Yankees Need the South

Yankees Need the South

Thomas Allen

Yankees need the South and Southerners, but Southerners do not need Yankees. Furthermore, Southerners are better off without Yankees. 

Yankees are extremely self-righteous, arrogant, hypocritical, greedy, disagreeable, and bossy. They possess the typical Puritan attitude: they lust to remake America and the world into the perfect image of themselves. (For more descriptions of the Yankee, see “The Yankee,” “The Puritan Yankee,” and “Cusson’s Description of the Yankee” by Thomas Allen.)

Although many Northerners are not real Yankees, many, unfortunately, have become Yankeefied. Likewise, many scalawag Southerners have become Yankeefied. (Most governors of Southern States have been Yankeefied: Examples are Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Roy Cooper of North Carolina. Two recent Southern governors are real Yankees: George Bush and Jeb Bush.)

Because of their need for Southerners, Yankees could not let the South go in 1861 and cannot let them go today. Furthermore, Yankees believe that the solution to America’s problems is to rule the South with an iron fist.

Yankees have a psychological need for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.  Could it be that Yankees know in their hearts that the leaders of the Confederacy were morally and ethically superior to Lincoln and the leaders of the North? Yankees needed and still need the “Myth of the Lost Cause” to reassure themselves that Southerners were and still are fiendish, diabolical, and abominable to justify their power, privilege, and amour propre.

Being void of virtue, Yankees need to steal virtue from others. Since the South is part of the American empire, stealing virtue from the South is convenient and easy. Thus, every good thing that comes out of the South is not really Southern; it is American, i.e., Northern, especially New England.

Moreover, Yankees need to belittle Southerners to feed their self-esteem. Without having Southerners to disparage, Yankees would be nothing. Thus, Yankees view themselves as righteous and Southerners as evil.

Although Yankees have lure and ideology, Yankeedom has no civilization; they have no culture. Therefore, they need the South to provide them with a culture.

Sanctimonious Yankees need Southerners so that they can have someone to whom feel superior. Condemning the South gives Yankees a sense of identity and importance because they feel superior to Southerners.

Additionally, Yankees need a scapegoat to blame for their sins and failures.  Being part of the American empire makes the South a convenient scapegoat. Consequently, every undesirable thing that happens in the North, such as racial strife in Northern cities, results from the sins of the South. Yankees blame Southerners for the racial hatred and social pathologies in the North. Moreover, they blame Southerners for the evil that Yankees have caused. Thus, all economic, social, and psychological problems are the fault of Southerners. Needing someone to blame for their failures, Yankees blame Southerners.

No Yankee is going to let the truth detour his hatred of and hostility toward Southerners, whether they are reconstructed or remain unreconstructed.

Appendix

In America, two primary branches of Protestantism compete with each other. They are the Yankee religion and the Southern religion.

The Yankee religion is Calvinist and Puritan, that is, disciplined, communal, and focused on the purification of the community. It places evil in the object, e.g., drugs, guns, and the living environment. Thus, it seeks power and stresses social improvement. Being on the right side of history is a personal virtue. Out of the Yankee religion have come abolitionism, millennialism, progressivism, prohibition, feminism, the civil rights movement, neoconservatism, political correctness, social justice, wokeism, and Antifa. Furthermore, it is the parent of the the concept of "the city on the hill.”  Usually, the sermons of the Yankee religion are on current events.

The Southern religion is spiritually Anglican, although it is not structurally Anglican. That is, it is folkish and focuses on the individual and his soul. It places evil in the hearts of men. Thus, it seeks sanctification and manifests in a person’s private life, and goes unnoticed by intellectuals and historians. It stresses faith and piety with the notion of a Christian gentleman. A virtuous person is valuable to his fellow man. Usually, the sermons of the Southern religion are on salvation.

The Yankee religion represents worldly power and prestige more than does the Southern religion.

Reference

Wilson, Clyde N. Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture. Second edition. Columbia, South Carolina: Stonewall Publishing LLC: 2005, 2025.

Copyright © 2026 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Nullification and Fugitive Slave Laws

Nullification and Fugitive Slave Laws

Thomas Allen

No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution)

When the States became members of the United States, they agreed to return fugitive slaves. As time passed and the Puritan Yankee abolitionists became highly influential in New England, New York, and the upper Midwest, the Northern States began refusing to aid in the return of runaway slaves. In other words, they began nullifying fugitive slave laws.

After the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, several Northern States effectively nullified it. (Presumably, Illinois and Indiana had no problem with the fugitive slave laws because they prohibited Blacks from entering them.)

Not unexpectedly, South Carolina objected to the nullifications. One reason that South Carolina gave for seceding was that various Northern States had nullified the fugitive slave laws. The reason that South Carolina listed slavery as a reason for its secession was that it was a prime example of the North’s hostility toward it and the North’s refusal to live by the Constitution.

Ironically, when South Carolina seceded, the Northern States no longer had a constitutional obligation to return runaway slaves to South Carolina. Thus, South Carolina’s secession effectively ended the need for the Northern States’ nullification, as far as South Carolina was concerned, because it was now a foreign country.

For South Carolina to secede to preserve slavery was absurd. Despite Northern States nullifying fugitive slave laws, slavery was better protected in the Union than outside it. Regardless of abolitionist rant, Republicans stressed that they had no intentions of abolishing slavery (see “Slavery Not the Reason” by Thomas Allen).

If South Carolina wanted to keep slavery intact, it would not accomplish that goal with secession. When it seceded, the United States ceased having any obligation to return runaway slaves to it.

Nevertheless, New England’s Puritanism, lust for plunder, and hatred of Southerners prevented them from letting South Carolina and the other Southern States leave the union in peace. The Yankee Puritans had seen the righteous, holy light, and they were determined to ram their vision of a sinless world down the throats of the Southern States despite the desiderata of the South. Puritans must free the world of sin so that Jesus can return — postmillennialism. (While the underlying principle of  postmillennialism is that the Holy Spirit becomes stronger, the underlying principle of today’s popular premillennialism is that the Holy Spirit becomes weaker.) Moreover, they would make the South pay for their liberation from sin by stealing as much wealth from the South as possible. (To the abolitionist Puritans, the greatest sin of all was slavery, despite the Bible not condemning slavery, which is why they abandoned the Bible.)

Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun, and most other proponents of nullification taught using it to void unconstitutional federal acts. Although Madison approved of nullifying constitutional federal acts that a State disliked, most of the others did not teach using it to void constitutional acts of the federal government that a State disliked.

According to Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which is quoted above, the Constitution authorized fugitive slave laws. Moreover, it obligated States to return runaway slaves. Consequently, Northern States nullified fugitive slave laws not because they were unconstitutional, but because they disagreed with them. (Since the Northern States controlled Congress, why did they not repeal the fugitive slave laws or rewrite them to address their concerns?)

Nevertheless, if a State disagrees with a federal law that is constitutional, it has the right not to participate in its enforcement. However, it has no right to actively intervene or interfere with its enforcement, as some Northern States did when they nullified fugitive slave laws. If the law was unconstitutional, which the fugitive slave laws were not, a State has the right to interfere with its enforcement.

