A Yankee in King Davis's Court

The Ellis Islander's Case for Dixie Pride

I spent a long period of my childhood in the South, as many Yankee children now do, in the pretty suburbs of the Piedmont-Atlantic Megaregion. I would not be opposed to returning one day, but I am certainly not a Southron. My family is from the North, some are from the West. I’m an Ellis Islander as well. I don’t have much ancestry here from before the civil war. I’m not sure if my ancestors fought in it at all, if they did they would have been the sort of F.O.B. Irish recruits the Union army was lambasted for conscripting. So, although I have often stayed up at night tossing and turning, wishing I would miraculously be divinely graced with ancestry going back to Plymouth, Niue Amsterdam, and the Lord Proprietors, it’s likely that the only possible Old Stock ancestry I have is if one of the some 7,500 Loyalists who returned to Great Britain made his way to Scotland and reproduced with one of my great grandmothers.

However, I have really always liked the Confederacy. And, I think I ought to make a case for why I like them, despite being far from a Confederate. Am I no better than the LatinX Shermaboo who acts like his ancestors didn’t cross the Rio Grande in the 1990s? Well… I don’t know, again if I had ancestors in the Civil War they certainly fought for the Union. But, it isn’t terribly uncommon to see people with Dixie flags pretty far north. Come to Upstate New York, you’ll see some of them. Were all of their ancestors Southerners who moved north? I sort of doubt it.

So, first of all, I don’t support the Confederacy because I have deluded myself into believing that I am a Southerner in the same way a LatinX individual may delude himself into believing that he is an American. I support the Confederacy because I believe the Confederates were, in many ways, on the “Right Side of History”. They were on the wrong side only insofar as slavery was somewhat obsolete, and this would be proven during the war itself. One of the main goals of the Confederacy was to make the war enough of a hindrance to the Europeans that it would cause them to favor the Confederates and potentially even intervene in the war themselves, but Southern leverage to the U.K. was severely limited by the British transition from buying cash crops out of the American South, to buying them from their colonial subjects. For example, the growth of cotton in Egypt and India. The British were probably the least likely to ever side with the Confederates, because it was the British who first made very big pushes for abolition. The French were perhaps the most friendly with the South, with the impression that Southerners were less anal about European ventures into the Americas. The South certainly accepted European help and collaborated with the French during their time in Mexico, but to act like the Confederates planned on just letting Europeans control the Western Hemisphere is a bit of an over-exaggeration. The Confederates had plans for colonial expansion long before America began its Imperialist period. Many Confederate elites were alleged members of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Prior to the war, Southern slavers encouraged an invasion and annexation of Cuba, not long after Polk (himself a Southern Democrat, and on a side note someone I would consider the Trajan to Washington’s Augustus) successfully took over a third of Mexico. Many of the Confederate bigwigs actually didn’t like the British and recognized how much of a problem a British presence in America would be, but the French were maybe less of a concern.

Southerners were the most interested in territorial ambition since the very beginning of the United States. The South was more rural, it relied on land. Although slavery was obviously not going to turn America into any sort of economic superpower, it was Southern interest in expansion that gave America the ‘Lebensraum’ to be a world superpower. It was Jefferson who made the Louisiana Purchase. It was Jackson who removed the Indians from the South, and it was Polk who finalized American control over Oregon and conquered the Southwest from Mexico. The Old Three Hundred were largely from the Upper South, places like Tennessee, although other Texians were of European origin.

The South would eventually have moved away from slavery, as it would no longer be financially viable. The reason I insist on the South being on the Right Side of History is because Southern Democrats had quite legitimate reasons to cling to slavery, which are only being vindicated today. Firstly, the actual reason the South seceded was not because Lincoln planned on abolishing slavery, it was because Lincoln was the first president to win without winning a single Southern state. While most abolitionists in positions of power supported repatriation of Black Africans to somewhere outside of the continental United States (ex: Liberia), this would be an expensive process, it would decrease the number of agricultural workers in the South (raising the prices of cash crops in the North), and it would be of little immediate benefit of the North.

Today, only some splotches of the “Black Belt” are actually *majority* Black, but before the Great Migration, the African-American population was almost entirely concentrated in the rural South. Northern Cities may have been a few percentage points Black, meanwhile the countryside was very often 100% White, or at least 0% Black. Meanwhile, large swathes of the South were majority Black. South Carolina, the first state to secede, was a majority Black.

