God Bless the South and May She Rise Again, From the Great White North

Like many people of my generation the first time I remember seeing the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commonly, if somewhat inaccurately, known as the Confederate flag or the rebel flag, was on television. It was painted on the roof of a 1969 Dodge Charger known as the General Lee that was arguably the real star of the show The Dukes of Hazzard in which it was driven by cousins Bo and Luke Duke as they foiled the schemes of Hazzard County’s Boss Hogg and easily evaded capture by Sherriff Roscoe P. Coltrane.

This show aired when I was very young and at the time I had no clue that the car’s roof, name, and distinctive horn tune were all allusions to the bloody war the American states fought between themselves from 1861 to 1865. When I later learned about this war my sympathies were immediately and instinctively drawn to the side of the South. Where did that instinct come from? From watching The Dukes of Hazzard? From growing up listening to country and western music, including such songs as Johnny Horton’s “Johnny Reb”, Hank Williams Jr.’s “If the South Woulda Won (We’d Have Had It Made)”, Alabama’s “Song of the South”, and Charlie Daniels’ “The South’s Gonna Do It Again”?

I ask this question, not out of some sort of naval-gazing, introspective, obsession, but because I have frequently had it asked of me by Americans when I have ventured to express an opinion about the war. It always seems to strike the Yanks as strange that a Canadian would sympathize with old Dixie. The follow-up question when I am talking to an American who is informed about Canada is usually about whether I think Quebec should be allowed to separate from Canada. The assumption behind this question is that it is hypocritical to support the right of secession for one group of people in one time and place and not for another group of people in another time and place. This, however, elevates the question of the right of secession to the level of a universal moral principle which it is not.

I am a Canadian Tory who believes firmly in the Loyalist tradition and heritage of my country. It would be remarkably inconsistent with that viewpoint to accept that the Thirteen Colonies had the right to secede from the British Empire in 1776. Needless to say, I accept no such thing. King George III was a good king and not the tyrant of Yankee propaganda. The Colonies, despite the lofty classical liberal language in which they worded it, declared their independence for reasons that were petty at best. They objected to the Tea Act of 1773 – which actually lowered taxes and the colonial price of tea – and the Quebec Act of 1774 guaranteeing the French Canadians their right to freely practice Roman Catholicism, which, in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s words “by a curious twist of reasoning was considered a major menace to freedom” (1).

However petty their reasons for secession, that they had won their independence in war was acknowledged in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and having secured that independence they preceded to establish their federal union. The union they established was, like the Dominion of Canada that would be established in 1867, a confederation. The difference between the two, was not merely that the American confederation had a republican government and the Dominion of Canada a parliamentary monarchy. Canada was established as a confederation of provinces, the United States as exactly what its name suggests, a confederation of states. States, unlike provinces, are sovereign. The Thirteen Colonies, having secured in 1783 the independence they declared in 1776, became states, i.e., sovereign political entities, and while there was no point in history between their being colonies of the British empire and their being joined in union with the other states, by their constitutional theory their existence as sovereign states was logically prior, albeit not chronologically prior, to that of their union. In a confederation of sovereign states, the members generally have the right to secede, and the American constitution implicitly acknowledges this right in its Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Several of the American states explicitly reserved this right for themselves in their acts ratifying the American Constitution, the right was widely acknowledged by America’s Founding Fathers, and indeed in the disputes about slavery in the nineteenth century, the Northern states at one point threatened to secede. My point, in all of this, is that in 1860-1861, when the Southern states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America, they were exercising a right that was established and acknowledged in the framework of the constitution from which they were seceding, which was not the case for the original colonies when they declared their independence in 1776.

In other words there is no hypocrisy or double standard on my part in saying that the secession of the Thirteen Colonies was an unjustified and illegal revolution on the one hand and saying that the South was within its constitutional rights in seceding on the other. The hypocrites are those who celebrate the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence but who deny that the Southern states had the right to secede.

