These awful wounds

won't ever heal

“Overall, Sigel’s army had more than 800 men killed, wounded, or missing, while Breckinridge’s losses topped 500.  Ten VMI cadets had been killed or had received mortal wounds, and another 50 would recover from other wounds.” ~ Scott Harris, “Put the Boys In”

When the forces of tyranny chose to destroy the homes and families of the people of the United States in the late 1850s it was hard to see how the matter would go. Had John Brown known in October 1859 that by the time the armies of the Confederacy had surrendered in 1865 over two million three hundred forty-seven thousand men would be killed or wounded while serving in uniform for the armies of the two sides, he might have paused in his considerations.

The Secret Six had urged him to begin the conflict. They raised money for his work. They obtained information about his target at Harper’s Ferry, a major arsenal for the USA military. The conspiracy to overthrow the concept of a constitutionally limited government reached through freemason lodges on both sides of the conflict all the way across the Atlantic ocean and into Buckingham palace.

Uncivil

Americans have had many names for the war which began in the 12th month of 1860 and was arguably settled in the sixth month of 1878. It was for a time known as the war between the states, and at other times the war of the rebellion, the war of Northern Aggression, the war for Southern Independence, and by certain poorly informed parties, the American Civil War.

Typically, a civil war is defined as a war for the control of the government of a nation state. Many examples are found in the annals of history going back thousands of years. To people living in the territories of the several states at the time, the matter of contention was whether the seceding states of the Southern Confederacy would form their own country or whether they would be forced to remain part of a “union” that they felt was no longer amenable to their interests.

You can find as many apologists for the war on either side as you seek. Both sides used the pretext of the re-supply of the fort in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbour as a cassus belli. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln sought to further their political interests with an open war between the Confederate States and the other United States. Davis wanted to push the undeclared states of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri to secede. Both sides wanted Maryland.

Lincoln wanted an open war to excuse his defiance of constitutional limits to his power. He wanted to impose income taxes, replace the coin of the realm with printed paper “greenback” currency, to censor newspapers, arrest newspaper columnists and editors, exile a sitting congressman who vexed him, and call up the militia of the several states without a congressional act of war. He did these and many other acts of tyranny. He imported Europeans and drafted them into the army on the wharves of northern cities. He had union troops fire on draft resisters in those same cities. He was directly, personally responsible for the millions of military dead, maimed, wounded, and a million or more civilians on both sides who were murdered, raped, killed, tortured, starved, wounded, or pillaged mostly by union troops. Lincoln hated freedom, hated free markets, hated Christianity, and wanted the destruction of all limits to his authority.

It Never Ended

I was reminded rather forcefully of the nature and casualties of that war this evening when I watched a remarkable film from Anno Domini 2014 called, “Field of Lost Shoes.” The studio promo photo at the top of this essay is from that film. You might find it an interesting portrayal of the men and women of the Virginia Military Institute who went to war in the fifth month of 1864. You won’t find the kind of disgusting woke communism so often attached to uglier portrayals of the South in this film. You’ll see that black men served in the Confederate cause, including tens of thousands in Confederate uniform. But mostly you’ll see that people willingly died defending their homes against the marauding armies of a tyrant.

These thoughts were new to me in 1985. I had not encountered them before. You see, I was not born in Texas. Nor had I grown to adult years there, but instead in Lawrence, Kansas. Now, Lawrence was a community that knew quite a lot of violence before the rest of the country got caught up in the open warfare that Lincoln and Davis wanted.

You see, the notion of states entering the union on equal footing was among the many dimwitted provisions of the constitution. Those particular passages are among the very many more noteworthy in their violation than in being upheld. Kansas was a part of the territories of the United States and the subject of a new doctrine called “popular sovereignty” that abrogated, among other things, the treaty of annexation of Texas of 1845. Accordingly, from 1854 Kansas was the site of emigrant groups from Massachusetts, including one funded by a man named Avery Lawrence, and various settlers from Missouri and other Southern states.

The idea was that people would vote for a constitution for the state and the congress would accept that vote, approve that constitution, and Kansas would enter the union either as a slave holding state or as a free state. Lawrence was a hotbed of free state advocacy and abolitionist fervour. Lecompton was a hotbed of advocacy for slavery. Various groups formed local militias to attack places held by one side or the other. Newspapers back east called it “Bleeding Kansas.”

As it turns out, a pro-slavery constitution was voted on and was approved. It was rejected by congress. Later, another constitution was voted on and approved, which opposed slavery. It was accepted by congress. So the district of corruption got a shiny new state. The bleeding in Kansas continued and eventually spilt over onto the other states as well.

