A Short History of the Confederate States of America

 

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis spent two years in prison without trial. He was released on bail and a year and a half later, the government finally dropped the treason charges against him. In 1877 he retired to Beauvoir, where he wrote, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. This was a two-volume tome of over 1,500 pages. I did not read this book. I tried, but I kept following asleep. Luckily, ten years later, Davis wrote A Short History of the Confederate States of America. Roughly one-third in length, “A Short History” covers the same ground and is more readable.

Davis writing style is clear for modern readers, but I would recommend a good understanding of the war to provide context for his narrative. That said, for a thorough understanding of a major historical event, it always best to get the story from the horse’s mouth. The Davis perspective may be biased, but those perspectives did not change between the war and the writing of his memoir. That consistency makes this book valuable for understanding the motivations for war.

Davis extols victories and offers strained excuses for errors and failures. In Davis’ mind, nothing was his fault, the Confederacy was always honorable, the Union always vile. For those not imbued with The Cause mythology, this heavy-handed prejudice can be off-putting, but I found it helps understand the ethos of the period.

Most history books are written by winners. If you don’t study the losers, then you have an incomplete picture. An example would be the hallowed Federalist Papers. There is a collection of opposition opinion pieces called the Anti-Federalist Papers. I suggest reading both and I highly recommend Jefferson Davis’ A Short History of the Confederate States of America.

(This is a research book for Maelstrom, a sequel to Tempest at Dawn.)

America is Too Good for Democrats

 

Democrats dislike America. In their minds, it needs to radically change, so they’ve been trying to start a domestic war. Civil, Class, or identity group--it doesn’t matter. Until recently, this has been a cold war with a few hot spots. Democrats are disappointed because past campaigns did not go the way they wanted. Occupy Wall Street did not incite class warfare, Black Lives Matter did not start a race war, and Antifa did not expose a vast cadre of neo-Nazis lurking in the background.

What happened? Why hasn’t their ground game worked? Simple. Americans are not ignorant, selfish, and hateful. That would be projection. The left doesn’t understand their own country. America is too good for them. They remain in their bubbles and safe spaces and view the rest of us as caricatures. They see us as bad people. Democrats believe we’re a bunch of illiterate boobs who can be easily herded in any direction they desire. They’ve swallowed their own demonization narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Democrats had hoped to provoke bad behavior on the right.  With near-absolute control of the media, provocations on the left can be downplayed while any reaction from the right can be relentlessly condemned from rooftops, podiums, and studios. This is a mindless battle fought with self-doubt, fear, and loathing. The emotions of destruction. In their view, they must destroy our nation to save it. To make their quixotic vision a reality, the existing selfish system must be burned to the ground so society can be rebuilt based upon the principles of social justice.

Trump Derangement Syndrome infected the Left because he scrubbed the speed from their nefarious doings and executed an abrupt U-turn. Darn. They had been making such good progress. Trump had to be stopped. Even before inauguration, Democrats rejected Donald Trump as a lawfully elected president. They vowed to resist every policy, every action, and every statement that came from the White House. They spied on his campaign and his administration. The FBI Investigated him at least twice, a special prosecutor tried to find indictable offenses, and Congress did their darndest to find dirt.  Nothing. When the Russia hoax failed to oust him from office, they tried impeachment to no avail. So, they took to insurrection in the streets. Antifa and BLM violence increased until chaos engulfed the entire nation. Street thugs maimed and killed law enforcement officers, destroyed property, and beat on passersby. Under the pretense this was peaceful protest, rioters were loudly cheered on by Democrat office holders and their allies in the media and Hollywood.

Still no civil war. Where were those rednecks? The Left had no choice but to escalate. They brought in a pandemic and hammered fear into every waking moment. They used this fear to redefine how we vote so Democrats could send Trump to the showers. But … no questions, no alternative narratives. All opposition must be squashed, or their flimsy cover stories wouldn’t hold. The first steps were easy. They shut down wrong-thinking on social media, marginalized resistors, removed conservative media's ability to boost their content, and coerced power brokers of every ilk to turn a blind eye. Everyone marched in lockstep.

Not enough. Americans had shown that they could awaken in dire situations. They needed an event. Something so abhorrent that normal people would be thrown into confusion, doubt, and mourning. The right had already shown that they wouldn’t rise to mere taunts, so the only recourse was to lure them into a compromising position.

