Southern History: The Cold War

The Cold War
Thomas Allen

Then came the Cold War against the South. The Cold War began about 1918 with the close of World War I and lasted until 1954. During this phase, the Gentlemen’s agreement that ended the First Reconstruction was abandoned by the North. Verbal assaults came out of the North against the South and were echoed by the scalawags of the South. The assault intensified until the dawn of the Second Reconstruction.

Through its imitation of the North, the South did discover that slavery was not necessary to safeguard White supremacy. The South learned to treat Blacks as they were treated in the North — institutionalization of segregation. The difference between the North and the South was that in the North Blacks were such a small minority that there was little need to legalize segregation whereas in the South because of the large numbers of Blacks, it was — hence, the “Jim Crow” laws.

Statutory segregation did serve a useful purpose. In the South, it showed Blacks where they could go and not go. Although Blacks were segregated in the North, there were few, if any, statutory guidelines. In the South, Blacks clearly knew which restaurants would serve them and which would not. In the North, they could legally enter any restaurant; but they might not be served, or their service would be deliberately delayed. Furthermore, the segregation statutes served to spur Black entrepreneurship. Black businesses sprung up to provide services that Blacks desiderated. Many of these businesses died with the repeal of segregation laws. Blacks preferred integrating with Whites and, therefore, preferred services provided by White businesses. Whites did not particularly desire to integrate with Blacks and, therefore, did not prefer services offered by Black businesses. Most important of all, statutory segregation along with miscegenation laws retarded the genocide of integration. It may be the only effective way to retard such genocide where two races live in juxtaposition.

Perhaps the South’s imitation of the North is why it took the North eighty years to become greedy enough and hypocritical enough to condemn the South for doing exactly what the North was doing. Besides, with the mass migration of Blacks northward, something had to be done to protect White supremacy in the North by keeping the Negro in his place, i.e., keeping him in the South. So along came minimum wage laws and other labor laws restricting the employment of labor to price Blacks out of the Northern labor market. Along came a host of “civil rights” laws, which were intended to be enforced primarily in the South and, for the most part, have been. Appease the Black man in the South, and he will stay there, away from the White Yankee.

These civil rights laws were written to apply only where there was segregation by statute, hence the South, and not where there was segregation by custom, hence the North. However, the South was not allowed to imitate the North this time. The South was not allowed to replace statutes with custom. If the South continued to discriminate against Blacks, there would be little incentive for them to remain in their place, that is, to remain in the South. Thus, Blacks were to be forced on Southerners as equals while segregated, except for a token here and there, from Northerners. The only problem the North has had with this strategy is the occasional renegade judge who forgets or ignores the purpose of these laws.

This time the egalitarians found their allies in the Northern White supremacists and greedy Southern politicians and businessmen.

Forcing the integration of the Negro on Southerners would lead to the annihilation of the remnant of the true Southerners. As Donald Davidson wrote, “it is not possible to absorb the Negro into white society in full and equal status without tearing that society to pieces and completely, perhaps convulsively, change it.”[1] The preservation of the Southern culture, Southern society, and the Southern race is why true Southerners oppose integration with the Negro and other races. The opposition has nothing to do with hatred of the Negro, for the true Southerner does not hate the Negro. The Negro is merely a pawn being used to destroy the South. For the most part, the Negro does not realize that he is being used to destroy the Southerner. If he did, he would, one hopes, truly object because he will perish with the Southerner. Integration is genocide. (Robert Whitaker defines miscegenation as “the final solution to the white problem.”[2]) It will destroy the Black man as surely as it will destroy the White man. If the primary purpose of integration is not genocide, then why do the integrationist oppose outlawing and preventing miscegenation?

Northerners who push integration possess a hypocrisy that far exceeds that of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Carleton Putnam, a Northerner, describes this hypocrisy as follows: “In forcing integration upon the South, the North is demanding that the South do what the North itself in similar circumstances would not do. It is an established fact that white people favor integration throughout the United States exactly in proportion as they do not need to practice it.”[3] This assertion is as true of Southerners as Northerners. The more Southerners advocate integration, the more they tend to isolate themselves from social contact with the masses of the common Negro. The most recent notable example has been displayed by a Southern President, who is, at least, a scalawag New South Southerner, who placed his daughter in an exclusive, elitist private school to shield her from the common Negroes, who are forced to attend public schools. William Workman confirms this hypocritical attitude of Northerners toward integration:

Integration, to the non-Southerner, is a matter of hypothesis, perhaps caught up with the stuff of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘democracy’ as spuriously applied to the issue. Integration will not affect HIS way of life one whit; it will not compel HIS children to enter a strange and strained school world where cross-currents — cultural, moral, and intellectual — will create such discord as to nullify the learning process; it will create such discord as to nullify the learning process; it will not evoke in HIM the perpetual concern over the possibility of physical strife flaring up within or without the classroom, or within the community itself. No, to the non-Southerner, all this is academic — an interesting sociological experiment bedecked with the outward trappings of altruism but internally loaded with explosive potentialities.[4]

