Reparations for the Whole South

Reparations are Due

Real and palpable damages were done to the South by ruthless invaders, who from 1860 to 1865 were burning both mansion and cabin, destroying food and sustenance not only of soldiers, but of non-combatants – a unique class in time of war, who were protected by the International Law of Nations, as observed by the civilized world of the day, and also by this nation’s Executive Order Number 100, better known as the Lieber Code. For these damages, reparations are due and payable.

Reparations for slavery is a short-sighted idea. It is groundless, narrow-minded, self-centered, divisive, and in a word, racist.

In an insane rush to demonize slavery, the black activist of today fails to recognize, as did Arnold Toynbee, that slavery in the South was different from all other slave systems known in the world. The Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the various European slavers working the Caribbean – all denied the masters’ religion and worship to the slaves.

In the South, the door to Christian redemption was opened wide, and the black servitors were invited in as brothers and sisters in Christ. They went to the same church, and looked forward to the same Heaven and Hell. Under such a structure, an extended family comprising both slaves and masters evolved, and eventual freedom was made inevitable.

Today the Christian Church is the strongest institution of American blacks. It was born on the plantation of the ante-bellum South. All of this was nearly destroyed by the fanatic abolitionists with their cries of “Freedom Now!” They were concerned not with the ultimate welfare of the slaves, but with feeding their own self-righteous claims to superior morality and sweet sensitivity.

It was on this pious wave of Puritan abolitionist sanctity that the Northeastern industrialists launched forces of imperial invasion and domination of the South. Free the slaves, save their souls, and capture a colonial market – all in one stroke of the Puritan whip. A nice piece of business. Abolition of slavery was not the “cause” of the war. It was the excuse, the vehicle by which power was sought and ruthlessly obtained.

War Crimes Against The South

General Sherman was an equal-opportunity destroyer. He burnt the mansion and the cabin; the smokehouse as well as the barn and cattle; the henhouse along with the hens. He meant for all mouths to be equally hungry – black and white craws to be starved equally. And after the war of “emancipation,” his noble warriors galloped off to the West to finish off the Indians. General Sheridan bragged that he had cleansed Shenandoah so that black birds and white birds had to carry a fly-over lunch. General Sherman said, “About twenty percent of our activity in Georgia was directed against possible military objectives; the rest (80%) was simple waste and destruction.” The destruction work of Northern invasion forces was specifically approved by President Lincoln and General Halleck, Commander-in-Chief of all Northern forces.

Genocide

Early on the U.S. Congress enacted the Confiscation Act of 1861. It provided for the confiscation of property in the South on a wholesale basis, as well as the confiscation and freeing of slaves held by Confederate masters – but not the slaves of the many slaveholders in border states who remained supporters of the Union. They could keep their slaves, and in fact could rent them out to the Union Army for a profit. The Emancipation Act of 1863 did not improve matters. It freed only the “other man’s” slaves, not the slaves in states under Federal occupation.

In sum, it was estimated in Congress that the Confiscation Act assessed the property, personal and real, of all Southerners who in any way supported the South – a population in excess of six million people – and property worth what Jefferson Davis referred to as “five thousand million dollars.” This is larceny on a grand scale, and it was planned from the very beginning of the War. Forget righteous indignation about slavery; forget the Constitution; forget the Law of Nations. We are talking about money. This is one of the most lucrative cases of theft in world history.

The U.S. Congress in 1865 passed a measure which read in part:

Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the context of savage tribes and resulting in the death of a multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather.
H.R. 97, JAN. 1865

This is a declaration of genocide.

At first reading it seems unbelievable. But the shame is that from this Congress, this body of men, it is not only believable, it’s the truth, as revealed in practice; Northern war-time prisons were instruments of torture, disease and starvation.

We must in turn, however, strictly refrain from asserting or implying that all Northerners sympathized with this hysteria. They did not. There was indeed a wide and significant sympathy for the ideal of local self-government, and letting the South leave in peace. This sentiment, however, was ruthlessly suppressed.

President Lincoln arbitrarily shut down over 300 Northern newspapers that questioned the war of attrition waged against a people who simply wanted to exercise the right of self-determination. Many thousands of dissidents in the North were imprisoned after short shrift before Military courts. The Writ of Habeas Corpus was suspended. People were imprisoned for indefinite periods, without being charged, defended, or tried.

Root, Hog, or Die!

