This is in response to the 200-year unrelenting war against the South. It is a defense of her people in the face of political corruption, economic exploitation, revisionist history and mainstream media indoctrination.

During the first half of the 19^th century, the North successfully pushed a series of fluctuating protective tariffs on imports to force Southerners to buy Northern manufactured goods at highly inflated prices. Huge sums in public revenue were spent largely on Northern infrastructure and industry, giving her military and economic domination over the South.

By the election of 1860, Republicans commanded the national government from Congress to the White House. A Northerner who promised an anti-Southern agenda was elected president without carrying a single Southern state. The South as a region had lost the power to govern herself.

Slavery had existed in every single American colony. Then state after state outlawed it. By 1860, only a small minority of people in the South owned any slaves at all. The institution was naturally fading into American history, as it had been all over the world — without the need for violence. But fanatical Northern abolitionists encouraged uprisings, stoking fears of a slave revolt akin to the genocidal massacre of thousands of white families in Haiti just a few decades before.

Raiders invaded Virginia, murdered her people, and tried to start a race war. After being caught, tried and hanged, the ringleader John Brown was hailed as a hero and martyr in the North. Abolitionist leaders publicly burned copies of the Constitution, calling it “a Covenant with Death, an Agreement with Hell.” It is no wonder South Carolina cited the issue of slavery in her Declaration of Causes of Secession.

The Southern states wanted out, as was their right, according to the 10^th Amendment. They soon seceded to form a new country much like the American colonies had done in 1776. The Confederate Constitution was almost a word-for-word copy of the U.S. Constitution, with language to bolster states’ rights and sovereignty.

In her 1788 Ratification of the Constitution, Virginia explicitly stated that the powers she had enjoyed as an independent country “may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression. …” When she did resume those powers in 1861, a president of a then-foreign nation unilaterally raised an army and invaded.

Four slave states did not secede and instead sided with the North: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. They were home to thousands of slaves, and yet they were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation. If the North was fighting to abolish slavery, then why was the institution of slavery still intact in those Union states during the conflict? Lincoln himself repeatedly said the purpose of invading was not to abolish slavery; it was to preserve the Union by subjugating the South.

Northern armies waged total war. Towns and farms were burned, women raped, civilians murdered. Southern men and boys picked up their guns and went out to defend their homes and families like their grandfathers had before them. Hundreds of thousands were shot down; some were murdered after surrendering. Sherman burned a 60-mile-wide swath of cities, homes and countryside from Atlanta to the Atlantic.

After the surrender at Appomattox, carpetbaggers followed in the Union army’s footsteps, looting and plundering the defeated and impoverished South by buying overtaxed land and businesses. Southerners’ rights to vote and hold public office were revoked, and the 14^th Amendment was unconstitutionally crammed down their throats. This amendment has been used to annihilate almost any semblance of the states’ rights to govern their domestic affairs. Northerners killed the Constitution in 1868.

It’s not enough for them to have nearly liquidated an entire culture. Today, liberals rip Confederate battle flags off of others people’s vehicles. Memorials to fallen family members, veterans and other patriots are repeatedly vandalized. Just this week, a family in Mosely had a gun pulled, chambered and pointed at the father’s head simply for displaying the battle flag.

There is a systematic movement to take everything from the Old South and obliterate it from the face of the Earth.

It’s no wonder the Northerners have been trying to destroy the memory of the Southern cause. It was the cause of abiding by the Constitution — a document that their liberal descendants still consider glorified litter. This debate only scratches the surface of the larger divide in this country: the debate of arbitrary control versus constitutionally protected freedom and self-governance.

The South was the latter. The South was right.

  

Angus McClellan, a Meherrin resident, was first raised in Cumberland County and was educated in Southside Virginia. He was deployed to Iraq and served with Farmville’s Army National Guard unit in 2005. He is an indirect descendant of fellow Virginia veteran Maj. Henry B. McClellan, also of Cumberland, who rode with J.E.B. Stuart and was noted for bravery at the Battle of Brandy Station. McClellan’s email address is angusmcclellan@gmail.com.