Naturally, the schools that I attended in Kansas taught a version of these events that favoured the outcome for the free state constitution. Later, with academic scholarships and other financial aid, I matriculated to Columbia University in New York City. There I was informed by an apparently sober member of the Young Spartacus League that libertarians are fascists. But I was never disabused of my misguided views of the war between the states during my years of study at Columbia.

My concentrations included astrophysics, economics, and history. There were extensive reviews of the battles of the war, especially in military history class of the battle of Brice’s Crossroads, among many other strategic and tactical victories for the Confederacy. I also learned a much more nuanced economic understanding of the causes of the war, the impossibility of slavery continuing as an economic system, and the burdens of tariffs.

But it was not until I showed up for an evening study session at the computer lab of the Jesse H. Jones graduate school of business administration at Rice University in the 8th month of 1985 that I found out the war had never ended. It was something of a revelation, and it caused a long sleepless night of contemplation, one of my many long nights of the soul.

As I stood in the doorway of the lab, there were IBM PC clones on tables along the right hand wall. Those were all taken. On tables along the left hand wall were Macintosh computers. I had with me the requisite floppy disks for either system - smaller and hard cased diskettes for the Mac and actually floppy disks for the PC. One of the Macs was not in use, so I sat down.

Later I would learn that I took my seat between two of the wealthiest students on campus. To my left was second year entrepreneurship student Pierre Schlumberger Melcher. To my right was another second year classmate, Caroline Williams, who had a very cultured manner. Pete was dressed in khakis and a white dress shirt open at the collar. Caroline wore a dress, a string of pearls, and heels, the attire in which she was invariably garbed.

It is a legendary event in the computer industry when Steve Jobs pitched a fit at a meeting over the boot cycle of the Mac operating system. Nevertheless, putting in the boot diskette and turning on the machine did not instantly result in the availability of its services. So, I waited, looked around. I felt at ease among students wearing blue jeans with blown out knees, a sweat band with political buttons that was all that remained of my college baseball cap, and a book bag full of books and things. But seeing the company in my vicinity, I pulled off the sweat band and left it in my lap.

Finally ready for my use, the Mac now needed to have a bit of diskette frisbee. Out went the operating system disk and in went the “apps” disk. Oh, glorious folders. I didn’t need to see the hilarious “Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home” film to know that the mouse was for pointing an on screen icon and not for picking up and addressing “Computer” in a vaguely Scots accent. Sure enough, there were little icons in the folders. One was for a paint app. It was bad. There were fills that were, well, bad. There was some ability to move the pointer about and draw arcs and curves and later I would learn how to make straight lines. But I closed it and moved on.

Here was a word processor. Ah, there was a keyboard that wasn’t fixed to a daisy wheel printer like the one at my high school’s computer lab, nor fixed to the edge of a cathode ray tube terminal like the one at college. So I typed a bit, saved a few words in a file, and moved on.

It had a little app for playing songs. Not very long songs. Not very good sounds would be emitted from the speaker. But here was a drop down list, and here was a song at the top of the list, so I chose it. Battle Hymn of the Republic began to play.

Caroline sat bolt upright, her work forgotten. She swivelled her head without moving her shoulders even slightly. Her reaction was so strong that I immediately looked at her to see what might be the matter. She said, “Well! When my grandmuthuh would heah that song, she would get up and leave the room.”

My jaw hung open. Caroline’s head swivelled in that deliberate fashion, and she went back to her work. I made the computer stop emitting sounds.

Looking around me, shaking my head hoping the confusion would dissipate, I saw Pete smiling. Thinking to get his assistance in this baffling matter, I turned my head toward him, but he looked away and I could tell there was no help for it. I would have to solve this intricacy of manners my own self.

It was her accent that cued me. If she didn’t have such a clear Southern lady’s turn of speech, it would never have occurred to me that a song that I had heard and even sung (in my very bad singing voice) in grade school was at fault. But vague memories intruded, and I looked in that music app’s drop down list. Behold, it was there! So I made the speaker emit “Dixie.”

Caroline’s head swivelled my way once again, and she nodded once, without smiling. She said, “That’s bettuh.” She went back to her work. I don’t think we exchanged more than twenty words over the following two semesters, nor at any time since.

I’m sure that I completed my assignment. I have a kind of recollection of going to one of the PC work stations and getting it to boot and doing a thing or two with Lotus 123 to be able to say I had done the things. Later the following semester I would begin managing two huge code projects as the “summer intern” for a combination real estate, oil field services, and space launch services company. I picked up 123 macro language really fast. But that evening it all seemed far away, seen through a glass, and darkly.