Lincoln performed as a dictator. His object was Power. Nothing more and nothing less.

As a result, the South and all its people were devastated. The most prosperous and richest culture on the continent was ruined by Union forces, much as Carthage was ruined by the Romans. There was no Marshall Plan. There was only twelve years of military occupation, combined with the ruthless manipulation of black people for the sole purpose of garnering their mass vote to support the Northern engine of power determined to transform our Republic into an imperial Union.

The single greatest disservice to blacks was by fanatic abolitionists, who yanked the slaves from the Southern farms, where they enjoyed our first Social Security system, nurtured and protected from the cradle to the grave. They were dumped totally unprepared for the duties of citizenship into the perils of an indifferent world. Abrupt “freedom” was much more perilous than slavery itself. It meant literally, “freedom to starve.” Or in Lincoln’s immortal words: “Root, hog, or die.”

Fortunately, the Southern blacks and Southern whites were able to work together to devise a plan of sharing labor and land on equal shares – now fashionably denigrated as “sharecropping.” It saved the South and the entire country. It was a solution devised by the people; as such it was subject to the vicissitudes of human nature, but largely, it worked – perhaps because the helping hand of Reconstruction was mercifully withdrawn in 1877.

Our Demands

NOW THEREFORE, IN THE NAME OF ALL THE PEOPLES OF THE SOUTH, WE DEMAND REPARATIONS.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the razing and burning of Atlanta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Staunton, Virginia, Mound City, Arkansas, Randolf, Tennessee, Meridian, Mississippi, Saint Francisville, Louisiana, Edenton, North Carolina, Selma, Alabama, Belmont, Missouri, Jackson, Florida, and more than forty other towns and cities from one end of the South to the other. A pall of frozen horror descends over our eyes when we realize that not one of these abodes of peace and civilization was destroyed in battle. All were destroyed out of sheer cruelty and petty vengeance. These acts were nothing less than war crimes – deliberate and evil attacks upon domestic civilians, their homes, their crops, their livestock, and their businesses.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the countless hundreds of homes burnt to the ground by Northern troops under General Sherman. Whether they be mansion houses or slave quarters, simple farmhouses or city residences – all were stripped bare of valuables, then put to the torch by Yankee troops under the approving gaze of their officers.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the black people left on the wrong side of the alligator-infested Ogeechee River of Georgia by Sherman’s jeering troops, as they pulled up the pontoon bridge and marched away in the dead of winter, deaf to the cries and pleas of the men, women and children left to die in the swamps.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the descendants of General Benton Smith, who, while standing helpless as a prisoner of war, was savagely attacked by a federal officer with a saber, laying open his skull to expose his brain. A pathetic remnant of his former self, General Smith lived until 1923, half in and half out of mental institution.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the “Women of Roswell” – factory workers in the town of Roswell, Georgia, who were forced to abandon their families and move forever to the North, where nothing was heard of them again, except for one, a pitiful wreck of a woman who was found by her husband many years later, in far-off Arizona.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the family of Colonel William Shy, found by his mother in a field in Nashville, naked and impaled to a shattered tree with a bullet hole in his brow, still stained by powder burns. We know the federal officer who committed this war crime. Colonel Shy had no descendants. He was a man of tender years, unmarried, and all his family-to-be died with him.

WE DEMAND REPARATIONS for the thousands of prisoners of war who were tortured, beaten and starved to death in the federal prisons at Point Lookout, Maryland, and Elmira, New York, where a deliberate policy of reprisal was followed, for the alleged suffering of prisoners at Andersonville, Georgia.

Heinous, Atrocious & Cruel

General Sherman deliberately cut the railroad line that served Andersonville and stripped the heart of Georgia of food that could have been sent to that prison. Federal officers of the highest rank refused to allow exchange of prisoners, because free prisoners would not only relieve the South of the duty to maintain them, but they knew the Northern soldiers would not re-enlist, and Southern soldiers would. They would not allow medicine to be sent to the prison, knowing the Southerners did not have any. The North sacrificed their own soldiers to their policy of savage reprisal and war by attrition. General Sherman forgot about the prisoners at Andersonville. He was too intent on his program for the South, which he described to General Halleck:

The United States has the right, and the power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain.... We will remove and destroy every obstacle – if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.