Nearly all South haters accept and endorse the egalitarians’ solution to the race problem without any critical analysis. The solution offered by the egalitarians during the War and the First Reconstruction is the same solution that they offer now during the Second Reconstruction. Their solution is genocide through integration. Genocide is hardly a viable solution. (Actually, Union soldiers began trying to breed the Negro out of existence during the War. This program continued to be followed by Yankee soldiers and carpetbaggers during Reconstruction. As Kendrick and Arnett report, “Tradition tells us that many of the mulattoes which we see today are the lineal descendants of Yankee troops and Carpetbaggers. The latter especially is said to have left innumerable copies of their physiognomy in the South.”[5])

At no place or time have two or more races been allowed (or in the South’s case forced) to integrate that the races involved did not proceed to breed themselves out of existence. Breeding the Black man out of existence, which is nothing less than genocide, is hardly a solution to any “White supremacy” problem, real or perceived. Is the destruction of the Black man through the genocide of integration in the name of equal rights, as the egalitarians want to do, any better than his destruction through the genocide of mass execution in the name of White supremacy as the egalitarians claim that the Klan wants to do? In the long run, the future that the Black man faces under the egalitarians is worse than any offered by any White supremacist. The egalitarians offer him extinction through genocidal integration.

The only really viable solution is the one offered by Lincoln, which is geographical separation. It is the only solution that destroys racial supremacy without genocide.

That great North Carolinian, Chub Seawell, summarized the whole egalitarian movement of the Second Reconstruction when he said, “The Ku Klux Klan comes marching down the street with a big banner saying ‘white power,’ and the media have a sort of running fit and yells ‘racism.’ Then the NAACP comes marching down the street with a big banner saying ‘black power,’ and the media call it ‘human rights.’” John Galt expressed the same sentiment, “If White people go out and march for black rights, they are hailed as having ‘social conscience’. . . . yet let three White people get together and proclaim their pride in being White men and Katy bar the damn door. They’ll be called KKK radicals, skinheads, racists, redneck and every other foul name that some minority scum can think up.”[6]

Genocide is nothing new to Southerners. Ethnic cleansing has been occurring in the United States for more than 150 years. However, it is not the Black man against whom a genocidal war is being waged. It is the Southerner against whom a genocidal war is being waged. (Like the Southerner, the Black man does face genocide because he is being used as a weapon to breed the Southerner out of existence.) Ethnic cleansing is occurring right here in the South.

Between 1861 and 1865 the United States government invaded the South and tried to kill as many Southerners as it could. Not only did it kill Southern soldiers defending their homes, it killed Southern women and children. It even killed the slaves whom it claimed it was trying to free. Judge Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania depicted the North’s war against civilians:

I will not pain you by a recital of the wanton cruelties they (the Lincoln administration) inflicted upon unoffending citizens. I have neither the space, nor skill, nor time, to paint them. A life-sized picture of them would cover more canvas than there is on earth. . . . Since the fall of Robespierre, nothing has occurred to cast so much disrepute on republican institutions.[7]

Richard Weaver’s assertion that “after all precautions have been taken and all corrections have been made, there remains considerable foundation for the assertion that the United States is the first government in modern times to commit itself to the policy of unlimited aggregation”[8] is true. (Unlimited war was one of the many vile legacies that the North gave the twentieth century to follow.)

Correspondence between General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton proves that genocide was the objective of the War. On June 21, 1864, just before beginning his infamous march to the sea, Sherman wrote to Stanton, “There is a class of people [in the South], men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”[9] On July 1, 1864, Stanton replied, “Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval.”[10] In his match across Georgia, Sherman did his best to carry out his war of genocide. He succeeded so well, that a Union corporal wrote from Savannah in 1864, “The cruelties practiced on this campaign towards citizens have been enough to blast a more sacred cause than ours. We hardly deserve success.”[11]

Sherman’s sacking of Atlanta and adjacent communities is illustrative of his genocidal war. A reporter for the Detroit Free Press offered this concise description:

Had one been able to climb to such a height at Atlanta as to enable him to see for forty miles around the day Sherman marched out, he would have been appalled at the destruction. Hundreds of houses had been burned, every rod of fence destroyed, nearly every fruit tree cut down, and the face of the country so changed that one born in that section could scarcely recognize it. The vindictiveness of war would have tramped the very earth out of sight had such a thing been possible. . . .

At the very beginning of the campaign at Dalton, the Federal soldiery had received encouragement to become vandals. . . . When Sherman cut loose from Atlanta everybody had license to throw off restraint and make Georgia ‘drain the bitter cup.’ The Federal who wants to learn what it was to license an army to become vandals should mount a horse at Atlanta and follow Sherman’s route for fifty miles. He can hear stories from the lips of women that would make him ashamed of the flag that waved over him as he went into battle. When the army had passed nothing was left but a trail of desolation and despair. No houses escaped robbery, no woman escaped insult, no building escaped the firebrand, except by some strange interposition. War may license an army to subsist on the enemy, but civilized warfare stops at live stock, forage and provisions. It does not enter the houses of the sick and helpless and rob women of their finger rings and carry off their clothing.[12]