There is, of course, a long tradition in my country of sympathy for the South. Our own Confederation – note the similarity in the term used for the union of the provinces of British North America into the Dominion of Canada to that chosen by the Southern states after secession – occurred in 1867, two years after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The triumph of the North in the American internecine war was the catalyst for the Confederation of Canada. Only five decades previously the United States had failed in an attempt to conquer British North America, they had declared their “Manifest Destiny” to rule all of North America, and now, the side that Britain and its North American provinces had openly sympathized with, had lost. Confederation was considered a prudent move to ward off another invasion by Yankees drunk with their own victory over their Southern brethren.

The widespread Canadian sympathy for the South in the 1860s is downplayed by the historians who like to play up our role as the destination point for the Underground Railroad but it was not just fleeing slaves who found refuge here – Jefferson Davis and his family fled to Montreal in 1865 and he found sanctuary in Canada until he received amnesty from the American government in 1868. Twelve years ago, Toronto Star editor Adam Mayers put out a historical monograph on the Confederate agents who had come to Canada in 1864 and in the last year of the war attempted raids and early forms of covert operations against the North from bases within Canadian territory, how they found the Canadian populace largely sympathetic to their side, and how all of this became the historical context in which Canada’s own Confederation was framed. (2)

As slavery and the slave trade had been abolished already in the British Empire by this time and Canada had been the destination point for the Underground Railroad, clearly the sympathy to the South on the part of British and British North American governments and the general Canadian populace could not have been due to sympathy to slavery. The reasons for that sympathy are suggested by Mazo de la Roche in her novel Morning at Jalna, which presents a fictional version of the events Mayers wrote about. Mazo de la Roche was an old-fashioned, “more British than the British”, Canadian Tory of Loyalist stock, whose “Whiteoaks of Jalna” series portrays a romanticized version of British Canada, in which the Whiteoak family represent British culture and society attempting to survive in North America in the face of modernizing forces coming from south of the border.

The author’s own sympathy for the Confederate cause is quite apparent and, indeed, can hardly be exaggerated when we consider the period in which the book was written. Morning at Jalna is the second in the series in terms of internal chronology, being set in 1863, but the last in the series to be written and published. It came out in 1960, a hundred years after Abraham Lincoln was elected and the Southern states began to secede, in the middle of the Second Reconstruction period, in which the Southern states were raising the rebel flag again in defiance of a hostile American government that was threatening to racially integrate the South by armed force if necessary, in the wake of the American Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. At this time, when the South was coming under attack in the media across North America and Europe, de la Roche wrote her novel in which ten years after Captain Philip and Adeline Whiteoak settled their estate in Ontario, they invite their friends Curtis and Lucy Sinclair to visit them at their manor Jalna. The Sinclairs are plantation owners from somewhere in the South, and they arrive with a full entourage of loyal and happy slaves. Curtis Sinclair turns out to be in the service of the Confederacy, and he obtains permission from Captain Whiteoak to meet with other Confederate agents at Jalna. While Captain Whiteoak is not fully informed about the agenda of these meetings he is nevertheless happy to assist the Confederate cause in some way and his wife, a younger version of the feisty grandmother who features in most of the series, is chomping at the bit to get revenge on the evil Lincoln and his gang. The Whiteoaks do not believe in slavery, but their sympathies lie entirely with the South both because it is being overrun by Yankee plunderers, rapists, and murderers and because they respect its hierarchical, chivalrous, and highly cultured and aristocratic civilization.

The reasons the Whiteoaks give for their sympathy with the South are undoubtedly de la Roche’s own reasons for such sentiments and they for the most part coincide with mine. I do not accept the idea that the question of slavery trumps all other considerations. The fact that this idea is so widespread in the present day shows just how ridiculous we have become. The United States invaded the Confederate States of America, overpowered that rural, agrarian, society with their modern, well-supplied and technologically advanced forces, and laid waste to their farms and towns with scorched earth tactics, and we are supposed to accept that they were in the right because they wanted to free the slaves who for the most part had been sold to the South by Northern slavetraders in the first place? Nonsense.