I lay abed in the “graduate house” dormitory. Really it was nothing of the sort. The university had bought the “Tidelands II” motel and were pretending that it and its native inhabitants of tens of thousands of wood roaches were suitable for the kind of quiet contemplation needed by graduate students. All night long, staring up at the ceiling, I realised that nothing had been settled.

At that point the war was over a hundred years in the past. Generations had lived and died. The army of Northern Virginia had surrendered. The people of the Confederacy had not.

Unhealed

It isn’t just the heir and the heiress who inherit the legacy of death, destruction, privation, and suffering. Everyone in Texas with family from those days had the experience of difficulty. I don’t know how they feel, fair to say, but I do know that they feel very deeply. I know because I travelled all over the state, for work and for different freedom groups.

I led the Houston Space Society for a number of years beginning shortly after my arrival in 1985 and continuing until I left the state in 2005. I led a group of advocates for a new Texas constitution, the “Texas constitution ratification committee” in late 1998 and through the first part of 2001. I participated in meetings of various provisional governments of what called itself the Republic of Texas. I broke bread with hundreds of men and women who want what any rational person wants: less government, no tyranny, and a restoration of decency, beginning with respect for individual liberty.

In my time in Texas and during my travels in other parts of the South, I met many Southern ladies and gentlemen. I visited their battlefields, their monuments, their cemeteries. I visited the graves where on “decoration day” they would adorn the resting places of the mortal remains of Confederate soldiers with replica naval ensigns and battle flags. There are union soldiers buried in some of those cemeteries, and their graves are also honoured with union flags. People try to heal the wounds.

But the wounds won’t heal. The people in power won’t allow healing. They are fomenting more division now because they believe that they face severe punishment, even death, for their ongoing crimes against humanity. They want Americans to fight one another.

You can see it in their critical race theory classes, in their literature, in their rallies, in their speeches. They want to pretend that only white people can be racist, which is a truly racist definition of racist. They want to demand reparations from people who never owned slaves, in states where slavery wasn’t allowed, to be paid to people who were never themselves slaves. They have destroyed monuments and will begin to burn books to destroy history and demand obedience to a new culture of authority. You will be told what to believe about the past, if you allow it.

Americans worked for a very long time, in my life, to overcome our anguish about the Vietnam war, about the murders of JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, and many others. To overcome the burdens of the military draft. To suffer as best we could the fiat money inflation that has come with the military industrial complex and its endless wars and endless procurements. We worked to find common cause, to be good neighbours, to accept equal protection under the law, to push for less police brutality, to love one another.

So the powers that be are importing tens of millions of people. They are importing Haitians for the purpose of kidnapping young children, raping them, and sacrificing them to demons. They are importing Venezuelan communists for the purpose of terrorising American communities. They have long imported drug cartel gangsters, and armed them with Eric Holder and Barack Obama’s fast and furious gun running. They have imported a number of Chinese nationals from the army of the communist government. The intention is clear: killing Americans who oppose communism, oppose tyranny, and seek peace, freedom, and want to build Christendom.

For over a year, I have been writing at this substack about the importance of your county, your community, search and rescue, and preparedness. I have written about information security and communications privacy, free market money, and the ways in which the system is broken for those of us suffering it, and working as designed for those who profit from it.

Until the European aristocrats who style themselves as our superiors are prevented from usurping the title of king, there will be no end to these wars, and there will be no healing of these wounds. There is no king but Jesus Christ. God chose Jesus to be our king, and Jesus lives. Anyone else who claims to be king is a liar, a thief of stolen glory, and a murderer of the truth.

I know that we will be able to live to see the end of these wars. I know that there are some alive here today who can begin the work of healing the wounds of the past wars. I know that the wars have gone on as far back in time as we have records, and were going on before God chose to flood the world to defeat wickedness 11,800 years ago. So there is much healing to be done, and for healing to take hold, you have to stop tearing open the wounds.

Where shall we begin? What can you do to set things right? Your situation is not my situation, so I don’t know in any detail the path you should follow. But I do know that we will get through these difficulties with God’s help, and without God’s help we won’t.

So I ask you to please pray. Pray to God. Pray in the way that you choose.

If you don’t know the words, you can look up the Lord’s prayer, the words that Jesus taught his disciples two thousand years ago. That is a very good prayer, because the promise is that when you pray it, God knows what you truly want in your heart, and God provides. Praise God. Amen.

Here are the words of a prayer that I have been praying many times every day. If you don’t like some of the words, leave those parts out. If you do want to join me in this prayer, please do. Or just say amen.

Eternal Father please help us to free the slaves, stop the wars, end the tyranny of the state and the state of tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction, and all souls in between. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. God’s will be done. Amen.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.