat for our sins. But as Thomas Carlyle said, all lies are cursed and damned from the beginning. Only the truth will make us free.

Consider the truth: To accuse the Confederacy of treason, one must wipe one’s feet on the Declaration of Independence, signed by the thirteen slave-holding Colonies (1) that seceded from the British Empire in 1776. Lincoln’s war on the Southern States, which he did not recognize as being out of the Union (2), is treason according to Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Self-defense is not. No Confederate was ever tried for treason, much less convicted, but why not Lincoln?

As for slavery, the wealth of New York and New England was founded on the African slave-trade and the manufacture and shipping of slave-picked cotton (3). To claim the North went to war to free the slaves, one must ignore Lincoln’s disclaimer in his First Inaugural Address, ignore his Emancipation Proclamation two years later plainly stating that slavery was alright as long as one were loyal to his government (4), and ignore that West Virginia, a “slave State,” was admitted into the Union afterwards. Slavery was not abolished in the United States until Lincoln and the Confederacy were in their graves (5).

As for racism, please note that the first “Jim Crow” laws originated in Northern States long before the war (6). Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, testified to the virulent racism in the North. The North’s strong opposition to slavery in the Territories was due to its strong opposition to Blacks in the Territories. Lincoln, a documented and life-long White Supremacist, supported these “Jim Crow” laws (7) and worked until the day he died to deport freed Blacks to Central America or back to Africa (8). As for Black racism, remember that it was Black Africans who captured and sold Black Africans into slavery in the first place (9). Furthermore, early US census records listed many free Black owners of slaves – from New Orleans to New England (10).

What, then, is the truth about that war? Do not confound the many causes of secession with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself. Follow the dollar and know the Truth. Cotton was “King” in the mid-nineteenth century, and with the South’s “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and free-trading with Europe, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” with its piratical tariffs would collapse (11), so Lincoln – rebuffing all peace overtures by Confederate diplomats – launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke the South into firing the first shot. South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation just as Massachusetts had responded to King George’s provocation at Lexington and Concord, and Lincoln got the war he wanted (12). Virginia, “The Mother of States and of Statesmen,” stood solidly for the Union until Lincoln called for her troops to invade and subjugate the Confederacy, whereupon Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for “choosing to inaugurate civil war”(13), and immediately seceded. Four other States (including occupied Missouri) followed her out. There stands the Truth – not with the North’s mythical “Battle-Cry of Freedom.” Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” claiming his war of invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance against the South was to save “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” is pure Orwellian doublespeak. How else would one define political allegiance at the point of a bayonet? Slavery was just the smelly “red herring” dragged across the track of an unconstitutional and murderous usurpation of power, but that takes the wind out of the sails of the Racial Grievance Industry, and knocks a hole in “The Myth of American History.”

***

Notes

1. See US census of 1790.
2. Abraham Lincoln. “First Inaugural Address” (1861) in Charles W. Eliot, LL D, ed. The Harvard Classics. 50 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910). Vol. 43, American Historical Documents, pg. 334.
3. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005) passim.
4. Abraham Lincoln. “Emancipation Proclamation” (1863). Eliot, Vol. 43, pg. 345.
5. US Constitution, Article XIII, December 18, 1865.
6. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, eds., with Komozi Woodard. The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South. (New York: New York UP, 2019) pgs. 13-7.
7. Lerone Bennett, Jr. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000) pgs. 183-214.
8. Thomas J. DiLorenzo. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. (New York: Three Rivers P, 2003) Pgs. 16-20.
9. Zora Neale Hurston. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Ed. Deborah G. Plant. (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2018) pgs. 9-10.
10. Dr. Carter G. Woodson, PhD. Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830. (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1924) pgs. 1-42.
11. Gene Kizer, Jr. Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston and James Island, S. C.: Charleston Athenaeum P, 2014) pgs. 56-69.
12. Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter,” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August 1937), pgs. 259-88, in Kizer, pgs. 197-248.
13. Gov. John Letcher to Sec. Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, in Richmond Enquirer, April 18, 1861, pg. 2, col. 1. Microfilm. The Daily Richmond Enquirer, Jan. 1, 1861 – June 29, 1861. Film 23, reel 24 (Richmond: Library of Virginia collection).