It did not seem “proper” to General Sherman to send a small detachment of cavalry to Andersonville to rescue his soldiers in prison. He was too busy a few miles away “taking every life, every particle of property” to be bothered. It didn’t fit his “plan.”

The South did release 15,000 prisoners to the North late in the War. In return, the North released not one single prisoner.

The Leiber Code

As a substitute for the Law of Nations, the North had Professor Francis Leiber draw up some “Rules of War” which addressed the moral problems of what they called “The Civil War.”

The Leiber Code was adopted by Lincoln on April 24, 1863, in the form of General Order Number 100. It placed certain obligations on United Stated armed forces in what it called “regular war.” Humane restraint is ordered in exemplary and admirable language. For instance, Section I, Article 4 provides:

As Martial Law is executed by military force, it is incumbent on those who administer it to be strictly guided by the principles of justice, honor and humanity – virtues adorning a soldier even more than other men for the very reason that he possesses the power of his arms against the unarmed.

We, as quondam citizens of good ole’ U.S. of A., bask in a warm self-righteous glow of contemplation, as we are “guided by the principles of justice, honor and humanity.” But we lay them down by the events at Ogeechee River or the prison in Elmira, New York, and we begin to wonder, “How did the U.S.A. stray so far?”

Part of the answer is that good ole’ Abe and Professor Leiber didn’t consider the “Civil War” to be a “regular war.” It was a war against “traitors” and “rebels,” and the humane-sounding rules didn’t apply to these inferior beings. In this irregular war, non-combatants could be expelled, imprisoned, fined and even shot as disloyal traitors.

Section X Article 153 in the Leiber Code declares:

Treating captured rebels as prisoners of war, exchanging them, concluding of cartels, capitulations, or other warlike agreements with them; addressing officers of a rebel army by the rank they may have in the same; accepting flags of truce; or, on the other hand, proclaiming Martial Law in their territory, or levying war-taxes or forced loans; or doing any other act sanctioned or demanded by the law and usages of public war between sovereign belligerents [doing all of these things], neither proves nor establishes an acknowledgement of the rebellious people, or of the government which they may have erected, as a public or sovereign power. Nor does the adoption of the rules of war toward rebels imply an engagement with them extending beyond the limits of these rules. It is victory in the field that ends the strife and settles the future relations between the contending parties.

Resistance is Treason

In straightforward English, Lincoln and Leiber are saying we don’t recognize you as actual living humans, therefore any observance of protocol on our part is a matter of expediency only. “It is victory in the field that ends the strife and settles the future relations.” Any obligations the North may have seemed to have felt were purely pro forma steps to “victory,” after which only the rules of expediency apply – no holds barred.

If force is the ultimate solution, then why do we have the Leiber Code? Or any rule at all? The commander has utterly arbitrary power. That is the rule of the invader Yankee. The last article of their Code (#157) says it all:

Armed or unarmed resistance by citizens of the U.S. against the lawful movement of their troops is levying war against the U.S. and is therefore treason.

It was Yankee propaganda that Southerners could not secede in peace; we were declared rebels and traitors, and shot at will. No due process. No witnesses. No jury. Sections 2 and 3 of Article III of the Constitution were ignored.

A Rebellious People

Lincoln embraced the Leiber Code to save face before Europe with whom he had to share the ocean highways of the world. He had to appear to abide by the Law of Nations, while at the same time pretending that the South was not a nation but a “rebellious people.” The Leiber Code at Article 154 declares:

Treating, in the field, the rebellious enemy according to the law and usages of war has never prevented the legitimate government from trying the leaders of the rebellion or chief rebels for high treason, and from treating them accordingly, unless they are included in a general amnesty.

There was a “general amnesty,” but many Southern leaders refused to accept it, most notably Jefferson Davis. To accept it would be to deny the Constitutional right of secession. Most importantly neither he nor any Southern Leader was ever tried as a traitor. The Northern role as the “legitimate government” was never proven. The U.S.A. today continues to deny any right of secession, but it still exists, and is still honored and pursued by the United Nations as the people’s right to self-determination. That is all the South ever wanted. We wanted it then and we want it now.

The crux of the matter is that before, during, and after the War, the North violated the Constitution, and the Law of Nations. The Leiber code was a sham. President Johnson realized that feelings between North and South had to be soothed. It was his intent to heal the wounds and rebuild the nation, free of the old hatred and recrimination. But he was overruled and impeached. The original theory of the North was that secession was impossible, and the War was a rebellion, rather than a war between nations. The War premise continued with a vengeance, but there were complications.