So, Northerners had very little experience with Black people. In fact, their experiences with Black people had largely been curated by selective migration. Freedmen who moved north had often bought their own freedom, or they had been freed by their masters for some other reason (i.e. they were the illegitimate son of their master) which suggested agreeableness or cleverness. Thomas Sowell famously uses this as evidence that Black Americans simply need to be culturally more refined, like the Freedmen, and also accuses Southern Whites of demonstrating the same vices as Blacks due to their decadent “Scots-Irish clannishness”… Obviously I believe otherwise, that the positive reputation of freedmen was simply due to selection. The reputation of Blacks declined as their presence increased in the North. Even today, it is the areas with the least Black people which are the least implicitly prejudiced towards them.

Similar phenomena happened in Europe. Despite “race realism” being the normal ideology across the Western World in the 1940s, allied European soldiers didn’t really understand the bad blood that White Americans and White South Africans had with Blacks. Europeans still don’t really get it, and during the Cold War the Soviets heavily banked on America’s segregation. It was ultimately quite crucial in ending segregation, along with turning the U.S. and U.K. against South Africa and Rhodesia (albeit, the Brits had bad blood with both of these states for separate reasons already).

So, it is quite reasonable that Southrons would fear the end of the “Southern Way of Life”. The end of Slavery could make the South a Black-majority region. Even if Black people weren’t given citizenship, it would still be extremely difficult for the South. As Thomas Jefferson said,

“It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

[…]

Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior. ... The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life. We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America. ... Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.”

Twenty years after Jefferson wrote this, the regime of Jean-Jacques Dessalines slaughtered every remaining Frenchman on the island of Haiti. Most of the Planters had left and returned to France, so those killed were largely of the Petit Blancs, the non-slaveowning Whites of the Island. The Haitians would frequently engage in massacres of the Mulattoes of the Island over the next century. The 1804 genocide of the French Haitians was engaged in with an enthusiasm that is seldom talked about, those who were killed were often killed in terrible ways. Children were buried alive. Women were raped and beheaded. Voodoo human sacrifices were made. Mulatto soldiers were forced to participate so that they could not weasel out of the blame, likening the Haitian planter-elite to an egg. He would “crack the egg, take out the yolk [Mulattoes] and eat the Whites”.

The French were perhaps not thinking right with the Haiti project, in all fairness. They mostly imported young male slaves, not bothering to import women due to the high mortality rates, while the forward-thinking Anglo-Saxon treated his human chattel more like actual chattel by giving them proper care and allowing them to reproduce and have families. Jefferson is probably correct that American slaves lived far better lives than Roman ones. In fact, American slaves had an average life expectancy of 36 compared to the White man’s 40. However, this is in one of the most developed places on earth at the time. Pretty much everywhere outside of America and parts of Northwestern Europe, the life expectancy was more like 30. Italy’s life expectancy was 30, for example.

There are certain perks of being a slave. You don’t really have the option or necessity to fight in wars. Even in Early Modern Europe, the participation of the gentry in warfare was so devastating that it actually dipped their life expectancies below the Yeomans and Burghers.

I would talk more about slave conditions, but I will use this part to advertise some good pasta from other people instead…

Slavery was not nearly as bad as you were told.

Myths about Black History

Inconvenient Facts about Slavery

An Alternative View of Slavery — Alt Hype

Key points:

• Slaves were not particularly shorter than their White counterparts, suggesting that they were not significantly more malnourished

• Whippings of slaves were probably not as common as they are portrayed in media

• White masters tended to supply resources for their bastard children and free them, and encouraged the creation of families on Plantations

• African slaves were subject to the fear of having a loved one sold off, but despite this the Black family was more coherent under slavery than in modern-day America

• White farm laborers worked similar hours to slaves, potentially even less

• African kingdoms were highly active in encouraging European countries to buy slaves, and European commodities were often dispersed much wider than elite circles

• slaves were not entirely agricultural, there were slaves who partook in skilled labor

When people conceptualize slavery, they imagine what it would be like to be a slave in the modern day. You lose all of your amenities, and you’re forced to work, for scraps. But, in the past, the living conditions were not that great in general. Slavery was certainly not desirable, but at least you knew you would have food, water, and a roof over your head. And again, as the articles point out, American Slavery was a much more “K-Selected” Slavery than pretty much every previous institution of Slavery. The Arabs and French were much more exploitative, with the former even castrating their slaves as a general rule. It was in the American South that the innovation of “Paternalism” emerged, where the master had a social obligation to take care of his slaves.