By H. V. Traywick, Jr.

If you are like me, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about mules these days, but a passage from Faulkner brought them to mind. Collectivism so far has not taken deep root in the South – at least among Southerners – but things are so rapidly changing with social media and the “Woke Revolution” that there is no telling the future. But whatever the future holds, the “woke” will have to contend with the ubiquitous individuality of the native Southerner, and one of the most individual of that breed is the mule. As William Faulkner wrote in Flags in the Dust:

Some Cincinnatus of the cotton fields should contemplate the lowly destiny, some Homer should sing the saga, of the mule and of his place in the South. He it was, more than any one creature or thing, who, steadfast to the land when all else faltered before the hopeless juggernaut of circumstances, impervious to conditions that broke men’s hearts because of his venomous and patient preoccupation with the immediate present, won the prone South from beneath the iron heel of Reconstruction and taught it pride again through humility and courage through adversity overcome; who accomplished the well-nigh impossible despite hopeless odds, by sheer and vindictive patience…

Although I’ve been around horses all my life, I never have had much occasion to come into contact with mules. My father had come home from the Second World War and was a manufacturer’s representative for a farm machinery company, but he said they still used mules in the tobacco fields, pulling the sleds down the rows where a tractor couldn’t go. Most of those broad tobacco fields that I remember seeing below Lynchburg when we were driving to South Carolina to visit my grandparents are gone now, and the mules with them, too, I suppose. One of the last I remember seeing was one day in South Carolina, when we passed a car load of colored men, with one man leaning out of the window leading a mule trotting alongside with harness jangling, in a picture surely worth a thousand words.

Mules, horses, and oxen were the farm tractors before steam power replaced muscle power as the prime mover of civilization, and they carried history on their backs. In my front yard when I was a little boy, there was a swale over which my tire swing hung. It was part of the remnant of General Jubal Early’s outer defenses of Lynchburg in 1864 when the Yankees came – the old road that connected Ft. McCausland (manned by McCausland’s cavalry and the VMI Cadets) on Langhorne Road with the redoubt held by the Lynchburg Home Guard (“The Silver Grays,” the young boys, and the convalescents from the hospitals) up on Rivermont Avenue, where Villa Maria is now. I would get a good running start and swing out over that little depression in the front yard where ninety years before teamsters pulling wagons, and artillerymen pulling guns and caissons once cracked whips and swore at hard-headed and recalcitrant mules:

… Father and mother he does not resemble, sons and daughters he will never have; vindictive and patient (it is a known fact that he will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once); solitary but without pride, self-sufficient but without vanity; his voice is his own derision. Outcast and pariah, he has neither friend, wife, mistress nor sweetheart; celibate, he is unscarred, possesses neither pillar nor desert cave, he is not assaulted by temptations nor flagellated by dreams nor assuaged by visions; faith, hope and charity are not his. Misanthropic, he labors six days without reward for one creature whom he hates, bound with chains to another whom he despises, and spends the seventh day kicking or being kicked by his fellows…

After The War, there were the “forty acres and a mule” that the carpetbaggers had promised the freedmen in exchange for their votes. It worked pretty well for the carpetbaggers, but not so good for the credulous freedmen. While they got top hats and cigars, the carpetbaggers got the votes and the forty acres. What they did with the mules is not recorded, but they did not need mules to plow the ground for votes, or to harvest taxes, or to foreclose on the forty acres.

