LOOK AWAY

By Robert Firth

AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, LEGACY, AFTERMATH, Most Americans, at least those born here before 1960, know the history of our Civil War but, what is generally not known- is why; why really the soldiers on both sides fought and died. Over the four years of bloody conflict some 690,000 young men from both sides lost their lives. That's an average of 14,375 every month and 479 a day. What were they so angry about that they were ready to give their lives for the cause- what cause? The popular myth is that it was all about abolishing slavery, but, as we show, that had little to do with the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781456635169

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LOOK AWAY

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

The legacy

What was and what remains,

154 years latter

ROBERT J FIRTH

Caribex Books        

REAL WAR

A division of Robert-j-Firth.com

9173 Old Pine Road, Boca Raton, Fl, USA

Copyright © 2019 by Robert J. Firth

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I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten;

    Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie's Land!

In Dixie's Land where I was born in,

Early on one frosty morning,

    Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie's Land!

1850

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

FINAL WORDS

APPENDICES

FORWARD

Look Away is a book I've wanted to write since I was 14. The school took a bunch of us kids to Gettysburg. I had read stories about the battle fought there and we were studying Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It was about twilight when the shadows of the trees were creeping across the mowed field where Pickett had sent his men to slaughter. I was standing there alone, thinking of how terrible it must have been, when a young man dressed like a Confederate soldier appeared in front of me. I hadn't heard him coming.

He looked just as real as you or me. At first I thought he was. I said, Hi, do you work here? He didn't move, didn't speak, just looked at me. It could have been: 30 seconds or 30 minutes... time was frozen. At 14, I didn't understand. The image shifted and waivered, finally evaporating. I remained a few minutes trying to figure out who or what he or it was.

As I grew up and went on to university of course, I understood that what I had seen was one of the many ghosts of Gettysburg. Hundreds of people visiting the battlefield have had similar experiences. But, the story doesn't end just there. Over these many years, he has returned several times. The last was about ten years ago when I was flying a DC-6 with 40,000 lbs of salmon from Dillingham back to Anchorage. It was dark and, in the glow of the instruments, his face was reflected on the windshield... What does he want? Maybe, he wants me to write this book?

Most Americans, at least those born here before 1960, know the history of our Civil War but, what is generally not known- is why; why really the soldiers on both sides fought and died. Over the four years of bloody conflict some 690,000 young men from both sides lost their lives. That's an average of 14,375 every month and 479 a day. What were they so angry about that they were ready to give their lives for the cause- what cause? The popular myth is that it was all about abolishing slavery, but, as we show, that had little to do with the war.

This book does not sugar-coat slavery and is certainly no mea culpa or apology for the whites of the time enslaving African blacks. They did it because they could and because the primitive and ignorant blacks couldn't stop them. We describe the situation then as it was and today, as it is. To do otherwise would be to commit literary fraud.

At the start of the conflict, America's population totaled about 31 million with some 9 million in the south (counting the 3 million black slaves) and 22 million in the north. Once the war was underway, the Union had about 2.6 million men under arms facing about 1.6 million in the Army of the Confederate States.

If you posit that each soldier on both sides cost their government in those times about $1.00 a day, the North was paying out $78 million a month while the South had to pony up some $48 million. The total cost for both sides over the 4 years was about $6 billion which, in today's money, would be $168 billion. Placing a dollar cost on the 690,000 dead soldiers of both sides, works out to about $8,000 a head. In 2019 money, that's $224,000 America spent to kill each one of her young sons.

We have been told that the war was about slavery. The North didn't want Americans to own slaves while the southerners needed them to work their vast and very profitable agricultural industries. This might explain why the 150 owners of the huge plantations wanted to fight but, what about the other 1.6 million Southern boys, none of whom ever owned a slave?

What would motivate a 20 year old young man, living on his family farm in Macon Georgia, to join up with Jeff Davis's new Government and go off to kill other young men from New Jersey whom he had never met? That's a good question.

In 1861 news was slow. The only way anyone knew anything about anything was by reading it in a newspaper or being told by someone who had read a paper. So, how would a newspaper in Macon Georgia know anything about a declaration of war in Washington DC?