Slavery is so ubiquitous in history that it wouldn’t be that much of an exaggeration to call owning slaves the primary financial goal of human beings across time. Even Amerindian fisher-foragers of the Pacific Northwest owned slaves. The reason people did not percieve of “owning a human being” as particularly bad was because the principle of fate was unavoidable. Why was a man a slave, and another man free? I don’t know, he just was. Why does one man die of plague, while the other lives? Why do one man’s crops fail, while the other has a bountiful harvest? Why are some born into poor families, and other into aristocratic families? Why does the lightning strike one tree and not another? Certainly, society should seek to improve general conditions of life for all of those who operate within it, whether for selfish reasons or for altruistic ones. However, it is only with this sort of Liberal quasi-gnostic pessimism that we come to this image in our heads where our souls are rolling around in a “chamber of Guf” and randomly get assigned a flesh puppet body. Someone is not “born a slave”, a slave is born. This should make sense in a country built on property rights. It is understood that there doesn’t need to be a “why” for property in order for it to be legitimate. If society no longer needs slavery, and slavery becomes an unnecessary cruelty, it is fair to get rid of it, but what worried Southerners was not just the end of slavery but Northern management of such an end. If the South seceded, they could at least get rid of slavery on their own terms, themselves being familiar with the danger of a free Black majority.

So, they seceded. They did not attack the Union. The Civil War only begins months after the secession, at Fort Sumter. And yes, the South did technically start the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, but it was only rational. The Union did not recognize the secessions and was clearly intent on re-integrating them into the Union. The South viewed this as tyrannical, because the constitution never explicitly denies the right of states to secede from the Union. Secession was only ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court postbellum, so there was no legal reason for the United States to deny the legitimacy of the seceded states. And in a situation where a state that does not recognize your separateness from themselves, and arms its military base offshore from one of your largest cities, it only makes sense to preemptively attack.

What happened during the war is not particularly relevant… But what happened afterwards is relevant, because the South was utterly vindicated. The South was forced to accept the 14th Amendment (which, unlike the 13th, was drafted after the war) in order to get back into the union. This event, I argue, is one of the most devastating events to the American nation. To put that linked post briefly, it completely changes the meaning of constitutional rights, it completely changes American citizenship laws thereby gelding American selectivity when it comes to immigration, it singlehandedly paves the way for the Civil Rights Regime, and it does all of this purely as a way to punish and politically weaken Southern Democrats. The South would be ruled by corrupt, unqualified Black Republicans (OMG!!! SO BAZED!!!!) under their lowest period despite the very offices they were ruling and the very nation they were a part of being designed by the founders to avoid this situation. Eventually, Jim Crow would undo much of what had occurred, but it too would be dismantled.

The reason I support the South, is because Southrons by virtue of their familiarity with nonwhites recognized the busted remains of the “Bantu Containment Chamber”, and viewed the continued existence of slavery for-the-time-being as not only an economic necessity for themselves, but also as the dam tempering the “Rising Tide of Color” our friend Stoddard talks about later. People like Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon had recognized during the infancy of the American nation that the non-white world and especially Africa was in a state of ferment, and that Europeans had to be proactive in order to avoid their own destruction. And on top of all of that, I cannot possibly blame Southern Whites for participating in a system which is found across almost every civilization at some point, and doing it with a degree of moralism that is certainly not seen across every civilization at some point. I do not consider the Southern planter as especially darker of a figure than the Northern industrialist, although I commend the latter for generating a greater degree of wealth. But both made their existence off of exploiting the uncontrollable low status of laborers, and in both situations it was ultimately better for the progeny of the laborer that his father or grandfather lived in this low state. For the Factory worker, this is quite obvious, as his wages would be invested into his family, his children, and his toil would be for the sake of them living a better life. For the slave, it comes from the increase in living standards which come from living in a White-dominated society, with White technological innovations. Were he in Africa, he would have his freedom, just as the Factory worker probably had less freedom than his ancestor prior to enclosure. However, and much moreso than the factory worker (who really saw a loss in living standards across the board), his living standards increased even in a state of destitution by many metrics.