If the Puritan Yankee abolitionists found slavery so reprehensible that they would destroy the country and its constitution and cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in the process, they could have bought the slaves and set them free much more cheaply and without destroying the country and its constitution. These abolitionists cared only about Black slaves in the abstract. They did not care for them personally as did their owners.

Reconstruction showed how little Northerners cared about Blacks. They threw the slaves into the free-labor market. Most slaves had few skills beyond farm labor, and most had little training in taking care of themselves. Their masters had provided their housing, food, clothing, tools, medical care, etc., and took care of them in old age and when they were unable to work. After emancipation, they immediately had to learn to do all these things for themselves. Many failed, and many died.

Also, the North could have provided freed slaves with farmland in the territories. Yet, it did not because the territories were reserved for Whites.

Unfortunately, too many Blacks still have not escaped the slave mentality. Through various federal and State welfare and civil rights programs, they depend on governments to take care of them, as they had depended on the master — they have enslaved themselves to governments. Worse, they have enslaved taxpayers to support them.

During the Jim Crow Era, Blacks were making great strides in learning how to care for themselves and to free themselves from a slave mentality. Discrimination and segregation in the North and the South forced them to become independent and rely on themselves. Then came the Civil Rights Era. Consequently, this progress was retarded and thwarted.

Appendix. The Tenth Amendment Center

The Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) is a strong supporter of nullification. However, it goes beyond the teachings of Jefferson and Calhoun. While they wrote that a State has the right to nullify federal acts that it finds unconstitutional, as far as I know, they never promoted the nullification of constitutional acts with which a State disagrees. (When the Northern States nullified fugitive slave laws, they nullified constitutional laws with which they disagreed.) 

However, TAC goes beyond nullifying unconstitutional federal acts. It not only endorses a State nullifying unconstitutional federal acts but also endorses a State nullifying constitutional federal acts that it dislikes — except for Southern States nullifying civil rights acts of the federal government, including those that are unconstitutional, such as school desegregation and integration. (I have not found TAC expressly opposing or condemning the Southern States and communities attempting to nullify federal acts outlawing segregation and forcing integration. However, it does support Communist agents and Communist-front organizations nullifying State and local segregation laws and practices. Consequently, I infer that it opposes States and communities attempting to nullify these federal acts.) Thus, TAC supports Northern States' nullifying fugitive slave laws and opposes South Carolina's objection.

TAC seems to have a low opinion of Calhoun, despite him probably being the most brilliant and original political philosopher that the Western Hemisphere has ever produced, because he supported giving nullification real teeth. Calhoun argued that a State could prevent the enforcement of an unconstitutional federal law within its borders by vetoing it and thus making it unenforceable, as did Vermont’s nullification of the fugitive slave laws, which authorized arresting and penalizing federal officials attempting to enforce the fugitive slave laws. TAC objects to giving nullification teeth — at least in practice. Consequently, TAC rejects a State enforcing its nullification by jailing federal agents who attempt to enforce the nullified act in that State. In its opinion and Madison’s, such nullification allows one State to impose its will on the other States by preventing the enforcement of a nullified act within the nullifying State but not in the other States. Yet, TAC only weakly, if at all, objects to other States imposing their will on the nullifying State. In short, while Calhoun advocates nullification-heavy, TAC and Madison advocate nullification-light.

Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Cussons on the Hypocrisy of the Puritan Yankee

Cussons on the Hypocrisy 

of the Puritan Yankee

Thomas Allen

In  United States “History” as the Yankee Makes and Takes It (1900, third edition) pages 68–69,  John Cussons describes the hypocrisy of the Puritan Yankee. His description fits today’s neoconservatives and especially progressives and wokesters. His description follows.

These new rulers [Puritan Yankees of the 1850s] had chiefly distinguished themselves as the enemies of existing institutions — their political and social creed being, in effect, “Whatever is, is wrong.” They were fond of execrating the Union as “a league with hell,” and denouncing the Constitution as “a covenant with death.” They derided the highest courts of the land as “crimping houses of iniquity,” and vilified the old flag as “a flaunting lie!”

But on coming into power they threw off all disguise, and shamelessly started a war of conquest in pretended defence [sic] of the very principles and symbols which they had so bitterly reviled.

With paralyzing logic they mutilated the States on the plea that the States were “indestructible”; they debarred them from the Union while declaring the Union to be “indissoluble,” and they tore the Constitution to tatters while pretending that they were the only class who reverenced its “inviolability.” Having thus approved themselves the only true champions of “the sacred principle of government by consent,” they rounded out their perfect work by converting the States into satrapies, and holding them under bayonet rule until the conquered peoples consented to ratify the whole of their rump performances.

Puritan Yankees favored secession and nullification until the Southern States used them. For most of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, the New England States, the home base of the Puritan Yankee, threatened secession. Massachusetts threatened to secede because of the Louisiana Purchase and argued that it had the right to secede. When Jefferson attempted to embargo trade with Europe during the Napoleonic War, the New England States threatened to secede. Several New England States discussed secession during the War of 1812. Connecticut and Massachusetts nullified Congress’ call for State militias.

Moreover, Puritan Yankees did not oppose slavery until the importation of slaves became illegal after 1808. Yankees had been the primary importers of slaves. Later, many Yankees became ardent abolitionists. As a result, like many other Northern States, the New England States nullified fugitive slave laws.

However, when the Southern States seceded and ended the “league with hell,” these abolitionists did not want to let them go. By then, the Puritan Yankees had gained control of the federal government. Now, they were going to use their newfound power to force their utopia on the world, starting with the South. They were going to save Southerners from their evil, heathen ways and convert them into the image of the Puritan Yankee. They started their conversion in the South and have metastasized across the world. America’s attempt to create American hegemony across the world is nothing more than the Puritan Yankee trying to remake the world in his own image.

One thing that Cussons seemed not to have anticipated was that most Southern leaders would lose their moral fortitude. Most Southern political, business, academic, and religious leaders would become scalawags. They would sell their souls to the Puritan Yankee and then genocide the Southerner, their own people. What the scalawags have not done, the carpetbaggers have. The genocide of the Southerner is mostly completed. (This genocide has been mostly cultural instead of physical. However, the United Nations considers the deliberate destruction of a people’s culture to be genocide. Destroying an ethnicity’s culture destroys the ethnicity.)

Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Some Republican Views of the Negro

Some Republican Views of the Negro

Thomas Allen

On pages 265–267, in Facts and Falsehoods Concerning the War on the South 1861-1865 (Memphis, Tennessee: A. R. Taylor & Co., 1904), George Edmonds gives the views of several leading Republicans on the Negro during Lincoln’s War.

