The Southern Cause Rests In Hallowed Ground

From Rebellion:

Jan 12, 2011 (5 days ago)

The Southern Cause rests in Hallowed Ground

from feed/http://lsrebellion.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default by Old Rebel

 

 

Here's Part I of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. (At the end of the segment, click the second icon on left for Part II.)



Sergeant Joseph Paradine, a Confederate scout, obtains a book on magic spells from an old man named Teague. One of the spells gives the holder of the book the power to paralyze one's enemies. "You could use this to clear a path all the way to Washington," says Teague. Paradine realizes the book is the key to Confederate victory. But then he realizes he can only invoke the spell if he joins Satan and renounces God. Another soldier argues that if they don't use the book, it will be the end of the Confederacy. Paradine replies, "Then let it be the end. If it must come, let it come. But if this Cause is to be buried, then let it be put in hallowed ground." With those words, Paradine throws the book into a campfire.



The next day, he and his compatriots head toward Gettysburg.



The story symbolizes the South's refusal to emulate the North's policy of total war on civilians. As Pulitzer Prize winning historian

Mark Neely has observed, "It was Lincoln, Grant, and the Civil War that incorporated total war into modern experience." General William Tecumseh Sherman noted early on that the solid popular support for the Confederate Cause made Lincoln's war a war on the Southern people, rather than on just the Southern armies:





“This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”



Whatever else he may have been, Sherman was a man of his word:



General Sherman set forth on a march to Savannah and the sea on November 15, 1864. He led his Union troops away from every Confederate army camp or stronghold. Instead, his army proceeded through the soft belly of the South, burning and destroying the civilians, their homes, their property, their farms, their food, their entire countryside. They murdered the children and the elderly, raped the women and then shot them, and stole every valuable they could get their hands on.




As Murray Rothbard observed, Lincoln's actual legacy had a tremendous and tragic influence on the 20th century:





For in this War Between the States, the South may have fought for its sacred honor, but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. We remember the care with which the civilized nations had developed classical international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms, and broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.



Jefferson Davis' and Robert E. Lee's refusal to wage war on civilians may have cost them in the short run, but the principles they and the Southern people upheld were timeless. Today, with the dissolution of 20th century megastates, and the resurgence of almost-forgotten nations, we are witnessing the victory that was denied the Confederacy, as well as the vindication of the Cause for which it fought.