The Right to Secede

In 1865, a Northern Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution freeing the slaves, but in order for the proposed amendment to become final, it had to be ratified by three-quarters of the States. Now on the theory that the Southern States had never seceded, they must as a consequence vote yea or nay for emancipation. There was no other way to get the majority needed for ratification. Most of the Southern states did vote to ratify. It was Southern votes that freed the slaves.

But in the bitterness preceding the impeachment of President Johnson in 1868, a radical Congress sought to “punish” the South and at the same time contrive a way to force the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been rejected by some Northern states as well as by Southern States. So the Southern states were informed they were not states after all, and were instructed that in order to be “admitted to the Union” – which Congress had claimed they had never left – they must first ratify the Fourteenth Amendment passed by Congress in June of 1866. So as non-states they duly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 28, 1868 in order to be able to do what they had already done in 1865 as states in their approval of the Thirteenth Amendment. All a bit murky, and utterly unconstitutional but to the victors go the rotten spoils.

Two states withdrew their ratifications but the radical Congress rejected their valid rejections, and declared the Fourteenth Amendment and its ratification to be as pure as the driven snow on the convent roof. The Congress had to have the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the final nail in the coffin of the Republic which had existed before 1861. It confirmed the ascendancy of a central government and the slow demise of local self-government.

Rigged Election

The North intended to try Jefferson Davis for treason and prove that Southerners had no right to secede, and were in fact a bunch of traitors. But wiser heads prevailed. Davis, who wanted a trial, was never tried because the wiser heads convinced the hotheads that there was indeed a right to secede under the Constitution, and Davis was no traitor for upholding the Constitution. A trial would have upheld the right of secession and exonerated Davis. That is the reason he was never tried.

However, in 1867, the solution of the mad-dog Congress was to divide the South into five military districts and rule it as a conquered nation – with the expedient requirement that all the new black voters must vote for Lincoln’s party and elect Yankee Presidents. This worked until 1876 when many blacks either failed to vote or voted the wrong way, and the election hung on how the electoral votes of Florida were counted. A deal was worked out to let the Republicans have the presidency one more time by counting Florida as voting for the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. Although there remains some doubt as to just how the Florida votes were truly cast, the army of occupation would be withdrawn from the South and the Reconstruction era would end. The candidate from the North would be President.

The result at law is that the entire structure of Reconstruction is an unconstitutional wreck. Every act, every deed, every misdeed enacted there under is gravely reprehensible and may be compromised and settled only by substantial reparations that compensate Southerners of all races and creeds for the horrors put upon them, and not just during the War and Reconstruction, but afterwards to this very day.

The wage and freight rate differentials and the banking practices in effect until World War II are examples of the damages that have been unlawfully imposed upon the South on into modern times. Even today, the South is still subjected to systematic genocidal attacks on our culture, our history, our symbols and our heroes. Southerners are instructed as to those with whom we must associate, where and how to educate our children, and how we must hate or love or pray.

Our very identity that we enjoy in the world today as Americans is that of a global imperial power, which stems from, and was born as a result of the War Between the States. The Empire won. Its regime is not “past,” it is here now, and grows by the hour.

We will accept reparations in the name of conscience – yours and ours. And then, in God’s name, leave us alone. We Southerners will make it just fine.

The Repairman

The big question is, who is the repairman that is going to make these reparations? The first spring-to-mind is of course White Southern slave-owners – the yeast of evil, the bloody beater of Black backs. He is doomed. But wait. Insert a pause clause.

Who sold him that black bill of goods? A Yankee! From Mass, Conn, or Rhode Island (New Providence Plantation), that's who. And who gypped a Negro Chief in Africa out of his spare livestock by paying pennies for slaves in Africa and selling for dollars to white folks in America? The Northern White folks who bought slaves soon "emancipated" their purchases by "selling South" for maximum profit. The pious people-peddlers of New England built vast fortunes out of the slave trade.

So tap their fortunes. They are still there, and they're fatter than ever.

Assess the Founding Trusts of Harvard University and Brown University or the descendants of the many slave-dealing families of New England, such as those of John Banister, Abraham Redwood or Joseph Wanton (Governor of Rhode Island, 1790). Or how about Aaron Lopez (largest taxpayer in Newport, 1775), or from Boston, you could tax the Belchers, the Waldons and Faneuils (of Liberty Hall) and Cabots (who only spoke to God), et al. And don't forget New York and Philadelphia, The City of Brotherly Love – many slavers, many fortunes, many trusts still breathing.