He writes, “It is known to all that the Creator has implanted in the very atoms of the human being, as well as in the being of animals, certain instincts for the preservation of life and the perpetuity of the race. Among these instincts is that of kinship. Our affections first go out to our parents, our children, our relatives. Next they go out to the people of our own country, our own color and blood. The white race loves white people more than it does the yellow, the red or the black. Negroes prefer their own color; they naturally affiliate with negroes in preference to whites, Chinese or Japanese. This is the law of kinship. [This law of kinship, most Whites today have forgotten or condemned. Most Blacks believe and accept this law.] Any reverse of this law is perversion — perversion is species of insanity. We have shown that in the year 1796 certain New England Federalists, to attain a certain object they had in view, set themselves to work to promulgate the gospel of hate toward the people of the South. By dint of teaching hate the teachers developed that feeling in their own hearts. As the teaching went on, the feeling increased in intensity until it became an insanity, a monomania utterly beyond the control or the influence of reason. Finally it came to pass that from this insanity of hate there sprung an insanity of love. The former was directed toward the white people of the South, the latter toward the negroes. Without evidence from the papers and publications of that day, the white men of this generation will not be able to believe that New England, as well as large numbers of the Republican party, came to admire and respect the negro race as morally and mentally superior to the white. At first this strange insanity only held that the negroes in the South were far superior in every way to Southern whites; but as time passed the insanity took on a more violent form, and those so afflicted believed and taught that as a race the negro was greatly superior, morally and mentally, to the whole Caucasian race, and not only this, they came to admire every peculiar quality of the negro, the blackness of their skins, their woolly hair. Their whole makeup New England orators and writers dwelt on with a sort of worshiping rapture and urged intermarriage between blacks and whites, not to elevate the former, but the latter.” (pp. 265-266.) The only thing that has changed since Edmonds wrote his book is that many Southerners have become inflected with this Negrophilic-Dixiephobic perversion.

To support his claim, Edmonds quotes several New England Republicans. First, he quotes Wendell Phillips, a leading abolitionist. Edmonds writes, “In the early stages of his insanity Wendell Phillips was fond of announcing to his audiences that ‘negroes are our acknowledged equals. They are our brothers and sisters.’ As time went on Mr. Phillips’ distemper became more heated. He was not satisfied with asserting that ‘negroes are our equals;’ he made the startling announcement that — ‘Negroes are our Nobility!’ And began to clamor that special privileges be granted to ‘our nobility.’ He wanted all the land in the Southern States divided and bestowed on ‘our nobility’ and their heirs forever. What ‘our nobility’ had done to deserve this rich reward Mr. Phillips did not explain. Perhaps he thought the fact that negroes had been brought from Africa in a savage state, and had acquired in the hard school of slavery some of the arts of civilization, fitted them to become a noble class.” (p. 266.)

Next, Edmonds quotes Governor Stone of Iowa. Edmonds writes “in a speech made at Keokuk, August 3, 1863, [Stone] was certainly in the first stages of this insanity when he said to his audience, ‘I hold the Democracy in the utmost contempt. I would rather eat with a negro, drink with a negro, and sleep with a negro than with a Copperhead’ (meaning a Democrat).” (pp. 266-267.) 

Then, he turns to Morrow Lowry. Edmonds writes, “The disease certainly had struck Mr. Morrow B. Lowry, State Senator of Pennsylvania, when at a large meeting in Philadelphia, in 1863, he said to his audience: ‘For all I know the Napoleon of this war may be done up in a black package. We have no evidence of his being done up in a white one. The man who talks of elevating a negro would not have to elevate him very much to make him equal to himself.’” (p. 267.)

Next, Edmonds cites the New York Independent. He writes, “The faithful old New York Independent sorrowfully wailed over the long delayed coming of the Black Napoleon, which all the insane negro-worshipers confidently looked for. ‘God and negroes,’ said the Independent, ‘are to save the country. For two years the white soldiers of this country have been trying to find a path to victory. The negroes are the final reliance of our Government. Negroes are the keepers and the saviors of our cause. Negroes are the forlorn hope of our Republican party.’” [One primary reason that Republicans promoted the Negro in the South was to establish Republican dominance in the South through the Negro. Now Republican racial nihilists complain that Blacks have double-crossed the Republican Party by supporting the Democratic Party. Another primary reason for promoting the Negro in the South was to genocide the Southerner.]

Then, Edmonds quotes James Parton. He writes, “James Parton, the noted biographer, was strongly touched with the prevailing disease — insane love of negroes. ‘Many a negro,’ wrote James Parton, in 1863, ‘stands in the same kind of moral relation to his master as that in which Jesus Christ stood to the Jews, and not morally only, for he stands above his master at a height which the master can neither see nor understand.’” 

Finally, he cites General Phelps. He writes, “J.W. Phelps, General in the Republican army, thought the negro race much better adapted to receive Christianity than the white. ‘Christianity,’ said Phelps, ‘is planted in the dark rich soil of the African nature. Negroes are as intelligent and far more moral than the whites. The slaves appeal to the moral law, clinging to it as to the very horns of the altar; he bears no resentment, he asks for no punishment for his master.’” (p. 267.)

If the people cited by Edmonds believed what they said, they had not spent much time around Blacks. To disprove their assertions, they needed only to look at Haiti.

Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Review of Facts and Falsehoods – Part 2

Review of Facts and Falsehoods – Part 2

Thomas Allen

Negro Voting

Edmonds reveals the low opinion about Blacks held by the typical Republican. He quotes an 1880 issue of the Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel, which he describes as one of the boldest Republican organs that frankly betrayed its party’s real feeling toward the Negro race, “As an office seeker, the negro [sic] has more brass in a square inch of his face, more rapaciousness for office, than his barbarian masters ever dared to possess. The Southern brigadier wants office and place, but he is willing to fight for them, or vote for them; at the drop of the hat he will shoot and cut for them; he does not whine like a whipped cur, or demand like a beggar on horseback, as the nigger does. Let the nigger first learn to vote before he asks for office. The brazen-jawed nigger is but a trifle less assuming, insolent and imperious in his demands than the lantern-jawed brigadiers; the educated nigger is a more capacious liar than his barbarian masters ever were, or dared to be.

“The greatest mistake the Republican party ever made was taking the nigger at a single bound and placing on his impenetrable skull the crown of suffrage. It is a wrong to him and to us to let him wield the ballot. The nigger is necessarily an ignoramus. The free nigger, we repeat, is a fraud.” (p. 220.)

(The reason for giving the Negro suffrage was to maintain Republican political power. Thus, the reason for the fifteenth amendment, which gave Black males the vote, was to maintain Republican control in the North. This amendment only applied in the Northern States; the Negro already had the vote in all the defunct Confederate States when this amendment was ratified.)

Grant’s Drinking

About Grant’s alcoholism, Edmonds writes, “From early manhood General Grant was afflicted with the drink disease.” (p. 221.) Then he quotes Wendell Phillips, insane hater of the South, and General Don Piatt, an abolitionist (p. 221).

“Phillips said: ‘Grant can never stand before a bottle of whiskey without falling down.’

“General Piatt, in ‘Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union,’ says: ‘Grant’s habit of drink lost us thousands and thousands of patriotic lives. The attempt to conceal this is not only pitiable, but hopeless.’”