There have been times in history when even slaves could become quite wealthy and independent, believe it or not. All slavery entails is that someone is contractually bound to another, and can be bought and sold. Slaves were not like prisoners, desperate to break free, because if they broke free they would have no means of sustaining themselves.

But, back to the Confederacy… Why would an ethnic like me, the Yankee’ist of Yanks, support the brilliantly British-descended Confederates? Was it not the Irish draftees who did the South in? Southern generals say it themselves, how devastating it was that the North could simply eat up immigrants from Europe and shit them all over the battlefield.

Well, I think that politically, the immigrants (with exception to the ‘48ers) were much more aligned with the South. Both voted Democrat, namely. The Irish famously rioted in New York over the draft, recognizing that freed Blacks did not have to participate in the draft due to their ambiguous citizenship. The Irish also voted overwhelmingly for George McClellan against Lincoln in 1864. The Irish, living in a poorer state, felt themselves competing with the Negro more directly. Freed blacks could take jobs away, and as would eventually happen with the Great Migration, flood lower income urban communities which European Immigrants lived in. There was also an undeniable strain of Jacobitism and Celticism which pervaded the Confederate intelligentsia, so much so that the Ku Klux Klan’s imagery is largely derived from Scottish folklore, and the Confederate battle flag was based on St. Andrew’s Cross. Jefferson Davis has the following to say:

Such, I have ever warned you, were the characteristics of the Northern people--of those with whom our ancestors entered into a Union of consent, and with whom they formed a constitutional compact. And yet, such was the attachment of our people for that Union, such their devotion to it, that those who desired preparation to be made for the inevitable conflict, were denounced as men who only wished to destroy the Union. After what has happened during the last two years, my only wonder is that we consented to live for so long a time in association with such miscreants, and have loved so much a government rotten to the core. Were it ever to be proposed again to enter into a Union with such a people, I could no more consent to do it than to trust myself in a den of thieves. ​

You in Mississippi, have but little experienced as yet the horrors of the war. You have seen but little of the savage manner in which it is waged by your barbarous enemies. It has been my fortune to witness it in all its terrors; in a part of the country where old men have been torn from their homes, carried into captivity and immured in distant dungeons, and where delicate women have been insulted by a brutal soldiery and forced to even to cook for the dirty Yankee invaders; where property has been wantonly destroyed, the country ravaged, and every outrage committed. And it is with these people that our fathers formed a union and a solemn compact. There is indeed a difference between the two peoples. Let no man hug the delusion that there can be renewed association between them. Our enemies are a tradition-less and a homeless race; from the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace of the world. Gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the North of Ireland and of England, they commenced by disturbing the peace of their own country; they disturbed Holland, to which they fled, and they disturbed England on their return.

Davis is suggesting that the South is descended from the Norman Cavaliers and the Jacobites, while the North is descended from the Anglo-Saxon Roundheads. Very interesting stuff. The Southern Democrats, in general, were more interested in what we would call “White Nationalism”, while Northern politics were caught up in religious Nationalism, Nativism (which was mainly a religious movement against Catholics, rather than a racial movement against Non-Anglos — see: Charles Lewis Levin), and of course the sort of uber-liberalism that was being freshly imported from Germany and Austria-Hungary. A lot of this sentiment is expressed in the Lincoln-Douglass debates just before the Civil War, where Lincoln famously makes his statements on the superiority of the White race. Yes, Lincoln probably did believe this in some capacity, but he was essentially forced into conceding it by Douglass, who was creating a racial-egalitarian image of Lincoln that didn’t jive with voters. Douglass himself was actually from the North, but being a Democrat his policies aligned with the hyper-Democratic South.

Douglass and Lincoln go back and forth on the phrase “All Men are Created Equal”, where Lincoln defends the possibility of Black men being endowed with the equal rights of a White man, while Douglass denies that this is the correct meaning of the phrase (which he was correct about — recall that the Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson) and says the following about what America is at its core:

“I hold that a Negro is not and never ought to be a citizen of the United States. I hold that this government was made on the white basis; made by the white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others.”

You can also see here that the issue of Black citizenship was a major political issue before the Civil War — so to say that Southerners were only concerned about Slavery for economic reasons is ignorant of the political environment surrounding the abolition question.