Numerous other examples could be provided to describe not only the genocidal acts of Sherman, but also of Generals Grant, Sheridan, Pope, and Butler as well as other Union generals and their commander-in-chief, who could have nullified any of their orders and removed them if he had objected to their waging war against women and children. Edward Lawton summarizes the war waged against the South as follows: “In their conquest of the South the Northern armies deliberately used methods of savagery such as were not seen in Western Europe on so broad a scale from the seventeenth century until the invasions of Hitler.”[13]

A foreign reporter compared the conduct of the North and South during the War. Of the North, he wrote:

This contest has been signalized by the exhibition of some of the best and some of the worst qualities that war has ever brought out. It has produced a recklessness of human life, a contempt of principles, a disregard of engagements, . . . the headlong adoption of the most lawless measures, the public faith scandalously violated, both towards friends and enemies; the liberty of the citizen at the hands of arbitrary power; the liberty of the press abolished; the suspension of the habeas corpus act; illegal imprisonments; midnight arrests; punishments inflicted without trial; the courts of law controlled by satellites of government; elections carried on under military supervision; a ruffianism, both of word and action, eating deep into the country. . . ; the must [sic] brutal inhumanity in the conduct of the war itself; outrages upon the defenseless, upon women, children and prisoners; plunder, rapine, devastation, murder — all the old horrors of barbarous warfare which Europe is beginning to be ashamed of, and new refinements of cruelty thereto added, by way of illustrating the advance of knowledge.[14]

Of the South, he wrote:

It has also produced qualities and phenomena the opposite of these. Ardour and devotedness of patriotism, which might alone make us proud of the century to which we belong; a unanimity such as was probably never witnessed before; a wisdom in legislation, a stainless good faith under extremely difficult circumstances, a clear apprehension of danger, coupled with a determination to face it to the uttermost; a resolute abnegation of power in favor of leaders in whom those who selected them could trust; with an equally resolute determination to reserve the liberty of criticism, and not to allow those trusted leaders to go one inch beyond their legal powers; a heroism in the field and behind the defenses of besieged cities, which can match anything that history has to show; a wonderful helpfulness in supplying needs and creating fresh resources; a chivalrous and romantic daring, which recalls the middle ages; a most scrupulous regard for the rights of hostile property; a tender consideration for the vanquished and the weak. . . . And the remarkable circumstance is, that all the good qualities have been on the one side and all the bad ones on the other.[15]

Next came the First Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877. During this period the might of the United States government supported various local scalawags and carpetbaggers, who tried to remold the South into the image of Yankeedom by political means. It was, in the words of Paxson, an era of “Northern revenge in the guise of the preservation of the dearly won Union [that] was worse for the South than the war.”[16]

The desire to annihilate the Southern people can be summed up by a statement made by Parson William G. Brownlow, former carpetbagger governor of Tennessee, at a New York convention:

If I had the power I would arm every wolf, panther, catamount and bear in the mountains of America, every crocodile in the swamps of Florida, every Negro in the South, and every devil in Hell, clothe them in the uniform of the Federal Army and turn them loose on the Rebels of the South and exterminate every man, woman and child south of Mason and Dixon’s Line. I would like to see Negro troops, under the command of [U. S. General Benjamin F.] Butler, crowd every Rebel into the Gulf of Mexico and drown them as the Devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee.[17]

Andrew Grayson offers this description of the genocidal war waged against Southerners during the First Reconstruction:

The institution of Radical Reconstruction marked the beginning of the largest, most malicious, and most malignant social, political, and racial experiment in the history of the Northern European White race up to that time. It was a premeditated program of economic colonialism, social and political Africanization, and racial and national genocide. . . .

And never before had one White government, people or nation sought to place another White people or nation in a position of absolute defenselessness so as to enable and ensure that the second White people or nation would be bred and butchered out of existence by a non-White people or race.

THIS the Government of the United States of America DID.[18]

Endnotes
1. Donald Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (1953), p. 210.

2. Robert Whitaker, “Partisan Dictionary,” Southern Partisan, VI/VII (Fall 1986/Winter 1987), p. 9.

3. Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View (Cape Canaveral, 1961), p. 36.)

4. William D. Workman, Jr., The Case for the South (New York, 1960), p. 128.

5. Benjamin J. Kendrick and Alex M. Arnett, The South Looks at Its Past (Chapel Hill, 1935), p. 59.

6. John Galt, Rise! (1989), p. 9.

7. Hunter McGuire and George L. Christian, The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States, Addendum (Richmond, 1907), p. 18.

8. Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, ed. George Core and M. E. Bradford (New Rochelle, 1968), p. 214.

9. “This Issue’s Quote,” The Carolina Confederate, March/April, 1994, p. 12.

10. Ibid., p. 12.

11. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York, 1961), p. 89.

12. McGuire and Christian, p. 80.

13. Edward P. Lawton, The South and the Nation (Fort Myers Beach, 1963), p. 207.

14. McGuire and Christian, p. 94.

15. Ibid., p. 95.

16. Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 (Baltimore, 1915), p. 123.

17. Andrew Grayson, The Black Death: Reconstruction I and II, p. 6.

18. Ibid., p. 7.
 
Copyright © 1995 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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