Continuing, Edmonds writes, “The terrible slaughter of Union soldiers at Cold Harbor was charged to Grant’s drunkenness. Major-General Wm. F. Smith, in a confidential letter to Senator Foote, July 30, 1864, states that soon after Grant had taken a pledge to drink nothing intoxicating, he (Grant) called at his (Smith's) headquarters, and asked for whiskey, and drank so often he went away drunk, and General Butler saw him. A short while before this Grant had written to Washington asking that General Butler be relieved from that department, because he (Grant) ‘could not trust Butler with the command of the troops in the movements about to be made.’ Instructions were sent to Grant to remove Butler. Butler heard of this and hurried to see Grant. General Smith wrote Senator Foote that he heard direct from Grant’s headquarters, and also from another source, that General Butler threatened Grant that he would expose his drunken habits if the order was not revoked. The order was revoked, and Butler remained in command, although Grant had said he was unfit to be trusted.” (p. 221.)

Some English Views of Reconstruction

Edmonds quotes two English historians on their views of Reconstruction (p. 238).

“Percy Gregg, the English historian, in his history of the United States, says: ‘The reconstruction policy was at once dishonest and vindictive. The Congressional majority (Republican) were animated not merely by selfish designs, but by rabid hatred of the South’s people which had fought so gallantly for what the best jurists of America believed to be their moral and constitutional right.’

“Another English writer of great eminence, Anthony Trollope, was in this country during the reconstruction period, and wrote of it thus: ‘I hold that tyranny never went beyond this. Never has there been a more terrible condition imposed upon a fallen people. For an Italian to feel an Austrian over him, for a Pole to feel a Russian over him, has been bad indeed, but it has been left for the political animosity of the Republicans of the North — men who themselves reject all contact with the negro — to subject the Southern people to dominance from the African who yesterday was their slave. The dungeon chains were knocked off the captive in order that he may be harnessed as a beast of burden to the captive's chariot.’

“We will give another passage from Gregg, the English historian: ‘The devastation of the Pallatine [sic] hardly exceeded the desolation and misery wrought by the Republican invasion and conquest of the South. No conquered nation of modern days, not Poland under the heel of Nicholas, not Spain or Russia under that of Napoleon, suffered from such individual and collective ruin, or saw before them so frightful a prospect as the States dragged by force, in April, 1865. under the “best government in the world.”’ (Page 375, Gregg's History of United States.)” [Palatine was a territory in Germany that lost about 90 percent of its population during the Thirty Years War.]

Not So Random Quotations

Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist:

– “He [Lincoln] is a first-rate second-rate man; that is all of him.”

– “Mr. Lincoln is a politician; politicians are like the bones of a horse’s fore shoulder; not a straight one in it.”

– “The Constitution is a mistake! Tear it to pieces! Our aim is disunion!”

– “The Republican party is in no sense a national party. It is a party of the North, organized against the South.”

– “We confess that we intend to trample on the Constitution of this country. We of New England are not a law-abiding community. God be thanked for it! We are disunionists; we want to get rid of this Union.”

William Lloyd Garrison, a New England abolitionist:

– “The Republican party is moulding public sentiment in the right direction for the dissolution of the Union.”

Rev. Andrew Forbes:

– “There never was an hour when this blasphemous and infamous Union should have been made; now the hour must be prayed for when it will be dashed to pieces.”

Parson Pryiic, a red hot Republican:

“A dissolution of the Union is what a large portion of the Republicans are driving at.”

William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State:

– “Our Constitution is to us of the North a great danger. The Southerners are using it as a shield.”

– “Only a despotic and imperial government can subjugate seceding States.”

– “The attempt to reinforce Sumter will provoke an attack and involve war.” 

Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s self-appointed bodyguard:

– “As a people, Lincoln thought negroes would only be useful to those who were at the same time their masters, and the foes of those who sought their good.”

– “Lincoln always contended that the cheapest way of getting rid of the negro was for the Nation to buy the slaves and send them out of the country.”

– “He [Lincoln] never at any time favored the admission of negroes into the body of the electors in his State, or in the States of the South.”

General Don Piatt, an abolitionist:

– “Lincoln well knew that the North was not fighting to free slaves, nor was the South fighting to preserve slavery.”

– “I found that Mr. Lincoln could no more feel sympathy for that wretched [Negro] race than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed.”

Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio:

– “There is really no Union now between the North and the South. I believe no two nations on earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor toward each other than these two peoples.”

Senator Stephen Douglas:

– “The fact can no longer be disguised that many Republican Senators desire war and disunion under pretense of saving the Union. For partisan reasons they are anxious to destroy the Union. They want this done without holding them responsible before the people.”

the Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel, a Republican newspaper:

– “The Stalwarts do not care a fig for the Constitution, and will trample it under foot today as did Lincoln and the Union hosts from ’61 to ’65.”

an Iowa editor:

– “Abraham Lincoln kicked the Constitution into the Capitol cellar, and there it remained innocuous until the war ended.”

Judge Yaples, in the Cincinnati Enquirer of 1880:

– “Republican hate is grounded on the fact that the people of the South will not join the Republican party.”

Unknown:

– “The people of Raleigh, N. C, were astonished to find that Sherman’s army were Christian gentlemen.”

George Edmonds:

– “The underlying cause of every conflict between man and man, tribe and tribe, country and country, has been on the one side a craving for power, on the other side an effort to escape that power.”

– “So long had the gospel of hate been preached, those New Englanders had come to hate the South so venomously they wanted to force her out of the Union she loved.”

– “All abolitionists believed in the right of secession. All hated the Union and wanted to break it to pieces.”

– “Before the South seceded, the foremost men in the Republican party openly maintained the right of secession.”

– “Lincoln was the first President who usurped the power to rule the American people.”

– “The whole reconstruction period was a deadly war on Southern people, and the more base and cowardly because waged on unarmed men and women.”

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

Part 1.

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The Antebellum Northerner’s Opinion of Blacks

The Antebellum Northerner’s Opinion of Blacks

Thomas Allen

In Northern Rebellion and Southern Secession (1904), E. W. R. Ewing describes the typical Northerner’s, including the typical abolitionist’s, opinion of and attitude toward Blacks.

Even before Ohio became a State, Ohioans saw Negroes as shiftless thieves and adopted laws to expel them. They found that Negroes lacked the fitness and capacity to provide for themselves (pp. 112-113).

Gerrit Smith, an abolitionist, concurred with the Ohioans. He “attested the incapacity, unfitness, and unwillingness of the Southern negro [sic] to provide for himself” (p. 113). He offered free and runaway Negroes farmland if they would farm it. His scheme failed from the want of takers.

When Cobb, a reporter of the Supreme Court of Georgia, asked the governors and leading politicians of the Northern States about the condition of the free Negroes in their States, he received the following replies (p. 288):
– from Connecticut: “not thrifty,” “immoral”;
– from New Jersey: “debased . . . generally indolent”;
– from Pennsylvania: “much deteriorated by freedom”;
– from Indiana: “sent forty this year to Liberia . . . hope finally to get rid of all . . . do not intend to have another negro [sic] or mulatto come into the State”;
– from Illinois: “thriftless, idle, vicious”;
– from New Jersey: “one-fourth criminals in State colored, while colored population is but one-twelfth.”

Nearly all Northerners held that the Negro was inferior to them. Regardless of any lip service that they may give to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” they regarded the Negro as a natural and social inferior.

Further, few Northerners, including abolitionists, would have allowed Negroes to marry their sisters or daughters, and the woman would have strongly objected to such a marriage. Moreover, in New England, Negroes had been burned alive for assaulting White women (p. 280).