Samuel F. B. Morse in the 1840's invented the telegraph. Using Morse code one could send by hard-wire any message to anyone who was connected. By 1861 every town in the country had a telegraph station. The telegraph operator in Macon was receiving messages every day from Washington long before the war started. It's safe to say that everyone in the entire state of Georgia (and all the other states in the country) understood what was being argued and decided in Congress.

So, how heated did the arguments get? Pretty damned heated! On May 22, 1856, five years before war broke out, Southern Congressman Preston Brooks,(South Carolina) who owned a large plantation and a bunch of slaves, took his heavy oak cane and beat the hell out of Northern Senator Charles Sumner, a passionate abolitionist, over the issue of slavery. Interestingly, Brooks dies in 1859 of pneumonia so never lives to see the beginning of the war or the end of Slavery and, of course, the end of the southern plantation way of life.

The House Committee on Ethics, deciding that beating the shit out of another senator in the halls of Congress was not good etiquette, censured Brooks who resigned- but was immediately reelected. However, as we said, in 1859 he died at age 37. Sumner, who was severely beaten, recovered slowly and eventually returned to congress. He survived the war, passing in 1874 at age 64 from a heart Attack.

Back before the war, the value of and profits generated by slavery by far exceeded the net worth of the entirety of the northern states. The profits from southern agriculture were that enormous. Slavery had driven the south's economy (as well as in all the northern states) since the early 1600's and, in so doing, had created untold personal wealth. Beginning in the late 1700's the Northern abolitionists threatened to destroy everything!

The War changed America and, as we see today, probably for the worse. What one has to recognize is that the war, on the Northern side at least, was all about keeping the union together- not to free the slaves! Why did the Southerners fight? The vast majority of the young Sons of the South who went out to do battle with the hated Yankees had never owned a slave. They were angry because the Northerners were trying to tell them how to live their lives. They wanted the Yankee Sons of Bitches to get the hell out of the South and mind their own damned business!

The Civil War started as a war of words and was ended by the roar of cannon. The final shots were fired in 1865 after four years of catastrophic slaughter and destruction. The military war ended mainly because the industrial and manpower resources of the North were far superior to those of the South. In point of fact, for many southerners, the anger and hatred that fueled the resolve of the Confederate soldier has never ended. In many significant ways, the old South never recovered from the war. In this book, we discuss this and other aspects of the pre and post-war South.

So what was the true legacy of slavery? What remained after the shooting ended and what remains today? On the plus side one could argue that white America inherited or benefited from black music, black athletes and a very few enormously skilled and intelligent blacks who contributed in many areas. On the not so good side, we inherited, enormous and unending welfare costs, a permanent underclass, crime and massive social division. After the war, the KKK emerged, the SPLC, the NAACP, Neo Nazis, the Aryan Brotherhood, BLM, Black Panthers and the new Black Panthers. Who or what did we leave out?

Robert J. Firth

Macon Georgia 2019

CHAPTER 1



CONFLICTS SHAPE NATIONS AND PEOPLE

Who we are, where we are and what we are today is related entirely to who, what and where we were yesterday. Robert J. Firth

White Europeans, as some like to tell the story, invaded North America, killing and infecting most of the natives, stealing their ancestral lands and tossing survivors into 'concentration camps' (reservations) where they are slowly dying- even today. That's one version popular with many of the leftie American-hating professors infesting our institutions of higher learning. Revisionist history- Most certainly!

Not to put too fine a point on the subject but, just down my street is an enormous gambling casino and hotel restaurant complex owned by a hugely wealthy native Indian tribe. There are, across America, a total of 474 Native Indian owned casinos with more under construction or being planned. My Grandmother was supposedly a Canadian Indian, I wonder, can I cash in on that? Maybe I should ask Lizzie 'Pocahontas' Warren?

Our past influences our present. Our beliefs and attitudes result from, and are shaped by, lessons learned over the span of time. Wars are poignant teachers. The sorrows, blood and tears of all conflicts seep into the collective pores of our souls making us acutely aware of who and what we were and have become. None of us can, or ever will, escape our past.