In Richmond there has been some talk about replacements for the monuments on Monument Avenue that were desecrated and torn down by the mobs of Jacobins (the Lee monument has been thoroughly vandalized, but it is still standing, albeit fenced off and under litigation.) A number of replacement heroes of a “woke” multicultural nature have been suggested – fine and upstanding people, I’m sure, except that no one has ever heard of them – at least none that remotely match the international fame of Lee and Jackson who shook the Lincoln Empire to its foundation while Jeb Stuart rode circles around it in defense of our brief independence. Other monuments of a generic nature have been suggested by assorted virtue-posters to reflect our multi-cultural and multi-gendered “wokeness” these days, but these suggestions seem to sputter along without any fire, as though the end of history and the final leveling of society that we have for so long expended our righteous revolutionary energies upon to attain, have left us with a sense of malaise and ennui now that we have attained them. As the poet Allen Tate wrote:

Empty of heart the empty man

Of the Day of Jubilo…

But not to worry! Perhaps I can help. I don’t know how “woke” he is, but may I suggest a generic monument to the multi-cultural and ambivalently-gendered mule?

By Charles M. Blackford

(Edited by H. V. Traywick, Jr., from the presentation given by Charles M. Blackford to the Garland–Rodes Camp, United Confederate Veterans, Lynchburg, Virginia, July 18, 1901, in Charles M. Blackford, Campaign and Battle of Lynchburg, Virginia, annotated and illustrated by Peter W. Houck [Lynchburg: Warwick House Publishing, 1994] pgs. 79-83.)

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

The fires of patriotism do not burn most fiercely where the land is most productive, or where wealth most accumulates. Nations which have owned broad savannahs upon which nature has been most lavish have often been driven from their country with little show of manly courage and without that zealous patriotism which creates heroes, while the peasant of Switzerland and the cottager of the Highlands, neither of whom can afford greater luxuries than oatmeal and goat’s milk, have held their values and their fastnesses for centuries against all odds. To them each dell has its story of valiant deeds of their forefathers and each mountain is crowned by traditions which tell of the great achievements of their race. For dells and mountains thus sanctified by the glories of the past, the peasant and the lord of the manor alike are willing to die. It was their love for the stories and romance of their race which sustained the nerve of the Swiss Guards in the discharge of their duty to the King when, without a faltering nerve, one by one they sunk under the blows of the infuriated Jacobins of Paris, and well won the grand inscription to their courage on the Lion of Lucerne. A like love was the foundation of the wonderful heroism of the Highlanders at Lucknow and of the Scotch who climbed the Heights of Abraham at Quebec. So it was their love for the historic memories of Virginia which nerved the courage of that dauntless division which, under a fire never before poured on line of battle, reached the brow of the hill at Gettysburg.

By gathering the traditions of the Highlands and thus perpetuating them, Scott has done a great work for Scotland. Others have done the same thing for England. It is for this generation to gather the same wealth for Virginia. Thus will the history of her people, of her valleys, her rivers and her mountains, be preserved and the facts be secured to generations yet to come which, when mellowed by time, will be perpetuated in story, in poetry and in song.

Thus and thus only can we keep Virginia and her people on the elevated plane upon which they have stood for centuries, and thus can we make her, in the future, the land of poetry and romance. It is Wallace and Tell who are the heroes of the poet and the novelist, not the commanders of the great forces with which they contended. In the far future many a novel, many a poem and many a song will tell of Lee, of Jackson, of Stuart and of Mosby – ideal heroes of romance – long after the names of the leaders who fought them will be mere facts in the prosaic history of the power of the greater to overcome the less.

It is not our duty to weep over the past or to bemoan the fate which resulted in the final overthrow of the Confederacy; nor should we do anything to keep alive the bitterness of that strife. On the contrary, it is our duty to bow to the logic of what has happened and to believe in the wisdom of the all-wise Director of the affairs of nations and of peoples; but it is also our duty to see to it that what is good and great be preserved, and that our children and children’s children keep green the traditions which will nerve them to a higher courage and stimulate them to a generous emulation of the deeds of their forefathers.