The Christianity that had formed and shaped the culture of the states below the Mason-Dixon line was a better form of Christianity than that which had formed the culture of the Northeast. Puritanism, a fanatical form of non-conformist, Calvinist, Protestantism that had banned Christmas and Easter, closed theatres, outlawed games and other amusements on Sunday afternoons, and otherwise tried to make life miserable for everyone, during the brief period in which they had been allowed to govern England, was the religion of the Yankee. Its adherence to the orthodox doctrines of Nicene Christianity had atrophied by the nineteenth century, but the ugly Pharisaic and Philistine spirit of Puritanism still lived on and can be detected in every word of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in which the Yankees announced the imminence of the pouring out of the grapes of God’s wrath on the slaveowning South by their own self-righteous hands. By contrast the South, whose Christianity was more traditional and orthodox, in “Dixie” sang of their love for the land that was their home, and that they were fighting to protect.

Today, the heirs of that ugly, Puritan, spirit have capitalized on the fact that Dylann Roof, the young lunatic who shot up a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, had posed with the Confederate flag, to demand that the flag be removed from Southern state capitols and from graveyards where men who fought under that flag are buried. They have demanded that retailers stop selling it and are harassing people who choose to display it on their vehicles. There have been demands that monuments to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate leaders be pulled down and that streets and building named after them be renamed. There have even been calls to ban Gone With The Wind and reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard have been yanked off television.

Well this Canadian, like those of the 1860s, wishes the South well, and hopes that they will recover enough of the spirit of their ancestors to raise the rebel flag once more, and tell these self-righteous, sanctimonious, neo-Puritan, busybodies where they can shove it.

(1) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Washington D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990), p. 51.
(2) Adam Mayers, Dixie & the Dominion: Canada, The Confederacy, and the War for the Union, (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2003).

Independence Movements

On Thursday, September 18th, Scotland voted in a historical referendum on the question of whether or not they wanted independence from the United Kingdom. The devolution of power to the Scottish assembly under Labour governments in the last four decades and the growth of the Scottish independence movement under the leadership of a small but organized group of zealots had made the referendum inevitable. The referendum had a very high voter turnout – 84.59% and in the end the no side won with 55.3% of the votes.

This outcome is pleasing to those, such as myself, who did not wish to see the United Kingdom break up. It was also not particularly surprising. Here in Canada, the Quebec separatist movement failed twice to win their independence in referendums. Quebec is far more culturally distinct from English Canada than Scotland is from the rest of the United Kingdom. Quebec is a French speaking province – the rest of the country speaks English, Quebec is traditionally Roman Catholic, English Canada is traditionally Protestant, and so on. Yet despite this, the secession movement lost twice, albeit by a much narrower margin the second time around than the Scottish independence movement, and is now basically dead. When the Parti Quebecois made it an issue in the last provincial election earlier this year their overwhelming defeat by the Liberals sent the message loud and clear that no further such referendums were welcome.

The unity of England and Scotland goes back much further than that of English and French Canada. The English and the Scots have had the same sovereign since 1603, the year that the King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from the last English monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, becoming King James I of England. Note that the Scottish king inherited the English throne. This can by no means be construed as England conquering Scotland. In 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne, the parliaments of the two kingdoms that had shared a monarch for a century voted to unite and form a single country. England and Scotland were both better off for it and the union thus formed proved greater than the sum of its parts. The idea that after three centuries as a united whole one part of this whole should be able to unilaterally vote on whether to break or maintain the union is perverse.