So yes, it is true, we did fight the natives and, in most all cases, we won. Wounded Knee was not a battle as much as it was a hideous massacre and slaughter of Indians by American troops, it has never been forgotten and never will. It is one of those embarrassing moments in history that has shaped us all. In some ways, I'd like to think, for the better.

We didn't win them all. In the Battle of the Little Bighorn, (Custer's Last Stand) fought on June 25, 1876 in Montana, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) had his ass handed to him by some thousands of pissed-off Indians (Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors) who shot and scalped ole George along with two of his brothers, a nephew and a brother-in-law. In total, the Indians killed 268 American soldiers and wounded 55.

The story of the displacement of the American Indian is a long and sorry one. The unstoppable migration of Europeans into America made the resettlement of the natives inevitable. The country was expanding westward. Indeed, there was no other direction to go. The American government struggled with the morality of its actions. Today, we are perhaps more sensitive to the pain and damage we inflicted on the natives and many accommodations have been made to, in some ways, mitigate the harm we inflicted by murdering many and evicting the rest from their accessorial lands.

The point of mentioning the treatment of the indigenous people by the entirely white Europeans is to point out the prevailing attitude of whites to persons of color during Americas' early days. The American Indians were the very first non-whites most of the European colonists had ever seen. They (the Indians) were widely labeled as 'savages' and treated as less than human. That 400 years ago from today, (2019) in 1619, when the first black slaves were landed in the Virginia colony, it should come as no surprise that the Africans would be treated the same.

Of course, the principal Indian wars in the western states came after our Civil War. In those years (after the war's end in 1865) the Federal Government ushered in the Reconstruction Project which was begun after the fighting ended. This was the attempted (but mostly failed) transformation of the eleven Confederate states from secession to rejoining the Union. The program was authorized and funded by Congress. Reconstruction was designed to supposedly help to rebuild the devastated south.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, (January 1863) along with the wars ending two years later and the passage of the 14th amendment, created millions of new black citizens (arguably a major error) while igniting a race war that has gone on, sadly undiminished, ever since. The Yankee Congress conferred on the freed slaves the same 'civil rights' previously enjoyed by only whites. These rights were reinforced by three new Constitutional amendments which, in a practical sense, weren't fully realized until 90 years later in 1954 when the Supreme Court, in the famous Brown V the Board of Education, decision declared unconstitutional separate but equal public schools for Blacks. (We will discuss this insanity in later chapters.)

The three Reconstruction era Amendments are the Thirteenth, (elimination of slavery), Fourteenth (those born in America are citizens) and Fifteenth, (right to vote) were all passed in the five years following the Civil War. Each and every one a direct and painful rebuke and insult to the former break-a-way states. That the Southerners hated the Yankees more after the war than during the war should be no surprise!

The eleven states forming the Confederate States of America had studied the issue of secession individually and collectively very carefully. They reached the decision that; any state in the union has the constitutional right to leave the union since, in joining, a state did not give up its sovereignty. (We include a few of these arguments in the appendices.)

Four issues framed, then and now, the Civil War memories of Americans, both north and south. The first, and easily the most painful and difficult memory the survivors had to deal with was living with the loss of loved ones. At war's end, there were 690,000 dead of both sides and over a million severely wounded. All had friends and family such that their loss was felt across the entire country. Secondarily, the southern economy was a mess and hundreds of buildings, towns and homes had been burnt by the Yankees in their destructive march through the south.

The third issue white southerners had to recognize was that their former black slaves were now entirely equal in the eyes of Federal Law and there were now millions of them off the farm and out of work, filling the streets and getting hungry.

In these early post-war days, there wasn't yet any great number of unemployed Blacks wandering around in the northern cities looking for food. The legally imposed equality (which was and remains absurd in many ways) simply wasn't accepted by either side- then or now. Blacks were considered inferior, stupid and lazy and, in no way equal. That attitude however, on either side of the conflict, wasn't helpful as far as what to do with several million unemployed