I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America (CSA) from April 1861 to April 1865. Pictured above is the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on the city\u2019s famous Monument Avenue.
\nThe grand cobblestone street is also adorned with statues of generals J.E.B. Stuart and Thomas \u201cStonewall\u201d Jackson, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. But Richmond isn\u2019t a blip in antebellum history or a relic of \u201cLost Cause\u201d mythology; hers is a rich, complex, and illustrious history from the earliest days. One we should know and study. Not shun or shame.<\/p>\n
Under the guidance of Captain Christopher Newport, New World colonialists traveled to Richmond from Jamestown, living and settling among the Powhatan in the 1600s. It was the home of Pocahontas and one of America\u2019s earliest successful white-European communities.
\nIt was in Richmond\u2019s St. John\u2019s Church that Patrick Henry gave his \u201cGive me liberty, or give me death!\u201d speech. It was here, in the heart of the Old Dominion, that Thomas Jefferson passed his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Famous past residents include Chief Justice John Marshal, poet Edgar Allan Poe, and tennis great Arthur Ashe.
\nVirginia\u2019s Capitol was designed by Jefferson, making Richmond home to the oldest legislature continuously operating in the Western Hemisphere. And it was in this very building that on April 23, 1862, Robert E. Lee stood when he accepted command of the military forces of his beloved Virginia during the \u201cCivil War.\u201d
\nLike so many native Richmonders and Southerners beyond the shores of the mighty James River, we call this bloody conflict that took the lives of an estimated 700,000 people anything but \u201ccivil.\u201d In fact, the true definition of \u201ccivil war\u201d is \u201ca war between citizens of the same country.\u201d
\nYet, the South had already seceded before war broke out. By doing so, those states set up their own independent confederation \u2013 an alliance comprised of 11 strong sovereigns guided by the principles of a newly written Confederate Constitution.
\nThis more-Jeffersonian coalition of subsidiarity also included amicable treaties with the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole Indians. The CSA was about bucking central authority, increasing autonomy, and letting each state chart out its own path.
\nThat\u2019s why Dixie chicks like me call the struggle the War for Southern Independence, hearkening back to its similarity of the American colonies\u2019 secession from Britain. Some firebrands, of which the South proudly is in no short supply, even refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression.
\nInterestingly, Mr. Lincoln never recognized the CSA as a legitimate government. Thus, in his eyes, that would have made North and South part of the same country. So why then didn\u2019t he get the approval of each of the governors and\/or their state legislatures before sending in the U.S. military to quell \u201cthe rebellion\u201d? That would\u2019ve been the constitutional, legal, and moral thing to do.
\nOf course, because the war wasn\u2019t about saving the Union or freeing the slaves or promoting the will of the people. It was about economics, resources, power, and revenge \u2013 always the real causes for all good protectionist wars, don\u2019t ya know? It was an invasion of a foreign entity, not a civil war amongst fellow countrymen.
\nSurprisingly, during my time in Richmond\u2019s public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, students were taught the unvarnished history of this pivotal period. Quite amazing considering the 100-plus-year Reconstruction revisionism that had been seeping its way into textbooks and curriculum a la Northern publishers and educrats.
\nBack then, I was encouraged to study the South, her people and their rightful places in the story of America (and the world) through the lens of history, not modernity and all of its misperceived perfections and moralisms. It\u2019s called context, y\u2019all.
\nIn fact, I attended Douglas Southall Freeman High School, an institution named after the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, who won the honor in 1935 for his four-volume biography on Robert E. Lee. Our yearbook was called \u201cThe Historian\u201d in Freeman\u2019s honor.
\nOur team mascot was the Rebels, whose symbol was a gray-uniformed soldier holding a gun in one hand and a Confederate Battle Flag in the other. The marching band played \u201cDixie\u201d at football games, as boosters donned Rebel Man pendants and fans waved the Battle Flag.
\nToday, the school remains DSF and its teams are still the Rebels, but gone are the pre-political-correctness images of a gun-toting Confederate hero. Screw history, even if you\u2019re an institution named after a famous historian: all must bow down to the gods of progressivism and sacrifice nuance, objectivity, and truth on the altar of sensitivity to the uninformed, miseducated, and\/or malicious. Just pay your penance and move on, say the useful idiots to we backwards-ass crackers.