Of course, as conscientious one-world citizens, for really serious reparations we would require the U.N. to assess England, France, Spain, and Portugal; not to mention the African Chiefs of today whose ancestors supplied the worthy merchants of Europe and New England.

It gets even more complicated. Most of the European slave-traders themselves were descendants of serfs, the European equivalent of slaves. In all fairness, they too deserve reparations. The serpent will have to swallow itself from tail to head.

Now the New Englander is a crafty sort. As soon as the Southern farmer had paid the Yankee for his labor force, the Yankee was struck hard by remorse – or was it a sudden perception of opportunity? He built factories. For his labor force, he shanghaied and "contracted" white labor from Europe. He had them buy their own tickets to ride his boats to Boston, then he worked them and their children for pennies from sun to sun. And when they got too old to work, he let 'em die. Why don't the descendants of these poor oppressed laborers deserve reparations?

And that's just part of how the clever Yankee industrialist exploited this opportunity. Early on, he had fixed it so only three-fifths of the Black population in the South were counted in calculating the number of Congressman allotted to each state. Presto. The North's wage slave laborers were counted as 100% voters, and thus the North controlled Congress.

Now with Congress in their avaricious paws, the Pious Puritans, to honor their private and personal God, enacted the Protective Tariff on all goods imported from Europe, thus forcing the South to buy inferior Yankee goods at Yankee prices, which – Praise the Lord! – were used to build more penance pulpits alongside the dollar factories.

And where do you think all this tariff revenue went? To public works, of course. Canals, lighthouses, railroads, harbor improvements – all located in the North, of course. These improvements were built with Southern money earned by white and black Southern hands working together in the same fields, as they prayed together in the same Southern churches.

The South is the only place in the world where blacks and whites have lived in peace together as one extended family, under the same God, rewarded in the same Heaven and punished in the same Hell. Even during the War when Yankee agents slipped around trying to incite servants to rise up and murder and burn, it didn't work. Our people weren't going to destroy their own homes. General Sherman's "followers" weren't following him – they were following those hams he stole – our Southern hams.

Accounts Receivable

Once you add up all the damages to Southern Blacks and Southern Whites – and once you factor in all the goodies stolen and sent North – not to mention the land itself, which Yankees bought up at confiscatory tax sales, courtesy of carpetbagging legislatures – you will find that an enormous net balance is owed to all Southerners as reparation for all those homes burned and gutted in Georgia and South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana; and for all those dollars sent North to pay for African laborers stolen by Yankee slavers and sold South; and for all those public improvements in the North built with Southern dollars; and last but certainly not least, for the brutal and savage War itself, which was brought not to "free the slaves," but rather to enslave the Southern populace as a captive market for Yankee goods.

Modern man's greatest peril is the monstrous specter of "Total War," which is war against all living things. All his vaunted progress, all his marvelous inventions, directed toward easing the rigors of life and existence, may die in a horrible plume of smoke and fire.

"Total War" is a Yankee invention, and is nothing but a regression to barbarism. It was how the Yankee won the War Between the States, devastating (with the kindest and most enlightened intentions) black and white alike. The Yankee was the indiscriminate destruction of the South. The Yankee was the very embodiment of "Total War."

The image of "Total War" is depicted in the young officer running up to General Sherman and asking, "Should we burn the quarters, Sir? That's where the slaves live."

The ultimate Total Warrior wheeled on his officer, shrilled and grated, "Burn it all! Burn everything they've got – save their eyes, that they may weep!"

Such behavior cannot be excused as the hysteria of war. It is the language of a madman.

Remorse

One thing for sure. Reparations are not owed by the South; reparations are owed to the South. And speaking for the South, we'd like to say: Why don't you just keep it?

But wait. That would be mean-spirited. There are, I am sure, good honest folk in the North who wish to confess their sins and make amends; and we all recognize how good honest confession is for the soul. Out of compassion for the remorseful Yankee soul, then, I shall propose that we set up an "Education Trust" in the South which will exclusively administer funds contributed by the sincere and apologetic Northerner whose conscience is disturbed by the notion that a sort of delayed Marshall Plan for our own people might be overdue.

That we might consider.