Most Northern States denied Negroes, including mulattoes, the privilege of voting and other privileges and duties of citizenship. They considered the Negro “unfit for the exercise of citizenship” (p. 267).

Yet, among the last States to deny free Negroes the vote was in the South. South Carolina did not deny free Negroes the vote until 1835 (p. 281).

Moreover, although more free Negroes lived in the South than in the North (p. 286), they were treated with greater dignity in the South. In the North, many employers refused to hire Negroes, and Whites generally refused to work beside a Negro (p. 289). About the treatment of the Negro in business following Lincoln’s War, Booker T. Washington wrote:

There is almost no prejudice against the negroes [sic] in the South in matters of business, so far as the native whites are concerned; . . . But too often when the white mechanic or factory operative from the North gets a hold, the trades union soon follows, and the negro [sic] is crowded to the wall (p. 289).

Moreover, Illinois made it illegal for Negroes and mulattoes to enter that State with the intention or appearance of residing there. If found guilty, the Negro would be fined, and if he were unable to pay the fine, then he was to be sold at a public auction (p. 268). Michigan and Indiana also prohibited Negroes from coming into them to live there (p. 269). Likewise, Oregon prohibited Negroes from entering it (p. 271). Also, California prohibited Negroes from entering it to reside there (p. 274).

To Massachusetts goes the honor of being the first State to expel all free Negroes in her boundaries (pp 269-270).

In 1829, Ohio restricted public schools to Whites only (p 266). In 1833, Connecticut made “it a penal offence to set up or establish any school or literary institution for colored persons not inhabitants of the State; and any negro [sic] coming to the State for instruction could be forcibly removed therefrom” (p. 266).

For the most part, the Northern States considered free Negroes, including mulattoes, a danger to their society. Thus, they placed many social and legal restraints on them. Even as late as 1870, many Northern States forbade Negroes from owning property, making contracts, and testifying against Whites (p. 269). Hypocrites that they are, these Northerners railed against Southerners for denying Negroes rights that Northerners refused to grant them.

For decades following Reconstruction, the Northerner’s low opinion of Blacks did not change much. Even the last violent resistance to school integration occurred in Massachusetts. Furthermore, since 1960, more race riots have occurred outside the South than in the South. (See “Race Riots” by Thomas Allen.)

Since the Northerner, including the abolitionist, knew from first-hand experience the behavior of the Negro, free or slave, they must have hated the Southerner so much that they turned the freed Negro loose in the South in hopes that they would demoralize and eventually genocide the Southerner. The only other option is that these Northerners and abolitionists were stupid; however, as most of their leaders were intelligent men, stupidity can be ruled out. Some leading abolitionists openly admitted their hatred of Southerners and their desire to genocide them.

About the burden that was thrown on the South following Lincoln’s war, Booker T. Washington wrote:

The time is not far distant when the world will begin to appreciate the real character of the burden that was imposed upon the South in giving the franchise to four millions of ignorant and impoverished ex-slaves. No people was ever before given such a problem to solve. History has blazed no path through the wilderness that could be followed (p. 289).

Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More Southern articles.

The Puritan Yankee

The Puritan Yankee

Thomas Allen

The following description of the Puritan Yankee, which is a redundant tautology and superfluous supererogation, has been extracted from Forgotten Conservatives in American History by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson, who extracted their description from several authors, but primarily from James Fenimore Cooper. (Cooper was a New Yorker, who deplored Puritan Yankees because they were ruining New York. They destroyed New York decades before they destroyed the South.) Page numbers enclosed in parentheses are to the book referenced above. In the quoted material, I have changed some verbs from past tense to present tense. My comments are enclosed in brackets.
New Englanders and the regions where their descendants settled [New York and along the Great Lakes and later the West Coast] are more Puritan and less classical than the rest of the country. Additionally, they emphasize “profitable economic activity and community supervision of public morals” (p. 18). [Hence, Hillary Clinton's, who is a Puritan Yankee, “it takes a village to raise a child.” Today, Puritans scrupulously supervise public morals to ensure that people speak and act in a politically correct way. If anyone fails to be politically correct, these modern-day Puritans vehemently attack him, not only verbally, but also physically.]
According to James A. Bayard, the Yankee school system [public school system] was the cause of the political turmoil of the 1860s and 1870s. [Puritan Yankees created the public school system, i.e., government schools, which explains why the public school system is so dysfunctional and why it indoctrinates instead of educates.] Bayard remarks, “‘It [the Yankee school system] may stimulate the brain but it ignores man’s moral nature and produces discontent with their condition among the masses. God help the country in which the masses are merely stimulated and trained to act in combinations which are always, sooner or later, controlled by demagogues’” (p. 48). [This explains why, with rare exception, demagogues, instead of statesmen, have governed the country since 1860.]
For the Yankee, democracy is a matter of power and appetite instead of a matter of liberty under the law. It means “that people have a right to whatever they happened to want, the law and private rights be damned” (p. 53).
Moreover, the Yankee has “a liberal supply of Puritanical notions” (p. 54). He has a native shrewdness with an evasive manner. Also, he gives the impression of “a sneaking propensity that renders him habitually hypocritical” (p. 54).
Furthermore, the Yankee admires plutocrats, especially the nouveau riche, and always defers to money. Money is “the only source of human distinction” (p. 54) that the Yankee can clearly understand. [In this respect, the libertarian is hardly distinguishable from the Yankee.]
Yankees are hardworking and entrepreneurial and often manage to gain “control (often clandestinely) of many of the essential business of the community (p. 54). [Thus, once they reach a critical mass in a community, they proceed to ruin it by remaking it in their own image.]
Also, Yankees are “pushy social climbers, insisting that their betters treat them as equals, but refusing to grant the same to those who are less successful and prosperous” (p. 54). They presume “an intimate friendship with mere acquaintances” (p. 54).
“The Yankees value education so much so that they often presume to more learning than they really have and expose themselves as pretentious pseudo-intellectuals” (p. 54). As a result, the Yankee established the public school system in the United States. Nevertheless, this school system offers an education that is superficial and substitutes learning for common sense. [Many holders of Ph.D. seem void of common sense.] Moreover, it fails to “produce the really educated men needed for leadership” (p. 55).
Additionally, the Yankee values and craves “respectability more than independence” (p. 55). He has the capacity to “organize to get things done and bring about change, whether other people wanted it or not” (p. 55). [The US government, which the Puritan Yankees have controlled since 1861, is notorious for bringing about change, especially if people do not want it, while ignoring what the people really want.]
About the Yankee, Cooper declares, “‘A Yankee is never satisfied unless he is making changes. One half of his time, he is altering the pronunciation of his own names, and the other half he is altering ours’” (p. 57). He adds, “‘I doubt if all this craving for change has not more of selfishness in it than either of expediency or philosophy’” (p. 57).
Yankee newcomers regard themselves more righteous than the natives among whom they settle. Therefore, the Puritan Yankee newcomers believe that they are entitled to change the ways of the natives and to appropriate their property (pp. 57-58) [as happened in the South during Reconstruction].
Inevitably, the Yankee quarrels with all above him. In his self-righteousness, the Yankee “‘throws a beautiful halo of morality and religion, never even prevaricating in the hottest discussion, unless with the unction of a saint’” — as Cooper writes. [Most often, today, that saint is His Divine Highness Saint Martin Luther King, Junior. Next to him is the most Marxist Democrat at the moment. Lincoln is another one of these precious saints, but his halo is beginning to tarnish among the younger Marxists.]
Out of the Puritan Yankee came “Anti-Masonry, Mormonism, prohibition, vegetarianism, Seventh Day Adventism, socialism, and feminism” (p. 58). Also, out of the Puritan Yankee came abolitionism and John Brown terrorism (p. 58). [To this list, neoconservatism needs to be added.]
Above all the Yankee, who is of Puritan stock, is a self-righteous, hypocritical reformer and crusader, who is forever seeking change for change-sake (pp. 144, 179).
Ever since 1860, the Puritan Yankee has controlled the United States. Since then, the United States have always been undergoing “perpetual crusades for the reform and reconstruction of society that diminish American liberty and independence to this day” (p. 55). If anyone objects to the Yankee’s righteous crusade [such as spreading democracy throughout the world], he is a bad person. For the Yankees, it is “a normal means of proceeding in their Puritan heritage . . . to justify themselves by portraying those who opposed them as bad people with evil motives” (p. 58). [Puritan Yankees are like locusts swarming across the land, devouring everything in their path, and leaving nothing behind but utter devastation. Thus, they remake the world in their own image.]
Fortunately, not all Northerners are Yankees. Many are decent, hardworking, honest people (p. 183). [Unfortunately, Yankees have infested the South, for example, the Bushes.]