There are some who might charge me with holding to double standard on the matter of secession. When the subject of the war the American states fought between themselves from 1861 to 1865 comes up I ordinarily put forward as my opinion that the South was in the right. In that conflict it was the Southern states that had seceded from the American union to form the Confederate States of America. Recently, when the anti-European Union nationalist parties scored major gains all across Europe in the European Parliamentary election, while progressives were wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth in frustration I was rejoicing.

My answer to the charge would be to say that it is unreasonable to insist that if someone supports one independence movement he must therefore support all independence movements or that if he opposes one he must therefore oppose all. “A foolish consistency”, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” To insist that secession must be either supported or opposed across the board is surely to insist upon a foolish consistency.

If independence movements arise in different countries their reasons for wanting to secede are unlikely to be identical and even less likely to be equally valid. Surely the question of whether we favour or oppose these movements should be more influenced by our evaluation of the reasoning behind these movements than some abstract ideal that supposedly settles the question of independence at a general level.

The leaders of the independence movement among the American colonies in the eighteenth century expressed their intention of seceding from the British Crown in terms of accusations of tyranny and oppression levelled against King George III and lofty sounding ideals about natural rights and democracy drawn from liberal philosophy. The accusations of tyranny were completely bogus and would have been so even if they had been levelled against the elected Parliament that had deliberated and decided upon all the acts to which the American colonists objected. The liberal philosophy behind the lofty ideals was unsound. At any rate, the accusations and ideals both concealed the real reasons for the drive for American independence, not least among which was the fact that the King’s guarantee of the French language and Roman Catholic religion in Canada interfered with their goal of creating a united, English speaking, Protestant, North America. My opinion, of the American independence movement of three centuries ago, is therefore rather low.

When the leaders of the Southern states declared their secession from the American republic a little less than a century later they justified their decision on the grounds of “states’ rights” a phrase which expressed both their objection to federal interference in what they regarded as the domestic affairs of the states and their theory of the American constitution, i.e., that it was a federal union of sovereign states which retained the right to secede at any time. This was one of two constitutional theories that had been competing with each other since the founding of the American republic. Ultimately, the argument was settled in favour of the other side by a bloody internecine war but a strong case can be made that by the terms of the American charter, the South was in fact in the right and that constitutionally, the members states of the federal republic of the United States had the right to secede. (1)

Of course, although the matter was decided by the war, at least from a historical perspective, the states did not divide and fight each other over a disagreement in constitutional theory. Nor did they divide and fight each other over slavery, despite what the politically approved history of the day will tell you, or over tariffs as pro-Confederate libertarians will tell you. Slavery and tariffs were both peripheral issues.

The antebellum Southern states comprised a society with an agrarian economy and an Old World culture with traditional codes of honour and chivalry, presided over by a landed patrician class. By contrast, the society of the north-eastern states was a dynamic society, with an economy that was rapidly being modernized and industrialized, a culture shaped by Puritanism, presided over by a class of wealthy merchants and factory owners. When the latter society succeeded in unilaterally electing a Republican president the leaders of the former society could see the handwriting on the wall – the forces of innovation, modernization, and industrializing now had complete control of the United States and their older style, more rooted, traditional society would be swept away. Secession was a last ditch effort to prevent this, albeit one that ultimately failed and resulted in their society being ravaged by the merciless war machine of the North.

The South, therefore, politically correct propaganda about race and slavery be damned, fought for their independence over what I would regard as a worthy cause – the preservation of a traditional, honourable, chivalrous, rural, society against “the Modern Age at arms” to borrow a phrase from Evelyn Waugh. By contrast, the separatist movement in Quebec arose precisely at the time when that province had thrown off most of its traditional elements and embraced modernity.

As for the Scottish independence movement, it sought to break up a kingdom that has been united for centuries, that was united peacefully by mutual acts of the English and Scottish parliaments a century after the Scottish king inherited the English throne, the union of which has stood the test of time. Let us hope that after this defeat at the polls it will soon be as dead as Quebec separatism.

(1) The case is based upon the ninth and especially the tenth amendment to the US Constitution.