Just as the Northerner was blind to the Negro, you could say that the Southerner was blind to the ethnic, so lived more in a state of Pan-European Whiteness than the Northerner. We tend to associate Anglo Supremacy with the South because of the Klan, but the First Klan never had any anti-ethnic emphasis nor was it anti-Catholic. This was all introduced by the Second Klan, which actually began in the Midwest. The Confederacy made dialogues with the Papacy encouraging the Church to condemn the war, and Pope Pius IX certainly did treat the Confederacy with more dignity than other European states did. While the South was, in an ironic twist, much more of a cohesive ethnos than the North, Southerners by virtue of their social conflict with the Negro and their expansionist conflict against the Indian, recognized the primacy of their Whiteness more than the Yankee, who might as well have been living in Europe. The Southron, when looking south, viewed the struggle of the Spaniard in Cuba as identical to the struggle of the Anglo-American in the South, because the Spaniard is White. He views the struggle between the French and the Mexican as a struggle between the White and the Mestizo, not as between the European Autocrat and a Liberal state of the Americas. In Alexander Stephens’ infamous “Cornerstone Speech”, the Vice President of the Confederacy goes as far as to denounce the Declaration of Independence’s line of “All Men are Created Equal”. The Confederacy would be built on the premise that not all men are created equal. Although I believe that Stephens was misguided in trying to create a dichotomy between the Founders and the Confederates, he gets to something very real. We can see clearly now in the quote I worded above that Jefferson, who wrote that phrase, did not believe “all men were created equal” in the most literal sense, he meant it more as a retort against the Crown treating colonists worse than they treat Englishmen at home. However, Jefferson also has a fixation on spreading Liberalism that would eventually be the death of the American experiment. He supports the French Revolution (initially) despite the crown’s assistance to us during the American Revolution. He supports the Liberalism swelling up in Latin America, which a support which is seen in later DRs like Monroe who crystallizes this support in the form of the Monroe Doctrine. Jefferson maybe had a better take on the situation south of the colonies prior to their actual revolutions:

“our present federal limits are not too large for good government, nor will the increase of votes in Congress produce any ill effect. on the contrary it will drown the little divisions at present existing there. our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North & South is to be peopled. we should take care too not to think it for the interest of that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards. those countries cannot be in better hands. my fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by piece.”

As I said earlier, the South wanted to expand across the American continent. The main reason America didn’t take more of Mexico was because people were understandably concerned about the Mestizo diluting the gene pool of Americans with the blood of the Indios. Here we see a positive trait of the white-conscious Anglo-American that was not so present in other colonial groups. The Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Frenchmen, even the Dutch in Malaysia and the Anglo-Africans… They had a certain penchant for the tawny women around them… I hear from travelers that an easy way to get free shelter in the darker parts of Latin America, or in the jungles of the Indo-Pacific region, is to have one-night stands with the local ladies, who love the BWC. But, you must resist! Because this is unproductive in colony-making.

The Southron is not so badly like this ok? He knows to marry White women, and not sully his blood. Yes, there were times where White masters had CONSENSUAL RELATIONSHIPS with their Black slaves… Yeah, I said it. We all know those chocolate shawties wanted dat bee dub’ya cee. But as we can see demographically this did not fill the South with a Mulatto class in the way it did in Haiti or the Spanish colonies, or with the Cape Coloureds in Africa. The Mulattoes are common in Angola too. The Portuguese, they loved them. They must have learned this vice of having sex with Black girls from the Arabs. What is up with Arabs, loving straight up Black girls? Strange stuff.

There was still a fairly significant class of Criollos of entirely Spanish or Portuguese ancestry in Latin America during the 1850s. Many of the Tejanos were Criollos and it was typically the Criollos who owned large cattle ranches, with the Mestizos and Indios doing menial labor on them. Immigrants could also be brought in from Europe, gradually pushing the Indios and Mestizos out or simply outpeopling them as was done in North America with the Indians. Nowadays, you will hear warmongers and reddit conservatives say we should “Invade Mexico and spread Democracy” and you sort of can see why this isn’t really productive looking at American Imperialism under T.R. and McKinley. We tried to morally justify “Liberating” Cuba and the Philippines from the Spaniards, and… For what? For nothing. This mentality of “world-civilizer” which Anglos and Americans had would without a doubt contribute to the “world police” bullcrap we would see the U.S. fall into later on. Suicidal Altruism strikes again…