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Corruption Under Democracy

Mencken on Corruption Under Democracy

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes corruption under democracy, pages 187-203. Below is an overview of his discussion on corruption under democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Nine-tenth of the Puritan and democrat is “cruelty, envy and cowardice.” About the early Puritans of New England, Mencken writes, “He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department survive in fable.” Then he notes that no perceptible improvements have been found in his successors.
    Mencken remarks, “A sixth of the Americano’s income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise.” [Today, the government gets half and the sharpers still get half, if not more, of the remainder. Thus, they typical American has much less to live on than he did in the 1920s.] “All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the past, and all of them . . . are bound to fail in the future.”
    Dreaming eternally of utopia makes the democratic man easy “prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his role of private citizen.” The poor old democrat is always facing schemes “full of virtuous pretences,” only to discover that “they are unmitigated swindles.” [Pick your favorite federal program as an example.]
    “All observers of democracy . . . have marvelled at its corruptions on the political side.” Democracy brings bribery, “and thus destroy[s] the integrity and authority of the State.” [In a democracy, incumbent politicians are notorious for bribing voters with money from the public treasury and businesses with subsidizes and special privileges. Also, lobbyists are notorious for bribing politicians with contribution to their election campaigns and by other means. Foreign governmental officials bribed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with donations to the Clinton Foundation.] Historians marvel that such blatant bribery occurs in a democracy “and marvel even more that democracy takes them calmly, and even lightly.” Democracy seems to accept bribery as inevitable and natural. Commenting on corruption during the Harding administration, Mencken states that a “small body of specialists in rectitude . . . ventured to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular than the thieves.” [Whenever a whistle blower presents evidence of corruption and even crimes by high-ranking personnel of the U.S. government, most often the whistle blower is persecuted and often prosecuted while the culprit remains unmolested and goes free.]
    Although “[s]uch phenomena . . . puzzle the more academic pathologists of democracy, . . . they seem to be in strict accord with God’s invariable laws.” Then Mencken asks, “Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery.” He adds, “In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the prehensible minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to deceive and inflame the mob.” [Thus, bribery is an essential, vital part of democracy.] “The whole process of government under democracy . . . is a process of” granting privileges and benefits to various groups in exchange for granting privileges and benefits to other groups. Moreover, “[t]he very head of the State, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker.” [Many third-world countries have solved this problem by having  their president elected for life — life being until assassinated or overthrown by some rival gang.] Mencken continues, “There has been no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of them have always been promises of private reward from the public store. It is surely not regarded as immoral by the democratic ethic to make and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions, e.g., Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them.” He adds, “What is reproached as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them.”
    Commenting on the foreign policies of the United States, Mencken writes, “That the United States, in its foreign relations, has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded universally to-day as a pious fraud — which is to say, as a Puritan.” [What would one expect from foreign policies developed and controlled by Yankees? Historically, the United States have been notorious for betraying its friends and aiding its enemies — especially during the Cold War, when they betrayed nearly every ally whose government actively opposed Communism. One of the most detestable of these acts was the U.S. government betraying one its World War II allies, Chiang Kai-shek, in favor of Mao and his communist regime.]
    Next Mencken comments on democracy’s domestic relations. “The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest rectitude and largest public usefulness.”
    About the Department of Justice, he remarks, “It has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption to-day.” [Nothing has changed. Many lovers of liberty refer to it as the “Department of Injustice.”] Moreover, “it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.” [It still does today.]
    “As Mill long ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend the operation of laws that are just.” [John Stuart Mill {1806–1873} was an English philosopher, political economist and civil servant.] To this observation, Mencken adds, “In this enterprise a democratic government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men, not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort.” [We see this today in America’s multitiered “justice” system. The well-connected people, such as Hillary Clinton, are not even charged when they commit crimes that would send a commoner to prison for life. On the other hand, people whose “crime” is merely supporting the Bill of Rights are prosecuted with full vigor and resources of the Department of “Justice” and are charged with a multitude of crimes. These people are usually convicted by a corrupt court system and are sentenced to the maximum possible term in prison. Likewise, specially protected groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the anti-Confederate protestors can violate all sorts of laws with impunity. Although politicians frequently prattle that we have a government of laws and not of men, the opposite is true.] Above all, the government “always shows that characteristically Puritan habit: . . . to wit, of inflicting as much mental suffering as possible upon its victims.”
    Next Mencken writes, “The constant and central aim of every democratic government is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, i.e., the jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such criticism rises. It is thus fidei defensor [defender of the faith] before it is anything else, and its whole power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting them into effect is under its control.” [Thus, the necessity of a well-armed citizenry — one that outguns the government.] Mencken continues, “No ruler, indeed, ever wants to be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines. . . . No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.”
    Mencken writes, “ I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the same kidney.” Democratic man is not shocked “to find them running true to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take what might be his for the grabbing, Homo boobiens sets him down as either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him.” [Does this explain in part the popularity of Presidents Clinton and Obama, who grabbed all they could?] “Democratic man is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men devoted to his exploitation that is, as a group external to his own group, and with antagonistic interests.” Moreover, democratic man believes that the government’s “central aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction devoid of moral turpitude.”
    Capitalism is secure in democratic societies. “Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of Capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.” [The type of capitalism described by Mencken should be called crony capitalism. It certainly is not free market capitalism. Under crony capitalism, capitalists use their control of the government, usually from behind the scene, to give themselves subsidies, contracts, and special privileges and to penalize competitors. Moreover, Mencken seems to contradict himself. Earlier in his book he describes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as being democratic; however, the economy under it was not capitalistic in any form. Nevertheless, being by nature democratic, socialism is much more compatible with democracy than any form of capitalism.]
    Mencken notes, “An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker; but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”
    Mencken observes that “the average American banker or business man, whatever his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, Labour leader, scholar, theologian or politician.” [Perhaps this is why big bankers and big businessmen are the real power controlling the government.] Then Mencken notes, “The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all democracies. . . . They organize and control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a gradually firmer grip upon the government. . . [T]hey [the capitalists] dispose of . . . [the] demagogues . . . and put the helm of state into the hands of trusted and reliable men.”
                                               
Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.

Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes democracy and morality, pages 162-176. Below is an overview of his discussion on democracy and morality; my comments are in brackets.
    “Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law.” A glance at the law is sufficient to reveal “the identity of democracy and Puritanism.” [Puritanism extends far beyond vice, which today is a minor part of Puritanism — drug laws, especially anti-tobacco laws, and, to a declining extent, the prohibition of prostitution being about the only aspects of this type of Puritanism remaining. Today, Puritanism appears mostly as political correctness, abortion, civil rights laws, laws controlling businesses, zoning laws, hostility toward Confederate monuments, hostility toward Christianity, and the like.] They are merely “different facets of the same gem. In the psyche they are one.” Both derive “their primal essence out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of more courage then he is, and that as they go through this dreadful world they have a far better time.” [Although Mencken description of the inferior man fits many, if not, most Whites, it fits nearly all Blacks. Yet, the old Black man said that he was glad that he was Black instead of White because Blacks knew how to have a good time and Whites did not.] This fear and hatred lead to envy.
    Envy is not “a speciality of democratic man. It is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere.” Nevertheless, democracy liberates it; “it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state.” [Therefore, all democratic countries have evolved into a welfare-state, which is based and built on envy.]
    Although humanity owes the old autocracies a great debt, the democrat is not likely to remember that debt. About the old autocracies, Mencken writes, “Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of superior man.” When Flavius Honorius collapsed, Europe fell into chaos for four hundred years. [Flavius Honorius {384 –423} was the Western Roman Emperor from 393 to 423.] Charlemagne revived the autocracy and made possible the Renaissance and the modern age. [Charlemagne {742 –814}, King of the Franks {768–814} and Emperor of the Romans {800-814} united much of Europe during the early Middle Ages.] The autocracies kept the mob “from the throat of civilization.”
    Mencken points to the French and Russian Revolutions to illustrate what happens when the autocracy collapses: “The instant such a catastrophe liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority of every kind not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it is also a blue day for every other superior man.”
    Mencken continues, “Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and dignity of law.” Moreover, “the democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state.” Especially, in the field of public law, Puritan legislation “is a thing of many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities. The Puritan . . . always tries to convince himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic and evangelical motives — that its aim is to work the other fellow’s benefit against the other fellow’s will.” [This is true even after Puritanism abandoned the Bible, of which Mencken probably approved, and became a secular religion.]
    Mencken notes, “The Puritan’s actual motives are (a) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (b) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level. . . . Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of himself.” [Mencken has just described the motives of the Yankee.] However, he notes, “The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act.” [The Mann Act makes it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of people for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.] Likewise, with an alcoholic beverage, the Puritan “can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition.” [Every chance that Mencken gets to condemn Prohibition, he does so.] Also, “with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery.” [Today, censorship appears in the form of political correctness and vulgar mobs preventing anyone with whom these low-lives disagree from speaking peacefully on college campuses. Now, books are seldom removed from libraries because of sexual content, most sexual content now being politically correct, but because of political content, i.e., the book is politically incorrect because it disagrees with democracy, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism, Marxism, or the ever-growing power of the government or is considered “racist.”]
    The Puritan’s “delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption that it is difficult to maintain that the other fellow, being deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself, in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso of virtue.” Mencken continues, “His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an inferiority for a superiority.” Being moral in the Puritan sense “is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence; . . . it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice.” Once the Puritan forgets “his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the devil, . . . [he] always turns out to be a poor stick of a man in brief, a natural democrat.” [Thus, Puritans and democrats are twins, and “Puritan” is merely another name for “Yankee.”]
    Mencken adds, “No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a poem worth reading — and I am not forgetting John Milton, who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” He continues, “Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of himself, i.e., that of moral legislation, he has done only second- and third-rate work.” [Puritanism explains the low quality, meddlesome legislation flowing from Washington and most State capitals.] “His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to his own depressing level always turn out badly.”
    “Since the first uprising of the lower orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution to moral legislation: . . . the Code Napoleon. It was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.”
    Mencken continues, “If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions.” Puritans face great difficulty in advancing their schemes under autocracies. They can only convince the King if the King is crazy. Even then, the King’s ministers will restrain him. “But the mob is easy to convince, for what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes: its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears that lie under the Puritan ethic.” Continuing, Mencken notes that “the political machinery through which it [democracy] functions provides a ready means of translating such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has spoken.” Thus, in democratic countries, “even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments are” enacted with ferocious haste. [Examples are Bush’s police state laws, which were mostly passed by Congress without anyone in Congress reading them and with little or no debate, and Obamacare, which Congress passed without reading or even knowing what was in it. Unfortunately, once enacted even the most egregious, intrusive, meddlesome, cumbersome, ineffective, inefficient laws are next to impossible to  repeal.]
    Mencken remarks “that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments of psychopathological persecution and private revenge.” [And now you know why we have the laws that we do and so many of them.] Most laws “involve gross invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling shows.” Mostly, the victims of these laws are men whom “the mob naturally envies and hates — men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks, and is uneasily conscious of  lacking: it thus delights in seeing them exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison.” [Although most members of the mob had never traded a stock, the mob was delighted when Martha Stewart went to prison.] Mencken notes that a district attorney is always ready to prosecute a superior man because “district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office, and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and destroying a man above the general.” These are the type of district attorneys who become Congressmen. (One “is seldom promoted because he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen.”) Furthermore, many judges reach “the bench by the same route.” [Most of the laws that Mencken uses as illustrations are petty, irritating laws. He seldom mentions the really despotic laws such as the wartime laws enacted during the Wilson administration that have been used since then to terrorize and imprison people who disagreed with the government. The laws that he mentions are nothing compared to today’s tax laws, which gather the mob’s support because they feed the mob’s envy: The mob is convinced that the tax laws are written to punish the rich and give the inferior man a free ride.]
    Mencken continues, “The whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity.” [If one listens to talk radio for a few days, especially on the shortwave and the Internet, he would discover the truthfulness of Mencken’s observation. He would discover that America has many political prisoners whose real crime, as opposed to the fraudulent crime of which they have been convicted with the aid of bias, prejudice judges, is that they stood for liberty.] Morons “whose chief delight lies in seeing their betters manhandled and humiliated” applaud this injustice. [Political cartoonists on the left are among the most idiotic of these morons.]
    “In the criminal courts a rich man not only enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy burdens.” Railroading a “better,” especially one who stands for liberty, is morally excusable. Sarcastically, Mencken asserts, “The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable classes.”
    Next, Mencken discusses Prohibition and the evils that it has brought instead of the paradise promised by its proponents. At the time that Mencken wrote, even the mob had turned against Prohibition, but its promoters refused to “repudiate their original nonsense.” [This sounds familiar. How many other laws are still being enforced that the mob has turned against? At least the mob got Prohibition repealed — and that required a constitutional amendment instead of a simple legislative enactment.] Prohibitionists are moved by “the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate.” [We see this with other laws — probably all mala prohibita laws. {Mala prohibitum is an offense prohibited by statute, but not inherently evil or wrong, such as failure to submit a report or to have a permit or license, failure to pay taxes, and most traffic violations. They are wrong because the government declares to be wrong. Opposite of mala prohibitum is mala in se, which is an offense that is evil or wrong from its own nature, irrespective of a statute, such as murder, rape, or robbery. Basically, the difference between the two is that mala in se is what God prohibits and mala prohibitum is what man prohibits.}] Like Prohibition, such laws become a means to “badger and annoy everyone who” does not comply with the letter of the law or its spirit, whichever is the most oppressive. Such laws “fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences” [as the drug laws do today]. Most of all, such laws satisfy “the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy.” Moreover, the Puritans can do this “with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.” Freedom from personal risk is the secret of the Puritans’ continual frenzy.
    Mencken notes “the American mob, far from being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of free men, and . . . this tolerance is sufficient to protect them [the Prohibitionists, Puritans, and other meddlesome busybodies] from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be the natural consequences of their anti-social activity.  If they had to meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to tell.” However, “they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania.” He continues, “Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen — the Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner — is beset from all sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes.” [Sumner {1840–1910} was a classical liberal, a libertarian, and an American social scientist.] “In order to satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical and corrupt, this decent citizen [the Forgotten Man] is converted into a criminal for performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him for them.” [Although Mencken writes this about Prohibition, it is true of most mala prohibita laws.]
    [What Mencken has written about the Puritan could just as well have been written about the Yankee. Substituting “Yankee” for “Puritan” would not change the meaning of what Mencken has written. The two are synonymous.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Two Types of Democracy