\nActually, the Cultural Marxists are smart enough to have initially taken aim on 1861-1865. They are a duplicitous bunch, and started small by challenging school mascots and Boy Scouts troop names. Get the low-hanging fruit before you tear the whole tree out by its roots, Jefferson, Washington, Madison and all. They were just a bunch of rich white slave-owners after all. Nothing to be learned here, people. Move along.
\nHaving knocked down the first dominoes, progressives have become increasingly emboldened in their anti-Southern efforts. It may start with Ole Miss banning \u201cDixie;\u201d Georgia changing its state flag\u2019s 1956-2001 design to be without the Battle flag; the University of Texas removing its Jefferson Davis memorial statue; and South Carolina removing the flag from state grounds. (Have I ever expressed just how much I disdain turncoat Nikki Haley? Ugh.)
\nNext thing you know, Washington and Lee University has removed its flag display that adorns the Lee monument in Lee Chapel, under which the Confederate general is buried; Charlottesville city council has voted to remove a Lee statue and rename Lee Park; the Southern Baptist Convention has banned the flag (why don\u2019t they just get rid of the word \u201cSouthern\u201d while they\u2019re at it?); the National Cathedral has removed flags from its stained-glass windows; and New Orleans is this very day in the throes of a violent cultural clash over removing four monuments, only one of which has actually come down.
\nNow, as a libertarian, I don\u2019t even believe in public property, which is where these statues are\/were erected, nor do I believe in tax-payer-funded schooling, like these ahistorical institutions of \u201chigher learning.\u201d (See, if everything was held in private, this nonsense wouldn\u2019t even be an issue. When \u201ceverybody\u201d owns a space, nobody really owns it, right? An argument for another day perhaps.) But a Richmond rebel girl\u2019s gotta take a stand.
\nInteresting, too, that one of the rationalizations heard from leftist municipal leaders, anti-Southern zealots, and miseducated tyrants is that the monuments and flags must be moved to a museum, you know, put in their \u201cproper place.\u201d You racists can display your \u201csymbols of hate\u201d or whistle \u201cDixie\u201d at home in private, away from the eyes, ears, and closed minds of totalitarians. Protect the public sphere, they say. It\u2019s for the children. It\u2019s for unity. Gag.
\nMan, what a carpet-bagger con. What the Cultural Marxists really desire is fully remaking the South in their own image \u2013 a progressive product void of all of its unique Southernness, a valuable resource forced to become a mirror image of their disillusioned puritanical paradise. Don\u2019t be fooled by this social-justice scam.
\nLeftists, of course, possess all the post-modern tools needed to engage in this war of expunging Southern heritage and antiquity: the mainstream-media cabal, the white-guilt-ridden American church, the indoctrination centers of K-12, the university re-education camps, the entertainment biz, and statism \u2013 an institution that is always happy to do the bidding of totalitarians who want to force their ideas on the masses.
\nBecause of the influence and power of these apparatchiks, they come, they see, and they eventually conquer, and then they ratchet it up. This is always the modus operandi of progressivism, so the cultural home-wreckers will never cease in their efforts to knock down the whole domino set \u2026 but that\u2019s only if no one gives voice to the voiceless: the Southern tradition.
\nI, for one, will fight against this ongoing Reconstruction of the South. She is a cause worth fighting for. It\u2019s time for all you good Southerners to reject this destruction of her important history and her symbols. Embrace your heritage of stubbornness, anti-authoritarianism, hard-working grit, and self-determination. It\u2019s in your blood.
\nBe that rebel you were born to be. Be the real resistance. Be bully proof. And just as our Confederate ancestors did, defend your home. It\u2019s time to push back against this cultural genocide of Dixie.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.abbevilleinstitute.org\/blog\/be-proud-youre-a-rebel\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America (CSA) from April 1861 to April 1865. Pictured above is the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on the city\u2019s famous Monument Avenue. The grand cobblestone street is also adorned with statues of generals J.E.B. Stuart and Thomas … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,9],"tags":[610,611],"class_list":["post-1683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-patriotic","tag-rebel","tag-the-south-was-right"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1683"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1686,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1683\/revisions\/1686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/patrioticfederalist.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}