So Democrats stage-managed an insurrection. Trump demonstrators were invited into the capitol and guided to the inner sanctum. Despite the absence of weapons, little wear on the capitol, and the violence coming from provocateurs and the capitol police, Democrats painted a national picture of an insurrection that came within a hairbreadth of toppling the government. January 6th cemented the departure of Donald Trump. Any questions about the authenticity of the election were dissolved.

All that remained was righting the train and getting it back on track.

Then it all fell apart … again. They forgot President Obama’s warning. “Don't underestimate Joe's ability to (expletive) things up.”

A version of this column was first published on American Thinker

Three cheers for Adam Smith, inventor of the world’s most effective contraceptive.

World Average GDP per Capita

You may remember Adam Smith as the 18th Century inventor of capitalism. You’d be right. But he also solved the problem of over-population. Capitalism is the greatest creator of wealth in history and wealthy families and nations have lower fertility rates. 

Let’s take the wealth side first. Think of Singapore versus Venezuela. Singapore has zero natural resources and Venezuela sits on one of the greatest oil reserves in the world. Or consider North versus South Korea. Or the People's Republic of China versus Taiwan. Or, in its day, East versus West Germany. 

 Capitalism beats a state run economy every single time. No contest.

Now, about those fertility rates. Look at the chart of U.S. birth rates in relation to income. Pretty obvious. The richer the family, the fewer the kids. It doesn’t matter why, the indisputable fact is that higher income, lowers the birth rate.

Does this relationship hold internationally? It does. Our indisputable fact went global: the higher the gross national product, the lower the birth rate.

Put these two observable phenomena together and you solve the Left’s most emotive fixation: global population control. Yet they reliably turn their back on capitalism because they distrust a system that makes some people richer than themselves. If the sustainability of Earth is an existential threat, then why discard obvious solutions? Many Leftists don’t think, others naively follow the catechism, but some purposely craft rationalizations for irrationality. 

Take population control: instead a real answer to their obsession, they promote every form of non-propagational sex, rabid feminism that separates men and women, people bunched up in tiny living quarters unfit for a family, ridicule of female homemakers, family dissolution, government dictates of family size, and when all else fails, they demand contraceptives and abortion for perverts who insist on an archaic relationship.

I sometimes wonder if anthropophobia is why Leftists frequently defend Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and other tyrants who impose ruthless forms of population control. (Hitler seems to be the only socialist they refuse to give a pass for murdering his own populous.)

Try Googling “birth rates versus GDP.” You’ll get hits on studies, papers, and programs to reduce population in order to increase wealth. Backward. They’re convoluting cause and effect. Why? Because they loathe capitalism. It’s not allowed in their toolbox. So, without thinking, they flip cause and effect. In the Leftist’s world, there are many cures worse than the disease. For example, they hate carbon dioxide, but lose their stuff if carbon-free nuclear energy is mentioned. If the means are blasphemous, the end remains delusive. 

Leftists cannot accept that the surest path to population control is to promote capitalism in every corner of the world. In fact, capitalism cures pollution, hunger, housing, illness, and even throws a monkey-wrench into totalitarianism. Just ask the Pilgrims. They got all that stuff for the first Thanksgiving after they tossed socialism in the ash heap.

But the Left won’t alter course. They remain bound to an ideology that promises a dreamland … but never delivers. 

Don’t blame them. They can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature.

The Impending Crisis of the South, Hinton Rowan Helper

The Impending Crisis of the South, How to Meet It
Hinton Rowan Helper

This book appealed to me for four reasons. 1) It was written in 1857 by a participant of the era. 2) It was an anti-slavery book written by a Southerner, 3) the book created a movement called Helperism, 4) Lincoln appointed Helper consul to Argentina, which meant he had probably read the book. (Further evidence that Lincoln had read the book is a section of his Cooper Union Address which far more eloquently echoes one of Helper’s commentaries.)

When writing a historical novel, it’s crucial to get inside the heads of the people who actually experienced the period. One technique is to read contemporaneous writings, including books, periodicals, newspapers, and speeches.

Helper’s thesis is that slavery harms economic growth, inventiveness, and the middleclass. He uses extensive census statistics to solidly prove his case.  The overwhelming quantity of data is convincing … but also dull. Luckily, the numbers can be scanned after the reader gets used to his presentation style. If you are interested in the data, I would recommend a print format instead of an e-book.

The Impending Crisis of the South provides an interesting and pertinent perspective on the economics of slavery.

(This is a research book for Maelstrom, a sequel to Tempest at Dawn.)