Mencken on the Two Types of Democracy

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the two types of democracy, pages 79-85. Below is an overview of his discussion of the two types of democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    [Representative democracy and direct democracy are the two types of democracies that Mencken discusses.]
    Mencken states, “Sovereignty is in him [the lowly Christian, i.e., the inferior man], sometimes both actually and legally, but always actually. Whatever he wants badly enough he can get. If he is misled by mountebanks and swindled by scoundrels it is only because his credulity and imbecility cover a wider area than his simple desires.” Continuing, Mencken writes, “The precise form of the government he suffers under is of small importance. Whether it be called a constitutional monarchy, as in England, or a representative republic, as in France, or a pure democracy, as in some of the cantons of Switzerland, it is always essentially the same. There is, first, the mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it. The political process thus becomes a mere battle of rival rogues. But the mob remains quite free to decide between them.” Occasionally and miraculously, the mob chooses the relatively honest and enlightened. More often, it chooses the thieves “because their words are words it understands and their ideas are ideas it cherishes.” Nevertheless, the mob “has the power to throw them off at will, and even at whim, and it also has the means.” [As the lowly Christian is now a minority of the mob in most democratic countries, if Mencken were to write this today, he would need to use another descriptor of the mob. Possibly, he uses “Christian” because he has a low opinion of Christians.]
    Mencken contends, “A great deal of paper and ink has been wasted discussing the difference between representative government and direct democracy.” Many of these pundits conclude that representative government is full of defects. “Not only does it take the initiative in law-making out of the hands of the plain people and leave them only the function of referees; it also raises certain obvious obstacles to their free exercise of that function.” Being scattered and unorganized, the people are unable “to formulate their virtuous desires quickly and clearly, or to bring to the resolution of vexed questions the full potency of their native sagacity. Worse, they find it difficult to enforce their decisions, even when they have decided.”
    Liberals cry over this fact. Their remedy is usually a “purer democracy.” That is, they propose “the recall, the initiative and referendum, or something else of the sort, and so convert the representative into a mere clerk or messenger.” Thus, they place “the final determination of all important public questions . . . in the hands of the voters themselves.” Only the voters “can muster enough wisdom for the business, and they alone are without guile. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.” [As witnessed in the United States, as the qualifications needed to be a voter has been lowered, the quality of government has declined. As the quality of government has declined, its power over and control of the people have grown.]
    Mencken notes that more democracy has never cured the evils of democracy. He adds, “Certainly no competent historian believes that the citizens assembled in a New England town-meeting actually formulated en masse the transcendental and immortal measures that they adopted, nor even that they contributed anything of value to the discussion thereof.” Mencken remarks that this “notion is as absurd as the parallel notion, long held by philologues of defective powers of observation, that the popular ballads surviving from earlier ages were actually composed by the folk. The ballads, in point of fact, were all written by concrete poets, most of them not of the folk; the folk, when they had any hand in the business at all, simply acted as referees, choosing which should survive.” Likewise, “the New England town-meeting was led and dominated by a few men of unusual initiative and determination, some of them genuinely superior, but most of them simply demagogues and fanatics. The citizens in general heard the discussion of rival ideas, and went through the motions of deciding between them, but there is no evidence that they ever had all the relevant facts before them or made any effort to unearth them, or that appeals to their reason always, or even usually, prevailed
over appeals to their mere prejudice and superstition. . . . Some of the most idiotic decisions ever come to by mortal man were made by the New England town-meetings, and under the leadership of monomaniacs who are still looked upon as ineffable blossoms of the contemporary Kultur.” [What would one expect from Puritans?]
    Nevertheless, “the difference between representative democracy and direct democracy is a great deal less marked than political sentimentalists assume. Under both forms the sovereign mob must employ agents to execute its will, and in either case the agents may have ideas of their own, based upon interests of their own, and the means at hand to do and get what they will. Moreover, their very position gives them a power of influencing the electors that is far above that of any ordinary citizen.” [Thus, incumbents usually win elections.]
    Mencken adds that “both forms of democracy encounter the difficulty that the generality of citizens, no matter how assiduously they may be instructed, remain congenitally unable to comprehend many of the problems before them, or to consider all of those they do comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner.” [This inability to comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner is also true of most members of Congress and State legislatures.]
    Continuing, Mencken remarks that “the great masses of Americans of to-day, though they are theoretically competent to decide all the larger matters of national policy, and have certain immutable principles, of almost religious authority, to guide them, actually look for leading to professional politicians, who are influenced in turn by small but competent and determined minorities, with special knowledge and special interests.” [Liberals and progressives consider the people intelligent and competent enough to decide who will govern the country, at least until they elected Donald Trump, but they consider the people too stupid and incompetent to govern their own lives. The people need enlightened liberals and progressives whom they have elected to govern the country to govern their lives.] By this means, the plain people were shoved into World War I. “They were, in overwhelming majority, against going in, and if they had had any sense and resolution they would have stayed out. But these things they lacked.” [The same thing happened with World War II. Roosevelt maneuvered the people into war that most did not want by maneuvering Japan into attacking U.S. territory.]
    In conclusion, the difference between representative democracy and pure democracy is more apparent than real.

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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